Hi everyone!
Welcome back to this Lightroom CC training course for beginners.
My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find me on Instagram @JRfromPTC.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to develop photos using the light and color panels.
Before we get started I would like to point out that this is a training series.
If this is the first video that you watch, the check out the description for the link
to the playlist with the rest of the videos for this training series.
Also, if this is your first time at the Photoshop Training Channel, then don't forget to click
on that subscribe button and on the notification bell.
Ok let's get started!
Let’s now look at how to develop photos in Lightroom CC
Open the Venice Image, by going into “My Photos” and open the Lightroom CC Training
album.
Inside of this album, you will see the photos that we imported.
Select the Venice photo.
To have more room to work with, I’m going to disable the refine search options.
And collapse the folders and albums panel by tapping on the “My Photos” button.
We’re going to start by making tonal and color adjustments.
You can make these changes through the Edit panel.
You can access the Edit panel by tapping on the first icon on the list.
And it will reveal the options available to you to develop your photo.
Editing in Lightroom CC is straightforward.
You can just go down this list and make the changes that your image needs.
It is not required for you to go down the list in order.
You can start from the bottom and work your way up if you wish,
or you can start anywhere you like.
However, in my opinion, it makes a lot more sense start on top, and work your way down.
And that is what we will do in this training video.
Open the Light panel, by tapping on it.
The “Light” panel will give you control over how much light there is in your photo.
In other words, it gives you control of the luminance values.
How dark or how bright the tones appear in this image.
The six sliders in this panel control different aspects of luminance.
The best thing about Lightroom CC is that you do not have to memorize what each of these
sliders does.
You can simply hover over any of the labels of each slider, and Lightroom CC will display
an animation and description of what the slider does.
In this case, the Exposure controls the brightness of your photo.
To change the brightness, you can simply drag the slider left or right.
All the sliders in Lightroom CC work the same.
Dragging to the left reduces.
And Dragging to the right increases.
In the case of the Exposure slider, dragging to the left decreases the light in the photo.
Making it darker.
Dragging to the right increases the light in the photo.
Making it brighter.
You could also adjust your photo by ending a numerical value in the input box, or by
activating the input box and using the up and down arrows in the keyboard to increase
or decrease the value.
Holding Shift allows you to change the values in increments of 10.
You could also hover over a slider and use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard
to adjust it.
by default, when you hover over a slider and tap on the arrow keys, you move in increments
of 5.
To move in increments of one, hold the Alt key.
That’s option on the Mac.
To move in increments of 10, hold the shift key.
This technique is great for when you are on a plane or train, and you are editing photos,
and you can’t use your Wacom tablet or mouse to be precise.
With the exception of Contrast, by holding Alt/Option on the Mac, all the sliders in
this panel show you an overlay indicating when you clip the image.
That means that the overlays shows you when areas become pure white or pure black and
lose all detail.
To reset the slider to default, you can double click on the circle or hover over the adjustment
label and double click on it.
If you adjust multiple sliders, and you would like to reset the entire panel, then hold
Alt option on the mac.
And notice how all the panel labels have now become reset buttons.
You can just click on “reset lighting,” and all sliders in this panel are set to default.
You may be used to working with the Histogram to edit your photos;
you can enable it in Lightroom CC by going into the three dots icon, and selecting “Show
Histogram.”
You could also use the Keyboard Shortcut Ctrl 0.
That’s command 0 on the Mac.
Also, notice that most of these options have a keyboard shortcut.
So remember the ones that you use most often.
The histogram is a graphical representation of the tonal values of your photo.
On the left-hand side, you have the shadows, midtones are in the center, and the highlights
are to the right.
As you can see most of the data in this image is in the highlights.
We can now start adjusting this photo.
Just like in Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC has an Auto Tone adjustment button.
In some cases, this is all that you will need to use to adjust the tonality of your photos.
You could also use this auto adjustment as a starting point.
In this training video we’re going to do it all manually, so hold Alt/Option on the
Mac and reset the Light panel.
And of course, photo adjustments are all subjective, the point of this video is to show you the
feature of Lightroom CC, so we will spend more working with the tools rather than the
look of the final photo.
I recommend to always start with exposure, but in this case, we really do not need to
make exposure adjustments.
So, we will move on to the Highlights.
Drag the highlight slider to the left to make the brighter tones of the image darker, which
will reveal more detail in the highlights.
Then Drag the Shadows slider to the right to make the darker tones brighter.
This will reveal more detail the shadows.
Then you can decide how bright the whites should be.
Drag them to the left to make them darker.
Make the Blacks darker by dragging the slider to the left.
Now that we are done adjusting the “Light” of this image, we can start improving color.
Click on the Color Panel to expand it.
Before we continue, I would like to advice you to enable a feature that could make Lightroom
CC a little less confusing.
If you open panels, without closing the previous panel, the interface could become cluttered,
and it can cause confusion, especially if you are a new user.
But there is an option that you can enable, to avoid this problem.
Go into three dots for more options.
And select “Single-Panel Mode.”
single panel mode allows you only to have one panel open at a time.
If you open another panel, the previous panel will automatically close.
Now let’s work with the Color Panel.
As the name suggests, the Color panel allows you to work with color.
But before we start working with color, let me show you how easy it is to create and edit
black and white photos.
You can make your photo black and white by clicking on this Black and White icon.
This also turns the color mixer into a black and white mixer.
The Black and white mixer gives you these sliders that control the luminance values
of the original colors.
For example, you can drag the Blue slider to the left, and it will make anything that
was initially blue darker, such as the water and the sky.
I can also make the water and the sky brighter by dragging the blue slider to the right.
And of course, you could fine-tune all these sliders to create a great-looking black and
white photo.
And just as a side note, holding alt or Option on the Mac, does not give you an overlay with
any of the sliders in this panel.
Not even when you are working with color.
You can reset Black and white Mixer by holding Alt, Option on the Mac, and clicking on reset
Then click on B&W icon to convert the photo back into color.
And that brings back the Color Mixer.
We will start at the top.
The first setting that you will notice in the Color panel is the white balance which
helps you remove color casts.
A color cast is an unwanted tint in the photo due to the lighting, the white balance of
the camera, or the lighting conditions when you shot your photo.
Lightroom CC provides you with white balance presets that can help you to easily remove
a color cast.
In other words, to neutralize the grays.
You want to make sure that there are no color cast on the neutral grays so that the photo
look natural.
I have an image here that has a pretty bad yellow color cast, so let me show you how
this control works with that image.
I’m going to select it from the Filmstrip.
For this photo you can try, one of the presets.
But I think that the White Balance Selector, the eyedropper, will work best.
We cause use the eyedropper to manually select a color that should be a neutral gray and
neutralize it with one click.
For example, this area of the image should be a neutral gray.
It should not have a yellow color cast.
Tap on this area to apply the adjustment.
And Lightroom CC will automatically cool this image and neutralize the grays.
The eyedropper made changes to both Temperature and Tint to adjust the white balance.
That is my preferred method of neutralizing a photo.
But you can make manual adjustments by adjusting the temperature and tint sliders independently.
I’m going to go back into the Venice Photo.
And I can do drag the Temperature slider to the left introduce blue, and it makes the
image colder.
Dragging to the right, introduces yellow, making the image warmer.
The Tint slider controls the balance between green and magenta.
But in this case, I’ll change the white balance to “As shot” since this photo
does not contain any outstanding white balance issues.
Now let’s talk about saturation.
The following sliders control the Saturation of your photo but in two very different ways.
Vibrance is a way of adding controlled saturation.
It will add more saturation to colors that have less saturation, and it will protect
colors that are already highly saturated.
In portraits, Vibrance will also protect skin tones.
Saturation simply adds saturation to all pixels equallly.
One of the best ways to add saturation to a photo is by first adding Vibrance.
Then, if you need a boost in saturation to all the colors in the photo, you can add Saturation
as well.
But try to keep Saturation to a minimum, and only use it after you have applied Vibrance.
The Color Mixer allows you to select any of these colors, and adjust its hue, saturation,
and luminance.
Select Blue, and drag the Luminance slider to the left, to make these areas darker.
Or you can brighten those areas up by dragging the Luminance slider to the right.
You can also adjust the saturation and the hue of the blues.
You can, of course, apply the same types of adjustments for any of the other colors.
This is the default view, which I think is the best view, but there are other views that
you can use to adjust the Hue, Saturations, and Luminance.
Select Luminance from the drop-down, and adjust the Blue slider.
Notice that when you come back into the “Color” view, the settings for blue have been adjusted.
Both views control the same settings, but they are represented in two different ways.
I think the default view is much better because it allows you to select the color and make
adjustments in a much quicker way.
Now that I have adjusted the Light and Color of my photo, we will move on to different
kinds of corrections.
In the next video, we will work with the Effects, Detail, Optics, and Geometry panels.
If this is the first video that you watch, remember that we have a complete series.
There is a link to the playlist in the description.
Also, if this is your time at the Photoshop Training Channel, don't forget to click on
that subscribe button and the notification bell.
Thank you so much for watching, and I will talk to you again in the next video.