Lessons

Lesson Info

Local Tools

So over here, we have dehaze. This is our next effect and dehaze and grain and post crop vignetting are all post kind of effects that you can do to your image that are minor little things that you can add to your photograph. I would typically wait til your done to use these things. The dehaze slider will dehaze things. I don't know if that's maybe like, I don't know, a foreign language for dehaz-a or something. De-haz-a (audience laughing) like people say Tar-get when they wanna sound (audience laughing) like they're going somewhere. (laughing) If we go ahead and go to this image here just move dehaze just to see what it does. Dehaze is gonna, if you have fog in your image, or you have sometimes this is actually great for haze that happens in like a 300 millimeter lens. If you've got a 300 millimeter lens on, and you're standing here and you're shooting at a mountain that is, you know, a couple hundred miles away from you, there's gonna be some haze that happens in between you and that...

mountain because there's particles in the air that you don't see that your camera might actually be picking up. If you press dehaze then you move dehaze up it'll help you cut through that and add some contrast. But, what I like to do is I like to see, okay what does it doing, okay, what is dehaze actually doing? If we move it up you can see that it's actually adding a little bit of blue, it's adding some contrast adjustments, it's doing some minor tweaks to our highlights in our shadows while it does it as well. So this slider is kind of like a combination of many different things that are happening all at once. So what I would suggest, is instead of getting heavy handed with this because it's gonna bring a lot of blue color cast and a lot of blue contrast along with it, don't go straight to this, before you start doing your basic settings. That's why this is kind of a finishing setting. If you drop it down, it's gonna make things hazy. So it's not really a dehaze slider, it's a haze dehaze, dehazy haze (chuckling) I don't know. It's got a little bit of both in it, okay. So I'll just bring that back to zero. Now, grain, this will add grain to your image. It won't necessarily add noise to your image it'll try to emulate what grain looks like in your photograph. So if we move this up, you can see we got a really big version of noise. This is the size of that grain and this is how rough that grain would be. And this can help emulate something like, the film grain from an iso 1,000 analog image that you print and it can look good, especially when you look at it in conjunction with maybe a sepia tone or a black and white image. That can be the icing on the cake right there. And then the post crop vignette, this is actually pretty cool. The post crop vignette, this is where you can make vignetting decisions after the fact that kind of emulate what happens with your camera. So, I do the same thing here, look at me. I go all the way down, there we have a black kind of border around my image but now I get to decide, okay, how, how dark do I want that to be? I don't want it to be black, so I take this down a little bit, or up I should say. Where do I want the mid-point to start in the image? How round do I want it to be? And do I want it to feather? And maybe I'll take that mid-point back a little bit here and then highlights, this is a really important slider. The highlights in this image were, are turning into what's like, tone compression. It's like bad HDR, so this highlight slider is really great because if you move it up, it will start protecting highlight areas from a vignette. Let me go ahead and make this really dark so you can see. See how it tapers that effect just on the highlights? Makes those highlights just a little bit more clean. Alright, so any time you're doing any of these, any of these vignettes, I always suggest with a vignette, always, always, always, use some form of protection for your highlights because it's going to ensure that you don't get tone compression in those highlight areas. Camera calibration, this is kind of advanced. I wouldn't, the only time I actually step into this realm is when I'm doing things with IR photography. I set up custom profiles from my IR images and that's the only time I really come into here so I wouldn't really concern yourself too much with what's happening over here with your camera calibration. And then, we have presets and snap shots and we'll talk about those towards the end. The other things that I wanna talk about are gonna be your local tools now. So, later on in this course we're gonna be talking about spot removal in Adobe Camera Raw. I'm gonna kind of glance over that one a little bit here. But spot removal is just, it's where you can fix minor little blemishes and stuff right here in Adobe Camera Raw, but there's a really great time and a place for that in the course, so I'm not gonna talk about here. We also talk about the transform tool during our transform section in the course. So I'm just gonna glance over that one here as well. The one that really is important here are the two that are really important here are the crop tool and the straighten tool. Again, we're gonna talk about cropping here too and we're gonna incorporate Adobe Camera Raw in that. But with the straighten tool, this tool you can click on it and it will globally edit your image. So if we move this over here and get more of a straightened edge on our photograph it's gonna have my old crop settings in there too so let's just make that normal. And if I just click somewhere and drag across the image to straighten it, it'll give me a crop preview. And if I commit to that and press enter, that's the image that I'm gonna get. Again, we talk about straightening a lot in this course. We also talk about cropping, so I'm not really gonna touch too much on those. The white balance tool, we already talked about because we talked about that when we talked about making our Milky Way photo have a good white balance to it. So, if we come down to, and all of these D and G files that you're seeing here, these are downloadable so don't feel any stress. Like, "I don't have a Milky Way photo." Well now you do. If you've never shot the Milky Way before, now you can play with it. It's a lot of fun. The local tools that I really wanna talk about here though are gonna be these three right here. The adjustment brush, the graduated filter, and the radial filter and these three are your primary local tools because tools allow you to make an adjustment to the image and make a mask for it so that you only select certain areas. What I want you to come to the correlation here, though, is look at this, look at any one of these, they all look the exact same, right. But they all do something different. And then look at our basic settings. It's essentially giving you the basic settings plus some noise reduction, plus dehaze, plus clarity, plus saturation all in a brush. So if we look at our adjustment brush and we have these things down here called masks. I'm gonna turn the mask on. By default, Adobe Camera Raw has your mask set to I believe white, it's set to white with the opacity down to here. I don't really like that so I'm gonna give you a real pro tip here, cause some people call me a pro. (chuckling) Take your opacity, bring that all the way up, and change it to magenta and why I tell you to take the opacity all the way up and change it to magenta is that if you're working with a Wacom tablet that's pressure sensitive, as you're painting down there, it's gonna be a pressure sensitive mask. If that opacity on that mask is set down to zero, I'm not gonna be able to see that pressure sensitivity, but with it set to 100% as I paint on here, you can start to see it build up that area. And we have the mask selected. Now there's a tool in here called auto mask. And auto mask, what auto mask is gonna do is as you paint on here it's going to automatically look at the pixels that you initially told it to select and try not to select anything too far outside of that within, basically the center of your brush right here, being it's primary focus point. So, if I start outside of this black area and I click and I drag around, it's gonna be smart enough to say okay, you want pixels that look like this white pixel that you started with. So it's gonna start taking in some of those highlight areas on the windows and other places and that's fine, I'll just paint around like that. What this is allowing me to do, is it's allowing me to separate my image and I know that it's separated, it's allowing me to separate the photograph from this portion of the photo to this portion of the photo. And I know that because that area that's magenta is the area that I'm going to affect. So if I turn this mask off and I now scroll up, you can see all the settings that were in place here that we applied to our image. If we were to go ahead and drop these, this setting down, I'm starting to add some blue. This, it was a rainy day, it was not beautiful at all. But we can start making this appear like it was maybe more of a, a nice day rather than the rainy day that it was. Bring the exposure up, it's gonna make that brighter and adjust that back area. Bring it down, and but see, here's what I want you to look at here. Look at this photo before. Does it look like there was any clouds there? No, but does that information existed in this image. And we can see that especially when we start separating those things out so, where is this, where does something like this brush tool come in handy? Well, it comes in handy if you're over here in your basic settings and you're pushing and pulling your image and with your exposure slider to see how far that raw file can go and you see that there's data up here, but as soon as you start to decrease that exposure this all starts to get dark. Well now you say, okay if this is getting dark and this is, this is getting nice, maybe I just need to separate those things. So Camera Raw allows you to do that right inside here. Where is my brush, where'd it go? I left it there and it was just there. (laughing) I'm just gonna go ahead and turn that mask on to see if it's available, where'd it go? Oh I turned my previews off, okay there we go. So make sure that, you know, you don't turn your previews off and step away from you computer or you're gonna drive yourself insane. (laughing) Happens when you're live. So, we're gonna go ahead and just make this a little bit less on the blues up there. And notice I'm moving this and nothing's happening. I don't actually have that pen selected. So that pin is gray, it wants me to make a new pin somewhere else. If I click on it and turns red. It's now telling me that that's the area I'm working on. So if I increase the exposure there, maybe increase the in contrast, drop the highlights a little bit. Look at how much clouds are there, that's crazy. My sky looks a little fake now. But, it's okay, we can bump that up. And again, all your sliders exist in here that exist in our basic settings. So you have access to your white points, your black points, your highlights, your shadows, you're gonna have clarity, and you have dehaze right here. So dehaze was selected. What's dehaze doing there? It's allowing me to see more of those those cloud areas and separate the blue from those, the actual white areas in the image. Bring that down, that looks good. Now how does that differ from something like the graduated filter. Well, the adjustment brush allows me to paint in an area that I want to bring out. The graduated filter is the exact same thing but the only real difference here is it gives me a wash, so think of the adjustment brush another great analogy, kind of a little bit on the fly, (snapping) (audience chuckling) The adjustment brush is like you doing the trim as you're painting a house and the graduated filter is you taking the roller and just rolling the house, okay. Ah, and the radial filter is like you taking a paint sprayer (audience chuckling). Dude, okay. So the graduated filter, I'm just gonna grab from the bottom and pull up. Whatever settings you have here are going to come through with that filter. So if I start right here, all of these settings are gonna come through with that graduated filter. If I just do something like this, like just just press the plus sign on the exposure, it's gonna reset everything to just wash more exposure. So, I'll click from like right here and drag up. And you'll notice that it's kind of like making like a window wash type of effect. Bring it up to here. If I press and hold shift, it'll maintain an angle rather than allowing me to free form and move all over the place cause I'll never make a straight line. If I press and hold shift, it's a nice straight line. If I turn my mask on, we can see the transition that's happening here. The wider this spread it, the bigger the transition is. If I bring this spread down, oops. If I bring this spread down, you can see how the transition is really light, it's really small. So I'm gonna bring this, transition up pretty high. To about right here. And then, turn that mask off. Now, there is no auto-mask feature here is there? Because it's washing that entire thing. It's masking whatever you tell it to mask. So we'll go ahead and just do something crazy here. Let's just bump up that, contrast, make this a little bit brighter in the foreground there. And then brighten up, well, darken down those shadows a little bit. Add a little bit of blue there okay. Now, what you'll notice is that, it's washing into the background right, and that background is as a lighter color. Well, there's a really cool feature in here that's like it's kind of like luminosity masking meets, meets Adobe Camera Raw and it's called a range mask. So let's turn that mask back on so we can see what's happening here. Click on a range mask and click on luminesce. What this'll allow me to do is it'll allow me to block out certain areas in that mask from being effected. It's kind of like, kind of like blend diff and we'll talk about blend diff when we get into Photoshop. If I come over to the right hand side and move this up, all the black areas are gonna be, start get protected from that mask wash that I brought up. Well I want the sky to get protected from there cause I've already separated that with my adjustment brush. So if I bring this luminesce down here it starts to protect those highlight areas. Specifically in the background. Now it is also going to protect some of the areas that are inside the foreground area too and that's where you have the smoothness slider. The smoothness will adjust how, how smooth that mask is from one section to the other. This is a very high-contrast mask. Meaning if you were to look at this in something like Photo Shop it would be this would be the black area and this would be the white area or something like that or maybe vice versa. I'm trying to think on the fly. Just that, smooth this up, turn that mask off and now that, that graduated filter is just washing that up. So notice how, even in this image, I didn't even go to my basic settings first. I just jumped over here and I started having fun with my brush and with the graduated filter. Now we also have another filter here called the radial filter, which is kind of like a little bit of both. It allows you to apply a spot but that spot is going to be a flood. So if we go like this, press and hold shift, it's gonna maintain a circle and we can put that right behind this area here and it's gonna take on whatever settings we had in our settings here. And see how it's like a, it's a spot. If we turn the mask on to see that spot that's the spot that we get. Down here we have different settings. Instead of this being a auto mask, the settings that get replaced there are either an outside or an inside. So you can make your own kind of cool little custom vignettes too that happen here to by just making the whole area a little bit darker and narrowing the focus down on something or if we reverse that, we can make that area right there a little bit brighter. And we still have access to our range masks. Turn that mask on, go to the luminesce mask and maybe make some of those dark areas not get so bright cause the dark area we want to protect, we just want those mid tones and those highlights to come out and now look at the difference. So, if we go back to our basic settings, and press P for preview, there's the before and the after. That's even before I've even gone into my basic settings and I still have those basic settings that I can edit my image with. So if I bump this up or bring this down, that's gonna be the overall of the entire image. So it's gonna, it's happening basically underneath the graduated filter and the radial filter. So if you'll think about this in terms of layers, this would be, your basic settings would be your bottom layer, then you've got your brushes, then you've got your gradients, then you've got your radial filters and this is happening underneath. So whatever happens underneath is gonna be changing how everything moves with our brushes. So much so that if we were to move this exposure up and then pop on over to our graduated filter check out our mask, this right here. It should change as well. So we hop over to our basic settings, drop this down, back over here, the area that it's selecting is a little bit different in that mask. What it's protecting is a little bit different in that mask because the luminesce values that are underneath that luminesce data have been altered by what you've done over in your basic settings. So they all work hand in hand, all simultaneously. It's all kind of happening kind of all at the same time. So, before we discontinue this, I do wanna talk about one more thing and that's gonna be snapshots and presets and the difference between a snapshot and a preset. A snapshot, what a snapshot does is, right now, I like the way this looks. So I'm gonna go over here to this side right here. You see this little, looks like a bunch of little images, right there? If I click on this, because I like the way this image looks, I can go ahead and call this You Done Good. (audience laughing) Now, if I go over to something like my adjustment brush and I delete that and I go to my graduated filter and I delete that. And I go to my radial filter and I delete that and I start fresh right from the beginning, and I start manipulating my sliders from the beginning, I can take I can look at what my image would look like if I took a different path to begin with. And then, if I, if I, let's just for grins just go ahead and go over to snapshots and make another one here that says You Done Alright. Now if I click on You Done Good, we see the good version. If I click on You Done Alright, we get the other version. Now these save themselves into the XMP sidecar file. So you always have access to them if you close it down and reopen it, all of those snapshots will be available to you. So it's a good way to take a little detour. You're like, I love what I've done here. This is awesome, let me go ahead and make a snapshot of it. And then we reset this and see what I can do with it. Maybe you make different versions. You make a black and white version, you make a color version. Now that does differ from something like a preset. Let's for instance go over to our noise reduction settings that we did over here. This is a perfect way to tie all of this together. And I just, yeah, cool. We'll go to presets and if I go and I make a new page here, I wanna make a preset specifically for the noise reduction and nothing else. Well, if I click on this little page icon here to add a new preset, it's gonna pop up and say okay, what do you want to make this preset out of? And it's got tick boxes next to it. So as I make this preset I can say, you know, I only wanted this to be a noise reduction and sharpening preset. So the only boxes I wanna have checked are gonna be these ones right here. All the other ones I wanna have unchecked. So what I'll do is I'll go ahead and press ALT or option and click on the sharpening and that's gonna uncheck everything else. Then I can check luminesce and noise reduction and color noise reduction and press okay. Let me name it first, let me call this noise and sharp. So now if I click on this image, which is definitely gonna need some noise reduction and sharpening also. If I apply this preset to it, it's going to add all the noise reduction and sharpening settings that I had before from the Milky Way image onto to this photograph. If I go over to that noise, you can see all those noise reduction settings there. There's the before, there's the after. So if you got some really good noise reduction settings that you really like, just save those areas. And this is, what I would suggest is if you do anything with noise reduction or you do anything with effects, like you do a custom effect, like this one. Perfect example, this split tone. If I come here and make a new preset for this. I don't want to include the white balance, the exposure, the contrast, the highlights, because what would happen is if I use this on another image, it would take all of this stuff that I did to this photograph and apply it to the next one. So I really need to pinpoint what do I want to do with this? Well if I just want those split tone settings, I press ALT or option and I can call this Split Tone. And if I click on this photograph and then click Split Tone it's going to add the split tone settings but not alter any of the other settings. It only does what that preset is told to do, which is the split toning. How does this differ from a snapshot then? Presets exist within Adobe Camera Raw. Snapshots exist within that raw file's data or that XMP sidecar file, okay. Pretty cool, huh? So you can separate those things out a little bit. And let me just do one little thing before we break here. I wanted to show you some of my little gee whiz information about XMP sidecar files cause I said I would. If we go into, let's see, one of our, one of our raw images here. What do I have, I have a raw image in, perfect. So, look at this. This is an XMP sidecar file. This XMP sidecar file is titled the exact same thing as that raw file. Now you'll see mine has this little, like looks like molecular structure thing around it, that's because I use a program called Atom to do HTML and CSS coding. So, I've told this program to be able to look at XMP sidecar files just for you. Alright, watch this. When we double click this and open this up in Atom it's gonna tell us everything that's happening in that raw file, pretty cool huh? It's basically saying, it's telling me the focal length, it's telling me the luminesce smoothing, it's telling me the color noise reduction. And you know, this is just a gee whiz thing so the next time you're with your friends be like, oh yeah XMP sidecar files are kinda like code. (audience laughing) I'm a coder too, check this out. [Male Audience Member] I learned how to code today. (laughing) I know we covered a ton. We covered, you know, our intro to why we shoot in raw. I hope now if you do shoot jpeg and you have never attempted raw that you see this and you're like, okay there's really a reason why I need to start shooting in raw because I can push and pull that data, especially with a Milky Way image. If you try and do that with a jpeg Milky Way, forget about it, it's not gonna happen. Then we talked about setting it up. Getting those preferences set up for you. We talked about the overall interface of Adobe Camera Raw and then we did a deep dive into things that are called global and things that are called local. With those local tools being things that we make informed decisions on very specific areas. And then we went in and talked about presets versus snapshots. Snapshots exist in the XMP file. Presets exist within Camera Raw.