- Bonjour mesdames et messieurs.
In this video, I want to talk you about Aurora HDR 2018
verus Lightroom CC.
(upbeat music)
Bonjour mesdames et messieurs,
my name is Serge Ramelli.
I'm a French photographer from the amazing,
the incredible city of Paris, France,
but right now, I am in Aruba.
And in Aruba, I took a lot of photos.
I've always dreamed to come to this island.
I was there when I was much younger,
and now that I am a photographer,
I always wanted to come back.
Some of the nicest beach in the world are here.
And you know, I've been trying a lot different techniques,
retouching only with Lightroom, retouching only with Aurora,
and I thought why not compare the different two options
that we have, and why not give you some
of my best secret workflow?
Well here you are.
Welcome to Aruba!
All right guys, so welcome to Aruba.
So let me show you some of the techniques I've been using
and the photos that I got.
You know, when I take landscape, I try to look
for a cool focal element, so I walked for miles
on Eagle Beach, Palm Beach, Arashi Beach,
all these beautiful beach in Aruba.
Eagle Beach is actually, this beach was voted
top best three in the world or something.
I mean they keep saying that.
I don't know if it's true.
And finally, I found this amazing trees here.
Actually, I found them with my iPhone.
This is the original day I found them, look at that.
Beautiful trees.
And you know, it's funny, cause I always shoot at sunset,
and so all right, this is an iPhone photo,
and I, you know, I realized that when you shoot nice sand,
it's kind of cool to shoot during the day,
because you get a whiter sand.
When it comes to the night, what happens is,
I look at the sand
It becomes very muddy, because you get all the shade
from the people walking during the day from...
You know, and it becomes like a very annoying texture.
Anyways, I found this tree, and I was gonna, you know,
take photos, but all of a sudden, there was a big wedding.
Apparently it's like a tradition in the island
to have a big wedding between the two trees.
So I said you know what, I'm gonna stick around.
I was trying to catch the trees without the weddings.
And the sunset was like really, kind of boring,
you know, because there was this one cloud that came over,
and I was like kind of sad, and I was about to leave,
when all of a sudden, the wedding went over,
they went on a side taking photos,
and I could at least frame the, you know,
some of the trees.
But something miraculously happened.
And that is that the sky just got incredible.
And this is something I realized is that,
let me show you the retouched result in Lightroom.
Sometimes after sunset, what happens is that you have,
you know, as the sun goes behind the horizon,
and you still get a great sky.
So I tried shooting this with two lens,
'cause I broke my 16-35, so I only had a 14 millimeter
and so let me see, and I had a 24-240.
This is a 24-240.
And this was with the 14 millimeter.
In the end, I think I'm gonna show you
how I retouched this photo.
So that's the Lightroom version,
but I think we can do even better than that using Aurora.
And we're gonna compare when it's done.
I'll show you the workflow.
So, this is a trick that I found a while back
with working with Aurora that I like to do,
and not many people do it.
I remember I showed this while I was helping Trey Radcliffe
in New Zealand on a workshop, and he was like,
oh, I never thought about doing that.
I was really proud, because he's like the master of HDR.
He developed Aurora.
And here is a secret workflow,
but please, please, please tell no one.
Only people following this YouTube channel.
So what I do is I open up the shadows,
a little bit, not too much, not a hundred,
just a little bit, bring down the highlights,
I do a little bit of white and a little bit of black.
It just gives a little bit more,
and especially on this one, it's kind of a dark,
and I'm maybe gonna open up shadows even more.
Then I pick my white balance.
I'm gonna go to my usual folder, which is shade,
and add a bit of magenta,
because people call me Mr. Magenta, as you might know.
And I think I'm gonna go here,
and I'm gonna make a little circle close to the tree,
and I'm gonna invert the mask.
I'm gonna feather it, and I'm going to go to exposure
to put everything on zero, and I'm just gonna add
a little bit of yellow and magenta,
maybe a bit of exposure.
Not too much, just a little bit.
And you see how it's effecting the tree there?
I don't want that.
So check this out.
We have this new option in Lightroom, which I love,
which is called range mask off, you see?
Look how the tree's been lit.
If I got to luminance, and I move range to the right,
you see how, what I'm doing is, back,
is only effecting the sky.
I only want this to effect the sky actually.
And voilà.
So it's just a very, very small retouching.
Then what I do is I synchronize what I need here
with all this, oh, you know what,
there is a spot here, I might as well take it out
while I'm at it.
Okay, and I think I did a really poor job with that.
Sometimes they're really hard to take out.
Okay, good.
So now I'm gonna synchronize, check all, synchronize.
So on synchronizing the retouch,
and it's mainly for the white balance
and for doing a little bit of contrast.
But I found when you do that,
you get a more interesting result.
So then I'm gonna right-click.
I'm actually gonna give you this photo
so you can see for yourself.
I'm gonna export into Aurora HDR 2018,
but you've got two options,
Open Source Files or Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments.
I'm gonna take Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments,
and by the way guys, if you bought Aurora HDR
just when it came out, there was a connection problem
because of the release of Lightroom CC Classic.
Adobe changed the directory where plug-ins are,
so they did an update two weeks after,
so make sure you have the latest version of Aurora 2018
if you want to do that.
I love so much that software.
It's unbelievable.
I think, you know, with Lightroom,
it's just an amazing combination.
Alright, so we are in Aurora,
and before we learn the software,
there is a hidden option you need to do,
because there is leaf involved.
It's a tree, so you have to go here
and click on ghost reduction.
So ghost reduction, what it's gonna do
is instead of blending all three photos,
for the leaves of the tree, because the leaves
of the tree are different from one photo to the other,
it's gonna take one photo as a stable data.
And in this one, it's gonna take the minus two,
no sorry, the zero here, which is fine,
as a stable data.
This one works the best.
Amount medium is fine, and I'm gonna click
on chromatic aversion removal and on alignment,
and then I'm gonna create HDR.
So by, you know, doing the chromatic averation,
it's gonna take these little fringes
and taking the under-exposed photo as a stable data
for anything that's moving is just gonna make sure
that your tree, your leaves doesn't weird,
so many HDR photos on the web that have like leaves
that look like drawing,
it's because they didn't use that option.
So let's wait until it loads here.
Alright, so here we are in Aurora,
and we are ready to rock and roll.
So what I'd like you to do is you can just go here
into the preset category and use a Serge Ramelli preset.
Serge Ramelli preset is here, and that's what I use.
I use my own preset all the time.
And on this one, I'm gonna go to photo search basic,
maybe as my basic preset,
which is already the one that's loaded.
And you know, we need to do some more things
to make this photo even pop even more.
So usually, I leave the basic settings on the bottom layer,
and then I'm gonna go here to plus.
And I'm gonna add a new adjustment layer.
And on this adjustment layer, I'm gonna take
another preset I created called...
Photo Serge Sunset Look.
Boom.
And that is a pretty crazy look that I really love.
And I just build it on top of that.
You know, I think that's about it.
Sometimes what I do is I click here,
and I click another adjustment layer,
and I go for Photo Serge Details.
Now Detail is not nice,
but it could be kind of cool on a tree,
so then I take this brush here.
I click on brush.
And you see I've got a brush, right?
And the brush, it says here paint,
but right now, the effect is off.
And as soon as I'm going to paint,
so let me just reduce the size, maybe let's boost
in a little bit, let's go like maybe 100 percent.
I just want to add a little more details here
on this beautiful tree.
I just want to add details here
and only on this beautiful tree,
'cause I just love how this tree looked.
So let me just make the size slightly bigger.
And you know, it's just adding a little bit of details,
of HDR details here.
But I kind of like that, just on the tree, nothing else.
Okay good.
So now let me go back to fit to screen.
Alright, and I love it!
But I'm not finished.
I'm not finished, so I'm gonna click here on apply,
and I'm going to go back into Lightroom.
Now guys, if you don't have a copy of Aurora,
they just got voted the best app 2017 by Apple,
believe it or not.
Best app on the App Store.
And so you can download it.
They have a special price that they did for that.
And the link is below this video.
You can purchase this from there.
You'll get a great price.
You get like a huge discount right now,
because they are so happy to be the best app of 2017.
They didn't expect it all, I don't think.
Anyway, it's a great app.
It really is a great app.
Alright, so we are back in Lightroom,
and all I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna open up,
maybe just add a little bit of contrast,
open up the shadows a little bit more.
I'm gonna crop the photo,
so I do like a little double (mumbles),
and I'm really quick into Lightroom.
And maybe, you know, use a little gradient here
to make a little gradient, but I want this to be dark,
just because the sun is not that nice.
Maybe just not around the fringes.
So we focus even more the attention on the tree.
And voilà!
So let me show you.
I'm gonna press C.
On the left, sorry,
on the right is my HDR version,
and on the right is my Lightroom CC only version.
And I don't know.
There's something about it that I really like with the HDR.
I got the colors to pop even more.
I love the radiance here in the sky.
I mean, I like the Lightroom version,
but I don't like so much the tree how it is there.
I think overall I did a better job on this one.
But you know, I use both.
I'm a lazy person, because sometimes,
this time, I did some bracketing, but sometimes,
I don't bracket, and when I don't bracket,
I use my, you know, signature preset,
which you can have for free, a few of them,
including this one for free.
Check this out.
So I created presets for every time of the day.
Five presets for blue hour,
five presets for blue hour is after sunset,
which is kind of now.
So I can try that, I could click that and see how it looks.
Yeah...
Actually, this is not, this is a sunset.
Sorry this one is a pure sunset.
So I created for five for blue hour, five for day,
five for golden hour, five for long exposure,
five for night photography, five for snow photography,
and five for sunset.
And sunset, oh, I clicked on snow, it's not good, and boom.
I'm gonna click on sunset, and it should be a lot better,
because it's an actual sunset.
The sun was, check that out, boom.
And I think on this one, the only thing is,
remember preset is only a starting point.
If you buy my preset, you will get all my presets
for $27, all 27 of them,
including tutorials on how to use them.
There is like a lot of tutorials on how to use the presets,
how to install them, it's all there.
This is something I added a couple of weeks ago actually,
because I was setting the preset without tutorials,
and I realized some people had some difficulty,
and now people are really enjoying it.
So I just made the bottom a little brighter.
I just want to cut this,
'cause there's a rule in photography,
you don't want to leave something like half in and half out.
I would probably clean that up in Photoshop,
but in one click, not so bad.
Not so bad, what do you say?
So that's the before.
And that's the after with one click.
Isn't that marvelous?
Voilà!
So, get message or preset if you didn't get them.
You will love them, I promise you.
I've spent so many months building these presets.
You know, if you don't know how to use Lightroom,
you can just click on them, and you will have fun.
And check out Aurora HDR.
Best software by Apple in 2018,
and I think it's completely worth it.
Alright guys, I hope you liked this episode.
And I want to invite you to my Los Angeles workshop.
I'm doing a workshop in February, Los Angeles.
It's my first one there.
There's still a few seats left, and it's gonna be amazing.
We're gonna be in Santa Monica in a beautiful hotel.
We're gonna be shooting downtown Los Angeles.
We're gonna go shoot the Griffith Park
and the amazing view over downtown Los Angeles
from the Griffith Park.
We are gonna go to El Matador Beach,
one of the nicest beaches in California,
and we're also gonna go
and do the Venice Canal in Venice Beach.
It's gonna be an amazing experience,
so if you're in Europe, you're cold,
you want to come with me in warm Los Angeles in February,
you are welcome!
Anyways, if you can't come to one of my workshops,
I've got a lot of photo walks and other workshops
also in Paris that I'm doing this year.
Check out my whole calendar on my website.
Mesdames et messieurs, I will see you in another episode
of my YouTube channel.