today's Sunday and this is my plan first of all I want to finish my seduction
short film because I want to post it tomorrow which is Monday but because
you're going to see this video on Thursday
basically if my seduction video is done you will see a link right here I hope this
is clear
done with that I will drive to the ocean because here we have 100 thousand
degrees at the ocean we have 40 degrees Fahrenheit less and also the scenery is
much nicer I want to fly the drone and take some pictures from the sky to use
this video where I will share my Lightroom adjustments - that's all
so this is the plan there is a lighthouse right behind that rock the
fog is coming in so I hope to get some good light before it gets really really
dark I will take the drone up and try to see if I can have the lighthouse and
part of the Golden Gate Bridge behind complicated - we'll see
there is still quite a lot of light so I will use an ND Filter 16
I always recommend to hold the drone like a baby
and with the left hand
you hold the gimbal steady
with the other hand clip in your ND filter
safe way to put it on!
unfortunately no luck it is too windy for the drone on this side of the ocean
and it's really not worthy to lose the drone for the shot so I will change
location and see if I'm luckier
so things didn't really go the way I hoped which for my experience in
photography it happens quite often I really wanted to take that lighthouse
image with the golden gate behind oh well I will need to go there again but I have
some images that I will use in this tutorial
before we get started I just want to make sure you understand this is not
going to be a comprehensive tutorial of every single function that Lightroom can
give you instead I want to share with you some basic adjustments that very
quickly will improve dramatically your raw images so have a look
so I imported a few images in Lightroom and I'm going to open them into the
develop module in order to show you a few basic but very effective adjustments
that are part of my workflow to express the full potential of a pretty flat RAW
file as you might remember from my last week video I like to shoot in a 4 by 3
ratio so the very first thing I will do is to crop the image in either a 1:1 one so a square format or a 2:3 these are my preference and in this case
I will use the two by three so we'll adjust the the crop to my liking and I
really want to show in this composition this path which is a very nice
guiding line I also want to crop these people here because it's a little
disturbing to me so I will go to the pole and bring everything down and this
is my final crop I think it's much cleaner so I will work with this as you
can see all the information in my histogram are in the center and I'm not
clipping in the blacks or in the white so this is great it means the images is
exposed in a balanced way said so I can still do quite a bit of adjustments
first thing I usually do is that I want to really bring down the highlights and
increase the shadows a little bit by holding shift and double-clicking on
whites I will actually expand the whites in the image and doing the same thing
shift and black I will expand the dynamic range of this image to the
limits I usually add a little bit of vibrance not much and also a little bit
of saturation in this case I don't touch the clarity as I shot this image in RAW
I can change the white balance to whatever I like and I think that the
daylight will work quite well for this image but if I'm not satisfied with it I
can always drag the white balance selector to any part of the image and
usually search for a neutral color neutral gray to basically pick your
neutral target and manually select your white balance in this case I'm happy
with the with the daylight white balance before moving on there is something I
really don't like so basically there are these two guys here that I want to
delete from my image I know that you can do a much better job in Photoshop but I
think we can remove them using the clone and heal brush let's see if this will
work I think that these might work very well for this image because as you can
see they're gone and you cannot really notice they were there before I might do
the same thing over here I can see that there is a distracting element of two
people right here let's see how this works I think it works fine as well so
now no more distracting elements in the picture let's move on from the basic
panel to the tone curve we can manually adjust the tone curve or we can rely on
some pre adjustments and the medium
contrast usually works very well for an image like this let's move on to the
detail basically in the detail panel I can increase or decrease the sharpening
I usually don't go crazy with this and I use a minimum radius and a maximum
detail and I mask the sharpening area by clicking on option and moving the mask
to in this case 30 also will increase a little bit of luminance in order to
remove some noise from this image just a tiny bit in this case a value of 10 make
sure that your lens correction settings are clicked in in this case when I
import I automatically have chromatic aberration and profile Corrections
enabled and then let's move to the effects I in an image like this I think
would be a worthwhile to put a little bit of vignetting and we without going
crazy we can adjust midpoint roundness and feather to our liking and create a
little more dramatic feel the upper right corner is is clearly brighter than
the rest of the image so I can add a gradient filter once I'm happy with my
selection I can maybe bring down the highlights maybe increase the contrast a
little bit and maybe reduce the exposure and by clicking here I can see the
before and after effect it's a subtle but in my opinion worthwhile adjustment
I can add a new gradient filter because I want to eventually bring a little more
light in the lower right corner which is a little darker and
I might just increase a little bit the shadows and maybe just a tiny bit
the exposure so I will add a little bit of Dehaze to the image just a tiny bit
and I am done with the effect and this is it so let's see how this image looked
before and as you can see with very few adjustments we dramatically changed a
very flat RAW file into a more compelling and interesting image I think
so again very basic very fast but also very effective adjustments that will
quickly increase the quality of your images and let your images express their
full potential without the need of buying any presets online from anybody a
lot of people are scared to use RAW format in photography because they think
there is too much work too much processing to do afterwards instead as
you could see with very few adjustments you can transform your RAW files in
beautiful images so if you want to see more content like these you need to let
me know and there are a few ways to do that consider to subscribe to my channel
like this video and leave me a comment below thanks for watching see you next
week