Lessons

Lesson Info

Architecture Photo

Welcome to a new full editing demonstration in this one. We're using this architecture shot kind of like a street photo of this nice street going from this photo on the left to this photo on the right, we're going to walk through all the steps which includes some cool tools right within lightroom, like the upright tools, some split toning and a lot of brushes to make this look like this. Alright, so as always you can follow along by opening up the architecture shot and that can be downloaded in the earlier lessons in this section. So the first thing that I always do is crop if you've been watching these lessons for a while now you know that I always crop actually though trick question because in this photo I'm going to do something else. I want to straighten this photo, something that I tend to do with architecture shots like this is I want the lines in the buildings to be straight and I want to do that before actually cropping in or out. So what I go down to is the transform propertie...

s, there are a few different settings you can test out auto which will try to straighten lines in your images or you can do it yourself and that's what I'm going to do. So if I click this little button right now with the little cross sections, basically what I need to do is tell lightroom which lines should be straight because this is a photo looking upward at the buildings, the way the angle looks. Some of these buildings lines actually appear like they're bowing out So to bow them back in, I'm just going to click a couple of lines so I want to pick a couple that are easy to see. So this one right here, it's easy for me to see now. Nothing happens until I set another line so I'm gonna set one over here. This line right here when I do that, things start to straighten out depending on how crooked your lines are, this might actually make your image look a little distorted. So you do have to be careful about that. I'm going to go ahead and choose this line right here again and you can do up to four lines and it will use the data from all four lines to try to make all the lines straight. Basically I want all these buildings to be vertical in the shot. I'm not caring about these lines down the street or anything like that, but I want the buildings to be vertical so that looks good so I'm gonna click done Cool. So now I'm going to go up in crop before I do that though, let me just show you before and after. So if I just turn on and off the transform, just a subtle change right there, it's not warping the photo too much, which means that it looks natural still, which is good. Next I'm going to crop it and the reason why I crop everything first is because I want to get rid of anything in my photo that I'm not going to have to worry about editing. Now. This photo is very distracting. There's lots of things going on. There's wires in the sky, there's lines going down the street, there's people, there's buildings, there's cars and I wanted to be a little cleaner. And so the way that I found I could do that is by cropping in quite a lot. Something like this where I get rid of this wire that's at the top. We are cropping around this sort of street pole right here, something like that. I still want to get these people down here in the corner perhaps to do that. I might switch my aspect too 16 x nine, something like that. Let's crop out just a little bit and something like that might be pretty darn good. Sometimes it's a little hard for me to really see what this is going to look like until I press the donkey button down here or press return on my keyboard and I actually like that a lot. Everything seems to be framed a little bit better. The street is a little bit more centered. So we do have those leading lines heading down to the horizon. Next I'm going to play with my exposure. So this photo overall is pretty darn dark. So I'm going to bring up the overall exposure quite a bit. I'm also going to bring up the shadows. I'm going to bring our test bringing down the highlights because we're losing a little bit of information in that sky, see how if I bring this down, we get that info back in the sky and then with the whites I'm going to see as well, I'm going to bring those down back down to now. I brought up my shadows a lot, I brought up my overall exposure with my blacks. I'm actually going to bring those back down just a little bit. So I bring back some of that contrast. If I bring everything up, it gets a little bit flat from my taste. So I'm going to bring that down for this photo. We've got lots of cool colors going on. So first I am going to bring up the vibrance overall and then I'm going to go down and I'm going to specify which colors I want to bring up. Now I could go through the sliders and do that, but I'm going to click this little icon next to saturation, this is under the H. S. L. Panel. If you don't see all of these panels, you might see something like Hugh or just saturation or luminant. Just click the all button. Now, click this little button next to saturation and then I'm going to bring up the saturation of some specific colors and I'm going to bring up this right here, which was sort of a greenish yellow. I'm gonna go over here, bring up this pinkish orange and as I do that, I'm paying attention to the rest of the photo as well because sometimes, especially with a lot of yellows, it brings up a lot of the warm tones and people's skin and things like that. That might not look so good in this photo. We're so far away from any single person that we don't really get that and it's not really looking bad, so I'm happy with that. I may also go in here and just bring up some of the saturation of these specific colors, like blue for example, which sen starts to bring out some of that blue in the hills beyond here and then in these signs over here. So right now I'm looking pretty good if I want to see the before and after, I can just press the backslash button again. This is before and after of the original photo. If I click reset, that's the original photo, that before after button that is of the edit that I created because this is a virtual copy. Now I can see that there's a couple of things that I want to do to make some more improvements. One thing is this photo isn't that sharp where we do have a lot of noise, but it's also not that sharp so I can go down here and sharpen it just a little bit more so that when I'm zoomed out, it looks a little bit sharper if you don't care about it being sharp, but you're worried about this noise and grain because it looks like it was shot with a higher I. S. O. We can bring up the noise reduction, which might look a little bit better for you to, it really depends on if you're going for sharpness or losing that grain, you have to kind of pick one or the other. For now, I am going to go with the noise reduction, which I like a little bit more. I'm okay with losing a little bit of the sharpness to get this sort of dreamy feeling. Now, one thing that I did with the colors and the other edit was used, split toning, add some warmth to the highlights and actually some magenta to these shadows. So I brought the hue of the highlights up to this yellow here and notice nothing happens, nothing happens until I bring up the saturation, and when I bring up the saturation I can really see what's going on, and sometimes what I like to do is crank the saturation up really high, so then I could really pinpoint what Hugh I want and then bring back the saturation. So I was at more of a green, I'm going to bring this back more towards a yellow orange and then bring back down my saturation. I want to play with my shadows to before I finalize my saturation because this might affect it as well, so my saturation for my shadows, I'll bring up all the way and at the same time I'll move my hue over to something like this sort of purplish pinkish. Now the saturation, I don't, I really don't want that high, but something a little bit like that looks good, but I do want to push my balance more towards the highlights then towards the shadow for this photo. Now let's turn this on and off so we can see what happens, see how the color has completely changed. This is definitely a stylistic thing, so you might not like it, but I'm trying to go for this dreamy feeling. It's that feeling you get when you travel and it's like the perfect day and it's the perfect sunset. I'm sure that a lot of you have had that sort of feeling when you're traveling, especially somewhere where you've never been, Everything looks like the streets were basically paved with cold. It's really magical. So I like that for now, I'm gonna leave it like that. The next thing I'm going to do is use some brushes too, make the sky look even better and then maybe even brighten up the pathways on the side because it's still a little bit dark. So I'll start with that by clicking the brush, I'm going to set my density 200% auto mask is off and let's just turn on our selected mask overlay with this checkbox down here or o on your keyboard and let's just paint over here like so just painting down the street into the distance and then back up the street on this side. And the reason I'm doing this is because I feel like it's just a little bit dark so I'm gonna press to turn off that mask overlay and then just boost the exposure. Now notice if I boost the exposure too much, it really quickly starts to look a little bit unnatural. So maybe you just want to pick up some of the shadows, maybe the exposure just a little bit, something like that. Now if we turn this on and off, it's a subtle difference but it just brings a little bit of extra pop of life too, the sidewalk and the people walking down the street. Okay now let's create a new brush by clicking the new button up there. This time I am turning auto mask on and I'm going to turn back on my mask overlay. I want to select all of the clouds, but I don't want to select these street poles and wires in the foreground. So I'm going to start by clicking right here and then just start painting over now it looks like the auto mask isn't working too much. So that's okay, we're going to get rid of that with the eraser. Now this is selecting most of the cloud, which I like. So let's take the eraser tool. I don't really mind if it's not selecting the highlights, the sky beyond the clouds because I really do just want to affect the clouds. Let me go there. That looks good. So I'm using the eraser to race off this pole using a higher or a larger feathering option down here will also help blend it together. So that's looking pretty good. Now I'm going to turn off my selected mask overlay so I can actually see what I'm doing and I'm going to either play with temperature or color to add even more warmth and more color to this sky. Now I'm not sure if I want more warmth with just the temperature slider. I might also want a little bit of magenta in there as well because the magenta kind of balances with these buildings over here in that pink that we added with the split toning so I don't want to go too crazy with it. I also want to play with D. Hey, so I'm going to bring up the D haze feature just a little bit so we could get a little bit more detail in the sky. Now sometimes what I like to do is crank it up a lot but look at how kind of distorted this is starting to look, especially up here starting to look pretty wonky. So I gotta be careful about that so I don't want to do D haze too much or maybe what I want because I do like the clouds down here. Maybe I'll use a different brush for the clouds up at the top. So I'm gonna take my eraser actually turn off auto mask. So it's actually just selecting everything and I'm just gonna paint over or a race up there. I'll do another brush up there to affect those clouds. So this is pretty extreme. I'm gonna drop it down just a little bit or what I can do is drop the saturation because using the D. Haze when it gets a little bit more contrasting and everything it adds some some saturation as well. But this is starting to look a little bit more vivid, a little bit more surreal which is something I'm going for with this photo next. I'm gonna get these clouds up here so I'm gonna click new and I'm just going to paint over this time, I'm not going to auto mask, I'm going to use a range mask to try to select it better. So let's paint up here, let's press the o button to see what I'm selecting. Perfect. Now let's turn on range mask, we're gonna select color. So I'm gonna take my eyedropper and just click right in the color does its job and now I can slide up or down depending on if I want more selected or it to be more specific with that color which I wanted to be pretty specific. So I'm going to drag it down quite a bit. Something like that's pretty good. Hopefully suppress ode to turn that off. Now, what do I do want to do with these clouds? I want them to match the background clouds a little bit increasing the warmth can help but let's try adding some color with this color option. Now let's start with this yellow right here, that looks okay. It's a little bit sort of muddied, add a little orange to see what that looks like. That's starting to look a little bit better. It's just sort of a better gradient going from the yellow to the red actually and that's actually looking pretty pretty darn cool. So we're at a pretty orange orange. If you don't like that much color, you can drop this down or you can just leave it at that orange and then play a little bit with the adjustments up here. Maybe I want a little bit more pink now I'm getting a little extreme so I'm gonna leave that like that saturation drop down, even playing with exposure sometimes dropping, it's not what I want increasing it. Just a little bit, might be what I'm looking for. I just want like more subtle fade from the clouds in the back to the foreground clouds and that is looking pretty darn good. Alright, so let's click done, let's see the before and after. So if we go reset, this is before and do that. Let's see the edit we did before. So this is what I was trying to make it look like This is what I ended up working with the clouds and the sky is way way more dramatic. Now I noticed that if I look at this right now while I'm editing it looks like those clouds are crazy. They look a little bit too edited. My hope though, is that if someone sees this for the first time, they might think oh wow, that's a really beautiful sky. Now I understand that some people might not think that. So I might go back to my basic settings, drop the vibrance a little bit or even just drop this overall saturation to tone all of the colors globally that we've added down a little bit. I also think I want to add a little bit of contrast so I'm going to create a little as curve with the tone curve. Maybe bring up just a little bit, bring down the blacks, bring up the shadows. Actually, now that creates a little bit of contrast. If you want, if you want a preset sort of contrast, you can just choose medium contrast right here. That might be a better place to start and when I do that, I might boost my overall exposure just a little bit. So this is an architecture style shot of not just one building but an entire street. The architecture is really what drives this photo, it drives the colors of this photo. I tried to make sure that I match the sky with the buildings. One more thing that I did with my previous edit was I added a little bit. It's pretty subtle here but I added a little bit of this gold from the sky into the ground down here. So what I'm going to do with my new edit is go back to my brushes. I'm going to select the brush that was in the sky and I'm going to paint that. Use that to paint onto the streets. So I'm gonna select this brush right here. I'm also going to drop my density just a little bit and now I'm going to paint over like here and that makes this street a little bit warmer. A little bit more pinkish magenta ish. Like the sky right here using these settings that we added to the sky. That's looking pretty good. Cool. So this is more of an artistic edit. I hope you liked it. If you have any questions, please let me know otherwise. I would love to see your versions of this photo. You could go completely different. You could go dark and dreary, you could go black and white. You could go CPU could go more natural and more realistic. I would love to see your work. You get posted to the course or you can post it to instagram facebook tag me and I'll check it out. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in another lesson