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Hey everybody! I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com
Welcome right into this Adobe Lightroom tutorial, where today
I've got another installment of "From RAW to Glorious JPEG" -
I don't know how many of these we've done now.
At least four or five, I've lost count already!
We're going to be doing a natural light photo.
These are some photos I shot literally out in the middle of a field,
noon-day sun blasting down on our subject.
I had no off camera flash. I had a single reflector as bounce,
bouncing some light back into her face.
And I'm going to show you how I operate and clean these guys up,
and get them ready here in Adobe Photoshop.
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this channel so you never miss any Photoshop or Lightroom, or photography
related tutorials in the future.
Let's jump into Lightroom now, and check this thing out.
Well, well, here we are once again, in Adobe Lightroom.
One of the best places - well, one of the best places when Lightroom
is moving along at a somewhat reasonable pace,
and not acting it's own sluggish self.
Like I said, I've got these photos. These are all natural light photos,
that I shot. Which have got a bounce, you can see there in her eyes.
Just a little, circular reflector - you know, $40 little - you know,
Westcott reflector.
We're bouncing a little bit of light back into her face, 70-200 Canon F28,
and what were these shot at? - f4.
So, you know, just some reasonable photos.
Some of them, not quite as in focus as I would like.
But it's more a product of a little motion blur,
because I was shooting, probably, yeah - 170 millimeters, when
you know, why was I shooting at 170 millimeters?
I don't even know.
So, I think I'm going to go with this one here,
these are all, you know, one-in-the-same look, so to speak.
I'm going to go with this one, we're going to retouch this one.
It's not really retouching, it's - it's cleaning it up,
and then we're going to spread it across everything else.
Now because I'm picky, I'm going to right click and choose to
create a virtual copy right out of the gate.
So, we'll work on the virtual copy, it just - because I've already
kind of cleaned this image up before, it's going to make it a little
easier for us when we go to preview, do some before and afters,
and things like that.
So, we're going to work on the virtual copy here.
And I'm going to mess around with this little toy here called Palette.
Now, the good folks over at Palette sent me one of these to try out,
and test out.
It's pretty cool, it's super functional, and it's super easy to set up
and get used to and you can do a whole, heck of a lot with them.
In fact, I've found I love just having it even connected to my computer
when I'm browsing Google Chrome, (chuckle)
because I have all these different hotkeys worked into it.
But we're in Lightroom today, so let's talk about this.
The first thing I would do here, is, mess around with the basic
temperature and tint.
And one of the cool things about the Palette is, I can have temperature
and tint mapped to separate knobs here.
So, I can play around with them both at the same time.
See my temperature and tint sliders? They're moving in unison.
So, l'm like, alright, I can push the tint, maybe I want a little bit more green
in this shot. Something around there.
And, you know, make it a little - a little less orange.
But I can really play with this and say, you know what?
That blue-green is really suiting my taste, or maybe it needs to be
a little bit more magenta, and as I put magenta in there,
bring some orange in, and back the magenta off until it's just right.
Now, I know I want this right around 5800, or so, and I just want
to introduce a little bit of green.
So something kind of like that.
So, we'll say 5800, -9, something right around there.
One of the other cool things about the Palette, not only are those knobs,
but there's also sliders.
So I've got this slider set to adjust my exposure.
You can see, I can just throw the exposure around really quickly.
So, I'm going to bump some exposure into this,
because we're going for really a highkey, like naturally lit, type of look.
I'll also come in here - I don't have any key set to map my contrast,
because honestly, I usually don't mess with the contrast here.
Usually I pump some contrast into this thing over in curves,
but you know, while we're here - we're here.
Then I've got knobs set aside also for contrast and exposure both.
Because usually I'm adjusting them with the highlight, shadows,
whites, and black. So I have knobs for all of these.
So I can just say, you know, push some more light into the highlights there.
Let's actually bump some light into the shadows as well.
Kind of open those shadows up. See how we see around her neck a little bit more.
And then I'm going to push a little bit more brightness into those whites.
Maybe not quite that much.
Maybe somewhere right around there. 20-25 looks good.
And then, should I open up the shadows a little bit more by bumping a
little light into the blacks? I think so.
I think darkening up the shadows - well, you know what? Maybe actually
darkening these shadows is nice.
We'll just put a kiss of black into those shadows just like that.
Then we'll come over, I might add a little bit of clarity as well, just to give
this some solid midtone punch.
And once more, I'll go back to my Palette and here I have a vibrant slider,
so I can push a ton of color into it.
I could drain a lot of vibrance out. Usually I'm working with vibrance and
not saturation. I just find you get, like, more fine tuned control.
So, I'll just push vibrance back, I don't know, -9, -10, maybe -11.
Somewhere right around there will work just fine for us.
Alright, I'm going to collapse basic.
Let's move down here to tone curve.
Now, for the tone, we're going to introduce more contrast into this.
So, I'm going to pull a little bit upward up here,
this is going to make our brights a little bit brighter.
And then I'm going to pull down right to about there, maybe.
And then, this is really almost like very cool, retro style, highkey photograph,
but it's - there's a little bit too much heaviness in the shadows.
So I'm going to fade the shadows a little bit by just lifting my black point.
I think it just gives me a really cool look.
And then I'll adjust the overall darkening just a little bit.
Maybe not quite that much fade. That's a little - a little on the extreme side.
Maybe I'll tone down my absolute brightest of whites, as well.
Just to kind of gray off those whites, and get this real highkey, high fashion look.
Now, I have a button here programmed on my Palette just to give me
a quick before and after.
So, we can see, there's our before, there's our after - so far.
So we're really - we're making kind of an extreme change to this.
But that's kind of what we're going for. This more stylized look,
so I dig it.
Alright, I'm going to close up tone curve.
Let's go down to HSL here. I think I want to take a little bit of color out
of the red. Mainly because I think her lips are a little bit too red/pink there
in the middle of what is kind of a muted photo.
And let's say we were shooting this for a clothing brand, we
really want that jean jacket to stand out.
That's - that's really the star of the show. So, we're just going to
take away from the red/pink lipstick, just a little bit.
Just to tone that down a little bit.
And then, let's boost the saturation of the orange, just to put a little
bit of life back into her skin.
So, I don't know, +25 in the orange department is good.
We don't need to mess around with hue or luminous - I think the
saturation is the only thing that we really needed to change there.
Alright, so now we can go ahead and sharpen.
Now, again, on my Palette I have one slider here dedicated to
sharpness. You can see as soon as I touch it, boom, the detail tab
opens right up and I get to sharpening. But, I want to zoom in and
see what's going on.
So, you can see, automatically, you can just click and zoom, or you can
have a button on your Palette that just immediately zooms you right in,
just like that.
And I can get a real good idea of what I'm doing, sharpness-wise.
And, you know, I'll add something kind of like that.
Then I'll hold down my ALT/OPT key and I'll use the masking a little bit.
And just mask it back to just the details in the photo and get a real
nice, little bit of sharpness, just like that.
Now, I love the camera calibration tools. So one of the sliders
on my little Palette I have set to change the tint in the shadows,
and that's going to swing me from a nice purple in the shadows -
magenta, really - to this greenish color in the shadows.
Which you can see how much it changes the overall feel of the photo, right?
Just by changing that one thing.
Maybe you wouldn't want to go quite that extreme,
but you can go a little bit.
I think I'm going to actually push some green into this, I like kind of the,
I don't know, the organic, kind of crusty feeling that it gives the overall photo.
And, if I wanted, maybe I'll bump a little bit more. So - eh,
you know what? I'll actually probably go the opposite way with the
saturation in the red.
And you can play around with the greens and blues.
Maybe I'll bump a little bit into the green here.
And take a little bit out of the blue, something like that.
Again, if the jean jacket is the star of the show,
you want to be careful messing around too much with that.
Let's do a quick before and after.
And we can see - yeah, I kind of like it. So, it's really coming from this
sort of, much more flat image coming out of camera to we're just - we're
pumping the contrast and blowing it out over here.
Very, very highkey. So I kind of like it. Maybe there's a little bit
too much green. Maybe I'll actually push that back the other way now
that I'm looking at it.
I think I might do that. And, - and just right from here I can use the
Palette and just go ahead and adjust the temperature.
So, maybe I wanna make that a little bit more orange.
Maybe take just a little bit of the green out of there.
Eh, take some of the green out. How do I wanna do that?
Yeah, probably something like that. We'll adjust it. Do what looks good.
Obviously, your photo will be a little bit different than mine,
but this is more of a stream of consciousness thing where we just play with
what we've got going on. Alright, I'm going to open up effects here,
and I think I want to add some grain.
I'm actually going to try dehazing a little bit first.
What if I bump a little dehaze into this? It kind of gives me that
really deep contrast boost.
Let's just that little toggle switch here to see before and after.
I kind of like that. I'll tell you one little pet peeve I have about this photo,
is over here, the highlight is so strong on her arm, it's kind of making
it disappear. That would probably be something I would take it into
Photoshop and clean that up a little bit.
But, for this, I'm not going to worry too much about it.
I'm going to zoom back in to 100%, just with my little zoom button there,
thank you Palette.
And I'm going to just bump a little bit of grain into this.
It doesn't have to be a huge amount. Just a little.
Maybe make it a little bit bigger, and make it a little rougher.
It's going to serve to kind of help blend some of the tones and the skin,
and wherever we have these harsh transitions from the hair to just the -
the just stark white sky.
It's going to help to kind of clean that stuff up a little bit.
Once again, we can do a quick before and after.
And we can see, we have (chuckle) a radically different image
that we got out of camera. And now we've done all this highkey
adjustment stuff to it. And I really - I really kind of like it.
So, we've made all these adjustments to this image,
and all these photos are from the same set, so in theory,
we would take these adjustments and paste them across all the photos.
Which, you could normally do by, like, selecting this photo, right?
Well, actually no, select this photo first, then we could select the next photo.
And we could hit the sync button, and it's going to say what do you want to
sync? And you could choose what, and then say synchronize.
And then, boom, we have everything on this photo.
Well, I also have one of the buttons on my Palette.
Again, I feel like I'm pumping the living daylights out of this Palette.
You can do all this without the Palette, I'm just having some fun with
the Palette. So bear with me here.
We could take this and I have a button set up to just paste from previous.
And essentially what it's doing, is up here under settings, we have this
paste settings from previous.
And our previous photo would've been the photo we edited,
so just with the simple click of a button, I can paste those settings right over.
So, I can just select another photo.
So, yeah, let's see what this one looks like here. That's pretty cool.
Let's go ahead and try this one. Paste those settings over.
Now if I wanted to select multiple photos, like all three of these,
I would just select this photo, and hold down SHIFT, select to the end there,
and then I would probably still use sync for this because I can do multiple
photos with sync. Whereas, paste previous, it would just select the first
photo in the bunch. So, you can see we have just these
highly stylized photos. Very highkey. Really sharp, crisp contrast.
We played with the color a little bit.
And we did it relatively quickly, and once you kind of have this down,
and you - you know, you like what you're looking at,
and you kind of know what you have in mind for adjusting the photo,
you can really, really get some good stuff.
And of course, with my little friend here, the Palette, I can play around and
have a little bit of additional fun, and add a little speed to my work flow, as well.
So, yeah, that's pretty much it for this one.
I hope you guys enjoyed it, I hope you picked up a thing or two. Again,
make sure you subscribe to the channel, so you never miss anything in the future.
If you did really enjoy the video, you thought it brought a little value,
consider picking up a copy of my Photoshop course.
It's all about how to retouch images in Photoshop.
If you're a photographer, I think you'll really like it. I think it'll bring you
some value. And it helps support what we do here at tutvid.com,
and for that - ooh! I thank you so much, that's for sure.
Also, sort of our pseudo-sponsor today, Palette, they aren't paying me
anything for the video, but they did send the Palette unit along, so I just -
you know, it's kind of a full disclosure kind of thing that I did get it from them.
And I just wanted to, kind of, test run it a little bit here in Lightroom and
play around with it to let you guys see and maybe sort of experience what
it's like to have one of these little bad boys. So,
for doing all of this different stuff in Lightroom, from curves to the basic
adjustments that we made, to color adjustments, and sharpening,
everything else along the way. Guys, for this one, that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.
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