Hey everybody, Chelsea here and today i'm going to show you how to fix your messed up
wildlife pictures using Lightroom. So I spoke to my peeps in our Lightroom
5 book group, if you know about us you know about our book, we talk about it non-stop.
I went to them and I said hey guys what would you want, would you rather that I
edited a really perfect, beautiful wildlife picture because you do get some
flack if you don't do that, or do you want to see real pictures with real
mistakes? And those kind folks told me they wanted some real pictures they wanted
to see some mistakes, so here I bring to you my mediocre picture full of mistakes.
First of all, the subject is underexposed, right? It's dark,
the composition leaves a lot to be desired and the sky is blown out.
There's like, chromatic aberration, the picture is a mess,
so let's start by cropping it down and we'll work from there.
So first I'll go to my crop tool and I like my wildlife pictures to be cropped
very tight, because i think people want to see the animal
unless the surroundings are really beautiful. And let's see here, put his
eye in about the upper third.
I'm not so worried about cropping out the fish, let's see how that looks.
I think I can go a little tighter
Very simple, but I like that it's close and it shows some detail.
Let me experiment and go a little bit tighter just to see.
I like that. Okay, so
next I have to make sure that our subject is properly exposed.
So I'll bring up the shadows.
And I'm not going to bring up the exposure because i'll also be lightening
the background which I don't want to do, because i want to recover the blue in
the sky
next and I think that raising the shadows would be a better idea for that.
So i'll raise the shadows quite a bit
and it looks good. He's not over-exposed,
you can see still see the feather detail,
our fish looks great here.
ok
And next I'll go into
the colors panel here and select the blue
and lower the luminance. If you go too far then you get this funky glow around
your subject,
it also looks really fake, you don't want to overdo it.
I'm also going to warm up my subject to make it
look like I went out during the golden hour, which I did not.
But that means that i'm going to just put the blue sky a little bit towards
the turquoise side, so it looks a little bit warm.
if I were to warm
up the temperature of
the photo here, it washes out the background. So instead what you want to do is select
your adjustment brush and go to temp
and then select your subject. I'm going to press O and that will show
you our mask.
I'm going to go in here and zoom in 2:1 to get really nice and close and
make sure that I've selected my subject properly.
mhm
And you want to select the fish too, he's a part of it.
Ok now press O again to get rid of the
mask and you can see that it looks a little bit warmer, and you went and you
took that crummy light and made it into something beautiful.
It does look like the golden hour. Let's see,
I'll try to warm it up just a little more. And then I'll select new and this
makes a new adjustment brush. And I'm also going to select the stick because
that's a part of it too, but sometimes, you know the bird has white on it and
sometimes that will look even more orange
if you try to raise the levels too much.
The stick is darker so it may be a little more resistant to
changing the temperature.
I'm going to select this layer again and try
raising the saturation a little bit.
Okay, and then
next I'll select another adjustment brush and I'm going to bring out his
eyes.
Let me zoom in again 2:1.
if your mask color is not showing up,
if you press Shift+O and it will change it.
I raised the highlights a little bit and the sharpness.
i'm going to select a new brush
and
go over the same part of the eye.
Let me show you what I'm doing here.
and some of the beak.
And bring up the sharpness.
Not too much or else it gets very grainy.
And let's just see a before and after
just to make sure we're going in the right direction.
That's not a before and after.
it doesn't show some of the edits.
Ok, next I'm going to
bring out the sharpness of the feathers a bit.
I'll select the adjustment brush again.
I'm all about selecting a bunch of adjustment brushes and just making little
adjustments at a time
Why? So I don't go overboard, so i can go back and adjust one section at a time.
I want to just bring up the sharpness a little bit.
Let's zoom in again very close and make sure that we're not making any
destructive edits,
we don't want to create too much noise.
See, that is too noisy it looks very artificial.
Okay.
I think that the fish is an important part of
the story so I'm gonna
give him a little bit of attention too.
I'm gonna go to clarity
i'm going to put the clarity down because I can tend to darken it up.
I'm going to
bring up his exposure a little bit and his shadows, brighten up the fish.
A little more saturation because i like his colors.
And the sharpness.
The highlights make him look a little shinier, let's see.
There's a before and after,
that looks much better.
I'm going to bring out the fish's eye a little too.
So another thing that I'd like to show you that I don't
i think is
necessarily needed in this picture, but i think it's a common problem, is how to
reduce noise.
You get a lot of noise in primary colors, so if you have very blurred green
leaves in the background, there's a good chance that there's a lot of noise.
If you have a very blue sky that you didn't have to darken like I did
there's a good chance you have a lot of noise. In this picture the noise,
you can see it's in the shadows.
Let's go in 2:1 and i'll show you. You can see the underside of this branch,
it's out of focus but it's noisy and the feathers have a bit of noise too.
I'll show you how to do it on the branch, I don't know that it will make a huge
difference in this photo,
but if you need it for your background then it's really necessary and that's a
problem we see with a lot of wildlife pictures that we get. A lot of shadow
noise or primary color noise
So again, your adjustment brush
and
I'll go to noise.
And let's select this brush, uh, this branch.
It's really hard to see the noise in this example
because the branch has a lot of texture.
But either way
I'll be teaching you a useful method.
So here's the original, you can put the noise all the way up, and if
that gets too smooth you can put a little, a little bit, about 20-25
and it's more realistic.
I'm gonna show you on some feathers, maybe that will be a better example.
So that is how you reduce the noise in your picture if you have that problem.
Otherwise, good for you! Luckily this picture wasn't too noisy, that's not
really one of the problems that I had.
One problem that I do have in this picture is a bit of chromatic aberration,
you can see it right here.
You can go down to the bottom and go to lens correction, and color, and remove
chromatic aberration and usually automatically it does a good job.
If it doesn't you can select these colors under defringe, and
even use the dropper tool and it will take care of it for you. Let me see if I
have any other chromatic aberration other than on the stick.
Let me just see the before and after again. I just want to see if I could
make it
even
sunnier. Okay, I think I can.
Ok, so i think we're just about finished. We took that blown out looking sky and
we put some blue back into it. We took care of the chromatic aberration, brought
out this beautiful creatures eyes, and brought up the exposure on the osprey
because it looked too dark.
Let's see the before and after as it is. It's a huge improvement,
this isn't even including the crop and we turned a really boring, blah picture to
something that's a little more pleasing to look at.
Not the greatest, but still much better than before.
I think we could even tweak it a little bit more and bring out those warm colors
on the Osprey to get more of that golden hour look, so let's try.
So you reselect your pin and it will show you that layer.
Come on now, don't make a liar of me.
There we go, that's the wrong one. This is the correct one,
even though it's not showing me. Let's bring up the temperature.
So this is the layer where I added that warm light.
Alright, so let me take my mask off and warm it up just a little bit more,
maybe even bring up the saturation a little bit.
Eh, I'll dial it back, it felt a little bit artificial.
Okay.
There's the before and after and I'm pretty pleased with the results.
I'll have more videos, I'm going to do one with the noise next time because I
feel like I couldn't give you a great example. If you have more suggestions, you
can put them in the comments. If you're in our lightroom 5 book group, always
share your suggestions because i really like to do what you guys want to do and
thank you so much for watching.