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Hey everybody! Welcome into this Adobe Lightroom tutorial,
my name is Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com. And Lightroom - finally! -
has an opacity slider. Well, it's more like an opacity slider plugin that a good
buddy of mine developed, it's called Opal, and it's pretty stinking cool!
In fact, it's so much fun, I think if it were any more fun, it would be illegal.
Very easy to set up, it costs about fifteen bucks, there's a link down in the bio,
you can pick up a copy of this plugin for yourself, if you're interested in using it.
A couple things about it: you need either Lightroom 6, or newer. And with the newest
versions of Lightroom, it can't be the Lightroom CC one, sort of the
web/cloud-based one. It's gotta be the one that you use on your desktop,
the full fledged, more robust version, Lightroom Classic CC. So, you want to make
sure you have the right version of Lightroom, and you can use this thing.
It's pretty cool. I'm going to run through how this works, and exactly why you
need it. Right here, and right now. Let's jump into Lightroom and check it out.
So here we are in Adobe Lightroom, we're going to check out Opal.
And I want to show you a couple of things about Opal. Number one, when you're
here in the develop module, you can simply bring it up by hitting the up arrow
key, and here it is, Opal opacity slider. But we really have nothing to swing the
opacity up. So, what I'll do is I will apply - let's apply this little preset that I
have here. And it's pretty strong, right? So, I'll bump the up arrow key, and for
right now, up arrow key is what Mac users will use. The Windows shortcut key
is being added soon by the developer. And you can also change the shortcut
key, by the way, to something else, when you're installing the plugin.
You can change it to a bunch of different things, but the up arrow key works
just perfectly. And what I can do, is just begin sliding this to the right or the left,
and you can see, we're kind of knocking the preset strength down. So I dragged
it down to 5. So, just think of it as 0 being the original image, 10 being the
full power preset. And we can also take it up beyond 10, to like, 15. We can
take it all the way up to 15, and that just increases the intensity of the preset.
So it's really, really helpful. We can also use our arrow keys, and just, you know,
move it in 1/10 increments, we can hold down SHIFT and move it a whole
notch at a time. We can say, maybe take it down to 5, hit apply, and there we
go. It is going to go ahead and apply that preset at half strength.
Let's slide back over here and grab a photo of the Mercedes here. And I'm going
to open up my echrome proset - presets, excuse me, here. And I'm going to
just throw the ex03 perfect porta onto this. And let's say we want to really jazz
this up, we want to pump this up even more. So, I'll bump the up arrow key,
and I don't even have to use my mouse, I can just simply pump it all the way
up to 15. Say, yep, make that extreme. Make that even more contrasted,
kind of flattened. And what's happening, by the way, is pretty cool. If I - I'm
going to cancel this out real quick - if I open up my tone curve, and I do something
like add a little bit of contrast, right? So let's add some contrast here, and then
maybe we want to flatten off our whites a little bit, like that, right? So we create a
nice, little curve. When I hit the up arrow key, and bring up the Opal slider,
and I begin nudging this upward. Look at that! It's performing all kinds of
interesting stuff behind the scenes, and it is changing my curves for me, and the
same thing if I back it off. It's slowly going to bring me back down toward just
standard, default curve position. So, I'm going to push this up to - maybe 13
looks pretty good here. So, like 130% opacity, if you will. And apply that.
And there we go! We have it. And, by the way, it's making all these changes
down here in HSL. It's making all kinds of different changes for us within Lightroom,
it's really, really quite remarkable.
And the last thing I want to show you about Opal, let me find another photo here.
Let's go with, oh, I don't know, let's go with this photo right here. Eh, maybe this
photo needs to be rotated a little bit, we're going to ignore that for the sake of the
argument. I'm going to go with impossible warm and moody. I'm going to drop that
in place. And let's say this was a preset that changes the temperature here in basics.
So, let's say it cranked the temperature all the way up to 10,000 or something,
something crazy like that. So I'm going to put this at 10,000, it's going to be super
warm. It actually kind of looks neat. Very, kind of cinematic looking. But, really,
you don't want your presets to be changing your tint and temperature slider here
under the basics area. But, if that is the case, what we can do is hit the up arrow key,
and we might want to change the opacity of this. But watch what happens... If we
begin to slide this back, we're going to see a bunch of changes taking place,
everywhere that it's moving stuff, it's going to pop those panels open for us.
And let's say we wanted to set this to half strength, and we'll just go ahead and
apply this. Well, let's go back and look here, it didn't adjust temperature.
What's the deal? Why is it not adjusting temperature? Well, we really probably
don't want it adjusting temperature. But sometimes, you might want that.
So here's what you would do, there's an advanced mode for the Opal plugin.
As if things couldn't get better, ladies and gentlemen, they do. You can come up here
to File, and go to your plugin manager, and I've this stuff covered up up here
because that's my license key, and you'd have to get your own copy to get your
own license key. You can take on, however, the advanced mode here, which is
very cool. When I do that and hit done. Now what we'll do, we'll hit the up arrow
key, now we have the opal slider, but we have all this other stuff.
So, tones, casts, color details, these are all sort of the segments that Opal slider
is attacking. I'm going to just uncheck temperature, for the time being, we'll
touch on that in just a moment. So, part of the cool thing about this is,
we can say, look, let's see what's wrapped up in details. Well, we can see that
it's grain, dehaze, clarity, and vignette. So maybe that's the only part of our edit
that we want to change. We want to maybe crank up that - that, you know,
dehazing and vignette that we added. Or maybe we want to reduce the dehazing
and vignette, well you can do that! Maybe color is the only thing you want to
change. Or maybe you want to change color and details, and color is HSL panel,
saturation, vividness, red, green and blue primaries. And then same thing here with
cast, we've got our individual RGB curves color channels. Your split toning, and
your shadow tints. And then for tones, you have your general RGB composite
channel curve. The parametric curve - highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, and
contrast slider. So you have a lot of stuff that you can change and split out in the
advanced version of the Opal slider. And then we've got temperature and tint.
So what's the deal with this? Well, like I said, let's say we added the preset and
it jacked up our temperature to 10,000. Well, the original, white balance temperature
of this photo, let's say, was standard daylight, 5,700 kelvins - well, what we can
do now, this will be the target that the slider will slide back to. So, here at full
100%, it is at 10,000 kelvin, in terms of temperature. If I set this back to zero,
well, we would see if this didn't move - hold on, I'm going to hit apply here for a
second, I'll going to scroll up, I'm going to right here click here and choose solo
mode, so only one of my windows opens at a time. So i don't have everything
exploding all over the place. Let's go ahead and add impossible, warm and moody
one more time, and we will crank our temperature up to 10,000 just like that.
And now what we'll do is - oop! let me just zoom out. I'm going to hit the up arrow
key. And we set our base temperature, the temperature of the original image,
5,700 kelvin. And let's just reduce our Opal slider, and I'm only going to mess
around with tones. I'm going to shut off cast color details, and let's begin
sliding this back. And you can see, as I slide it back, when I get back to zero,
sure enough, temperature is at what we set it to be. The original image at 5,700.
But, if I crank past 10, like up to 14. We got it up past 10,000, 11,720, and then
15 is where it maxes out. We're at 12,150, and oh, by the way, all the other toning
and everything, is being taken into account and cranked up as well. We can
take on, of course, cast and color and details, and really blow this image out
of the water. And the same, by the way, applies for tint. So, if it had a specific
tint. And tint was being adjusted. You can also say, look, originally my tint was
at zero. And you can work with that, as well. And then I can hit apply, and we have
really, really cranked this image up. And if I look at a before and after, there it is,
out of the camera. And there it is, with all this crazy stylizing added to it. Now,
one other thing I should add. This thing was so easy to install too, it'll take you two
minutes to install. You download the file, you unzip it, you run the simple installer,
you choose the hotkey you want to launch Opal, like up arrow key - and, by the way,
ESCAPE will just close out Opal without committing a change. If you hit up arrow and
hit ENTER, it applies whatever little change you make, super easy. - After you choose
the hotkey, you just open up Lightroom, and activate Opal. And then you just start
using it. It's that easy! It was easier than easy, in fact. And that, ladies and gentlemen,
is the Opal opacity slider. Brand new! For Lightroom! Developed by my good buddy,
Nathan Johnson. I highly recommend you go check it out, and pick up a copy of it
for yourself. Thank you for watching this video.
So, there you have it, ladies and gents! Again, if you enjoyed it, make sure you
use that link down in the bio, pick up a copy of this plugin for yourself today.
You can use it - well, I mean, look - think of all of the different possibilities, right?
That's what I'm trying to say! Think of all the possibilities for a plugin like this. Something
that is really, really helpful here in Adobe Lightroom. I think you'll really enjoy it.
Guys, for just really checking out this nice, little plugin, opacity slider in
Adobe Lightroom. That's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.
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