hey guys what is going on my name is alex and this is the car creative and in this video
i want to show you guys how to take this photo and turn it into this photo and we're going
to do that in three parts first we're going to talk about exposure and how to properly expose
for snowy conditions second we're going to talk about color and thirdly we're going to talk about
masking and filters to really bring the subject out of your photo and then kind
of as an extra i'm actually going to show you if you have a human in it with
skin tones how you might edit that differently so let's hop into the edit here and i'll show
you guys how i do this all right so if you're one of those people that's interested in the settings
you can take a look up in the top left corner here and these are the settings i shot at one
six four zero of a second at an aperture of 2.5 and iso of 200 i probably could have brought
that down and i was shooting on the sigma 35 millimeter lens now the first thing that i do
when i start editing an image is i want to crop it and i generally keep my original settings and
i'm always looking at the horizon line to see if i can get this set straight as per the earth i guess
so there we go i think that's a pretty good start that keeps it right in the center
now i'm going to adjust my exposure we're going to make sure that we save all of our highlights
now up here in the histogram we're taking a look at our highlights here and if you look and click
that button we can see that we don't want to lose any detail so we're gonna make sure that we retain
all of our highlights and bring out the details in the snow here and it's okay if it looks a
little bit underexposed we're just gonna add some to our shadows here to bring out the
details in the wheels the front grille that kind of thing and then holding option we're going to
drag the blacks down until we start to see a loss of detail and that's not that bad because it's
in places we don't really care to see in these kind of deep pockets of the car so that's okay
so you can see that that's kind of where we're landing there now when it comes to dehaze i
generally would add a bit of this in hopes that it'll bring out the details in the sky you can
see that if you go extreme it's going to bring out a lot of details in the sky now we don't
quite need to go that extreme we know we have the details and we're going to bring those back
later clarity and texture this is up to you guys i tend to not actually do a ton of clarity i like
to use sharpening and those kinds of tools rather than make it kind of gritty like this
so i'm actually going to leave the clarity there okay so i'm going to skip the
vibrance and saturation until we get to the color section but for the tone curve we're going to put
a couple of points here on the tone curve and the highlights you can see if we push those
up we're going to lose a lot of detail in the sky in the snow so we're actually going to pull those
down just a little bit and we're going to take our mid-tones and pull them up and you can see
that that kind of separates some of the shadows and the highlights on the car as you can see as
i push that up and i kind of like that look i like that it kind of accentuates the lines on the car
and then down here in these shadows we're just going to pull those down to taste but we don't
want to make it look too too contrasty just yet so we're going to leave that and i might try and pull
these up because again i want to add a bit of that separation between the highlights and the shadows
of the car but what i'll do is actually take these highlights up here that are probably going to be
in the snowy areas and we'll pull that back down so there's our exposure for now a nice balanced
looking photo now getting into the color section this is where the magic happens now you'd think
if you're editing a wintery photo you just want to drag this blue dial over and you could
do that but that's not what we're gonna do here we're just gonna reset that because we're gonna
up our vibrance to make sure that car is popping we're going to bring down our saturation and the
reason i'm doing that is there's a lot of gunk here in the snow and typically that lands in
like the yellow zone but for now we're just going to bring that down and depending on your subject
in your photo you can just bring this down to taste i'm going to bring it down to about here
knowing that when we go down to the hue saturation and luminance panels we can bring back all those
details now specifically in this world rally blue brz uh it does tend to have a lot of purple in it
so i'm actually gonna bring this back to the right and then we go to the purple and you can see that
there's such a high impact in the purple zone so we're just going to drag that a touch to the
left to bring back the world rally blue color now typically when i'm working with automotive
photography we're going to bring the yellows down that brings out the cement or kind of like
the dirty colors in your photo aquas always tend to land in the windshield so i'll show you this
we're going to pump up the aqua and there it is bring it down and that makes it a nice clean look
just kind of taking out some of those reflections i guess in the window so we're going to do that
there and then the blue again our card is blue so we can dial this into taste it's already popping
pretty good so i actually don't need to do too much there and we're going to come down all the
way to the calibration panel and we're actually going to bump up the saturation here you'll
notice in a lot of photos if you bump up just the blue saturation it'll really make your photos pop
and then you can go back up to the hsl panel and kind of adjust which colors need to be taken
out and of course you can dial this into taste depending on the subject that's in your frame
let's see if maybe we pop pop the blues there now if we pop if we pop the blues in the luminance
we're kind of doing everything including the sky so we're actually going to wait till we get to the
filter section to mess with the car specifically sky specifically in the ground but moving on
to the color grading this is where the magic really happens to get that classic wintery look
so the way that i edit my photos is i come into the shadows and you add 220 into the hue and i
tend to add 10 into the saturation now you can add any hue you want in here but you can see
that it's kind of adding that kind of wintery blue look so again you can just drag this hue
around and find your favorite version of winter whether it's more the purple side or the aqua side
um again for me 220 tends to be the sweet spot and 10 for my saturation so we're going to leave
the luminance we're going to add blending it doesn't really matter where you go you
can go 180 whatever i just usually land up here somewhere and i'll mess with the balance in a
second because the balance tells us how balanced we're going to be between these three sections so
going into the mid tones i'm just gonna pop this up because you can see on the car
it's adding just a bit more contrast again and pop onto our subject in the middle there
so 30 looks good to me and in the highlights i'm going to add 35 and 10 in the saturation for now
and this is where we're going to mess with the balance so if you come up to the high side you're
going to see we're moving more towards the 35 hue but we actually want to go down towards the
blue side so our shadow side and you can see that we're going more towards that kind of clean wintry
look now depending on your preference here you could go to your shadows and pump up that blue
wintery look and make it look really cold if you want that's great and depending on again what you
want you can up the saturation to keep the warmth a little warmer and add a little bit of color
contrast so as you can see that's kind of what i'm doing here is my highlights are on the right side
and my shadows are opposite adding color contrast and that just adds a little bit more depth in your
photo i'm actually going to dial back some of the warmth in the highlights there because i'm going
to add that a little bit later so just kind of moving through here again with sharpening i'm not
actually going to do too much to add to it but i'm going to hold option on my masking tool and drag
that to the right and you can see the white lines that's the only thing that's going to be sharpened
and i'm going to drag that over till just the car is sharpened there and that looks pretty good
so we don't have a ton of noise in it but if you wanted to you could add a bit of noise reduction i
would suggest depending on what lens you're using to enable profile corrections and remove chromatic
aberration and try and do that at the beginning i should have told you that at the beginning to
do that first this photo's looking pretty cool as it stands nice wintry blue but we're only
halfway there when you get to this point in the editing process this is where adding
masks and filters is really gonna help this car or your subject whatever it is stand out
of the frame so to start we're going to come up to our masking panel up here this little circle
and we're going to grab a linear gradient tool now if you drag from the bottom and hold shift it's
going to give you a nice straight line we're going to come up to about here yeah it's affecting the
car a little bit but we're going to deal with that in a second so we're just going to drag
our exposure down just to taste just to make sure that we're taking light away from the bottom
and that's drawing our eye to the subject so what we're going to do is come up to subtract and we're
going to hit select subject now what that's going to do here is it's actually going to take away
the darkness from the car and if you hit o it'll show you what your mask is doing the next thing
that we're going to do is we're going to create a new mask we're going to hit select subject
that did a great job of selecting just our car which is awesome and from here we're
going to dial up the exposure just a little bit to help the car stand out you need to be really
careful not to like make it pop too much because then it looks very unrealistic so we're looking
for this car to still sit very naturally in its environment and really just pop out of the frame
so i'm going to fiddle with this a bit we're going to up the shadows just a touch to bring out the
details again in this section here being careful with our whites and highlights to make sure it's
not standing out or getting overexposed and then using contrast to make those kind of edits that we
did sit pretty naturally and if we look here this is kind of the before and after we're not doing
too too much but just helping that car pop out a little bit so the last masks that we're going
to do is we're going to select the sky and we're going to see how well it can select the sky there
so it did a great job of taking the details in the sky so what we're going to do here is we're
actually going to dehaze the sky and bring back some of those details in the clouds and if it gets
too dark that's all right we're just going to add a bit of exposure again and i'm actually going to
warm this sky up just again to add a little bit of color contrast i'm actually noticing like a bit of
grain up there so maybe i'll take away the clarity take away the texture and add some noise reduction
up there and let's see what that does to the sky finally we're just going to draw one last linear
gradient from the top just to draw attention to our car and just kind of bring that down just
a little bit and my final step is just to kind of add contrast to taste i might try and make the car
pop out just a little bit more again being careful not to overdo it because you don't want to look
unrealistic so so there you go there's a quick before and after of a nice icy blue wintery photo
now if you have a human in it really the only difference that you're going to do is you're just
going to make sure that your oranges or your skin tones that you're actually saturating those on
your subject to make sure that they stand out so between the orange saturation the red hue making
sure that your reds kind of line up with that nice orange look and your luminance you can really
dial in kind of a nice skin tone for a person or a subject in your frame now what's really cool about
lightroom is you can actually create stackable presets which is what i have done and they are
for sale and we are so close to releasing version two guys so stay tuned if you have purchased those
previously they're awesome the edit that we just took i don't know 10 15 minutes to do
i can do in almost six clicks so i've reset the photo here and i'm going to show you how my car
creative toolbox can actually help you make that edit super fast so i'm going to come down here
to my snow day and this is just affecting the light of the photo here i'm just going to adjust
that a little bit then for the curves we're gonna again click snow day and we're seeing
how that's popping into the color section i've got my kind of blue which is a sweet little brz color
and then from there we're just gonna make sure to soften the sharpening or i don't know maybe
we'll use this one and then i've got some new filters that are going to give you a bit more
selection with what you're doing on the lower you can even stack a couple of those on each other
if you want you can darken the top bringing down the exposure on the sky there or you can lighten
the sky if you choose and then you can hit that sky update and when it says update there that
means you need to go in and update your subject and we're going to do that for both our subject
and our sky so going up to our filters here we're going to take our car update that
hit our sky update that adjust that a little bit
because it comes in a bit dark then we're going to make sure our crop is good to go
this adjust our exposure and really quickly you have a bang and photo
in just like 10 clicks so pretty cool little toolbox and you guys can purchase that in my
store link down below but that is a quick way to edit wintery blue photos i appreciate your time so
much and if you enjoyed watching this video please give it a thumbs up if you learned something feel
free to subscribe if you're into content like this and i hope to see you guys in the next one peace