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Lesson Info

Synchronizing Adjustments

I want to change this one and there's several ways I can do it. The first way I can do it is if I've adjusted this one and I like the way it looks, then I'm gonna go to the next one and I'm simply gonna go over to this button here that says Previous and I click on it, and every change that I made on the last one goes to this one. But, that's kind of a slow way of doing things, because you'd click and then click and then hit previous, and then click and hit previous, and click and hit previous. That would be dumb, so let's undo that and let's do it a better way. I can also click on this image and then I can Shift click or Command click to the other images that need the same adjustment. It could be like all of these, 'cause there was another one right here that needs that same adjustment. I can go to the Sync..., that right there, with the three ellipses there, all right? If I click on that, it opens a dialogue box where I get to choose what is going to be synchronized. This is useful wh...

en you only want to synchronize the exposures and stuff, but you don't want to synchronize like the Crops and the Spot tool and all of that kind of stuff, which we'll talk about in our next lesson. In this case, we will leave the Spot Removal and the Crop out of it. But the rest of it we're gonna include, and I'm gonna hit synchronize and now that one has the same settings and that one has the same settings, and they're all done. That's pretty easy, but that's still too long a process for me, so let's undo those. Okay, we're back to the wrong exposures and I'm going to click on all of these, but instead of hitting the Sync... button and having to go through a dialogue box, I'm gonna hold down the Option key. When I hold down the Option key and hit that Sync button, you'll notice that the Sync... goes away. So, I hit Option, see how it disappears? That means that it's gonna take the preferences that I used the last time I synchronized and it's gonna synchronize with all of those check boxes checked except for the ones that I didn't check. I'm gonna hit Option and Sync, and with one button, I did it. That's much faster. That's a much better way to do it. But, that's still really a slow way to do it. (giggling) Okay? I'm going to go back and I'm going to click on this one and I'm gonna reset it, then I click on this one, reset it. Then I click on this one and reset it. Better would be the process of seeing or foreseeing, so you would look at these images and you'd say, you know what? All three of these images right here are the same. Why wouldn't I take all three of these and just adjust them all at the same time from the beginning? That's what the AutoSync is for, so this little toggle button, you click on it and it's in AutoSync mode. Now, if I'm in AutoSync mode, anything I do is just done. I'm not, there's no synchronization necessary, so I don't have to copy and paste something. I don't have to click and then click here and then hit Previous, and I don't have to click here and then Shift click to here and then-- It's just if I do it, it does it. Now, I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna take the exposure up just a little bit. I'm going to bring the black down, I'm gonna bring the shadows up, I'm gonna bring the highlights down. It's all the stuff that I did before, right? I'm just working on the same stuff that I did before. I'm gonna go in and warm this up and bring the tint down a little bit, take the temperature there, and then I'm gonna add a little bit of clarity, and the saturation's already down. Now, the photo is done, but look. It's already done, I'm just done. You just added five years to my life. (laughing) Five years? Okay, now are you ready for this, 'cause I'm gonna add another five years to your life right now. If I find that I always do certain things to images, so let's reset this image again. If I find that I'm always doing the same thing to images. For instance, tell me, do you usuallly, on every image, brighten them or darken them on the exposure? I believe I darken. You darken 'em? Okay, well I brighten them. That's just my-- Every time I touch a photo, there's always a little bit of brightness. Now, it changes based on what photograph I'm shooting, but generally speaking if I were to track my, I pretty much bring the exposure up 1/2 a stop or 1/3 a stop or something like that, and I always take my highlights down a little bit. I just do, that's what I do. I always take the black down a little bit, I just do. The shadows go up a little bit, so I do the same things over and over again and then I tweak those things a little bit based on the photo. Okay, so I'm gonna go to the exposure on this image and what you wanna do is take a normal image to do this with. Just take a image, reset it so it's completely normal, don't touch the temperature and tint, because that actually does change every photograph. But, you've started the exposure. Bring your exposure up a little bit. We're just gonna go kind of at 30 or 35 is fine. I'm gonna leave the contrast where it is. I'm gonna take the highlights down a little bit. I'm gonna take the shadows up a little bit, take the white down just a tad. Take the blacks down a little bit more than that, and then clarity up just a little bit and saturation down to like -12. That's what I like to do to most images, now I also happen to like to go down into the Effects panel because I like grain. I'm gonna go in and add just a little bit of grain to the image, just a little bit, add a little bit more roughness to the grain and bring the grain amount down a little bit. Let's just work with the size just a bit. There we go, I like that grain. It makes it feel a little bit more volume in the image. There's so many people that want to go back to film and they shoot film again and stuff like that, and they think they're all artsy about it, but I can get the exact same look on the film that they're getting. But, I'm doing it digitally, and quite frankly the funny thing, I hope someone watching film is watching this, but any, somebody who's has gone back to film and is like making a big deal of it, you realize that when you shoot film in this day and age, it's a digital image when you actually print it. So, it's still digital, 'cause you send the film to the lab, the lab scans it, sends it back to you, you adjust it, now you're actually back in digital, the same place I am, but you don't have as much control over it as I do. Now, you're sending it back to the lab who's printing it digitally on photographic paper, and so it's like you made a copy of a copy and I have the original source. My file's so much better than yours, and I have control as to whether I want the grain or don't want the grain. And I had three copies of mine before I went to bed, and you were sweating for the next three days waiting for your film to get back and not be torn or ruined by the developer. So, I don't know. I just don't get the allure for film at all. But anyway, that being said, back to our discussion. Sorry, that was a little sidetrack. Okay, so I like that film look, so I'm adding that grain inside of Lightroom, right? Then, let's say I like to make sure that my Lens Correction, so I like to make sure that the Chromatic Aberration is removed. I also like to enable the Profile Corrections, so that any lens that I'm shooting with, it just automatically takes the bend out of it and it also takes that vignette out of it. But, I kinda like the vignette, I just don't like the bending, so I want to take the vignette down a little bit. I can actually go in here, and this is important. We're not just talking about one thing at a time, so everybody pay attention here. In the Lens Correction area, when you're working on a Profile Correction, if you want to take the vignetting, or if you want the distortion to be corrected, but you don't want the vignetting to be corrected, you turn this to zero and now it will only correct for the distortion and it won't correct for the vignetting. Or you could do it the opposite way. Or you could do it kind of at a schedule of like 50%, so you could say, I only want 50% of the vignette removed. So that it has a slight fall off instead of a rapid fall off, Now, when I zoom back out, you can see that, let's turn it on and off. If I turned it on, that's before and that's after, but you can see right up here in the corner, that's where you see it the most. Watch the corner, so if I turn this on, see how the corner gets less dark? That's where I really dislike it, is when you have a wide shot and the corner gets, like dark in the corner just right there, it gets dark, I hate that. By taking the vignette down to 50% of a removal, it's perfect. I'm just gonna turn this on Auto. If you turn it on Auto and then you take this to 50%, now it's going to just take that and say, I'm gonna do an auto-correction on every image and I'm going to scale it back 50%. I'm just deciding on the things that I do constantly. Now, if you only do the Lens Correction on a couple photos, don't add it to this. All we're doing is touching things that we always touch to make our images normal, all right? Once we've done that, if I go up-- Let's say that that's everything that I wanna do. You might wanna add something in the curves as well. You could go into the curves. In fact, my Preset collection comes with a series of curves, so we could add like a classic film curve. If I click on that, let me, before I do that, I'll zoom in on him so you can see the classic curve in action. When I click on a classic curve, do you see what it does? It adds that film look, so if I wanted every image that I ever shot to come in with this classic film look to it, then I could do that by simply going up here to the Develop module, going to Set Default Settings, see that? Click on it, and now I can set every image that comes in from my Canon 5D Mark III will get all of these settings. Anything I've touched and it's going to become your default setting. Any time an image from this camera comes in, it's just gonna automatically apply the stuff you're always doing all the time anyway. Then, you just work on the rest from there, okay? Now, watch what happens. Let's just, let's just do it. I'm gonna update to those settings and now when I come in and I, let's just go to some random other job. I'm just gonna go, let's go to our selections that we were making here. Let's highlight all, this is a wedding complete with, do we agree that's a different thing than what I just worked on? But, they were still shot with this camera, and it was still me that shot it. Most of the things that I'm gonna have to do to an image are gonna be done that way anyway, right? I'm always bringing the sliders up and down the same way, and so I'm going to go in here and if I go to the Develop module and I turn this on AutoSync, right here, I'm going to hit Reset. Now, when you hit the Reset button, it doesn't take your images back to zero, zero, zero, zero. The Reset takes you back to the default, which could be zero, zero, zero if you set it for that. But, if you have set your camera default, the Reset button takes you to the camera default. By clicking on Reset, I'm gonna be showing you what these would have come in as when I imported them. Clear on that? Okay, so I am bringing this back to import. Clicking on it. There we go. All of 'em are getting, look at that, all of 'em are changing. Everything's changing, see how it changed the-- But, now I am... Like, look at this one, see that? It's done. Now, there are outliers, like for instance this one that's too dark, right? That one's too dark, but I can highlight the whole segment and all I do is go to the basics and grab the exposure and bring it up, and now that one's done. Maybe bring the black down just a little bit, and now she's done. The only thing that I am not able to do by automation is the temperature. I might have to bring the warmth up on that photo. Instead of, how many sliders did I click to make the default? Then through create? Yeah. Four, five? I did exposure, highlight, shadow, white-- clarity-- Black, clarity-- Vignette. Saturation, curve, lens correction, two settings in Lens Correction and the grain. I did 11, 11? Now, instead of doing 11 sliders on every photograph, I'm doing two or three. When I do that, if it do it by AutoSync, which we told you how to do, then I've done three sliders on five or six images and they're done. I've adjusted those, so let's go to something completely-- Let's go over here to say, here. There's some flower images, right? So, let's just highlight all these flower-- Well, they're close to being done, but let's just take it up just a notch, like that, and let's add just a little bit more clarity. Now, I like those, let's just warm it up. Okay, so three sliders again. I just accomplished all the flowers that were on the edge there. Now, let's go somewhere else. Let's go to images of, here, let's go to these images of getting ready, right? Let's go and look at her getting stuff in her hair, right? Well, that one's done. Okay, so let's go to this one. Okay, so that's set, just needs a little bit more brightness because of whatever exposure. I'm just gonna bring it up and play with the temperature and the tint. Now, that one's done. Now, remember we added a film effect to all of them, so they've all got that milky feel to 'em, But, the point is, is that whatever it is you always do. If you're not adding that milky film look to it, then don't add it. Now, I just go to, like, for instance this one, I'm gonna take that and bring the exposure down and the temperature up, and now those guys are done. Then I'm gonna go over-- So, it's, do you see how simple this process is? You are, wow, yeah, that's... That is a lot of, I guess I'm lookin' at everything that, realizing how much you have adjusted already and it automatically goes to the image, so there's just only a couple that you have to tweak. Right, and the trick is, if you wanna be fully automated, the trick to making a default setting and adjusting your images with synchronization is that you have to first pay attention to what you do. You first have to say, I'm always bringing the exposure up and I'm always taking the highlights down, and I'm always doing this, and I'm always doing that. Those are the things, jot a note and plan it out. Then say, okay, that's what I'm doing always, so now I just need to make a default, which is like the master, mega Preset. Because as it's coming in the door, it's doing everything you always do. Then, once you've done that, then it's just a matter of highlighting blocks of images that are different than the normal, 'cause the normal's gonna be pretty much done. It's just a matter of the things that are different from the normal, right? Yeah. Thank you for explaining that. That's kind of another little a-ha moment for me and for people online as well. That sort of pause moment as well, I'm gonna have to go back and re-watch, that my fear when putting all those Presets or changes upon import, it was like, well, it's different exposures, it's different scenarios. In my mind, it's always like I'm gonna go just look at those particular images. If they have different exposure, then clearly I'm not gonna go up one way or down the other way to all of them, but what you're saying is it's just focusing on the things that you find consistently doing-- Right, you're only-- And just do those. Focusing on those, so that's right. Then look at the ones that are within, okay, these three are within that scenario. These are in that scenario and then automate those. Exactly. It's sinking in for all of us. (laughing) Good. Got another five years. Yep. There you go, another five years, so the Develop, the Develop, your Develop settings need to be based on what you always do. If you don't ever, if you don't have any specific always for exposure, just leave it at zero, because you swing one way or the other and you just have to do it per image. But, I would bet that 90% of the photos that you, no matter who you are out there, 90% of the photos that you mess with, you do it almost exactly the same every time minus one slider, minus two sliders. Of course, you don't touch temperature and tint. Leave them. You want the-- You want the temperature and tint to stay in Auto, so it needs to be at the Auto setting when it comes in. When you set that default setting, you make sure that it's in Auto . That way, it always Auto looks at the adjustments it needs to make to that specific set of images. Every image is gonna change based on what it needs, right? Or you can put it in As Shot, if you don't want Lightroom to do anything to it. If you just want, if you trust what your camera does, leave it As Shot. If you want Lightroom to do anything to it use Auto, because, otherwise, if you use any other temperature control option, it's going to turn it all to tungsten. Right? So, everything else leave, anything you don't do on a regular basis at zero, leave the temperature either as As-Shot or Auto. I would prefer As-Shot. Then, make your default and then from then on out, everything that comes in will be that setting on this camera. If you have another camera, you have to set a default for that camera too. That way, two different cameras get two different settings. Great, that was the question that I was just gonna ask from Gordon. "Can I make my defaults for my iPhone, "my Canon, and my Nikon?" Yes, so if, so take your iPhone photo that you just shot, take that photo and make a adjustment that's always the same, the one that you, what you always like to do to your iPhone, set that, then set the default on that image. Then, go to your Canon picture and do it the same with the Canon, and then go to your Nikon image and do it the same on the Nikon, and then it'll do it. Now, one point to be made here, is that in the Preferences dialogue box, inside of Presets, remember I mentioned this? The camera ISO settings for defaults and also camera serial number. If you want to separate it out, because you have, I shoot with this camera which is a Mark III. But, my assistant shoots with a Mark III as well and he shoots differently than I do, then I need them to be separated out by serial number. Then, I click on there, so that way I have to actually bring in every camera that I ever shoot with that has a different serial number than this camera. I have to set a default for every single individual camera, so that then when my assistant shoots bright, I can adjust for the brightness and I can bring his down. If you and I shot together and I was adjusting all of your images, mine would be brightened, yours would be darkened, because they come from different cameras. Even if they're the same model. Same thing is true if I click on this ISO. I'm sorry, we just did it the wrong way. This is the camera serial number and then if I click on this one, make defaults specific to the ISO, it actually separates every single ISO on your camera as a different camera. So, 50 is different than a hundred. Then, you could adjust every single ISO setting, so you take a picture at every single ISO and then you adjust each one of those. Then, each one of those becomes its own camera, so that by the time you get to 20, 3200 ISO, it can turn on the grain reduction and all that kinda stuff. Like, the noise reduction, it can amp that up, or it could just turn 'em to black and white if you're using like an old camera that looked horrible in color in those high settings. Okay? So, those are options available to you as well. I don't wanna get so far into it, because, again, we're kind of a beginner course and there's a lot more to learn. That's how I like to work with images and we just need to warm that one up.