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Editing a Photograph: Basic Panel

luminosity color saturation. So I got my base, and now I'm gonna come in and look at the luminosity values. Black, white shadow and highlight and exposure are the ones that kind of set the variation. That contrast is the extension and compression within those if they're starting out, I recommend thinking about black points and white points first, that says to the range of contrast, it's available if you hold that, if you move the slider and you could just visually judge what you like, nothing wrong with that. If you're a little o C D. He rolled down the altar option key, and as you drag that slider bars, I drag it to the right. You're going to see in the foreground some of that yellow green appear, and then you're going to see that little bit of black appear where that tree is right there. So I move that slider the first time color starts to appear. That's got a little bit the green yellow in there. That means it's starting to clip data. Data in the shadows is starting to disappear. Th...

e point it's at here, it's pretty speculate. It's actually in the deep shadows of the blades of grass as I keep dragging that to the right where pure black appears. Now I'm at oversaturation completely. I'm losing all of the detail in the shadows. Traditionally, when we were first teaching proper workflow, we teach people get to the point where black is our white is just clipped and stop Okay? And you can see I've lost a lot in the photograph. The black It's really kind of compressed the tones, but what I'm dealing with is the basement. So I'm just done with the basement side of the photograph. The white point is going to help me deal with setting the ceiling point of the photograph. So once I've got that same thing, I can hold down the altar here, the option key, drag that slider with right, and at the point, white first starts to appear. I've now hit the point of maximum white. Now, I said, if you're a little o c d, you can hold down that Ault option key and slide this lighter. If you're lazy, O c d. You hold down the shift key and double click on the word whites and it just pops to the first point the white appears same thing happens for blacks. It'll just snap to the point when that first appears. Now that's where it first mathematically appears. That still doesn't mean it's right. It still doesn't have the feeling you want, but in general we want to get that ranges closest possible. Now I will crush a black into oblivion without thinking twice about it. Because deep shadow, to me it's a it's I'll admit it. It's my romanticism from my film days. You look at Kodachrome, you look at that National Geographic photographs from the sixties seventies. It was that gorgeous black. In those photographs, I was cause Kodachrome created a gorgeous black and I just I love that, and I'm a black and white film photographer. And if I don't want something to be fully shadow detail, I want Deep Black. I'm just gonna smash it now highlights. I am very delicate with my highlights, So in my editing style, it's gonna be I'll crush shadow. But I'll do everything possible to protect a highlight. Once I learned that in my aesthetic, I can edit to that aesthetic. It's one of the things when we talk about vision and voice and style on how that comes up. I could have told you that was my style 10 years ago, but editing over time, I started to realize, like all, let a black go on. I'll see the highlight show up. And when people look at my work now and they say, Oh, I've got a Daniel photograph and they show me I can guarantee It's usually got a smashed up black in it because they recognize that's part of my aesthetic White and black point being said, I've kind of set the range. So in the history, Graham, I've gone all the way to the ends here. Now you can turn on your clipping warnings if you want, and you can see the blue shown up down there where I've actually clipped in blue clipping is shadow red clipping highlights. Like I said in my photographs, if you turn on clipping warning, that's not unusual to see a little more blue than a lot of people would prefer the clipping warnings just gonna help. You kind of see where those are. I do not recommend you leave them on because one you can't see behind them. So if you're trying to make edits for certain things. It's gonna become a distraction. So the J Key's gonna talk all that on and off. That's a keyboard shortcut for that. Once you kind of have white point black points set moved to exposure. That's your mid tone range. So if you I want to know what the's sliders do if you look up in the history Ram up here when I click into the middle right here has I s So it's going to say exposure their shadows. There's blacks. I can actually control the slider from inside the hissed a gram by clicking exposure and drag. You'll see the exposure slider moves. So if you want to know where these we're in the history, Graham, the effects gonna being kind of how strong it's gonna be You can see here that the white slider is only really affecting that very, very far side of history. In this case, there's not much data over there for it to effect. So I've got a little wiggle room there in that highlight if I want. But exposure is I'm looking at the mid tone areas in the overall kind of brightness and luminosity of the photograph. If I lose the sky or I lose the foreground and I'm losing parts of the photograph, I don't worry about that. At this point, I'm looking for the overall effect of the photograph. In this case, I've got to make a decision, though I've got basically that horizon line in the city on the frame So compositionally I said the foreground in the sky are about equally is important. The sky was a smidge more important took up a little more of the compositional outline. But in those two waiting of those two things, they become very similar. So in that I've got now, probably I would wait towards the value of the sky and getting my mid tone there and just seeing kind of at what level do I think? The sky is close to where I want it, knowing I'm going to either put a grading on the foreground. I'm gonna put a grating on this guy because I can't get everything in the one. But I'm gonna get it as close as I can across the whole image. In this case, probably somewhere around there. Now you can see, though, if I look back at my map and a plus one on that cloud and that clouds a lot brighter. And I have lost some of the blue contrast back in there so I might make a decision Looking back at my map about well, I wanted that sky actually to be maybe closer to their So maybe I'll take that They're now I've got kind of a plus one on my cloud Maybe it plus 1.5 on the cloud But I'm starting to kind of pick up a little of that ended I had created on my map early on just in the global process. Once I've made that exposure slider I then guy then drop down into the highlight and into the shadow element and I put the highlight placement where I want it. So this case, I'm gonna bring my highlights down to get some of that texture back in the cloud in the shadow of got an opportunity to really control how that foreground gets experienced so I can open those shadows up breaking darknet down. In this case, I probably open him up a little bit and I can come back now and make an adjustment to the black and there if I need to order the white point. So nothing at this point is set like once I move a white point slider when I move that exposure slider, those air, those edges air being pushed on as the tones separate. So I might have to go back in that at that white point slider. But I'm doing as much of that work at this stage, trying to get that luminosity set as best I can. I may need to come back later. If I split tone or I do something later on down the path, I might have to come back to hear what my goal is to get. This is locked in a possible now that I have the base exposure set where I want now I go after color correction. Color correction in the global sense is the white balance adjustment tool. So if I click on the want pick or anything I click on out here, that should be neutral. It will pick up and set the white balance based on the color, as it attempts to identify. That is neutral. So if I click the bottom of the cloud, which has an element of grain neutrality to it. You see, it just warmed the image up just a tiny bit because where we were, there's what it did. But if I take that same one and I click on the greens, I get purple. I click on the yellow. I get this weird blue cyan color. I click on the lighter green out here. I get a lighter purple. So what it's doing is it's saying green is the dominant color of the white balance. To get rid of green, we add magenta. So this is one of the other things that when it comes to color correction, you are never removing a color. So we talk about it. Is removing a color like you need to take out yellow your images to yellow take out yellow. What you're doing is you're adding the opposite color, so to remove yellow, we add blue. And that's why the tent temperature sliders worked the way they do. The temperature slider is got Kelvin values in it, but 2900 kelvin is yellow. It's tungsten light. A candle is 1900 kelvin bright orange yellow, but if you look on the temperature slider. If I come down to 1900 it's blue. That's because if it was can delighted, be yellow. And to fix that, we have to add in that much blue. So the reason I bring that up is and we're thinking about color and you're looking at color pieces and you're adjusting the tent temperature slider you're adding in the opposite color, so you're never removing the color out of the photograph. You're just adding color on top of it. And that explains why sometimes you don't necessarily get the effect you think you're going to get or you remove some blue and then also in, you're like, Whoa, whoa, whoa! Worded. That kind of red come from well, you you yellow came out yellow, got to mix with the calibration of magenta, and it created red. So that's why you'll sometimes see secondary color appearing is because you can't remove the color. You can only overrated. So in this case, I'm gonna go ahead. I'll just just click on there. That's pretty close to the white balance I would want I would coming in her finesse it. I watch people really struggle with the sliders as well. So one of things you could do is come in and actually click on the actual box, and then the arrow keys will drive it by 50. Or, if you hold down the shift key, it'll move it by values of 200 or 100. So you're finessing you could type the actual number in there. I could takes type 64 36 if I wanted, but once it gets close, you're better off clicking into the box to adjust it. Then try to move the slider. Justice haywire Question. This may go against your rule here. I'm not sure, but can we just Iet, to be honest, I probably could count on one hand the number of times I've used the one I I just color. I do color by I. It looks to blue. I remove it because I actually don't know it's neutral in this photograph. I didn't go out and put a great card out there, so I'm like Click, click, click, click now so I might take the wand and click and 50 places and pick the one I like best. But I usually just corrected by I literally can count outside the studio in a natural set, and I can count the number of times I've clicked on that one, too, once I have that color set. Then I moved down to vibrance and saturation, so vibrance and saturation are similar but different. What saturation does it moves all colors equally. So if you're saturation, is 10 and then the saturation. The color was at 90 and I had 10. It just moves. Keeps. Move them all up equally, vibrance looks at the respective levels of saturation and less saturated colors. Get more saturation of the vibrant slider and more saturated colors. Don't move this far, and it attempts to protect skin tones. So if you're a portrait photographer and you want to do a punch into a photograph, you're better off of the vibrant slider than you are the saturation slider, because it's gonna try to protect the reds and oranges and yellows that sit in the skin. Tones the other piece about making the adjustment as I use these in opposition of each other, so similar to how I like to push things apart and then compress them back together. So I have a little bit more control. So in this case, I will punch the vibrant slider up a little more than I want. OK, so wherever I decided, it's too. It is. So what I've done is I've kind of compressed a little bit of that, uh, saturation range. I then used the saturation slider to back it back down to the level I want. So what I've done has gotten two sliders to get control of that color. Now, in this case, I wanted to push those saturation closer together. So that's why I use the vibrant slider first. If I wanted to try to stretch those apart, I would use the saturation slider first in the vibrant slider seconds. That's my decision Now. The actual editing of the file math is the same. No matter which slider moves first, I find it visually easier to see if I'm compressing to use vibrance first. And if I'm extending to use saturation first. Once I have those pieces set, my my core luminosity color pieces are set. I'm now ready to go tackle the other elements that would be considered global edits within the photograph. Those would include ah, noise reduction sharpening if I had any uh, lens correction I would apply if I was going to split tone. If I was gonna convert to black and white any of those pieces. Now I convert convert to black and white immediately. Or I could do these edits and then convert to black and white. But then I would likely have to tweak these again. So in the black and white world, we would just make that easy, um, kick over and conversion.