Lessons

Lesson Info

Fine Tuning Your Image

Welcome to Lightroom Classic: The Complete Guide. Let's take a look back at what we've covered thus far. Well on the first week, we laid a firm foundation on how to think about Lightroom, talking about how Lightroom catalogs work, how you can use collections and folders to organize your images. I talked a little bit about adjusting, but mainly how do you get your images into Lightroom, organize them and then get them out if you need to? On the second week, we started with how to organize your images to work on projects. That's where we learned about things like collections, flags and labels. Then on day two of the second week, we started to get our images to be searchable by tagging them with keywords. On the third day, we started working on isolated areas of the image so that we can apply an adjustment only to someone's face or only that little part of the lower right that's too bright so we could really fine-tune our images. Then we moved on to day four to working with the little tec...

hnical details of our image that can really polish them, and that is things like reducing noise, sharpening, and correcting for distortion. Well, we're not even halfway done, we've got 11 days left, that's 11 out of 20. Today, we're gonna get into how to really fine-tune your images. We'll talk about fine-tuning both the color and the tonality or brightness of your image. We'll talk about working with vignetting and reducing haze. Before we actually get into fine-tuning images, let's talk about one area of Lightroom that can just tell us a bit about our photographs, and that is the histogram. When you're in the develop module in Lightroom or when you're in the library module in Lightroom, on the right side of your screen, on the upper right, you can get this area known as a histogram. Let's take a look at it and how to think about it in general. I'm gonna first click on kind of an average image and we'll take a look at the histogram. It can take a moment for it to load to paint on the picture, but eventually we should see the histogram. And I'll go to the develop module here which will kind of force it to load this picture. And this area right up here in our develop module is simply trying to describe how bright our picture is in all the various areas of the image. If you look at it, it represents black on the far left edge right here. And so all this is is a bar chart that says if there's any black in the image, there'll be a line right above this area. Then it thinks about going brighter and brighter and brighter from black, right in the middle would be 50% gray. If there's any of that in your picture, you're gonna find the little bar on the bar chart. And as you continue to work your way to the right to get all the way to the right, that's where solid white would be. It would be really nice if they were to put a gradient that goes from black to white below the histogram, it would be much easier to read what it means, but they won't so we'll just imagine one. So what can I tell from this particular image? Well, I can tell you on this image, there is no solid white in the picture. I don't even need to look at the image. Just by looking here, I can see that the histogram does not extend all the way to the right side. And if it did go all the way here, we would have solid white. But in this case, the brightest shade in our picture is about this bright, and that might be at about 15% or so darkness. We do have black in the image because the histogram does extend all the way to the end and touches. But now let's go through a few images and take a look at the histogram and see what it can show us about the image. I'm gonna start with a really dark picture. I'll go to the develop module with it so we can see our histogram, and you'll notice that in the histogram, there's always one line that goes all the way to the top on every single image you ever open, and that just means that that is whatever shade is the most prevalent in your image, the shade that takes up the most space. And in this case if you look at this histogram, you can see that that part that goes all the way to the top is right above the far left of the histogram, that's where black is. So that means black takes up a tremendous amount of space, so does 99% gray, 98, 97, 96, and then brighter than that it starts to trail off where it takes up less and less space, and once you get to maybe around 90% gray, then it starts taking up very little space because the height of the histogram is saying compared to the shade that takes up the most space, how much does everything else take up? So compared to black, all these other shades take up very, very little space. This also tells me that the brightest shade in the entire picture, it's darker than 25% gray 'cause I can see a vertical line right there that I believe is for 25%. In fact, it's probably about 30, 35% gray is the absolute brightest shade we have. So if you look at the picture, it makes sense. If you look, we have a huge area of solid black or really close to solid black, and everything else compared to the amount of space black takes up is almost inconsequential, and that's why in the histogram, it's pretty darn short in those areas. Let's switch to another image that is not quite as dark as that. We still have a tremendous amount of dark information in this picture If you look at it, most of the road's surface and these mountains on the side are extremely dark, so over here in my histogram, of course, we have really tall areas near black. Now if you look at black itself, it's on the far end, it's not very tall there, which means the actual solid black areas take up only a very small amount of space. But then as we get a little bit brighter than black, we start taking up more and more space, it gets higher and higher, and once we get to maybe 95% gray we start taking up a tremendous amount of space. And you can see that here I can still see detail in the majority of the road, it's hard to tell if you can see detail in these mountains, but I think I can see a little bit of variation. Then compared to that, everything else takes up a lot less space, especially the bright areas, and therefore the bright areas over here are much shorter. So, go to another image. Here again, we have huge areas of really dark stuff, but now if we look at the bright areas, the sky that's up here, and the reflection of light on the water that's down here, when you add those two areas together, it's starting to take out a lot more space. So when we look at the histogram, we see kind of a more prominent area near the right. And that simply means some area that's near white takes up a good amount of space, but nowhere near as much space as what's really dark in the picture. So that's why this is much taller than that. Another image with a lot of darkness in the image, and therefore the area right above black is quite tall, and most of the other things in the image are below 50% gray. Anything brighter than 50% gray barely takes up any space at all. This image varies from black into the medium tones and it takes up about the same amount of space here in those dark tones as it does in the medium ones, but then we pretty much don't have almost anything that's brighter than about 50% gray, and we can see that on the histogram. Things are relatively consistent in how much space they take up. The absolute darkest parts take up a little bit more than everything else, and the light stuff barely takes up any space at all. Now with this, there is no right histogram, there's no perfect histogram. The histogram could just tell us some basic information about our file. The most common thing that I glean from a histogram is is there white or black in the picture? So if I look at this particular histogram, there's no white in it 'cause there's no part of the histogram that extends over this far. The brightest shade in the entire picture is right here. That's about, what, 25, maybe 35% gray, and it looks like it does contain black, but not very much, 'cause it's not very tall. So that's one thing I glean from it is do we have white or black? The other thing is you will find that in a histogram, you see colors. And those colors will tell you how colorful an area is. If the colors seem to line up with each other, do you see how these are somewhat close to matching? Wherever the the colors line up, you see gray, and wherever they deviate, you see color. Well, looking at this histogram would usually tell me that the dark areas in my picture are more colorful than the bright areas. And that's not always easy to interpret, but do you see this wall that's here? It's relatively dark and it's got some color in it, and that's showing these colors deviating from the gray. As you get into the bright areas of the photograph like this sidewalk that's here, that's pretty close to being gray, there's just a little hint of color that's there. And so if you look in the bright portions of the histogram, you'll find that it's mainly the colors lined up where you just see a gray mask. The little part of the color that kind of sticks up above that is very slight, and that means that it's not all that colorful in the brighter portions of the image. And it's not that I look at the color information all that much, but it can give me a just a little sense for how colorful is a particular area? Most the time, I'm looking at the ends to see if I have white or black. That tells me if I have the full brightness range in my picture. But you'll see with all these images, there is no exactly correct or good histogram. It can just tell you about various aspects of your picture. For instance, this one contains no white at all, it contains no black at all either. And here now, we get into images that have a lot more really bright areas within the image, and so now that really tall part you see is more towards the right because white is on the far right as we get closer to white, in this case, it takes up a lot less space, or a lot more space I should say, and the darker tones in the image take up a lot less. When we get into the medium tones that are here, they're rather colorful. You see how that color is being pushed away from the gray? That's probably our blue sky that's in here, although our blue sky could also be this little spike here depending on how bright it is. So here I'm just showing you a variety of images and their histograms. Now let's take a brief look at how the various controls in the Lightroom adjustments affect the histogram. So if you want to change its shape, you might have an idea of how to do so. So I'm gonna choose an image here that, let's see, I'll choose this one, it doesn't have any white in it, I'll go to the develop module, and let's just take a very brief look at what the basic sliders do to the histogram. I'm not gonna cover every single one because there are certain ones that make larger changes than others. First, exposure is gonna move the entire histogram the same direction that you move the slider. So if I move exposure up, you see the entire histogram moving towards the right. If I move the slider towards the left, the entire histogram's gonna move that direction as well. So if you wanted by chance to have your histogram centered, you don't need to do, that doesn't mean it's a better image, you could adjust exposure. Contrast is going to widen the histogram or skinny it up, as if it grabbed two portions, grabbed the right area and a left area, not necessarily where these spikes are, but in general, grabbed an area about here and an area about here and it's either gonna spread them further apart or push them closer together. So as I increase it, it spreads them further apart, and as I decrease it, it puts it closer together. Then we have whites and blacks, they're gonna grab the ends of the histogram, and let me get this back to its default. They're gonna grab the ends of the histogram and move them. If I move the white slider, the right edge of the histogram is gonna move in the same direction as the slider. So if the image did not have any white in the picture, and I wanted it to have it, I grab the white slider and move it up like this. If I continue to move it, watch the far right of the histogram, you might start seeing a spike develop where it gets tall and that means there's a large area of solid white in the picture. If I move it the opposite direction, you'll see it moving further and further away from white, so that's gonna darken up our highlights. If I grab the blacks, that's gonna affect the far left of the histogram If I move it towards the left, that part moves left. If we move it too far, we're gonna keep getting larger and larger areas of solid black, and eventually that's gonna be a really tall area of our histogram to indicate we have a large area of solid black. But move it the opposite direction, you'll see it moving away from black. And there's only so far I can get it to go away from black, but I could do so. Those are the main sliders I think of when working on the histogram. You could also think of shadows and whites. This will work on instead of just pulling the end of the histogram this way, it will try to isolate a section of the histogram attempting to leave the rest of the histogram largely unchanged, and it'll do it on the right side. See how it's grabbing kind of that hump that's on the right side and moving it? And this one will try to isolate the darker areas of the image, kind of moving this portion of the histogram over, we'll try and not to change the rest. Or I can move it the other way, but it's gonna be limited in the amount you could move. So that gives you some idea of how your adjustment might affect the histogram, but I mainly use it to glance at and see do I have solid white or solid black, and how much space do those take up, how tall is the solid black and white areas? And do I really need that in my picture or not? So when I'm in an image like this one, I want a large area of solid black because I don't want you to be able to see what's in the shadows. And that's how I adjusted this image. And if I were to reset this image, I'll hit the reset button, you can see that usually, you can see a whole bunch of detail and it was also cropped differently, but by manipulating the image to kind of interpret what do I want this to look like? I want this look solid black, and I want this to look a little darker than it currently is the histogram can tell me if I kind of successfully did that. In this case, I do have solid black in that area, and the bright areas are nowhere near white, so we can make rather radical changes to the look of the image. So now let's start adjusting the few images using other features. We want to get into an area called HSL. HSL stands for hue, saturation and lightness, or luminosity is another word for lightness. And so if I take an image like this one, I hit D to go to the develop module, and I end up scrolling down under this area here called HSL, I can expand it, and this image has had the colors tweaked on it. What we find in here is there are a bunch of colors listed, and there's a slider for each one, and then we have three different things we can change. We can change hue, saturation or luminance. So let's think about what those three terms mean and let's see what we can do with these sliders. First, the term called hue. Hue means basic color. So if I want to change the basic color of all the red hats to make them look pink or maybe orange, then I want to choose the red slider and as I move this, if you watch anything that's red in the image, you see I'm just making it orange, or if I go the other direction, I'm gonna make it pink. And so I can fine-tune the color of the reds. If I see the blue hats that are in there, then I can come down here to the blue slider and I can push them either towards purple or towards cyan to fine-tune exactly what color those objects are. That could be a blue sky, and you want it to be a slightly different shade. If I want to work on the greens, I got to be careful because in here, there's green and there's greenish yellow, and the two will probably be treated the same, so I can move the greens as well. But these are all the colors I can work with. Now there is a special way of adjusting them because to get into a particular color of a hat like this one, I might need to move the yellow slider the majority of the way, but also move the green slider just a little bit in order to get it to target that. So in order to get this to target things more precisely than just moving one slider, we have a little thing to the left that I call a donut, 'cause it looks like one, and if you click on that, when you move on top of your image, it will highlight whatever slider it thinks would control this area. So if you look right now, the number next to the word red is highlighted. If I go to this hat, the number next to the word blue is highlighted 'cause that's the primary slider it thinks would affect that area. If I come down here to this hat, you see the slider called yellow highlighted, but if I actually click on my picture, I can now drag up or down to adjust it, and you'll notice it doesn't just move one slider. For that particular hat, it thinks that two sliders are really what would be necessary to fully be able to manipulate its color. So if I really want to shift the colors around in this image, it'd be great to click on that little donut icon, then I can just click on my picture, drag up and down, and I can fine-tune the colors in this whole image relatively quickly. In this case, remember I'm working on the hue, and hue means basic color. If you want to see what this looks like before and after, I'm gonna double-click on the word hue, and that's gonna reset these all to their default settings. And so there's what we started with, then I'll choose undo, and you'll see what it looks like afterwards. Next, let's move on to the choice called saturation. Saturation controls how colorful various areas are. And I also have the little donut icon available, it works the same way. And so now I can come in here and let's say that all the red hats are too colorful, so I click on a red hat and I drag downward to make it less colorful, or I can drag it up to make it more colorful. So I can fine-tune exactly how colorful that hat is. I'm gonna go to the blues and let's also make it either less or more colorful. I'm gonna try to make these a little more subdued. And the greens I can fine-tune, and you see it's moving the proper sliders to control all those areas. Now when I get to the pinks though, it's gonna be hard to isolate pink from red because the two colors are just so similar. So when I try it here to adjust the pink hats, the red hats change too, and there's only so much we can do to isolate. So I can either do that manually moving these sliders with my mouse, or most of the time, I would end up using that little donut icon. I'm gonna reset these by double-clicking on the word saturation and that should reset all the sliders that are found underneath it. That's more of what the original image looked like. The third thing we can change is called luminance, and again, I'll grab the donut, and now we can control how bright those areas are. So if I go to my red hats, I could make it much darker of a red. Maybe I go to the green hats and make them darker as well. Maybe the blue hats should go lighter. But I can fine-tune that rather nicely. And it's once I get used to the combination of all three of those choices, hue for basic color, saturation for how colorful it is, and luminance for how bright or dark it is, once I get my mind around that ability to change those things for individual colors, then I can really fine-tune my images. So let's look at a few images where I might want to use this. In this particular case, we have a picture taken in Iceland and the one thing I don't like about this picture is if you look at the mountains in the distance, especially the darkest portion in the center of the image, I see blue in there. It's either blue or purple I see in there, and I don't want to see that. So I got to think about these three choices and which one would I want to use? If I use hue, I could change that from blue in the dark portion of the mountain, I can make it, if you look where blues is, I can make it more cyan-ish or more purplish, but that's not what I'm looking for. If I go to luminance, I can make the blues brighter or darker. I'm not looking for that either. It's saturation that I'm looking for, that's how colorful it is. So I click on the little donut, I go on top of my image, I put it right on top of that dark portion of the mountain, and then if I drag up, I can make it more colorful and maybe it'll be more easy to see the color that was there, or if I drag it down, I'm gonna make it less colorful. It's not that I want to completely get rid of all color, I just don't want my eye to be drawn to that area due to the color, so I'll bring that down. If you want to see before and after, there's a little light switch just to the left of where you see the letters HSL and if you turn it off, it will disable that section of Lightroom, so you can see what it would look like without the adjustment, turn it back on and you'll see what we've done. We'll see if we can find other images where it could be useful. I find that I often don't like the way greens are rendered in a picture. And so this particular image already has the greens tweaked. Let me show you what it looks like before and after fine-tuning the greens. I'll turn off the little light switch. This is what it looked like before. To me, now they look just like an odd shade of green, whereas afterwards, they're a deeper, darker green that I prefer. So how did I go about doing that? Well, let's take a look. The first thing I usually do when it comes to greens is I'll go to the hue and I'll push the greens away from yellow, making them more of a pure green, and that's what this change is doing. After making it more of a pure green, next I would go to luminance, and with luminance, I usually darken the greens a little bit. Once I do that though, they usually look artificial because they'll look too colorful, so I finally end up at saturation and I lower the saturation. This made the greens a lot less colorful than they used to be. If I come in here and double-click on each one of these headings, I can reset those, and you'll see what it looked like beforehand, and here's what it usually takes to actually get it to happen. I start with hue, I click the little donut, I click on something green within the picture, and I move towards the right. Now they look too colorful, but part of that is also it's a bit bright, so I go to luminance, I click on the greens and I bring it down. Still looks too colorful, so I have to end up with saturation and bring that down until I like my greens. And I find that's something very common I need to do with green grass, with trees and a lot of other things for me to like the way they look. In this case, you'll notice the end result looks slightly different when it comes to the sliders, and that's because I used the little donut. With the previous version of the image, I had manually moved only the green sliders. You'll find that green grass and greenery in trees is often really dark yellow, and so you'll have to move the yellow slider on occasion to truly isolate an area, sometimes you'll find that's necessary. Let's look at another example. In this case, the image has already been tweaked as far as I remember, but one of the main changes that I did to the image was I wanted the yellows to be the brightest area within the picture. And so I went to the luminance choice. I grabbed the little donut guy, I clicked in the yellow trees, the leaves that were in here, and I could darken them up or I can brighten them up, and I could really make them stand out from everything else that was in the image by just brightening them up a bit. I also fine-tuned the other colors in the image a bit. You can see here that the purples and the magenta are a little bit brighter. If I go to saturation, I made it so that things that are green and blue are not very colorful, because there's just not much green and blue in here, and if I didn't do that, I'd see some blue in the actual trunks of the trees, and so that reduced them. If I go to hue, even that I fine-tuned. One thing that could be nice is if you move sliders in opposite directions, you can get more separation between colors. So if you had a red object and an orange object, then move red and orange in opposite directions, and suddenly, you'll be able to see the difference between those two objects a lot more so than you did before. But the main thing there was that I thought it was a good example of when you might want to work with luminance and brighten up a particular color. Just a few other examples. Here's an image, and the most common adjustment I make with the HSL sliders is to saturation, and here you can see that I made the blues, in this case the aquas to get this wall to be nice and colorful, to be just more colorful than before, but then these areas here where the curb is and this trim were a little too colorful, so I ended up bringing the yellows and oranges down in saturation. If you want to see what it looked like before and after, I turn off a little light switch here, and you can see that those yellows, my eye was drawn to them too much, so I lowered the saturation on them, and that was the main thought behind the change. But it's not unusual for me to go to HSL on all sorts of different images. With this particular image, when I was done adjusting it, I found that I just saw a hint of blue in the little highlights that were in the leaves that are here. Most likely, there was a blue sky above, and this blue sky reflected in the highlights. So here, I brought the saturation down in the blues. And there was a very subtle change, but it did improve the image. I could have gone to hue as well, and in here, if I found that the yellows at the top of this didn't separate from this yellowish green background, I could have gone here and adjust the greens in one direction, and adjust the yellows either in the opposite direction, or get it more similar. But if you look there, now this yellow top is separated from the green background. If you want to see before and after, I'll double-click on the word hue. Before, the green background looked a little more yellow after, I get a little more separation. You can also attempt to do a partially black and white image. In this case, to get this one object to be in color, I went to saturation, and if you look at the settings that we used, pretty much every color that's in here except for blue and purple have their saturation turned to negative 100. Negative 100 means take out all the color. Now you might be wondering why did I leave purple turned up? Well, this area here that's in the shade right there is actually purple, and if I were to bring the purple down, you'll find that many other areas in the vehicle don't quite look right, so I wanted to leave the purple alone. Now, I wasn't able to get the entire background to be completely black and white using only these sliders because there were a few blue elements in that background. So after moving these sliders like I've shown you here, I grabbed the adjustment brush, and with the adjustment brush, I went onto my image and I took the saturation slider and I turned it down. Then I brushed over anything that was left over that had color in it. So if I turn off the little light switch for the adjustment brush, those areas will come back into color and I'll point them out a little bit. If you look in here in this area, I can see just a hint of blue right there on the wall in these areas, I see some blue in the headlights, and there's a few hints of blue down in here and just the tiniest bit there. So if I turn this adjustment back on and I hover over the pin that represents where I painted, you'll see all the areas that I ended up painting and fine-tuning to try to get the blue out. And so if I turn this little light switch off and back on again and you look at the windshield, you can see how I fine-tuned it further. But the vast majority of what I did happened under the HSL sliders 'cause that is, there's another heading here called color and there's also a choice here called all. And just in case you run into it, it's not very often I use that, but this is a fine image to use it on so I thought of it, and that is usually when you go to hue, saturation and luminance, you can only see one section at a time. If you ever go back to revisit a picture that's already been adjusted though, it can be useful to choose the choice on the right called all, because then you don't have to switch between hue, saturation and luminance to see what's been done to the image, it shows you all three sets put together. This particular image hasn't had anything done with those sliders, but now we have separate donuts for hue, saturation and luminance. So if I found certain areas like the greens in this image should be more saturated, I can go in here and make them more saturated. If other areas are too saturated, I could fine-tune them. I could also go up here to the hue, click on its donut and say I want to fine-tune the color of this object, and it fine-tunes everything of that particular color. So we're really doing the exact same kind of adjustment that we did through hue, through saturation and through luminance. we're just seeing all three sets of sliders put together. The final choice here is one called color, and it is again another way of changing the exact same settings of hue, saturation and lightness, but this time here, we have samples of all the colors that are usually appearing. So if I go to HSL, do you see these names, red, orange, yellow, green, aqua and so on? Well, when I go to color, we're seeing those exact same choices across the top. So if I click here, we have reds that we're working on, and now we see all three sliders, hue, saturation and luminance. It is just a different way of viewing the exact same adjustments. So if I want to think about the blues, I can see exactly what all three of the sliders are doing and I could fine-tune them to work on the blues. But in the end, that is no different. If you look here, luminance, negative 10, saturation, positive five. If I'm in here and I go to luminance, you see it's at negative 10. It's the exact same setting. It's just a different way of viewing these sliders. Do you want to see them all at once? Do you want to see them just for a particular color? But I mentioned that just so you know if you accidentally click on one of these areas or if you have a mental preference for working in a particular way. All right, now let's move on down to this section called effects. Effects has an area called post-crop vignetting. You'll find two different areas in Lightroom where you find the choice for adjusting vignetting. And it always refers to brightening or darkening the edges of your picture. The other place where you'll find it is in this area called lens corrections. There you saw a choice called vignetting. And if you went to the manual section, you would also find a choice called vignetting here. So what's the difference between this choice under lens corrections, and the one that's found under effects? Well, it really has to do with if you cropped your image or not. So if I go to the crop tool and I look at this particular image, if I do anything that talks about lens vignetting, then it thinks about the original cropping of my picture. So when I end up brightening or darkening the edges with lens vignetting it's gonna be doing it way out here on the true edges of my original uncropped picture. And that's not gonna be very effective in this particular case 'cause we're cropped into the central portion, we might not even notice that the edges are being darkened. That's under lens corrections. Now we're under the section called effects, and that's where I find the choice, and it's called post-crop vignetting. So post-crop vignetting means ignore the original framing of this picture and concentrate only on the area that I've cropped now and do the vignetting based on that cropping. And so that's the difference between the two. And so I use what's under lens corrections to literally correct for what a lens is doing to my picture, and if that's not what I'm trying to do, then I'm doing it here instead under effects, and it's called post-crop vignetting. Let's take a look at what's available. First you'll notice that most of these sliders are grayed out, you can't even move them unless you move the amount slider. And so I just need to move the amount slider, I'll move it to the left, it's gonna darken, to the right would brighten. So I'll move that. That controls how much you're gonna darken or how much you're gonna brighten your image on the edges. Then we have the sliders below that let you fine-tune the end result, and there's a trick about using those sliders. If you hold down the option key, that's Alt in Windows, when you move these sliders, it will act as if the amount slider is turned all the way to the right or left, and therefore, it's easier to preview what you have because I might have moved the amount thinking I only need to darken the edge a tiny amount, and then when I adjust these, it's really hard to see exactly what it's doing, but if I hold down option, it's more prominent, and I can see it. So here, midpoint means how much should it go in towards the middle of the picture? That's a little too far. I'm gonna bring it out so I can still see the majority of those two masks in the center. Then we have roundness which controls the shape. Again, I'll keep the option key held down, Alt in Windows, so I can see it in a more prominent fashion. I need to decide what's gonna help me there, my shape. You'll notice the shape a lot more when you're on a rectangular image. Then we have feather, which is how soft of a transition do we have? So if I bring feathering down, you'll see we have a hard edge, and when that's down at a hard edge, it'd be easier to see what roundness does, but with a square image, it's not quite as obvious, but you see it's round there. Bring it down and it's more just a rounded corner. Now we go to feather, hold on the option key when we click, and that controls how soft of a transition. I find the vast majority of the time, I have feathering turned pretty much all the way up because I don't want the effect to be too obvious. Now the moment I let go with those sliders, it stopped applying them with the amount at 100%, so now the effect is a little bit more subtle and I can fine-tune my amount to decide exactly how dark I think the edges should be. We have one slider left at the bottom, I don't know how effective it will be on this image but it might help, and that is highlights. If we bring this up, it's gonna look within that area on the edge of the picture that we were darkening, and if it finds any really bright areas, it's going to affect them less and less because it looks a little odd when something like a really bright blue sky gets darkened, and you'll see it on other images a little more prominently, but let's see how much you can see it here. Look at the lower right of the image, where you see some white, or something close to it. You see how that comes back? And that's trying to help so you don't notice the fact that you're vignetting the photograph by keeping it off of the bright areas. The final setting that we have in here is the style, and the style has three choices; Highlight priority, color priority, and paint overlay. Paint overlay is something that I almost never use. It would simply put black on the edge of your picture, and it wouldn't make any attempt at all to make the colors look appropriate. The only reason we have the choice called paint overlay is that used to be the only choice you had. And if you ever want to reproduce the same look that you created in a really old version of Lightroom, you might need to use the choice called paint overlay to get that look. If I choose it here, you might notice on the edge of the picture, it won't look as much like this blue is just getting darker, it will look like there's just been black put on top with the opacity lowered, and it just doesn't look as good. The other choice we have is called color priority, and it's the choice I use the most. And that's because it'll try to keep the color fidelity of your image on the edge where it looks natural. The final choice is called highlight priority, and I would primarily use that if the most important thing about the image is the way the highlights are rendered on the edge of the picture. If you want to get a better sense for that, I'll see if I can find a better picture for it. Here we go. Here, you notice that right here, there's light falling on this. In case you don't know what you're looking at, this is a train car, and I think I might have been in Burma when I captured this, and you see how this bright area, it's breaking through a roof that's above, like a skylight, and it's falling across this area. And right there, this part, if it gets darkened through vignetting will most likely look unnatural. We already have some vignetting applied here, I'm gonna double-click on the words post-crop vignetting to see if that will reset it. Here's the original. Let's see what this looks like if we don't use highlight priority. I'll darken the image using vignetting. I'll adjust my mid-tone while I hold the option key so I get the most prominent view, decide exactly how far I want it to go in. This is exactly the roundness setting that I think would be best for this image, there. Feathering to control how soft the edge is. And now at this point, I'll darken this a little further to exaggerate it, this part of the image starts looking a little bit unnatural because it looks darker than over here. So that's when I can come over here and increase the highlights, and you see how those bright areas now break through the vignetting so they can remain nice and bright and look more natural. Then if I change this from color priority to highlight priority, right on the image, I might see better rendering in the bright portions of the image. It's gonna say that it's more important to get those to render nicely than it is important to make the colors accurate in other places. So only when I have areas like up here where those highlights are coming through near the edge of the picture, might I switch between color priority, which didn't make the highlights look as good, and highlight priority where the colors might look not quite as good, and as it's just a matter of determining what's more important in your image. Here are a few other examples of vignetting. This image has had the corners vignetted, and if I turn off the vignetting, I'll just turn off the light switch next to the word effects and you'll see that before, you can see the edges of this object, and you can see another color off in the corners. I can't really crop any tighter because then I would start getting rid of this circle that I wanted to keep within the image, so instead, I used vignetting and I just used an extreme amount of it to try to cover up those edges. I'm surprised I actually didn't bring the amount even further down, and I would usually set this to color priority to get better rendering then I could bring that down a good amount. But you get the idea of why I might want to vignette that picture so you don't have the distracting corners. I also use vignetting quite a bit when I shoot with a fisheye lens. I have what's known as a fisheye zoom lens, and that will allow me to zoom between a full circle fisheye or one that still has the distortion of a fisheye, but it fills the entire frame of the picture. When I do that, I usually need to crop my image afterwards because I get the normal proportions of an image where it's a rectangular picture, and I simply crop it into a square, where it's nice and centered on that little circle. And then usually the edge that's right here, the transition from the blackness that's out here to the actual image, sometimes I see artifacts there where I'll see some blue or other colors, and other times, it's just too abrupt and I want to soften it, and so that's when I come in here to effects and I add vignetting. This already has vignetting, I'll turn it off, and you see before versus after. Just bringing it in a little bit, and I can control the transition with this choice called feathering. But I will often do that if I ever see any color fringing on the edge, we can kind of cover up the color fringing with vignetting. Now you might think though that after showing you this post-crop vignetting that it's something that I use all the time on my images, there's actually something else that I usually use as a substitute for that instead. So let's see what we can do. I'll go first in this image. With this image, let's first try our post-crop vignetting. I'll bring our amount down a little bit and I'll set it to color priority so we get the best color rendering, and what I really want to do is make it so your attention is drawn to the subject of our photograph and not so much the clutter surrounding him. So I'm gonna bring the amount down a considerable amount and then I'll start adjusting my midpoint to get it in towards the guy that's there. I'll adjust my roundness, just see as best I can do, and the one thing I'm not liking at the moment is that we're darkening his feet. I'll adjust my feathering, see if I can get it the way I like. And let's just say I want it something about like that, but I'm really dissatisfied with this area right here. If I turn the effect off and back on again, you'll see how much we've done to darken the picture, but within the settings that are here, I can do nothing to fix his feet. So I want to show you something you could use to replace post-crop vignetting for those times when you need more control. This is a feature we talked about in a previous lesson but we didn't use it for this particular use, and I didn't show you a special trick that's useful when you want to do post-crop vignetting. I'm gonna go to the radial filter. It's found just below the histogram that's here, just to the left of the adjustment brush, and it looks just like a circle. With that, you can usually click and drag on your picture to define the area that you would like to work on. And with default settings, I believe it's going to work on the area outside of the shape. Well, here's a trick. First, let me hit delete to delete that, and if I want this to stimulate vignetting, then I want to stretch that circle so that it covers the entirety of the image, it touches the edge. Well if I hold down the command key on a Macintosh, that's control in windows, and I double-click on the picture with this tool, then it will automatically create a shape that goes all the way out and touches all four corners of this image which will make it act a lot like post-crop vignetting. Then I just have a feather setting down here at the bottom which controls how soft of a transition I get, and instead of having one slider that allows me to control the amount, here I have all sorts of sliders. I can bring the exposure down if that's what I think is necessary, or maybe it's just the highlights that I want to bring down in that area. Maybe I want to make it less colorful in that area as well on the edge of the image, but let's get this to be a considerable change to the image. Then here's where I have more control. First, I can adjust this shape, so if he is not perfectly centered, I can grab one of these sides and pull it in, but the problem is when I pull one side, the exact opposite side comes in with it. The trick to get only one side to move is to hold down the option key, Alt in Windows. Then I could pull just one side to fine-tune that if I wanted to. Pull just the other side, fine-tune, and so on. But what really makes it useful is this setting right up here called brush. When I choose brush, I can then go down below and I'll find a choice called erase. And I can erase the effect wherever I want. So I come in here, get a smaller brush, and I might turn on the setting called auto-mask, and I'm just gonna click on his feet and paint on it. And in order to completely remove the effect though, I need to have a setting called flow turned all the way up. Now I'm completely removing this as I paint across his feet, and unlike when I use the normal post-crop vignetting, here I can actually control where it's being applied and I have much more granular control of where and where it isn't. Now there, it went a little bit beyond his foot, so I might choose undo, and I might get a smaller brush so I don't get the over-spray and be more careful down there where his feet are. So that's an alternative, and here, I'm not trying to make this picture look perfect, I'm just trying to show you the tools you need to use. What you need to remember is when you go to your radial filter to get it to make a shape that goes all the way out to the edges of your picture, I held down the command key and I double-clicked within my picture, that's the trick that made that happen. Then if I want to grab one side of this shape and not have the opposite side move at the same time, then I need to hold down the option key when I do so. Finally, if I want to be able to paint to remove the effect from various areas, I go over here near the right side and there's a choice called brush, and only when I've chosen that choice called brush can I come right down here and use this option called erase, and I can just paint to erase it from my image, either using auto-mask or not depending on what I prefer, and there's a whole separate lesson on using this particular tool in painting with the brushes. So if you're not familiar with how to do that, be sure to watch the other lessons, then you'll get good at that particular feature. So that's post-crop vignetting. But now we have more ways we can fine-tune our images, so let's move up to the next feature which is called split toning. In our list of adjustments we have in the develop module of Lightroom, one of them is called split toning. And right now, there is some split toning applied to this particular image. I'm gonna turn it off and back on again, and you'll find it's only a very, very subtle change to the image, it's in the brightest portion right up here, but let me show you what split toning does. I'll double-click on the headings that are in here to turn it off, and then we'll look at it in depth. So split toning is going to force color into the bright or dark portion of your image. And here we have a setting for highlights, that's gonna push a color into the bright portion of your image. The one called shadows will put it into the dark portion of the image. So if I want to control the color of this area, it's obviously a bright area, so it would be the highlights I want to go to, then this slider called hue determines exactly what color will be put into that area. Now just moving the slider though doesn't do anything all by itself because the slider below that called saturation controls how strong of the change you're making and the default setting for that is zero, which means you're not making any change at all, that's why I'm not seeing anything when I move this. There's a trick though, if you hold down the option key, Alt in Windows, which I have held down right now, then when you move the hue slider, it'll act as if saturation was turned all the way up to make the biggest change its capable of making. So now it'll be easy for me to see the color being applied as long as I have the option key held down. So I can go through here, and I liked it when we had kind of a blue tone in there, I just don't want to be all that strong. So I choose the shade I want there, I let go, and now I go down to saturation to control how strong is it. If I bring it all the way up, I'll see exactly what we had when I was choosing the color, and I can go anywhere in between that, and nothing. I'll say I like it about there. Then if I want to, I can also add a color to the dark portion of the image by using the settings underneath the heading called shadows. Again, I hold down the option key, so I preview this at full strength, and I move the hue slider, and I can choose what color goes into the dark portion of my image. Maybe I like in the dark portion of my image a little more of a greenish tone. Then I adjust saturation to control exactly how strong it is and there I start to see it quite quickly. So I might only put a tiny portion of it in there if I put any in at all. We have one final setting under split toning, and it's called balance. And balance means where do the highlights end and the shadows begin? And if you want to see the effect of balance, again, hold down the option key, Alt in Windows, when you click on it, that'll show you both the highlights and shadows applied at full strength, and then start moving the slider, and you'll get a sense for what it does. You notice now the greens are extending all the way into the highlights, or if I move it the opposite direction, the color that's going into highlights is now extending all the way to the shadows. And this kind of determines where do highlights and shadows cut off from each other. So I want to move it and tell that object where I was trying to put blue light in, seems to be separating color from the rest of the picture. So here, everything seems the same color. Go the other way, still everything the same color, but somewhere in between, just that area above turns blue and the rest is green. That's where I want to be. Now I can fine-tune all the settings that I have, maybe now I can fine-tune how much color's in the highlights fine-tune how much color's in the shadows, and maybe fine-tune what color is in the shadows until I like it. So let's look at a bunch of other images where this has already been applied. I'll show you what it looks like with and without the effect and I'll give you an idea of why did I use the settings that I did. In this image, if I turn split toning off, there's not a huge difference in the image, but this is looking down an alley. If I remember right, it was in Venice, Italy, and I just wanted this bright area to be a bit warmer as if there was more of the golden hour sun kind of hitting it. So I think what I did was over here in my highlights, I told it to put kind of a yellowish orange color and just put 25% of what it could put in there. If I were to option-click on the slider for hue, you'd see what it'd look like at full strength. It's kind of a greenish yellow, and then I just dialed in the amount until I thought it looked natural and didn't look as if I'd manipulated it. The other thing that I did is I put a different color in the dark portion the image, but only just a very subtle amount of it, and it looks to me like I put a blue color in. If you want to see what it would look like at full strength, I'll hold option when I click on that slider, and you can see in the dark portion of the image just a little hint to cool it off, and it barely has any of it of applied, if you look, it's only at 8%. But then I adjusted the balance to try to really separate this bright portion from the dark, and if I come in here and hold option when I grab balance, and I move it, I moved it until the yellow only when in the highlights like that, and fine-tune it. So that's a more subtle change to the image, but I think it improved the image, it made a little bit warmer in the highlights. It's really common to use it when you convert an image to black and white. I'm actually not certain that this image is black and white, it's just close to it in its color range. If I turn off split toning, here's what it looked like when I was done processing the image. If you want to know where we are, we're on the Panama Canal here, and they were building another bridge, so I wanted to capture that and kind of get these as a bit of a silhouette, but when I was done processing the image, I just wasn't all that happy with the color. So I decided to put some yellowish in this bright area, and I ended up choosing I think a purplish for the dark, and this is what the end result looked like. Yet another one still on the Panama Canal, and here, you can see the colors, it actually shows you a sample of the color for the bright area and a sample of the color for the dark, and if I were to turn that off, this is what the original looked like. Not all that much different, but this allowed me to push a little bit more color to the top of the photo into that sky and a little bit more into the water, but a relatively subtle change to the image. Just so you know, there are other settings in here we haven't talked about. If you actually look at that sample of a color on each one, you can click on it. If you click on it, it's a different way of choosing the color you're applying. Now you can choose the basic color you want across here which is the same thing as the hue slider, and you can choose how powerful it is by going vertically, where if it's at the bottom, it would be the equivalent to having the saturation slider at zero, and if it was all the way up here, it would have saturation at 100, just a different way of choosing colors. In the end, it just moves these two sliders. The other thing is you'll notice there's a little triangle to the right of both highlights and shadows, and if I turn that little triangle, it simplifies the look of this, so I can simply see the two colors that are being applied and I can control the balance between the two. But I usually like seeing those sliders, so I can tell exactly how much saturation has been dialed into the image. Here's a black and white image. I didn't put any color into the highlights at all, left them neutral, and in the shadows, I put in a bluish color. And if I turn off split toning, it'll just be like a normal black and white picture. When I turn it back on, you find just a little bit of cool feeling to the shadows. Here's a good example where you can see a bright area that is isolated where I don't see other objects other than the reflection of water here that are bright, therefore I should be able to target that easily with my highlights, everything else is dark. Here, we're in Iceland. These are little iceberg-like things, where snow that has melted down. So if I turn my split toning off, here's what I had before, turn it on, you'll see a very subtle difference, but what's happening is yellow is being put in to the highlights. Before, after. If I want to put a little more in it, just bring up my saturation. I just didn't want it to be too noticeable. It was just nice to get it to put some warmth in there. I also put a little bit of blue in the shadows to exaggerate the coolness of the snow. So before, everything feels about the same, after, just a little bit of difference in the color. Just got a little bit of kind of purple in the shadows. Before, after. So I use this in all sorts of images, just any time I end up thinking that I want to shift the color based on brightness, and I want to put the color either in the bright area, the dark area, or both. And I would say I use it on maybe about 5% of the images that I adjust, but when I do, I really feel that I can fine-tune the look of the image. One other thing to look at when it comes to fine-tuning your images is an adjustment called curves. And curves in Lightroom is nowhere near as powerful as curves in Photoshop, because in Photoshop, you can use curves in something known as an adjustment layer and in that adjustment layer, you also have a mask where I could paint to determine where it's being applied. Because I can't paint a mask, it makes it so the curves that I find here in Lightroom are nowhere near as powerful as Photoshop. So curves in Photoshop is like my favorite adjustment on earth, curves in Lightroom is like eh, I'm glad it's there, but I'm not excited about it. So I just want to give you an idea of how it works and a few other things you could do with it. The main thing I think about with curves is sometimes when I'm in the basic portion of my adjustments, I will have certain adjustments maxed out. In this case, maybe I have my whites turned way down, and it's maxed all the way out as far as I can go. I can't move it any further. Then I gotta find another slider that might be able to give me a similar effect. Well, instead of searching only these sliders, I'll come down here to the tone curve. And with the tone curve, we have two different versions. One is called a point curve, and the other is known as a parametric curve. Parametric means we manipulate the shape of this curve using sliders. And you can switch between those two different styles by clicking this little icon right here. You click it once and you're on a point curve, that's where you actually grab dots and pull on 'em like this to change a curve, click on it again, and now the only way you adjust this shape is indirectly through these sliders, so those are the two different kinds you can use. At the bottom here, it says what do we have loaded into our curve? This is where we could save a preset if we create a certain shape we want to use over and over again, and the other thing you choose from this menu is the choice called linear. Linear means none. It means make this curve perfectly diagonal. And so if you ever do anything to your curve, if you decide you don't like it, you can change this menu to linear when it comes to that point curve. So, let's take a look. A brief look this would be here, we have a highlight slider. There I can control the bright portion of the image, not dissimilar to the highlights slider that I find in the basic area of Lightroom. We have a shadow slider which allowed me to control the brightness of the dark portion of the image separately from the rest of the picture, not dissimilar to the shadow slider that you find in the basic adjustments. Then we have lights and darks, which instead of working at the extremes of really bright and really dark will work a little bit more towards the mid-tones to fine-tune things. So if you ever find the choices under the basic tab are either maxed out to as far as they can go, or you just can't find something that allows you to adjust a little closer to a mid-tone, you can come in here and use these sliders as an alternative. There is a little bit more to it in that you can use these three sliders that are here to define what is it considering to, how does it define what a highlight is and what range of brightness shades is defined as a highlight? And this would end up defining what range is thought of as the shadows, so you do have a little bit more control over it. Finally, there is a little donut icon up here, and if you grab the donut icon, you can move on top of your image and it will highlight whichever slider down here would affect that area your mouse is on top of the most. So if I want to work on this area, I could click on it and drag down to darken, and it's going to in this case adjust the dark slider. Then I could go to a different area over here and it would let me know, is it the light slider or is it the highlight slider that would target that area? And so you can use a little donut. If you need to be more precise about your adjustments, then you can switch to the point curve. With the point curve down at the bottom, if you're gonna do your own adjustments with it, I would suggest you start with it set to linear. Linear means don't have any dots on this line yet. The way you can think about this curve is it's telling you how much light would be used to reproduce your image, where on the left side it's talking about black, and that's why the line is all the way at the bottom 'cause you would use no light whatsoever to reproduce black. Then as you move towards the right, you're thinking about brighter and brighter shades. When you get to the center, you're thinking about 50% gray, and if you go straight up from it, it's simply telling you how much light would be used to make 50% gray. You keep going to the right, and it's thinking about brighter and brighter shades. Once you get all the way to the right edge, it's thinking about white, and if you go straight up from that, the reason the curve is all the way at the top is because you use as much light as you possibly could to reproduce white. So this diagonal line that's unchanged is known as a linear curve, means we're not making any change to the image at all, and this is simply showing how much light would you use to create various shades of gray in your image? It'd be really nice if they put a little gradient down here at the bottom where it had black on the left, white on the right. It's the same gradient I wish they would put underneath the histogram that we see in Lightroom as well. Then you can click on this line and push it up or down. That's like having a dimmer switch in your hand, and if you push it up, you're adding light to your image. If you push it down, you're taking light away and darkening your picture. So you could move this up and brighten the image, or move it down to darken. If you want to get rid of a dot 'cause you added it accidentally, we could just right-click on it and say delete. So how could I use that? Well, we have a little donut here. I'm gonna click on it and then I'm gonna move on top of my picture. When I move on top of my picture, if you look at curves, you'll see a little dot that's there. That dot is indicating how much light is currently in the area where my mouse is? If I want to change the amount of light that's in the area where my mouse is, I click my mouse, and that dot on the curve actually gets cemented in there, and then I can move it up to brighten or down to darken. It's like I have a dimmer switch in my hand that's controlling how bright the area is I clicked on, so I'll do that. Then I'm gonna move my mouse into a different area of the picture, let's say this area here. If I look over at curves, I see a temporary circle showing up. That circle is telling me how much light is currently in the area where my mouse is. If I want to change the amount of light that's there, I click my mouse, that converts that circle into an actual point on the curve, and then I can drag it up if I want to brighten or down if I want to darken. Most of the time, I end up with two points on my curve, and I'll end up moving one up if I want to brighten, and I'll either leave the other one alone or I'll move it down to darken. And so in here, I can dial in and have more control over what's happening, but really, curves is dramatically more useful when I'm in Photoshop because that's when I can paint on a mask and do many other things to further control what we can do. So if I had an image, let's say like this one, I'm gonna come in here and start with a linear curve, and I just want to get more separation between these lines, horizontal lines that are on these badlands that are here in the lighter areas. So I grab the little donut that's there, I come down here and I'm gonna click first on the bright portion that's here, and in curves, you see a dot, or a circle. That indicates how much light is there. If I click, I lock in the amount of light. I don't have to move it, but if I click and add a dot, it means don't change this. Then I'll come into the dark portion, the little band that's going across there, I'll get my mouse right on it, and since that would use less light, it should be lower in the curve. I'm gonna click on it to convert that dot into a point, and now I can drag down to darken all those lines in the image, or I can drag up to brighten them if I want. If I were to get those two dots to the exact same height, then the brightness of those lines would become just as bright as the area surrounding them, and you might not be able to see the lines at all. Now, I'm only looking at that one hump that's here of the image, this area here is quite a bit brighter, areas back here are darker, I'm just looking there, let's see if we can get it to be harder to see that line, the band. If I get it to be exactly the same height, you see no detail, and they usually look pretty terrible. So anyway, I could fine-tune the area of those, the brightness of those two areas independently, which can be nice. I just really wish I could paint it in so I could avoid affecting this area that I might not want to, and if I could do that, this would become dramatically more useful. So I really wish they would take this and get it to be inside the adjustment brush as like a special option where I could paint that in 'cause then you can have a lot more control. So remember in curves, this line starts out with a setting if you want no change for your image of linear. Linear means don't change the amount of brightness in my picture. Then this line simply indicates how much light would you usually use if you have never changed your picture to make black, to make shades that are getting brighter and brighter. When we click within our picture, it adds a dot, and then that's like having a dimmer switch, and if you move it up, you're using more light than you used to use. And if you add another dot and move it down, you're using less light than you used to use in that area. If you want to get rid of your dots, one way is to right-click and say delete control point. You also find if you right-click there's a choice called flatten curve, and all that does is change the menu that's found at the bottom to a choice called linear, 'cause that's a nice flat, uncurved curve. So there are two kinds of curves, if I click the little icon on the right, this is what's known as a parametric curve. And it's where if you're not all that comfortable with curves, you can just think of these as additional sliders is if you found them under the normal basic adjustment area. Just know that they won't make as smooth the transitions into the rest of your image, so I wouldn't use these as much as a starting point, I would mainly use them when you find the sliders under basic, you're either maxing them out or you can't find one that will do what you need, then you come in here. And then if you want ultimate control where you really want to click on your image and dial things in, I end up clicking over here on this icon to get to the point curve, I grab a little donut, and that's where I can really target an exact brightness level within my picture, and therefore I can say make the bright portion of this brighter by dragging up, make this dark portion darker by dragging it down and get more contrast in there if I need to. And that is curves. Remember, if you purchase this class, you get homework assignments. And in this case, the homework assignment is a custom Lightroom catalog that contains challenge images where your challenge to use the features that we covered in this session to accomplish various things, and that's so you can get used to these features on images that are not critical to your workflow. Instead, by the time you get to an image of yours that needs these features, you already have the practice needed to be good at them. That's because you did the homework. Now just so you know, we still have two weeks left in this course. That means we're gonna talk about black and white adjustments. We need to talk about getting our images onto a map. We need to talk about HDR imaging, stitching panoramas, troubleshooting, tips and tricks, and a whole bunch more. Before we think about next week though, next week is really when we're gonna get the most out of Lightroom's special features, I want you to head to the Facebook group. If you're not already in the Facebook group, just visit the website you see listed at the bottom of my screen, ask to join, it'll take just a short time for us to approve you, then you can create posts and you can ask whatever questions you'd like. You should also know that if you purchased the course, you get a lot more than just homework that I mentioned earlier. You get a PDF workbook for each lesson, and it makes it so you shouldn't need to go back and re-watch these videos each time you want to remember how to do something. Instead, you can just refer to the PDF workbook. You also get Lightroom develop presets, which will make it so it will be a lot easier and faster to do particular adjustments in Lightroom. And you'll also get things like a keyword starter set, and you'll get some example images. If you want to find me online, my main website is called DigitalMastery.com, but you can also find me on these various social media outlets. This has been Lightroom Classic: The Complete Guide. I hope to see you next week.