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White Balance and Vignettes

This one has got the issues mohr with white balance we're going to go into our white balance in a second that's, actually, but talking about white balance this is a color passport color picker from x right excellent piece of equipment to have in your camera bag hard covered plastic so it doesn't get destroyed like a you know, some other kodak and great technique beth and other people make calibration charts. No, the thing that I like about this one is that it has both portrait and landscape swatches. The reason for that is that we often like to actually warm up we don't want a neutral color in atlanta in a portrait we often put warming gels onto our cameras are onto our strobes to do that and we like our landscapes a little cooler, so and then you'll notice that this is wanting if you want a warmer portrait in a cooler portrait warmer portrait in a cooler ice versus son and basically was telling is these are graze but are all of them are slightly different and how the gray eyedropper w...

orks whatever you click on, it will neutralize that color meaning if we come over here and look at these numeric values, these numeric values should be or we'll eventually want them to be the same the red, green and blue we can even come up here and use one of our little target's up here now we can see that that is that value of that swatch right there there's the red, green and blue values of that swatch what the great eyedropper does when you click on it is it's going to take whatever's underneath there and it's going to balance out the red, green and blue? And when it does that because you're clicking on something that should have no color cast when it removes the color cast from that it gets rid of the excess of color cast in every other color in the entire file so you do it one so as I click here click it automatically balanced out these two now two o two to afford two of three there now balance in neutral and as I click around each one of these you're going to notice is a slightly different result on the file because these are all slight different variations on blue therefore I can warm up the file slightly by clicking on this one I can cool it, I can cool it, I can warm it up so they give you variations on it that's the way how you can calibrate a system and when you get something like a color passport it gives you what the value should be so you can shoot this value and then you what you do is you find tune the colors using this and this over here these red, green and blue values until they read the numeric values that they tell you they should be and then you're going to save accustomed profile and basically what you do is you just save a preset for I like this this under this studio lighting this preset and again you can save it and you're just going to come over here to the camera calibration you can use the hs l in terms of th s l adjustments if you're using that to fix it as well as the lens profile. Uh, the len's profile corrections making a preset is a great way because if you're shooting under set studio lights on a regular basis, this set up this thing I got the chair there, you should have that nailed down so you don't need to do anything in photo shop you should have the sharpening said you're so set your camera lenses set everything has said you're fine tuning your profiles, everything should be set and you should only be doing a little teeny fine tuning maybe a little targeted dodging burn, but you should be able to go through ten thousand shoots as quick as possible because if it's a similar lighting on it, you can nail it, you know that that's going to be consistent with each each different shots and we'll get into this I'm tab, and how to use it, and especially how to use these presets that are built into it. Okay, so that's white balance, this would be another example I've been using for years and years as shot raw file, great turkey baster. I know that there's, this is a lava wall here, click on it, and it instantly gives me the correct color that I saw when I was looking at the window at three o'clock in the morning at a moon set in waikiki. I come up here and do the rest of my tango, like coming up here here and doing my shadow, my clarity, my vibrance, you know, and the amount of information that you can pull out of raw file is truly fantastic, so that is white balance. If you're using one of these, what you're typically going to do is you're going to shoot it in the scene, fixed the white balance here, and then you would hold down two or more shots and then synchronize it, and you just say, would you synchronize white balance? So even though you probably won't use the shot with the model holding up the little great tag macbeth color chart, you can make a preset for it and then synchronize it will not make a preset you just simply fix it in that one image she loes it down now smiles beautiful moves on okay so synchronizing that is a used for synchronizing we're gonna be doing a lot of synchronizing coming up just appear you know we always got him jack yeah um you know I want to start off with just a couple of things from earlier a woman are sorry. Yeah linda tom asked when if ever would you use highlight priority vignette ing well we looked at the one the color I don't use it because it's a little bit is not as subtle to it in other words you khun seymour of the dark tone of it okay it's not using the color it's using the luminosity and I want to protect the color I don't want to see my colors go muddy and so I use the color priority the one thing that highlight priority has it has that it's a little bit more protective of the highlights but since I have a highlight slider at the bottom I feel I have the best of both worlds so my priority is that it looks like a dodge and burn rather than it can I really get my highlights dark? My thing is to make it is a cz much of a true dodge and burn as possible which by the way I'm coming over here to your lens correction setting this vignette under here this vignette ing and uh this been yet ng here at the bottom this is a true dodging burn so this is I mentioned there were five there three there and there are two more here that's a true dodging burn so that's what I'm trying to get but it doesn't follow the crop and so I don't use it as often as I used the other one but very good question um but speaking of which since we're on here here is another image that um actually I think this one is using I'm not saying that I have been yet is on here check we just had one pop and do you mind if I slip another question and right hand you jim and va is with us all the time wants to know where would you where would you like to have somebody holding the color passport doesn't need to be under the same light or is there a certain angle or how do you best work with that you definitely would want it under the same light because that's what you're trying to compensate for so it has to have the same ambient cast as the scene so whatever that whatever that is but I know you probably more concerned with the face or whatever is pertinent if it's a product shot of the nikes you're going to put it right in front of you know right where the lights are right on it if it's a person have a nice day to their face probably that light's not two different but again, if you had sidelight dramatic side like you know a window light and cool light from artificial light then you're right you may wanna have them, you know do a few things in there and again for may the numeric values there you're never at a set perfect value some people look for a perfect rgb value for skin or for this or for that when it comes down to it at the end you're going to move those sliders just like putting a color gel on your camera you're doing it for aesthetics presuppose you have a calibrated monitor but you wanted to make it look pretty the people who use numeric values and say it's got to be this highlight this numeric value this thing my goal is to make it look pretty there's a pretty good can I sell it good? Can I go home at night? Good. You know that's what? My priorities are awesome thank you, jack. You're welcome. Okay, thie other thing I mentioned in terms of been yet ing and let's actually, um looks like it's got a um file and we're gonna get to things like I might as well do it here now when you come up here to auto and the middle tone exposure looks good my clarity I'm going to make it pop because it's a architectural work maybe that shadow is actually looking pretty good highlight again you can see how quickly you can do this and then our little vibrance so what is obviously a very underexposed shot this may be the situation is probably bracketed serious right here and I liked it because of the the siegel in here but there's a couple of the things that you have at your disposal here that our once you've optimized color and tone you still want to do as one of your first steps depend upon whether it's bugging you or not and that is going to be things like the upright filter I mentioned before under lens correction under profile hold on that's the current lens correction we can't do this it's not finding the camera that is if if you know if it can find out figure out what camera um under lynn's correction we're going to get rid of this keystone ing as we're looking up into this scene but it can't find one so it's not gonna be ableto do that you can guess if I knew what lens I'd shot this with whether it wass you know my um nikon and it says cool pics but if it's my you know twenty eight, two, three hundred then that's going to take a stab at fixing it so this is just doing that basic correction but it's correcting for the lens and has no idea whether I'm pointing up or down and that whether there's any vanishing point distortion going on and that's where it comes into handy to do are upright filter, which is right here I was scroll down here I'm going. This is the old settings for manual I'm going out that's just outside of the scroll and upright is where you're going to be able to ask dobby camera toe automatically try and get rid of this vanishing point, the key stoning of things falling together in a way as they go further into the distance and that you also have all the manual controls but the upright these settings right here. Okay, these options these four of automatic where it's going to try and do everything that it can, an emphasis on the horizontal and emphasis on the vertical, and an emphasis on the horizontal and vertical setting up a grid structure, not taking into account possible good taste. In other words, it's goingto do whatever it can to do that where's auto is going to try and do a balanced one. So I'm gonna come over here and just do auto and you can see that it did actually a quite a good job of automatically finding the verticals in here and straightening out the file we zoom out a little bit um and the same time it's also going to do a little bit of a crop, we undo that you'll notice that it's doing a little bit of a of a crop here, which I'm not crazy about, but that will do that this right here is where it has bending the image or expanding the top to compensate for that vanishing point and you're going to see these little sections of the image still being here um, by the way, since you can actually expend extend the canvas in photoshopped right, you don't know how you can kind of anti crop and upright is available within adobe cameron photo shop little tip if in here since you can't expend your extend your canvas in adobe camera here if you would take your image and if this was the one main problem and you didn't want it to crop what it's doing on these edges here you can go into don't be came a raw x in photo shop before you go into it expand your canvas so you have nice white area around your image then do the upright filter let it fix it and it will actually leave all the parameters at your disposal it will not force it into a crop so that's just the thing as opposed to here this show not show overlay the constraint image when you do that and do a crop it's automatically going to crop out any of this, you know, transparency, so that is something again I typically don't do because I want to be able to control that and in this case that story, maybe the feet of the people and I want to do that anyway. So there is before here is auto here is an emphasis on the horizontal lines in the image, it's not taking into account the verticals, but it is giving me a perfect, great little cries in line here is on the verticals. You can see that in this case is just a little bit different in terms of how it's prioritizing it, then the auto, and then on the other apply level horizontal, vertical perspective corrections again, in this case just slightly different as well, but all of those air doing a good job and making a stab at it when you do this now we're getting again into beyond the basics of up of color and tone you're going to notice things like this on the wide angle, especially we've now done this correction, you're getting what's known as chromatic aberrations, which is an awful, nice big word to use in conversations at cocktail parties, right? Impress people or telling get your clients to shut up because they're asking too many annoying questions and you just tell them, you know you've got a lot of chromatic aberrations there, bob it's going to cost you a lot of money you want me to fix those and we'll take another week so you better leave now because I got a lot of work to do because you got chromatic aberration but anyway the chromatic aberrations under color we're all under this lens correction area right now len's corrections the profile where we enabled it and we gave it one since it didn't find itself manual is where we found our upright features color is where you're going to find remove chromatic aberrations and actually is a great little option it's just clicking they used to do this with a different profile for each camera and they realized that they could just run an algorithm that does a great job as doing this so it's just a one click there's really no downside to it anytime that you're using especially wide angle glass isn't shooting under some high contrast you may want to turn that on you can continue to fine tune it you can see that there is an amount slider it's really not a purple thing going on here um you can move the area that it is adjusting and again we're not seeing sometimes it is a dramatic improvement in terms of setting these sliders I'm not seeing any green just ever so slightly if you look over here there's a little bit of green so I can't emphasize that and again you confined to knit what it considers to be the parameters that it's working on so even something like that for me is going to be a you know, significant improvement from the fluorescent orange but that really is a red and I'm not saying that the other thing that's going to help take care of that is when we get into sharpening doing a little color noise reduction because that kind of fits into that equation is also going to be able to get rid of any problems with color but you can see that an excessive color you have fine little detail it's actually is a great example because when I'm getting rid of color noise in this file here is the nice blue windows reflecting the blue sky at some point I'm actually getting rid of the subtleties of color information by adding color noise removal so just often times it looks like it does nothing so people use an excessive amount of the color noise removal like it's a pre b but it actually if you've got a lot of subtleties either in case of things like this architectural work or if you have a crowd scene with people in it um you notice that their faces will get mushy what was all these little subtle of the face is only this big you do that color noise reduction and it becomes one blob of color because basically how do you get rid of color noise reduction is by softening all the color and blending it back in. So it is it's not a free ride, as some people think that anyway, the software does an amazing job and luminous is also is great and well, like I said, we will get more into that noise reduction later on. Okay, command zero to fifty screen. Okay, I think that is for the tango. I could keep going on these just to show you what the tango there's that before and after in terms of that's, a lot of clarity, this a sunset shot of um when that you saw before here is before and after this one is probably using I'm using a little bit of a graduated filter effect graduated indy effect. We're going to use that ah lot tomorrow, maybe even the end of today, but here's our before and after primarily being the tango, that wave shot again being able to pull out that color in tone, you can see that kind of excessive been yet that I'm pulling out here and here again. Iss tonga were doing a little bit of the lens correction on there as well, but being able to pull out what is obviously an overcast day, you have to work with it but you don't have to settle for it and here is a little iphone when this one I have any work done, so we'll just do the tango here let's do a little crop just a great old airstream and uh so we'll do our auto that will pull out that information the middle tone values look good clarity is going to bring in a lot of pop to the image my highlights I'm going to make that as dark as I can maybe a little shadow you can see it my history graham I'm not getting a pure black with this file this is with an old iphone, so I'm gonna take that black down kind of pegged that down use my vibrance to bring back in quite a bit on this and I'm probably going to use I think I want that crop to be much tighter because it's not that interesting sure, but that's plain said that that tango until you go into it you really don't know what you're working with actually let's before we take a break before we get into targeted work this are graduated radio filter our radio filter I mentioned we have five in yes, we actually have six and this is the brand new one that came in with the new adobe camera which is mind bendingly awesome and that is that you can actually take the entire tango and put it into a soft edge been yet now and that is very, very cool and basically what you khun dio is you have your targeted adjustments is going to be a teaser you can do either inside or outside of the oval that you're going to do, you can default it to set feather for it, and, uh, you can come up here and drag out your oval, and then you have it your disposal you're then yet including, you can take your highlights up, but your mid tones down and you can take your shadows that's going to be this is for the outside here, and you could take your sharpness down, meaning you can come up here and actually add a, um, little softening vignette. If you look at what we've got going on here, we're getting our old little hold a plastic camera blurring, taking place. So in terms of our blurring capabilities, we can now not only do a vignette that darkens the edge of a file or lightens it, or does anything else that's possible through these sliders, but you can now also add sharpness to the perimeter, and again, we'll be playing with this tool at length.