Hey it's Vanessa Joy with AdoramaTV,
and I'm talking to you today but how to edit
light and airy photos in Lightroom.
First of all... we're setting the
record straight.
Photos do not happen in post-production,
photos happen in your camera.
first of all, I use an import
that's just something that I made based
on the things that I typically do,
presets are great guys, but they're not
gonna apply to every single photo...
because every single photo is taken
differently. So you can go to
breatheyourpassion.com and grab my presets
but depending on how you take photos, it's
not gonna necessarily work the way it
works on mine. Getting bright and airy
photos starts with how you're taking it.
So if you want a bright and airy photo,
make sure that you are taking it in a
lightly colored background.
So I don't go looking for evergreen trees to put my
couples in front of.
I'm looking for backgrounds that have the
Sun coming through it, that's a nice light
green or any other color on the lighter end of
the spectrum. I mess around a bit with
the curves, just a little bit, really
reinforcing the things I'm already doing,
and then this is really my secret sauce.
All right so, I mess with the saturation,
I lower the skintone saturations, and
then raise the green, aqua, blue, purple,
magenta really, everything else and this
helps the vibrancy of the photo, but in
addition I'm raising the luminosity of
the skin tones as well. So you know it
just helps make the photos nice and
bright, vibrant, the skin tones look good,
not overly oompa loompa, and that's
definitely a goal of mine.
I am doing some sharpening, I'm making
sure that my masking is up to about 89 so
I'm not sharpening you know, like her
crow's feet, i'm just sharpening the edges here.
I do have noise reduction on, not that I
need it here at 100, but it's just there
by default, and then of course removing
chromatic aberration, and enabling the
profile lens corrections, and this was
shot with the 85 mm f/1.4...
it doesn't make a difference you know, if
I take this off, I don't see the
difference, a little bit of distortion
and a little bit of vignetting, and I
just completely remove that.
I'm just going to go ahead and
all of that, and then I just go through
and adjust manually, and if there's any
little adjustments that I need to make
to the exposure, I do that also.
I'm really careful about not blowing out
my whites, I know that's a little bit trendy,
but I do not like blowing out the detail
of my white wedding dresses. The detail's
what my clients paid for, and the last
thing they want is their beautiful
$20,000 dress to look like it came off
the David's Bridal Sale Rack.
So sometimes my exposures are a little bit
off, and I do like things a little bit
bright. So that looks good, and ultimately
I'm looking at the histogram here with you guys.
So looking at the histogram I've
got no shadows, so I'm gonna come down
here take the blacks, and bring them down
and just adds a little bit of contrast really.
Just making sure that her hair
here, and eyelashes they really pop and
sometimes I just go to the next one if
it's in the same scenario, and hit previous.
See what happens... a little bit
overexposed I'm just gonna bring it down.
There we go, so this, I wanted to focus on
a little bit. I'm not one to do a lot of
retouching. I don't like it, my clients
actually don't ask for it, because of the
way I shoot, and the way that the light
is controlled you really shouldn't have
to do a lot of skin retouching,
if you're using light correctly, but I am gonna
help them out just a little bit.
So coming in here to my brushes, I do have a
brush that helps remove bags, and these
are the settings for it. So it's just
lowering the clarity a bit, bringing up
the shadows. Actually lowering the clarity
way too much. I'm gonna bring that up,
I'm just doing some other things. Just
gonna soften right underneath the eyes
so that she doesn't feel like she has
bags under the eyes, you know as much as
you can control this. That was a little too
much, bring that down, there we go, as
much as you can control this with light,
you know sometimes with weddings you
cannot control it. So it's nice to have
these solutions, and then another thing
you can do if you want to. I have a
little setting here for blue eyes, which
she does have. It's a fairly warm picture
so it's making them more green, so I can
come in here,
just cool down the color toner.
Just her eyes and a little bit of saturation and
even bring down the whites, and highlight
so that the color pops a little bit more.
It's very slight, I don't like doing a
ton of it. Let me show you before and
after. This photo is actually an outtake
from how to make it look like a sunny
day when it's not.
It's one of the photos
that I took before I added the sun with
my off camera flash, but it's still a
pretty photo.
I can take this and using
my gradient tool, take away some of the
contrast, and add warmth in the gradient
tool. So it kind of looks like Sun flare.
It's a little neat trick again, not a
huge fan of editing things in post, and
faking it later, but if I have a photo
like this. That was a test shot and it
looks great, that's a way to make it look
greater. This particular photo I'm
working on the skin tones, because I
didn't have them in exactly the right
light that was flattering for skin tones,
and they were standing on more of like a
red brick sort of ground, that was coming
up and hitting their skin tones.
I really needed to work on those here, so
I'm just messing around with the white
balance, and the tint, to get a skin tone that
looks accurate.
I could also go into the
hue saturation and luminosity, and mess
around with it there, but I think I got
what I'm looking for.
Ultimately the skin tones are what
matters to me. the background and
everything else is secondary.
I want their skin to look natural, oh my gosh,
does anybody see the bad thing I did
here... it is horrible!
This photo... look at that horizon line
going right through
the groom's head, no, no, no, no, no, no,
that's not a good thing to do.
Don't do that.
This is an interesting photo guys,
this was meant to be a silhouette, but as
I was messing around with this photo.
I noticed... hey I could bring it up three stops.
It is a raw photo, and get a
completely different look.
Now I don't recommend this, I don't
recommend it at all actually, because the noise in the
grain that you're gonna get in this
image by bumping it up three stops from
a silhouette, to a properly exposed
photograph, isn't gonna look good.
It'll probably look good on this screen, it
might even look good on it,
but the second I printed out, you're
gonna notice the noise.
You're gonna notice the muddiness in the image,
and it's just not gonna look like it would
have if you had exposed for it correctly.
So that's how I edit my light and airy
photos, my whimsical dreamy romantic
photos. It shouldn't be that much in post
get it right in camera.
Looking for more inspiration?
click the link in the description below
to download my free posing guide.
Hit the subscribe button and the bells!
Make sure you're notified when new
videos pop up here on Adoramatv
Leave some comments, ask your questions...
there are no dumb questions, and there's
no such thing as mean comments.
There is such thing as main comments.
I collect the mean comments..
so I have an excuse to
eat ice cream but seriously...
don't be