- Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs,
welcome to Clearwater Beach, Florida.
I want to show you a photo that I'm gonna take
of the sunset, hopefully it's gonna be a nice one,
of this beautiful place.
And how I composed it, how I shoot it,
the settings I use, and how I use my Lightroom preset,
my natural Lightroom preset, to retouch it.
So follow me here in Florida
and let's take some photos.
So as you can see here, this is the pier.
I really like this place because you need
to have something to show when you take a photo.
If you're only shooting the water,
it's not always interesting.
Shooting the pier is something I always go for.
Now, I'm gonna go on the left side of the pier
and the sun is gonna set on the right side.
Could be a good idea, could not be a good idea.
We'll see, but let's get to it, mesdames et messieurs.
So I'm thinking to shoot the pier from over here.
Let me show you through my camera.
Okay, so that's maybe the framing I'm gonna go for.
I might go ... I have a 24-240,
so that's at 24
and that's at 240.
Am I, like, really hunched in like this
for a detail shot.
In any case, what I'm gonna try to do is,
have about a one- or two-second exposure.
The water has small ripples.
I like it when it's more wavy.
I'm gonna try different settings.
All right, so my first setting is 1/60 second,
7.1, ISO 100, auto focus, 2-second timer.
So, now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go
at 500, at 50 ISO, and I'm gonna go f22.
And then I'm gonna push this
to about half a second.
So, half a second is gonna give me
a little bit of a wave, you know?
I'm actually gonna go more,
it's not very nice with people passing by.
I'm gonna go at one second.
Yeah, that's way too burned,
but I like the water, how it is.
So I'm gonna wait a little bit for the sun to come down
and we'll keep shooting at long exposure.
(upbeat piano music)
Okay, I'm gonna try to move the other side of the pier
to see if I get a better framing.
This is what I'm seeing, so you see the sun,
the sun is setting the other side of the pier.
And I'm gonna go and see if I get a better light over there.
See what happens over here.
Oh, yeah, the sky is really nice there.
Sky is really nice.
We'll see how the framing comes to view.
But that could be cool.
Let's try a few framing.
So I'm here at the other side of the pier.
That could be a good frame, I'm at 24.
Or I could sort of zoom in on the pier
and get that a little more.
Let's see here, something like this.
We'll see, let's take different photos,
short exposure, long exposure and see what comes best.
A little, cool trick, if you go down very low,
close to the wave, I find that
the wave look nicer sometimes.
So I'm gonna try that also, see if it works.
Okay, the sky has now gone totally crazy.
I love that, because you got the reflection
of the sky here and there.
That's gonna give us some good shots.
So, let's see, let's jump over
into Lightroom and see what we got.
All right, so here we are in Lightroom.
I've imported the photos and I've taken a whole bunch,
I'm not gonna go through all the photos.
And I've actually put a little star system
on the one I really like.
But every time I was doing this,
one normal exposure and one long exposure.
So every time, the long exposure of the water
is gonna be more wavy, more flowy.
For example, like this.
Or, when I do a short exposure, then--
Let me see a short exposure here, for example,
everything is fixed.
Sometime I would like more of the wavy version,
sometime I'm gonna more like the "fixed in time"
that you get on the water.
Anyway, so let's see here what we have.
I'm gonna put my little star system,
to just show you the best of the best.
So, this one, I like the framing.
I love the clouds, how they are.
But there was a lot of people in the water, there.
Here, it's cool, but the people in the water
are still there and you can still see them.
As the sun was coming down and I was making this photo,
I always really underexpose my photo a lot.
So that's what we'll follow on retouch.
This one, I really like.
So this one I gave it a two star.
It is a slightly long exposure,
because it's 1/3 of a second.
I was trying different speed, I just love the light.
And now I'm gonna use my Natural Everyday preset
to retouch it.
Now, the way my Lightroom Everyday preset works,
just to show you, is that you have different groups.
So you have a group called "Blue Hour," "Day,"
"Golden Hour," "Long Exposure,"
"Night," "Snow," and "Sunset."
Now, this is a sunset, so the one I would go to--
It's actually a mix between a Golden Hour and a Sunset.
So if I just go to Sunset Basic,
I'm gonna get a strong sunset, could be way too much.
But it was really red. It was so red.
Not that red, but it was really red.
So I can try Golden Hour, Golden Hour Basic,
see how it is, it's gonna be very similar.
Yeah, hardly see any difference.
But you can get creative.
You can go to Snow Basic, it's gonna give you
a very blue photo, which I don't like.
In this one, I think, I'm gonna go for--
You can go to Day, which is gonna give you different colors.
On this one, I think I want to go, maybe...
Yeah, I think I'm gonna go to Night.
Night, I'm gonna use Night Linear Circle Light,
something like this.
It's very blue, so I'm gonna--
I can always bring back some of the blues,
bring back some of the magenta.
No, you know what, no.
On this one, I'm gonna go for the Golden Hour.
I'm gonna take the Golden Hour Linear Light,
which is really red and crazy,
so I'm just gonna back it down a little bit
by adding some blue, but I really want
to get the red feeling there.
And a preset is a starter point,
but I'm just gonna lower the exposure a little bit.
You can click here in the circle
and see if there is any circle to be changed,
to be moved around, or you can erase them.
I always like to have some kind of
point that's kind of light in the photo.
So that's kind of cool, so people would look into that.
Or I could put this point over in the water,
to get some reflection, yeah, why not?
And I can go here.
I already have a little gradient here,
I can make this one a little darker
and this one is already darker, it's good.
So it's fully retouched in, like, three clicks.
And everything is done, you got the clarity,
the hue and saturation luminance is already done,
your sharpening is already done,
the lens correction, everything, one click.
Another idea I had, actually, when I passed by
under the pier, I took one HGR.
So one thing that I do sometime is
I just take all three photos
and I go right-click, photo merge, HGR.
On the HGR option, I just use the deghost to hide,
that's what you see in red here.
The deghosting, basically, means that it's gonna take
the underexposed photo to be ...
and you can try different tests,
but for this one, this is what worked the best.
It's gonna take the underexposed photo
for the movement for the water.
And "Show Deghost Overlay," that's what it means.
So I've already created it, so I'm gonna cancel,
because I've already created it.
So that's just the HGR and I'm gonna go straight, again,
to, I think, my sunset this time.
I'm gonna take my Sunset Linear Circle Light.
I want something really crazy.
So one click ... boom.
And on this one, it's a little too much, again,
so I'm gonna add some blue.
And that's one thing I don't do,
I'm just gonna do the upright and I think
I'm gonna take my crop tool, I wanna crop it a little bit.
And voila, okay?
And I can look at my circles, where they are.
There is a circle here,
which is a big circle for the sunset.
And that's about it.
And maybe I'm gonna add some more blue on this one.
Yeah, back some more blue, maybe lower
a bit of vibrance and saturation
and add a bit of contrast, something like this.
That's one photo that I really like on this one.
Okay, last but not least is this one I wanna show you.
This one, the sky got so crazy.
I don't think in my life I saw so much red
and the reflection in the water was crazy.
Again, the long exposure, 2.5 seconds.
I think, this one, I'm gonna go on the ...
Let's see here, and you can see a little preview.
I'll just go through this.
I think I'm gonna go on the Golden Hour Light on this one
because this is really how I felt.
This is how I felt,
maybe back it down a little on the blue, just a little bit.
And it's basically retouched, one click and it's retouched.
Now, to install the preset,
you will have a link below this video to download them.
I'm gonna give you a couple of profiles,
I'm gonna give you a couple of free presets
so you can try this at home.
But, if you buy my $27 package,
the Serge Ramelli Signature Preset Collection,
you're gonna get all the Natural presets,
all the special effects, including my wedding
and my portrait essential and my film preset.
This is over 300 presets and it's
instead of $135, you can get for $27, for limited only.
This is really the preset that I use every day.
That's why I call them the Serge Ramelli Signature Preset.
Let me give you an example.
This is a book I'm preparing on Venice.
And every single photo I've used, as a base,
my Lightroom Everyday preset.
It's just so much faster,
when you have so many photos to retouch, to use this preset.
You know your sharpening is good,
you know your histogram is basically good,
your white balance, you know where you're going.
Your HSL is done. You know, you can place exactly
the point of interest,
your dodging/burning is already prepared.
It's really my workflow that I've been using for years.
So this is something I truly use every day in my workflow.
I highly recommend it.
And I think it will change the way
you retouch your photo in Lightroom forever.
Thank you very much and I'll see you in another episode.
(upbeat piano music)