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Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome into this Adobe Lightroom tutorial,
brought to you, as always, by tutvid.com. My name is Nathaniel Dodson. And this
is the - I believe - the sixth installment from raw to glorious jpeg, where I just
take an image into Lightroom, have a little bit of fun with it. Sometimes we get
some results that are cool, sometimes not so cool. But one thing that's guaranteed,
is we'll play with some tools, functions, features, and sliders in Lightroom and maybe
learn a thing or two, about how this interesting little photo application works a
little bit more and more, each and every time. So, without further adieu, let's
jump right into Lightroom, and check this out. Okay, well here we are in Adobe
Lightroom. I'm going to work with this photo right here. And the first thing I'm going
to do, is I'm going to right click on it; and I am going to choose to create a virtual
copy, just so I'm working on its own little piece of it, off to the side. And I'm not
messing with the original image. Really, I mean, I would work with the original
image in a normal working environment. But for the sake of this tutorial, I'm going
to go with a virtual image. Now, this photo - these aren't the best lit photos that
I've ever shot before, but I gotta tell you... we were out on Staten Island, you can see
that's lower Manhattan there. There's World Trade Center One. A number of years
ago, before World Trade Center was even completed construction-wise, and it
was, I think, it was -17 degrees. It was freezing cold. The coldest photoshoot I've
ever been a part of. I dropped my camera. I broke a lens. I broke a camera. My
hands were freezing cold. And the poor model was - she was awesome, she was
incredible. And I did the entire shoot without a jacket because I looked at her, and
said, if you have to wear a dress like that, you will not be the only one out here on
set this severely under dressed. So it was a bonding moment for us; and it was
freezing cold. But, with that out of the way, let's take a look at how we can play
with this image a little bit, and maybe get something of it. The first thing I'm going
to do, is come over here and choose my crop tool. And well, if I let go of the crop
tool for a second, there's a bit of a slant here. Again, this was more like, set up,
fire away some photos, let's get our coats on again, kind of thing. So, the image is
a bit tilted. I could've been a little bit more careful about it. So, I'm just going to
go ahead and level this in accordance with the horizon there. It's not going to be
100% perfect, but it will be better than what we had before. So, there we go.
Leveled it off a little bit. The composition is not quite perfect. But again, good
enough for what we're working with. I want to get rid of the octa that's hanging
out and showing up here, camera left. I'm going to use the healing brush, cloning
healing option here, and I'm going to use just a giant version of the brush. I'm
going to make it a little bit bigger with my bracket keys, just maybe something
like that. I'm going to click a single time, and it's going to attempt to find a bit of
sky, or something, that's going to work to cover this up. But you can see, that it's
not quite covering the very edges. So I need to actually make this a little bit
larger; so I'm going to drag the edge of it. You can grab and drag it, maybe this
is as large as it's going to go. In which case, I'm going to do two of these. There
we go. So, I got one. And I'm going to come over here, and I'm going to place a
second one right here. And obviously, that's a terrible placement. So I'm going to
lift this up, and then I'm going to drag this out here to get more sky. And then
I can just drag this around until it looks the way that I want it to look. And then
I can click healing brush over here, and there we go. It's not perfect. Photoshop could
do a much better job getting rid of a big area that needed to be healed up like
that, but it's passable here in Lightroom. Most people probably won't see that.
Let's jump over here into the tone curve first. And I tend to not use this version
of the curve. I like to go with the point curve where I do everything the difficult way.
And what I want to do here, is I want to grab the black point and I want to lift
it pretty drastically. So, I'll probably lift it to right there. And then I'm going to pull
down, maybe we'll add some more darkness to the shadows. I'm going for a
very heavy, thick feeling, almost muddy, faded image effect, with some blues
in the shadows - that's kind of what I'm going for here. And we'll just desaturate
a little bit of her skin, because it's far too yellow/orange. But we'll tackle that
when we get to it. I want to bring some of the brightness and the midtones
back up to bring out some of the blue in the skies, as it was. I'll probably bring
down the white point a little bit, because that'll help just darken her skin and
help blend that in with the rest of the general dark faded palette of our image.
And I'll add a little bit of brightness to the general midtones there. Actually, it's
beyond midtones. It's really highlights. Our midtones are really here. So, I'll
actually take my shadows here, I'll back them off a little bit. Bring them back
here. And then I'm going to bring this point back over - eh, how do I want to do
this? Let's see. Let's push it up a little bit. Maybe something like that. That
may be too bright for that part of the image. There we go. Something like that.
I need to lift the shadows. They're just a little bit too - I'm sorry, not the shadows,
the darker midtones - I need to lift them a little bit. Like that. I think that's better.
If I shut my tone curve off, there's before. There's after. So, we're just flattening
and fading generally the darker parts of the image. And as you can tell, by the
histogram, the image is just really dark, overall. Next, I'm going to jump into...
let's go into the blue panel. Or, the blue channel, excuse me. In the curves panel.
And I'm going to pull up on the blue. Down here in the very darkest parts of the
photo, you can see, it's going to give us a heavy blue color cast. Far too heavy.
So I'm going to immediately tamper down on that, and just pull down another
point, back in line with the original image. And then I'm going to pull up, and try
to just bring the original image back to where it was before. Maybe pull a little
bit of blue into the very brightest parts of the photo. And just, I don't know, mess
around with this until it just looks right out there. There we go. Something like
that. I don't want to influence the overall bulk of the image with too much blue,
or too much yellow. Blue and yellow are opposites. So I'm just trying to adjust
a little bit. You can see, there's what we've got so far, by toggling the on/off there.
I think we're done with tone curve for now. Let's come down to hue/saturation.
HSL is where we're going to make a lot of changes, and a lot of times when you're
playing around with color and tone in your image, the more you mess around with
HSL - it's kind of complicated at first, I'll admit. But the more you mess around with
it, the more you'll realize the power of it. And the more you'll just flow with it, and
it'll make sense to you. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to change the hue in the
reds. I'm just going to push that a little bit more toward orange. Maybe something
like that. I'm going to push the oranges back a little bit toward red. Just a little bit.
I'm really focusing on keeping an eye on her skin, and what the tone of her skin
looks like. Now, here for the yellows, there's a lot of yellow up there. So, I think
I'll push these way back toward orange. Something like so works for me. Green,
whatever little green there is in the image, I'll push it more toward aqua, because
I want aqua, purples, and blues to be out there. Aqua, I don't think I'm going to
touch aqua. Aqua is probably fine the way it is. If there's a little bit of blue,
we'll just give it a drip of aqua. We're not going to mess with purples. And for
the magenta, I'm going to push any magentas closer to red, because the
thought would be, if there's any magenta that's up in her skin, I'd rather
push it more toward a natural reddishness in her skin. Now, I'm going to
go to the saturation. Let me try pushing up on the red saturation, I'm going
to drop the orange saturation down. You can see, if I push that way down,
it's just taking all of the color out of her skin. I don't want to quite go that far.
I'll probably go around -30, something like that. We can see before and after.
She's still very over exposed. But we can control that in the luminence when
we come in here. We'll just have to make a mental note here that the oranges
have a lot of brightness being flooded into them. For yellow, I could try
desaturating yellow, or I could push - eh, maybe I'll actually push a little bit of
color into the yellow. Something like that. For the greens, I'll probably
just desaturate them a little bit. Aquas, I'll push up a little bit. Blue, I'll also
push up a little bit. Purple, I'll push that up a little bit. And magenta, I'll
probably actually push a little bit into the magenta. There's not too much
magenta in the image, in general. Now, I'm going to come over here to
luminence. And with the luminence, I think I want to immediately darken
all the red, orange, yellows, because that's probably going to affect her
skin for the most part. So, let's go -20 there. Here, I'm going to go -25. That
looks pretty decent. And then the yellow, I'll probably go -20 ish, as well.
You can really see what we're doing there. Now, I can come back to saturation,
for instance. And say, yellow, you know what? I actually want to desaturate
you a little bit more. Orange, I want to desaturate you a little bit more. And
maybe even red. Yeah, red I'll push more back to just center/normal, just
like that. Alright, back to luminence here. With green, I probably don't need
to really mess with green too much. Same with aqua. I'll just probably
brighten aqua. And blue, you can see, blue is kind of getting the color of the
sky behind her. I do want to brighten that up a little bit. Just to add a little bit
of background definition. Magentas and purples, you can see, it's not doing too
much. We'll probably brighten that up a little bit. And then, magentas - I'm
sorry, I said magenta and purple. Just regular purple. Magenta, we'll maybe
push that up. Or should I push it down? No, I'll push it forward a little bit. I'll
go +30 ish for magenta. I'm going to close HSL. And actually, I can shut off
HSL. There's before HSL. There's after HSL. So you can see, we're just making
some color changes there. I'm going to go to the detail tone - detail tab,
excuse me. And I'm going to hit the little loop icon here. So, I'm going to select
that, and I'm just going to zoom in here. Over her neck, there's all this detail
in this crazy shoulder strap, brooch of the dress. And I'm going to hold down
ALT/OPT, and I'm going to sharpen. And I should probably click on the photo
to zoom in to 100%, as you can see. I mean, there's a bit of motion blur in
the photo. You can even see her goosebumps. I don't know if the motion blur
is her moving. Probably not. It's probably me shaking from the cold. But,
you know what? We got some photos. So that works. And then radius, I'll
probably reduce. Drop radius down a little bit. I'm not going to mess with
detail. I'm holding ALT/OPT here, and I'm going to pull masking up. So, we're
only really sharpening the bits of the image that I want sharpened. There
we go, that's good. I'm going to click out on the image to zoom back out
a little. It might be fun to come down to lens correction here, and apply
a little bit of bow to the image. Something, maybe like +12. And then just
constrain the crop, just to pull it back together. Make her look a little slimmer
and a little bit of bend to the photo, in general. Help it to flow with the angular
nature of that railing back there. Kind of neat. And also, actually, let me
bring this up. Maybe we could brighten up the corners of the photo a little
bit, with the vignetting; so we could infuse a little vignetting and then spread
the mid point inward, I guess. Something like that. So, there's - we shut
that off. We turn that on. Yeah, I think it levels the image out a little bit. If we
add a little bit of that, or the vignette correction, if you will, up there to the
corners. Let's come down here to camera calibration. And here's where you
can really swing the tone, or the direction, that the color is going to take in the
image. I think I want to push this a little bit more toward the greens in the
shadows. So, I'm going to go -20. But, I don't know, purple is kind of cool, as
well. I'm going to stick with -25, let's see what we can get here with this. Then,
I'm going to change the red primary. So I'm going to actually push this to the
point where it's going to resaturate her skin a little bit. So I'll push it up, I don't
know, 10, 12. Something like that. And then I will counteract that by going -15
here on the saturation. We can just see, we're making some color changes. Some
tonal changes there. I don't know that I really want to mess with the green primaries
too much. It's not really going to affect the image in the way that I want this to be
affected. I will try with the blues here. I'll push the blues a little bit more toward
the aqua. That's going to add a little bit more of that greenishness. We're
going to combat the green and help balance it out in a moment. And I might just
go ahead and boost the saturation here of the blue primaries, that's kind of neat.
If I shut off camera calibration, you can see, we're going from purple - it's
just a little less purple, more of aquaish color. And then up here in the basic
tab, I can swing the tint either way. I think I'm actually going to push it toward
the magenta direction about +20. And then I'll just warm up the overall
image a bit, as well. Let's push it to maybe around 8,000 or so. Maybe I'll just
dial 8,000 in manually. And then, you know, at this point, we can just mess
around with a couple more of these sliders. Maybe push a little clarity into
it. Maybe not too, too much. Bump the exposure just a touch. Reduce a little
bit of contrast. Or maybe it needs contrast... I don't think it needs contrast
because we're going with that faded look, so if we now infuse or force contrast
onto the photo, it's going to really just make it start to look murky; and
almost like it's losing a lot of critical detail. Let's reduce the highlights, maybe
we'll reduce the whites a little bit. We'll boost the shadows just a touch.
Maybe we'll reduce the blacks a little bit though, just to kind of darken some of
that stuff up. You know what? I'm going to go back to camera calibration,
I think I want to take some of that green out. It's just a little bit too much for me.
I'd almost rather it be red, orange, and purple. You see how that's like the color
scheme of it now, instead of it being that green-y/teal? Alright, I think that's
much cooler, and maybe I'll bring back some of the saturation. Maybe a little bit.
Swing the color this way, the red primary that is. And then bring some of that
saturation back. And then if I combat - cause now her skin is far too orange,
so I would go back to HSL, go back to the saturation here, and try taking some
of that red and orange out again. Something like that. There we go, if I shut
that off, turn that on. That looks a lot better, I think. Jump back over to the
basic tab, maybe reduce the overall vibrance of the image, just a little bit. And
if I do that, I'm going to go back to my tone curve. I'll probably go to the red
channel here. I'm going to take the finger scrubby tool, and what I'll do, is I'll
push some red into the brighter parts of the photo. And I don't really know
that I want to push teal into the shadowy parts; because, again, if we do that
teal look, that's really not what we're going for. I want that warm, murky -
murky look. So, I'm going to go with a bit of red there. We could try here with
the green channel, what happens if we infuse a little bit of magenta into
the darker parts of the image, but not too much. See, that's way, way too much.
There needs to be just a very subtle amount of magenta. And I think
that's too much. I'm just going to double click that to get rid of that, and I'm
honestly kind of questioning my choice here of the reds. Maybe what I'll do,
double click this, I'll just add reds to the very brightest parts of the photo,
like that. That might be more like what I'm looking for. I'll collapse tone curve
here, and I think I want to add a little bit more clarity. Again, you just have
to be careful with the clarity, because you can really destroy an image quickly.
But again, it's all subjective. So you could say I've already destroyed this
image, right? Then, I think, last but not least, we'll go with a graduated filter
here. And I'm going to just darken up the exposure here for the foreground.
I'm going to hold down SHIFT and pull this up from the bottom. Let's darken
this up a little bit, but I think I'm going to brighten the whites because that'll
give the snow and the area where the light is just dropping some light on this
platform she's standing on, it'll just give that a little more snap. And I'm going
to create a new mask here. I'm going to pull down from the top. This one, however,
is going to brighten things up, and not darken things down. And I think
there's - man, it does look like there's a little bit too much purple up there
in the sky, doesn't it? It looks a little bit like that. I'd almost rather make it a
little red, right? Yeah, by warming things up, like so. And just rid of a little bit
of that purple. Balance it out by making the tint a little greener, something
like that might be cool. And maybe to finish things off, blend it up a little bit.
I'm going to zoom in on this. You could just add a little bit of grain, something
like this. Nothing too, too crazy rough with the grain. Maybe actually drop it
down a little bit less - little bit less grain than that. There we go, something
like that. And we can get a quick before and after here. There's the image we
began with, with somewhat normal colors, right? You could argue, hey I just
like that way more. And then we just go with this really faded, moody look,
that looks a little bit like that. And you could go in and very quickly change
the overall gist of the color by messing with color calibration, really, really
quickly. You can make it a very purple/red image, and you can shift the red
primaries. Something totally different. You can shift the blue primaries.
Something totally different. Green primary, you can come in and begin
swinging things all over the place and making all kinds of changes to the
image rather quickly through camera calibration, and then of course,
the tone curve, as well. But overall, we took the image from just a shot
from a DSLR with a single, off-camera flash, to something that looks
a little bit more - I don't know, it's just a little bit more stylized here in
Adobe Lightroom. So there you have it. That's our final finished result.
Maybe you enjoyed, maybe you didn't. If you did enjoy this tutorial,
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For some camera calibration; some cropping; some healing; some messing
with curves; and sliding HSL sliders here and there, and really, quite frankly,
every where. And everything else we covered in this Adobe Lightroom tutorial,
ladies and gentlemen, that is it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.