- All right guys, I'm excited.
This is my first blog of the summer.
I'm gonna bring you with me to Griffith Park
and I wanna take a whole bunch of photos there.
It's one of my favorite location to go in Los Angeles.
I'm gonna try to re-shoot this photo,
which is the cover of this magazine that I shot years ago.
And I'm gonna take you with me,
show you the gear that I use.
So come with me in Los Angeles
and let's do some photography together.
I'm gonna shoot all the behind the scene.
Okay, so I'm gonna go shoot with a 70 to 300.
I need to get 200 to get these useful,
so I need a big lens.
I'm also taking my Sony A7R3 with a 24 to 105
which is like my go to lens for everything.
In case something I need a wider shot,
I'm gonna take the Mavic Pro 2 and it's remote.
And here's a little case where I have spare batteries
and spare SD card.
I cannot tell you how many times I went shooting
and I was missing a battery or something.
So let's go and do this.
(upbeat music)
(car engine roars)
(rock music)
(camera clicks)
This is the view.
This is the view but I'm gonna shoot it, from up there.
I'm gonna to have to climb up there.
Hopefully there's not too much rattle snakes.
So I'm gonna wait the night
because it's a little too early now.
It's a little too bright,
because we need like a good night
to get that terminator shot.
Hasta la vista baby.
(upbeat music)
This is Hollywood.
All the way the view of all L.A
and the Griffith Park.
Whereas downtown Los Angeles in front,
that's the photo I'm going for.
It's very hazy.
When it gets a little darker,
it's gonna be more interesting.
So I'm just gonna hike a little bit.
Well, the waiting for the right light,
it's still a little too bright for me.
I want it to be darker.
Just gonna check what's up there,
see if there's a better view.
See, I can get a new angle maybe.
I'm gonna try shooting this view for change.
(camera clicks)
All right, let's go home.
Okay, I'm back in my office and before we get started,
I just wanna tell you
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You can click the link under the video.
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I'm gonna give you skies,
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I'm gonna give you brushes.
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Plus, it's what I used to do all my books.
So it's amazing.
Stay until the end, I'm gonna show you
the best retouching is coming at the end of this video.
Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna do is,
I'm gonna make an HDR.
Remember that's the first photo
we shot of the Hollywood sign.
So that's a normal exposure minus two,
under exposure, plus two over exposure.
I could only retouch this profile
but I find that when I do large print,
sometimes, not every time,
I get a better quality with the HDR.
So how I do it, I select all three photos,
I right click,
I go to photo merge
and I go to AGR AGR.
Okay, and I usually leave auto align and auto select on.
The deghost amount, I use high.
I like to use high because if there was any winds
that blew the leaf while I was shooting this,
it would help prevent this.
You can click here on show de-ghost overlay
to see if there is a ghosting overlay
because we're taking three photos.
If something moved between the three photos,
then it can give a better result.
But you can see there's no de-ghosting.
It's not detecting any changes between the three photos,
so I can go on none.
And I've already done that and it's here.
And so usually what I do on this ones is,
I open up the shadows,
I bring down a bit the highlight,
not completely all the way but just about that way.
And then I check my blank point holding my option
on a Mac or out on a Windows.
What you see here is 100% black.
So, I usually like to go about two or three percent black.
And then I do the opposite here with the white.
Now what you see here in yellow is 100% white.
I don't want that.
And then once I've done that,
then I decide the overall exposure
and then I adjust the highlights.
Because it's an AGR, I got a lot to work with.
The photo is very blue.
So, I think I'm gonna go to shade.
Yeah, it's too warm.
So let's go to maybe daylight.
I think daylight's good.
Yeah, daylight is better.
I add a bit of magenta,
a bit of contrast to make it pop.
And then usually what I do at this point,
is I take whatever I've done here.
Let's see, maybe let's go into this gradient here.
I'm gonna click here and maybe just darken a bit
the top of the sky.
Yeah, I can do that.
Yeah, I love this little pass to Hollywood.
So once I'm done with some retouching here,
what I do is I go to my develop,
I press command shift C,
I select everything and I take my normal exposure
and I do command shift V and then I sort of adjust it
so it matches the look of the HDR.
And then I select both of them
and I press C on my keyboard, shift tab.
And so the HDR is, let's see.
That's the HDR on the right side,
that's the non-HDR on the left side.
And usually I zoom in like 100%
and I don't know if you can see here
but it's a lot more noisy here than here.
So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna end up using--
You can see a lot of noise here.
It's a bit less noisy on this one.
So I know in this case, the HDR has a bit of quite the--
It's not a big deal,
It's just a little less noisy
but it goes a long way talking about noise
because I didn't use one of my preset.
I have to do my noise reduction.
So I remove chromatic aberration.
There's a lot of chromatic aberration here.
You see that little red thing here all along,
if I click here, boom, it's almost completely gone.
Let me show you.
Before, red.
After, gone.
And on about profile correction,
it just makes the vignette a little bit off.
And then I'm gonna go to my noise reduction sharpening.
So sharpening, what I always do is,
this one is a bit noisy cause it's underexposed,
so I'm gonna go like 20 in noise reduction
and about 80 in sharpening.
Okay, so 80 plus 20 makes 100.
So, that's my formula.
And then I put the masking.
So, I hold on the option key so you can see.
Basically the mask is anything which is white,
is gonna get sharpened.
Anything which is black is not gonna get sharpened.
So I'm gonna go to about 50 and boom.
I'm quite happy with this photo.
I think I'm gonna put it like 16 by nine because I can.
And wait for it.
This is like the least nice photo I shot that night.
Stick around until the end you'll see the best photo
is at the end.
Okay, cool.
So I'm kind of happy.
That's that was like the first thing that I did.
Nice HDR.
Okay, it's cool.
Hollywood, Hollywood.
Now this one, it's not my favorite.
My favorite is coming at the end.
This one is kind of okay.
We have the Griffith's park
and we have all of Los Angeles behind.
So on this one, I'm just gonna open up the shadows.
I'm gonna boost the exposure a bit.
I'm gonna not lower so much the highlights
'cause I don't lower so much the highlight
when it comes to night shot.
And the white balance, it's too blue.
So I'm just gonna go like this
and maybe add a bit of magenta.
Add a bit of contrast,
a bit of texture and a bit of clarity, why not?
And it's a cool shot.
I kind of like it.
I'll show you something more cooler.
That's the photo that I got, which I believe can be a cover.
So on this one, I'm actually gonna use my preset.
My free preset that you can download to go faster.
So I'm gonna take my basic surge drama preset.
And all I'm gonna do is change my white balance
to make it more blue.
And you can see here, there's like a circle,
which you can put over the city.
It's too red for now.
So I'm just gonna make it less red
but I'm gonna keep it.
It just makes the whole city glow.
And you know what, I'm gonna add in that circle
some de-haze to make it pop and some clarity and texture
to make the city pop even more.
I'm gonna make it bigger.
Yeah.
It's still a little too much red,
so I can lower a little bit there.
I can lower the saturation.
So it's my big drama, big drama.
And I really love it.
I use my preset all the time.
The only reason I didn't show you with the preset
is I wanted to so some people know we not only use preset
but the truth is I only use my preset.
You can get some of it for free.
The link is below.
And then I am gonna go 16 by nine on this one.
And I really wanna get on the Griffith.
I love that shot.
That is very similar to the cover that I did.
And because I used a preset,
I know the sharpening is done.
I know everything is done.
It's ready to go.
And then this one very similar.
I like what I did here so I can click on shift
and I can synchronize what I did except the crop
and synchronize them this way.
Most of it is kind of done,
except here I did something really weird.
So I'm gonna reset that because I had a big dust there.
And you see the white balance changed a lot,
so I need to make these more blue
and a bit more magenta.
I need to erase that spot.
That spot was really annoying.
Voila.
And then I need to make the photo straight.
Working with preset totally changed my life.
It's so much faster.
I mean, I spend less time retouching
and more time being out there.
Look at this.
So I shot this.
I think if we look at it, it's 153.
Yeah, I53 millimeter.
I thought I was gonna get at 200, but 153.
And let me show you one last photo.
I shot this one like a couple of weeks before.
I'm gonna use my basic sunset preset on this one.
I'm gonna crush the black by holding the option key.
Crush the whites and it's the same view.
It's just much wider.
It's just that night there was a much nicer sky.
And same thing, I'm gonna put this over the city.
It's too much.
And that's the way to get it done instead of changing
and messing around with a yellow and a magenta,
like what we did.
I'm just gonna do go to wrench mask
and I'm gonna go to luminance and I'm gonna lower that.
And that's gonna just make it go behind
and check it out, it's just more subtle before and after.
I'm gonna crop this 16 by nine
because I'm a little too far away.
Yes, I like that leading line to the Griffith's park, boom.
Voila.
Add some more contrast
and maybe make it a bit darker.
And I love that shot.
I love that shot.
So get my free toolbox, do the training.
The free tool box comes with lots of training.
You will love it.
It's gonna show you my really basic workflow.
It's completely free
and you will receive it in your mail
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