Lessons

Lesson Info

Developing Raw Images

So let's work on a few normal pictures and let's see, right here we have one that's hazy. I'll just take that. It's raw file. The DMG file extension means it's Adobe is version of a raw file. You can convert your camera manufacturers what raw files into a more universal version that adobes come up with called DMG. That's what this is. I happen to use those for the class because when you convert it, you can also scale the picture down. And I'm giving you guys if you purchase the class smaller file sizes than what my camera produces. Because my cameras a 61 megapixel camera and those files are massive, and I'm giving you more reasonable file size so you can learn from it. All right, so if you look at this image to me, it looks hazy. It doesn't completely look like fog, but it just looks dull. It looks almost like a old vintage photograph, most the time. That's because the darkest part of the picture is not black has an image fades like you put it out in the sun. Those densest areas start...

to kind of wither away in, so this is one of those images where I would usually use whites and blacks is a finishing technique at the end, But I'll probably use it at the beginning here if I bring blacks down. Eventually, the darkest part of the picture will near black right about there, and now we get more density in that dark area. But when I do this area where you might see it, the darkest portion of a tree it starts becoming harder to see the detail. And it's very easy to push it too far and get that to really block up where you can't see the detail. So let's instead come down here and try D. Hayes. When I bring d hes, I'll bring it up. It is getting darker and darker, but I can still see the detail that's in that tree. And so D. Hayes is better when you haven't image with that, um, looks hazy now. In this case, there's a lot of other things that would need to be done to this image to make the color look good. Let's just work on normal pictures, though in slowly learned with the sliders to all right, here we are in camera raw, and to me, this image just looks bright. I can pretty much not see any detail in here, least to my I S o. I think the door might also be a little bit bright, so I'd say the images bright overall in any time. That's the case where it's the entire picture exposures, what I'm gonna go for. But once I get it to about here, I don't want that door getting any darker. And so I might stop moving exposure because that affects the image is a hole in What I don't like is this brightest area that's out here. And so since that's the brightest area, I'm gonna go for highlights that will try to isolate the bright areas from the dark. And I'll bring that down, and it looks like I'm gonna have to bring it all the way down. I've maxed that out as far as it can go, and I still want this to be darker out here. So, uh, I'm going to show you a trick if you ever max out highlights or shadows. There's a trick that I use almost every day that I'm in photo shop and saw shared this early. If you've Max Saudi, their shadows or highlights and you wish you could go further, then go to the exposure slider and moving in the same direction. You were attempting to move the slaughter, you maxed out. So I'm gonna move exposure towards the left until I see the detail I was looking for in that bright portion of the picture. The problem is, once you bring exposure down, it affects the entire picture, not just the bright areas. So somehow we need to get those dark areas to come back. Well, then go with the opposite of the slider you maxed out. So if it was highlights, you maxed out, go to shadows, moving in the opposite direction to bring back the dark areas. That's when you have an extreme image, though. There we go. Now I can see detail in the highlights. I don't mind that at all. I can see enough detail in my door and I think it looks a lot better if you want to see before and after. There's an icon right down here near the bottom. Do you see this guy? If I click on that icon Ah, you're going to see what it looked like with these sliders zeroed out. You see, they're all zeroed out right now. I click on that Icahn again and I'll see what looked like afterwards. So here's before in, There's after and I like the detail. I'm getting in the highlights. Now. With this image, we can start talking about the sliders. They're found down here. Texture, clarity, those two. They have to do with detail. But there is a distinct difference between the two. If you look at this particular image, do you see the really fine detail that's up here? That is mainly going to be affected by the slaughter called texture? It brings out fine details. That means the weave of fabric, something that subtle detail clarity, on the other hand, brings out the bigger details. So that would be things like the door knob and the difference between it and the surrounding. So let's see if we can see the difference here. I'm gonna zoom in in the lower left. There's ah, magnification number, and I forget the little plus sign here. It'll zoom up. I'm gonna get to at least 100% cause that's the only time you really see all the detail and let's see what happens when I bring up this slider called texture. Watch the fine detail in the stucco like areas you see if they bring it up and then bring it back down those air being emphasized also the texture of the paint that's in the door. I can start seeing the actual brushstrokes, so that allows me to bring out that kind of detail. If I moved down here so you can see more of the general detail, let's see what happens with clarity. Clarity is gonna bring out that more generalized detail. So you see the door knob. It's not the really fine texture. It's not like I'm saying, the the um, would you call it the No, the texture of the metal coming out. Instead, I'm seeing the overall highlights and shadows being emphasized, So clarity is for big, chunky detail. Texture is for really, really fine detail, and if you don't have the slider called texture, it means you don't have the most current version of photo shop. It was a recent addition, all right, so there's one image you want to see before and after again, I'll hit that icon in the lower right before turning back on after there's a lot more we could do. We just need to learn about the sliders that are found here. We might as well learn about some of them. We haven't talked about a the sliders that have do with color, and there's four sliders under the basic tab that mainly have to do with color. Those are the temperature in 10 sliders at the top and then the vibrance and saturation sliders in the bottom. Let's see if we can figure out what they do. Ah, first, let's end up working up here with temperature intent, temperature and tent is designed to color. Correct your picture and color correction is usually needed when your picture has a color caste. Ah, color caste is when you have a light source that was not white. You have candlelight or a fireplace where sunset or something else where it's not white light, and then you shot something under that condition. Maybe it's fluorescent lights at work in your camera with not set up to compensate for your camera has a setting called white balance. And if you set a custom white balance in your camera, which end up doing? Is he holed up either a white sheet of paper or a gray card, meaning something that doesn't have any color at all? You point your camera at it, so it fills the frame, and then you do a custom white balance and all it does when you do that is it looks at what color did that sheet of paper look like to the camera? Did that color did it look like a neutral color, meaning a shade of gray? If so, you're good to go. But if that looked at all yellowish now, then it would no to compensate for it. If it looks at all bluish, it would No. Hey, we need to shift this away from blue, and it does that with a setting called White Balance. And that's what we find right up here. Now, if you look at white balance, temperature is going to shift your picture. So the entire image starts looking more blue. If we push it this way, warm or yellow, if you push it that way, blue and yellow are the opposite of each other. Every color you ever see has an opposite and the opposite of blue happens to be yellow. That means if we haven't excess of blue, your picture just looks to blue. In general, the way to fix it is moving away from blue. But that means it's going to move it towards that opposite color. And it's only if we absorb all the excess blue and keep going that you're gonna notice that you're doing it by introducing the opposite color. So the opposite of blue is yellow, and the opposite of magenta is green. That's why you see those colors on the ends there. So with this image, I'm just glancing at it. It might look the tiniest bit green. I'm just looking out here, and it's actually a little bit blew out there. Eso anyway, I can adjust it. Let's just see what happens. I move the temperature towards the left. You see looking bluish. Move it way to the right. You see, looking yellowish somewhere in between will be a balanced amount of those two, where it doesn't look like it's to yellow or two blue. And it's a personal choice because some people like their images to look warm and others like them to look absolutely neutral is if there was no, uh, influence of light sources color. But then we can adjust tint of my mood towards the left. It's gonna look to green, move it to the right. It's gonna look to magenta. But somewhere in between is going to be a balanced. Nice amount of those two where you don't notice too much of either one most of time when I'm moving These one of the things I'm looking for is when the colors separate the most. As they move this all the way to one side, everything looks to blue. At the moment. If I move in the opposite direction, everything looks to yellow. But somewhere in between, I get the best separation where I can see the difference between the colors the most in this image is only a red door and then not much else for color, so I wouldn't notice it as much. But that's one thing I'm looking for. So anyway, confined to in the color there, then we'd come down here to vibrance and saturation with both of those moving them towards the right is gonna make your picture look more colorful, moving them towards the laughed will make your picture look less colorful so I could take vibrance and crank it up and you see the door. It becomes more vividly red. We'll double click on the slider. That's how you reset it. I'll bring up saturation, and it also makes the door look more colorful. But there's a tendency when you make something more colorful that if you push it too far, you end up hitting something that's called technically saturation. Clipping clipping means you're throwing away detail. And so if you make something unnaturally colorful, you're gonna end up with an object that doesn't have any texture or detail. And that's gonna happen the most when you increase saturation, Saturation treats every color equally in general, and it just makes things more colorful. Well, some areas are already relatively colorful in those will be easy to overdo. Once you hit that certain point, the detail will get thrown away if you keep going. Vibrance is different. Vibrance cries to concentrate on the mellower colors in your image, the areas that are not all that colorful to begin with, and that's where it's going to try to do most of its change, and it's going to kind of tone down that change as it gets into the more and more vivid areas within the picture, so you get less and less of a change. Therefore, I'm able to crank vibrance much higher than saturation in. It's rare for an object that's colorful to lose detail because vibrance is mellowing things out as it gets into those more colorful areas. It actually does a lot more than that, but you could think of vibrance as what should happen to the mellow stuff in saturation is what should happen to everything. So if I want this wall here want the color to come out, I want to adjust vibrance because therefore it will do the most to that area and will do less and less as it gets into the more vivid areas. Or I could move in the opposite direction, and then I'm going to say, make it less colorful in those Melo areas so that those areas do not compete with what's already colorful. And then, once you've done that, the door is not colorful enough, so bring up saturation. I used them together, but your pride understand, Morris, do we just work on more pictures. Let's learn more about white balance in vibrance and saturation By working on artificial images that I made eso I'm gonna grab a bunch of, um, images. Here. All type command are to go to camera raw and let's take a look at what we have First, this is an unchanged image. This is what I made in photo shop. I used the Grady Int Tool and Funder Shop, and there is a way to make it have the colors in a rainbow and go around a circle. So anyway, I constructed this, Uh, this is what it looks like originally, and let's see what vibrance and saturation does If I increase saturation. Let's see, there's no real detail in here that I can't see texture the weave of fabric. But if I bring it higher, you notice that some areas start losing variation like down in here is I get into this area watch. I'll double click to reset it. I used to be able to see the variation where it got less and less colorful as I worked my way out. Um, but once I get it all the way up, that's not the case and that wasn't unchanged. It looks like because this looks a little different. But anyway, if you watch in this area suddenly you will notice less variation. It all looks like a solid blob, and that'll be not uncommon with saturation. If, on the other hand, I bring up vibrance, it's going to try to be working on the mellower colors in the image. Do you see the pinkish area out on the edge, getting quite a change to the image? And it does less and less as it comes in here, towards the middle where the vibrant colors are. But you might have noticed one exception. There's one particular color that vibrance always over, does see if you can figure it out as they bring this up. Just look at this image and say what part of the image is changing the most? Which color? I think it's relatively obvious. There's one color that's getting the biggest change in its blue. The vibrant slider assumes that everything that's blue in your picture is a sky, and it thinks that when you're cranking up vibrance, you want your sky to look more vivid, and so it will usually dark in your sky slightly and will make it more colorful. The problem with that is not everything that's blue is the sky. Sometimes it's water. Sometimes it's a car. Sometimes it's something else in. So any time you bring vibrance up and there's a blue object in your scene, you're gonna have to be careful about the other thing. Add vibrance does is it tries to protect skin tones because if you over saturate somebody's skin, they're gonna look overly red, and they're gonna look sunburnt. So if I bring up vibrance, I don't know how much you'll notice it on this image, but you might notice that the tones in this general area the reddish orangish yellowish tones, might not change as much as the others. Let's see if you can tell they still change quite a bit. But compared to what's happening to pink into blue and green, bring that up. But it's going to do a little bit less to the orange ish, yellowish reddish tones, and that's because it assumes that skin and therefore, for most photographs, people end up adjusting vibrance when they wanted more colorful because it's a more sophisticated adjustment. But I end up using the combination of vibrance and saturation together, and I think of vibrance as what should happen to the mellow colors. And then saturation is what should happen overall eso if you want to see the difference if I were to bring vibrant down to make things less colorful. First off, let's see vibrance and saturation. This is what it looks like when you move this saturation slider all the way down. It takes every color, and it treats them equally, makes it less and less colorful. If you bring it all the way down, it takes all the color out. This is what would happen if instead you did the same thing with vibrance. You notice that the areas that were the most colorful were affected the least. And so I think of Vibrance is what should happen to the mellow stuff, the things that are not all that colorful to begin with. And then after I adjust fiber and some like all right now what should happen with what's left over? Maybe I wanted to be more colorful so I can get the whole thing. That pyre. You don't have to completely understand what I'm kind of demonstrating here But then let's come in and try to think about white balance because there's something special about white balance. I'm gonna grab a bunch of images. Each one of them has a color cast their artificial images just like the other gray wedge that we had before. But this image here is to blue. This one is too blue green, this one's two blue and magenta. This one's just to green and so on. Let's see if we can correct each one to get rid of the color cast. So if this image looks to blue, all I need to do is move the slider that has blue within it. That's the temperature slider and moving away from blue. And it's only once I've absorbed all the blue that if I keep going, I noticed that I'm using yellow to do it. But if I don't go too far, I should be able to get to the point where it's just gray, and that's known as white bounds. Now there's a way to get a photo shop in camera raw to do this for us, and that is in the toolbar. Up here at the top of my screen. You see all these tools. One of them looks like an eyedropper. That's your white balance tool. And the white balance tool is designed to click on anything that is a shade of gray that would not have any hint of color whatsoever. In the real world, like this computer's display, that's great. There's no doesn't look pinkish or bluish or whatever. Any pinkish or bluish or any other color I see in it is caused by the lighting in here, not by the object itself. That's what I'm looking for. So white sheet of paper, this little coffee mug that I have here as long as they don't hit where the coffee stain or tea stain, these little dangles that are on the table here are our white, that kind of stuff. Just be careful of shiny objects. It is chrome object. It's like a mirror reflects its surrounding. So oftentimes those aren't so good. But I look for something that should be a shade of gray that would have no color, and all I got to do is click on it. And if I dio, it will figure out the correct white balance setting to compensate for that color caste. It does that, and it's called white balance due to some technical stuff behind the scenes. If you want just a hint of what's happening behind the scenes, your pictures made out of three colors red, green and blue. That's why in photo shop, we talked about making like new documents. If you ever do that, you have a choice. If you want RGB mode, that means your picture would be made out of red, green and blue. Well, the way you make a shade of gray is you use a balanced amount of red, green and blue, and when I move my mouse on top of an image, we switched to a different one. Here, you'll actually see an RGB readout. It's right over here on the right side. And if I put my image my mouse on top of the image, it will tell you what's that area made out of. Into Most people, those numbers don't mean anything, but if you know the area that your mouse is on top of should be, a shade of gray shouldn't have any hint of color whatsoever. Then you should know that what you should see showing up there is, the numbers should be perfectly balanced and if they're not your color caste. So in this case, if you look at those numbers, you notice that blue is higher than the others. That's because it's as an excess of blue. When I click here with this eyedropper, which is the white balance eyedropper, watch those numbers. They got as close as they could be to be unequal. And if they're off by one, that doesn't matter. That's close enough, but all it did is it looked at where my mouse was when I clicked it. Look at the numbers that were there in it moved the slider that was found down here so that whatever one of these was an access, it moved it away from that color until it was no longer in excess. So you don't have to remember that. But for those that like to know a little bit about how things work behind the scenes and why it's called white balance well, there we just balanced it. So it's a balanced amount of red, green and blue. Anyway, I go to each one of these images, grab that little white balance eyedropper and click on any one of these bars, and it can measure what's in there and compensate for it and all its doing. When I click with this eyedropper, remember, I'm in the eyedropper right up here. Is it? Is moving these two sliders right here? Temperature intent? And it's figuring out what would be needed to make that area look neutral, meaning it has no hint of color. So just do that to each one. Got a bunch of them here. Each one has a different color cast, but we can correct every single one of them. As long as we can find something within the scene that should be a shade of gray. So that's why it's nice if you're gonna go out and take photographs to incorporate gray objects in the scene. I have a little great card that I have in my camera bag that I put into my scenes when I know the colors are critical and I'll just take one picture with it in there. Make sure the lighting that's falling on my subject falls on that little gray card, and then I take the card out, and I photographed in that light source for as long as I want, then I can adjust more than one picture at a time in here. All you do is when you have more than one picture and camera. There's little side menu up here, and you can choose select all. And that means even though I'm looking at this version, when I click, affect all the others, too. And therefore I could color corrected by clicking on that little gray card that included in the first photograph. A za Long is the same light source is falling on the card as would fall on your subject. So we'll end up using that whenever we noticed that the image has a color cast. And if we happen to have something that should be whiter, Gray will use the eyedropper to click on it to adjust things. So let's just start adjusting a bunch of images and see if we can improve them. I'm gonna grab more than one here, hold shift and then all say, opening camera raw. I don't know if they're all raw files. They show up as thumbnails on my left side, and I'll just click on one and let's just adjust away now that we're getting a better sense for what these sliders do. All right, so this image is too dark. So if everything's too dark, exposure is where I go. But if I get exposure up to high now, the bright areas air starting to become too bright. So I could either stop right now and not go any further. And then instead, just think, well, what is still not bright enough to be the dark portion of the picture. So Shadows tries to isolate the dark portion of the picture so I could bring it up instead, and that will concentrate on just the dark. But it's maxed it out. What if I wanted it to go even higher and I wish it wasn't already maxed out? Well, that's when you have to use a trick that I mentioned, and that is any time you get either highlights or shadows maxed out, and you wish you could move it further, because here I wish I could make the dark portions of the image even brighter. But I've max it out, then go to exposure and move it in the same direction as the slider that's maxed out. You wish you could move it further to the right, so move this further to the right intel that dark areas bright as you want it. The problem is, exposure affects the entire brightness range in your picture. So now we need to get the bright areas back to the way we had them, and that's where you grab the opposite of the one that's maxed out. So if its shadows, the opposite would be highlights and moving in the opposite direction until those air is go back to normal. Maybe somewhere in there, then we have a bunch of other sliders we can adjust. Contrast controls the difference between bright and dark. Maybe there's too great of a difference right now, so I could lower that a little bit. And maybe, I decided, overall, brightness just want a tiny bit darker. All right, then we can come down here to texture and clarity. Clarity is going to make the larger objects jump out in the photograph so it will just make things pop. More texture will bring out the fine little details, like the texture of the stucco that's up here, and you probably won't notice it unless you zoom up really close in your picture. So I'm not gonna adjusted here where I can't see the fine textures. I just don't feel like zooming up to me. The image just feels a little bit too yellowish in. Maybe greenish. It's just to me. It looks that way. I'm not really sure, but I'm going to adjust the temperature until it looks to blue with the other way toast too loud yellow and then find the part in between. That is the most balance that looks the most natural to my eye. I like moving these two extremes, like way too far this way, way too far that way. And then don't look at the slider. Look at your picture because people have a tendency of thinking they shouldn't move things far and often times I find that I moved things too much greater extent when I move them to extremes. And then I stopped looking at the slider and I look at the picture and decide by looking at the picture what it should be done. So that's what I liked. Now I can decide. I want things to be more colorful. I don't want that red sign to become to ballistically colorful, so maybe I bring the overall color down, see the red signs getting less red and then bring up vibrance that they bring up the mellow colors. Something like that. If you want to see before and after, remember, there's an icon with lower right. If I click on it, there's before everything zeroed out. Now click on it again. There's after before after, All right, let's work out some other images. I think I have two versions of this picture in The reason for it is I just want to show you there's a limit to what you can dio when you have a raw file. A raw file contains a lot more information than a J. Peg A J Peg file. First off can only contain brightness levels. That means between black and white in between. There's 256. He can't have more, and that's why JPEG files are almost always small. Raw files, on the other hand, can have thousands upon thousands of brightness levels, and it makes it so you can get away with more radical brightening and darkening, and the other thing about it is if there's an area that looks like it's solid white in a picture. You can probably get some details show up in there if it's a raw file. If it's J. Peg filing, it truly looks white. There's probably no way to bring that back. If you try to darken it, it'll just look like a solid shade of gray. But there's a limit where if an area looked solid white, there's only so much you could bring back in. This is one instance of that. Do you see this area down here where it looks like this is kind of blown out? There is not much detail. Well, I already have my highlights turned all the way down. If I double clicked, you'd see this is what it looked like originally. Well, if the bright area is to brighter, bring highlights down. I've maxed it out. So remember, there's that trick, which was go to exposure and moving the same direction and notice it doesn't matter how far removed exposure. I don't see the texture and detail that should be there if I was really in that scene, because this image is where the exposure was simply too bright. So there is a limit, But let's go to a different version of the picture. Here's another one where the original photograph was taken. Just the littlest bit darker in this still looks overly bright. Let's see if we can get that detail, show up or bring down my highlights because I want the bright areas to get darker there. I can see it easily cool. I like that ground now, but the rest of the picture needs something. Well, I could say overall, that it's kind of dark, so if its overall, I might need to bring my exposure up. But since exposure controls everything, that's also gonna mess up that bright portion of the image, so I might need to bring it down even further. Then the dark area, the area inside and up here. I think that that is too dark, and it's since it's only the dark area I'm thinking about there. I'm gonna bring up this slider called Shadows and bring that up. Then, if I want, I can control how big of a difference is there between bright and dark stuff that's contrast and possibly bring it down. But I'll bring it up and down and see which one, I think looks better. Maybe about there. Then I could make detailed pop out with clarity if I want to bring it up a little, and I could decide what to do with the colors. So I want mellow colors to be mellower, so this brown dirt becomes less colorful, doesn't compete with the color of the car, or do I wanted to become more prominent by bringing it up? I think I'm gonna bring my virus down, and then overall color would be saturation. We haven't adjusted white balance. You don't have to do it in every picture, but you might as well try. See what happens if I make this bluer or yellow er. And where in between, is it the most balanced in natural? Now here I'm trusting my screen, and I hope it's calibrate If it's not, then what I see on screen might not be what's really in the file. So it's important you have a calibrated screen or what's called a profiled screen. To really trust that, And if I were to happen and noticed something that really would be gray, I could have used the white bounce eyedropper. But let's see what we did. I'm gonna hit this button in the lower right, right down in this area. There's the original. Looks pretty unusable to me, and there's my end results so far.