Hi I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching
AdoramaTV. For today's episode I’m going to put a
little twist in our portraits using
Lightroom.
Now for the most part what
we're looking for in portraits is a nice
soft pleasing look and that's fine but
every now and then you'll come across an
image that could really benefit from
adding little grunge, a little drama, a little more
intensity. So that’s what we're going to do today.
First and foremost we’re going to find our image
which is totally up to you and we're going to
run it through lightroom and hopefully
bump up the grunge scale.
So we've got our picture it's of this
gentleman in Afghanistan and as you can
see from this raw file he already looks
a bit intense and dramatic, so we are going to
hopefully improve upon that. My first step
is to go to the lens correction tab and
click on the top two boxes which takes
some distortion, any residual distortion
out of the image and then we are going to go to the basics
tab and this is we're going to a lot of
our work. From here what we're gonna do
is we're bump our exposures up to
about 36, around 36 ish don't get too
bent out of shape you never get you
don't hit the exact on. You can do it by
increments as well and the contrast
we're going to bump up. Bump that up by
50, around 50 ish.
From there we go to our
highlights slider and we're gonna bring
that down to about 60, -60.
You can only see the effect starting to look at this
gentleman face and shadows we're going
to add + 40, going to deepen the shadows a little
bit.
This is where we are going to get to our white and
black points. We haven't touched on this
yet but we're going to really sort of,
really go to town these. So + 50 on
the whites ish and - 40 on the
blacks. So what we've done with these
settings is we've increased the dynamic
range, we have set the strong black point
and increased the contrast. So the image
is starting to look like something but it looks a
bit oversaturated which we’ll try and
take care of in next step. When you grab the
clarity slider we’re going to drag it up 90.
Vibrance + 20 and then the saturation
starting around - forty, starting to
look like a bleach bypass picture more
than anything else. I'm just going to
steal a little bit of that back maybe go to
about, maybe to 30. Now we've got a
pretty good-looking picture now. The
clarity, boosting the clarity is going to
increase the mid-tone contrast and
sharpen the picture, the desaturation
helps with the intensity. The penultimate
step is to adjust the details. Now we will
just close down the basics tab, and open up
the detail tab and we're going to really
drag the sharpening up to about 90. You can
see how that's affected the image, you
can see you see all the detail in his beard here
is really starting to come out. Radius up to about 2.
No introduction with the luminance we're
going to just go up to about 30. This just
helps with that really heavy-handed
sharpening around there. Detail we will leave as is.
So you can start start to see that this
picture is really different from the
beginning. Kind of our last area to look at is
click on effects. We're looking for the post
crop vignetting, and this is a
real personal thing here. You drag it to the
left and you start to see the vignetting
coming in. I personally like lots of vignetting
on these kind of images. Grab the
feather tool drag that to the right and that
will help the transition rules become a little
smoother.One of the last adjustments I'm going
to make some is I’m just going to grab the brush, make
sure it's just covering the eye.
Double-click on effects to bring
everything back to zero, I'm going to just
grab the exposure slider and take it up
a little smidgen, 25. 24 is fine. I'm just
going to do a slight drag across the
eyes
Just make them stand out a little more. Close
that down and we're pretty much there.
Last thing to do is look at the
before-and-after and you can see the final
image, the way it looks after all those
adjustments. I do stress that these are
very subjective and that every
photographer should make these
adjustments to suit their own tastes. So that's
it for me I'm Doug McKinlay for
AdoramaTV. Don't forget you can also
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