Hey guys, my name is Chelsea Northrup and today we'll be editing this picture. And I
provided a link down below in the description where you can download the
picture so that you can follow along. So you might want to pause me and go get
that right now. So the first thing we're going to do is take out these water
splatters. If you've taken pictures of water falls before you know that there's
just water and mist flying everywhere and it gets all over your lens, so let's get
rid of it. You want to select your spot removal tool and you want to adjust your
feathering to about thirty to forty percent, and I'll show you why real quick.
You'll learn a little something. If you have too much feathering and you select it, it
leaves a halo so you can see that it didn't really get rid of it, it leaves a
halo around your spots. So I'm going to press ctrl+Z. If you don't do enough
feathering, then it just looks like a cutout, they're really sharp edges and it
doesn't blend nicely. So like I was saying, let's do like thirty, forty percent and see
how that works.
That's crazy, so I'm
gonna press H and it's going to show me where it sampled from. On a rock, good going
Lightroom, thanks.
Alright and i like to press H to hide it just to see if it did a good job. I think
it could do better. I'm just going to delete this and try again. I'll make my
brush a little bit bigger and i used the right bracket key as a shortcut.
I'm going to pull it into a similar place like this is a shadow when the
branches are going in the same direction and if I press H it it looks
natural. Snd the same thing here, make my brush a bit smaller
that wasn't big enough.
And again, I want to sample it from a similar area, so the shadowy spot down here looks good.
I'll just press H so I can see. That's decent. And you just keep going like that.
That's all right. Oh that one actually worked? Wow.
When you have a spot like this, if you go down too far you can see the edge
of the photo
you can go to a spot where the water isn't moving in the right direction and
then it looks kind of funky so you want to make sure it blends naturally and
that looks good. I should also mention him on the heal tool and not the clone
tool, you'll get different results if you use the wrong one or the other one.
Nothing's wrong.
Okay, so i think I got all
of all the spots out and it already looks a lot better. So I'm going to go in
and just play with the exposure a bit. So the overall exposure is good, but i just
want to make sure there are some whites and some shadows in there. So I'll go to
my white slider, I'll press alt while i slide and i can see that there are
already whites in there that section is actually a bit blown out but I don't
want to bring it all the way down because if I do the whites in the trees
are also just killed and it looks so flat and muddy. You can see if I bring it
up, it's brighter, it pops a bit. If I bring it down too much, it's
pretty ugly. I'm actually going to leave it just about where it was. The same
thing with the blacks, I'll press alt, while I drop it down and just make sure
there's a little bit of black there that makes it pop.
I am going to add a little bit of clarity but just a skoch, because
sometimes I see things like this, and it's like, chill out,
that's too much. Ya gotta... less is more sometimes.
Ok and now I'll go to my
colors and there's a lot of green and a lot of tan and I just like to make this
kind of red tone in the rocks pop. So let me select the orange and i'll make the
hue a bit more towards the orange side. Now you don't want to keep your blinders on,
because sometimes I'll be extreme about it, sometimes there will be a part of the
photo that you don't expect to have that color in it and it can look artificial
or cause fringing or give away your editing. So look around.
Sometimes I'll go to the extreme, I'll go all the way to the other end of the
slider just so I can see what's going on and make sure I'm not damaging my photo
in any way. And with the greens i'm going to bump up the luminance just a bit to
make them pop and move the hue so that they're just a bit richer. Alright, so we
played with some colors, now I'm going to get a little more picky because i want
to warm up this picture, the temperature of the picture, but I don't want the
water to turn like orange, that looks really bizarre. So i'll bump up the
overall temperature just a bit and then i'm going to select my adjustment brush
so that I can kind of fade in those warm tones. So the effect that I want to use
is temp and i'll use my right bracket to make my brush big and I want the flow
all the way up and
if you press O, then you can see your mask. Just select your whole picture.
This is fun
Okay, so I'll press O again to get rid of the mask and I'm going to bump up my
temperature to where I want it.
That looks pretty good. But as you can
see, the water is still a bit warm. So I'm going to press O so I can see my mask
again, and I'm going to press down Alt and that will bring up my erase tool
here. And I want to flow down to about 20 to 30.
And i'm just going to take some of those warm tones out of the water.
You don't want it to cool either because that will look unnatural. So let's press
O and make sure it's not too cool. And I think that looks pretty good. So the next
thing that I want to do is selectively- let me press new for a new brush. I want to
selectively bring down highlights. So let's use the highlights brush and it
thinks I want to bring them up, so let me move it down. I'm going to press O for
my mask and use my left bracket to make my brush smaller and select the water.
And I'm bringing down the highlights because the waters a bit blown out and
this is going to add just a bit more detail back in, make it pop.
If you run into a spot like this where your brush is too big, you can use your left or right
bracket to make it larger or smaller.
And then I will press O to hide my mask.
Let me see... so this is where my highlights were and I don't want them
too low because it gets a bit dark, I still like the bright whites in the
water, so bring it down just a bit.
Alright so I'll press my adjustment brush to leave my adjustment brush and I just
like to just look at it and and see what should be changed.
Sometimes I'll just walk away from my computer so I can come back and get a
fresh look at the picture, because when you're just staring at something and
editing it you can just gradually add more and more edits until it's over processed.
That's bad
So I think the last thing that I want to do is bring more of your focus to this
part of the picture by artificially creating a narrower depth of field. And
I'm going to do that with my adjustment brush. So again, this opens up a new brush.
I'm going to make my brush bigger and press O so you can see the mask.
Oh, let's change it to sharpness.
I'll get the corners just a little bit, even though that's not really natural.
And now if you press alt you'll have your erase tool up and i'm going to put the flow up
on my erase tool because I'm going to erase around these rocks here everything
behind them is going to be out of focus kind of a wall of rocks. So all the trees
will be blurred a bit and that will bring your attention to the foreground.
I'm going to
use my brush again, bring the flow down and then blur some of these things
that aren't quite in the same focal plane as the waterfall but are still
in front of these trees here. So you can see, like this wouldn't be perfectly in
focus,
this is a bit behind this focal plane.
Ok, let me turn off my mask I'll leave my adjustment brush.
Okay, so let's see the before-and-after so you can get an idea of what the blurring
affected. So before the background is blurred a bit, you can see this isn't
quite in focus but the after picture is blurred enough where your attention is
really brought to the subject which is this one part of the waterfall.
And i'll press Y to get a side-by-side- oh by the way to get the before and
after, I use the backslash key under the backspace key.
Alright so let's press Y and get a side-by-side and you can see I warmed up
the picture which made it look just more inviting and prettier.
I brought out some of the detail on the waterfall, I've blurred the background
and got rid of those splashes. And if you have any other tips for editing a
waterfall, you can put them down below and help your fellow editors out.
That's it!
if you have any suggestions for other videos you can comment down below as
well. We have an entire Lightroom book where we have tons of tips and I have
more videos that are not seen on youtube, 12 hours of video in fact. So thank you.