Lessons

Lesson Info

Dodge and Burn

there's a great image because it is it can look so awesome. But when I was photographing, it was I was just collecting the data. I knew what I could do with it, and so I just needed to collect the data. Um, I wasn't gonna be there for this is a place called Whole Stat. And it's ah, it's a really beautiful little place. Um, it's ah, it's actually one of the first or maybe the first known salt mine in the world. Beautiful little village. And I and I wanted to, um, get the best shot I could. So what I was looking for in this shot was I needed as much information in the highlights as I could get up here in the sky, and I needed to have a much information as I could get in the shadows. So I was just looking at my history ram and making sure I was getting all of the information in, um so once I have all the information and it's just a matter of looking that hissed a gram, you can see if I if I if I click on the Jakey, the hottest part is right up there in the cloud, you can see that there's ...

a little bit of overexposure in the cloud, but that's it. So I was watching on my camera to make sure I had full information throughout those clouds, so that later on I could bring it back. But I wanted I That's my rule of exposure. Get his bride as I can until I'm clipping my highlights and bring it down a little bit. That way, I have as much information as I can get. So here we are. I'm going to quickly go through in a just this image from start to finish so that you can see how I'm going to use all these tools together. So I come into an image like this, and I say, Well, the first thing I want to look at its exposure because that's the middle of that's all of that's most of the image. So I'm gonna grab the exposure, and I'm gonna bring it up like this, all right? And also, I need to choose a profile. I'm gonna choose the landscape, choose a landscape, uh, adobe landscape profile, because I want the colors to pop. So I'm gonna take my exposure and bring it up until I like the exposure of my, uh, mid tones, which is that the actual town itself. Once I've got those, then I'm going to play around with the contrast, and I'm actually gonna bring the contrast down because I want Maurin Formacion, not less. So I'm not trying to rich in my, uh, contrast. I'm trying to limit my contrast that then I can play with the contrast individually. So I bring the contrast down just a little bit and then I would take the highlights way down so that I can start getting that information up there in this in the clouds. So I'm just bringing it down until, like, see how I'm getting the sky. But I don't want to bring it all the way down because that tends toe mess with edges up here. So I'm gonna bring it down to about here, and I'm going Teoh, lighten up the shadows just a little bit. So I get a little bit more information in the trees, and then I'm going to take the black down until I get some nice rich overhangs and see how the the shadow warnings air turning blue right here. And that's great. Having that shadow warning tells me that I'm getting some really rich shadows. But I don't want to go to the point that the shadows start to go into the buildings in the trees. So I'm just looking for overhangs to be really dark shadows. That gives me the richness that I want. Okay, The next thing I want to do is add some texture to the entire photograph because the photograph has beautiful buildings and tiles and has trees and water. And so the texture is a great place to do that. And then I'm gonna add just a little bit more vibrance to it, and I'm gonna play around with my, uh, temperature intent. Warm it up just a little bit and you can see em going back and forth with my tent until I've got I think what looks good. All right, so now I've got the basics done. So this is all my global adjustments that have been done. I can also go into my hue, saturation, Lew minutes and I could simply just click on this target adjustment and point at various things that I want to brighten up So, like, for instance, I want the luminous of this red building to go. I wanted to brighten, so if I scroll that up, I'm getting a little bit more luminous up there. But there's very little other things that are red, so it's fine. If the whole photograph was red, you'd see the whole photograph shifting and changing. But as it is, I'm just simply going in to this building here and brightening it up or dark ing. I just like it a little bit brighter. That helps that side. And I can ah come into any of these that I want to work on. But I think that's good that the greens, I kind of want this green here to darken up a little bit and I could bring it down. But the problem is, is if I go too far, it's gonna get this green over here, so I don't want to go to farm. Just bring it down a little bit, Okay, so my hue saturation luminous is done, and at this point, I'm gonna go into the lens correction because I'm guarantee. See that dark over here? It's light over here, so I'm gonna get chromatic aberration. So I just go into the profile section and say, Remove chromatic aberration and boom, it's gone. Okay, so now I've taken care of everything globally that I feel like I need to get taken care of. So at this point, it's just a matter of using my local adjustments to do my work. So I'm going to start with a Grady Int and the Grady int that I'm gonna use is simply just bringing the exposure down. I want to bring some shadow down. I want to bring, um, the highlights down quite a little bit. Um, and then I'm just gonna grab it and drag across the sky like this and notice that I'm going at an angle like that. So I'm getting the entire sky. But I'm not covering all of this now. In the old days, you would just leave this and you might come in here and then turn it to their There's a brush control inside of the Grady int. There's brush so I could click on brush, and then I could come down to the bottom of the brush area and I could say erase and I could go and try and auto, uh, mask and erase this out. But there's a much better way to do it, and that is to use the range mask. So I'm gonna use the same range mask we used before. But this time, instead of using the um, instead of using the tool for color, which I could use, I could click on color and I could go up and choose all blue things. So just kind of like that, and you'll notice that what it did to the see how it it cut right here along the edge and right on the mountain and all that. But the problem is, I actually want the mountain to get a little bit of this. Bernas. Well, so instead of using color is my range mask, I'm going to use Luminess. It's with Luminess. I can then say I don't want dark things to get worked on. I only want light things to get worked on so I can do the same dropper thing and click on here and go all the way across like this, and you can see how it's cut out most of the trees. There's still some lightness in those trees and So all I need to do is take this. It's given me the range generally from 29 to 100. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this and bring it up until it goes away from those trees. But it's still falling on this mountain, So that's it. So it's really from 60 to 100 that, uh, grading is in effect. So now I'm gonna turn off that mask overlay, and you can see what I can do now I could just dark and things up writing them up, and it's not affecting that little mountainside. But it is affecting my, uh, sky and some of that Ah mountain over there. And so I and the great thing is I can drag this down, and it's still not going to affect that. That edge of the it's still not gonna affect that edge of the mountainside. So I can I can re negotiate this until I like what it's doing. I can even grab the top. So when you're working on a radiant, it's a little bit different than a brush, because it could be flexed and moved all the time. So I grabbed this and Aiken drag it. So the Grady it becomes faster. So at the top of the grading is 100% of whatever it's doing and at the bottom of the grading, 0%. And then this is the middle. And so I can just draw a line and you can see the line if you're up here. But once we get down here, it's not affecting stuff, because why? Because the range mask is only allowing it to effect from 60 to 100. So I'm just dragging it down and letting it on. Lee effect that area, so I like it that way. I'm going to just re negotiated this way just a little bit because I don't mind some of that light creeping in down this canyon. I just don't want it to affect the whole mountain. The problem is, it's also affecting some of those lighter buildings A little bit right. There may be right there, but that's OK because we can always come in just like I said, and hit the brush setting, come into the erase setting inside of the brush and then just come up here and erase anything on that. And here that might be troublesome for us. So there I have just gone from Let me just show you the difference between before and after. So So this is before Oh, it Sorry. This is before I did my edits before. So that's not gonna help you. It'll let me just turn off my Okay, so this is before and this is after. So that's a huge change with a very small tool. And the beauty is then I can come in and grab on a like, for instance, I can grab a radial filter and do the same thing. So radio filter is just a round version of the same thing, right? And so you can see the mass that I've created, and I want to keep the town bright and I want the out. So instead of remember, we were talking about vignettes. Post crop vignettes. Post Kraft vignettes are lame because they always follow the crop, and it's always in the center. So post crop vignette means that it's always going to vignette directly to the center. Well, the town's not in the center of this photograph. It's on the side. And so I want the vignette to bring you into the town so I can grab this Vinje and I can move if I just grab the side. It works both sides at the same time. If I shift, click any of them. It works, all of them at the same time. And if I option, click or all click one sided Onley moves that one side so I can really manipulate this thing to my heart's content. Um, until I have exactly what I want out of it. And then remember, I can always come in and repaint or unpainted things as as I see fit. So in this case, I could use a range mask on. This is well, but there's too many different colors that are involved. So instead, what I'll do is I'll go to the brush, click on the brush, and I'll come down and hit Erase and I'll auto mask. And now that I'm in auto mask mode and I'm erasing now, if I erase off the red building, it's just gonna do read stuff and Dark Woods stuff. And then if I do this yellow building, I'm just going to get the yellow building, and now I'm just going to get the brown building and it's not spilling outside of it. It's not even like the green. The greenery is going to stay the same. So I'm just working on things that I want to make sure that they don't get darkened at all, and the rest of it's going to stay fine. So I'm just see how that yellow building just popped out. But then I'm burning all the way around it, so I think that I've done a pretty good job. So I need to get down here in the water and make sure that the building's reflections stay nice and bright. See, I've even helped me auto mask down there. Uh, here's I need to get the church reflection. I need to get the reflection of that. And what it's doing is it's registering color and tone. And then it's autumn asking outside that. So it's saying, OK, I'm not gonna hit anything that's outside those colors or tones. So once I've done that, I'm gonna turn off that mask overlay, and then I'm gonna So I didn't even care what the effect waas. All I cared about was that I was getting a mask, and so Now I'm going to go in and just darken it up a little bit more, and I'm going to bring some shadows down, bring up some whites a little bit. So we get a little crest. You can see how that I'm brightening up that sky quite a bit. Um and I'm even going to take the temperature instead of making it warmer. I'm gonna make it a little cooler just so that that town offsets itself even better. And so now that's what we look like. And I think that's pretty close to being done. It's got some other stuff to do, but I like I like the way it's looking now, I just need to go in. Um, now I just need to go in and crop it, So I'm gonna go in, and just so I click on the crop tool and then I'm just gonna and notice that the light rooms moving a little slower now And that's because I've got all these computations going on at the same time that I'm cropping it, and so just be aware of that. The other thing that I might want to do, um, is I might want to straighten this up a little bit because it's some of it looks like it's leaning, so I can always come in here and grab my transformation tool. Click on the upright transformation, and I'm just going to draw line on important and obvious vertical lines. So the 1st 1 is this building right here, that red building and then the next one is this clock tower and all I'm doing is trying to hopes there. So I all I did was straighten up this clock tower and that building and helped to straighten all of the buildings inside of the town. And that's really all I need to do with that. And then I could go in with the crop tool and just finish out my crop the way I want it there, and I'm finished with that image. So retouching inside of light room and burning and dodging are very, very powerful tools in making an image really stand out and become something better than what it waas when you captured it. And remember, you know, when we're capturing were just capturing data and so there's the first thing you do is try and get the best daddy you can. And once you have great data inside your camera, bring it in and use global adjustments to get it most of the way there. But again, you're still just trying to get the basics done. And then it's It's in those targeted areas where you can take a ah, a Grady int tool or radial Grady int or a brush. And by burning and dodging and choosing different colors and warming up certain areas and cooling others down, you can really target and change the way the photograph is gonna look just by doing that extra effort in certain areas of the photo. And so, uh, really get used to and play with these, uh, these local adjustment options that you have in the brush and in the radio Grady Int and in the regular Grady INTs because they're fantastic tools.