Lessons

Lesson Info

Retouch Workflow Part 1

We talked about working with individual catalogs and we talked about setting up a, um a template catalogue so that all of your connection points that you would develop over time or inside that catalogue and then we can utilize those in any catalog we haven't. So I just wanted teo remind you of that because when we work today and right now we're actually going into the fun part of developing I know that the last two segments have been very, you know, moved files here and moved files there and stuff like that sometimes that's not a fun tow listen to but it's still important that you understand that portability of catalogs issue I think it's very important that you understand the ability to send those catalogs out to either someone like she got at it or to an assistant or even just you know, on your own so I think those are important discussions have but now we get to do a little bit more fun stuff, but as we're in this catalog I want you to recognize is you're looking at this catalog tha...

t we're working on I want you to recognize that all of the elements that we set up during that that template are inside of this catalog already ready to go even though this is a larger working catalog, I still have all the same connection points available all right um so uh the the first thing I wanted to do was I promise that it's just them before afters. And so we'll do the before after and then well dovetail into how they were done. And then we'll start playing with some travel photography and do some interesting things there. So here on our screen is the first shot that I wanted to show the before after, too, because I really, really like this shot. I thought, this is an excellent shot. Now the original shot looks like this that's the original shot. So this is out of camera shot as normal. No, no post processing done whatsoever to it. And then this is what happens. This is what, uh, shootout at it does to it toe just to normalize it and make it perfect, which it looks great. And I can just send it to the client. And then, of course, it's got my I rotated it. And then this is what I did to it because I thought it deserved a little extra because I thought it was such a good porch. I love the dress, and she she actually manufactured most of this stuff. So, like, this dress is really a lot to do with her design, like she designed all the strap things that are going around. And she made the cloak and it's all this stuff is really her andi I just I just loved it I loved all the but I thought it it really deserved to be a black and white I like the colors I love the colors but I really thought that once I made it black and white then everything would just meshed together really nicely all the textures and stuff like that so this is what I did to it. Now I want youto notice some differences about this shot versus that shot do you notice any differences of light? All right the light is on and the light is spilling on the e I mean that's that's pretty does it look like the light is actually hitting the wall on? Does it look like the light is hitting her hair? Watch this watch the hair the hair lights up ok, so that is I just hate alight when it's not on if the light's not on it feels like something's wrong but this is not a photoshopped image. This is all done in light room so we're not doing anything extra outside of lighter everything's done inside of lighter so when we get to our landscape r I mean our travel photography stuff I actually have a couple shots where we can we can play with this kind of stuff so we can turn some lights on and stuff like that. But you also noticed that I went through and I did a little bit of bright ning on the window sills so that I had those because I really wanted the white here of the window to mimic the white of her dress, to mimic the white of this square here to mimic the white of the all of that stuff was in my head was watching us, and I was thinking, I need all of that stuff toe work together, so they call it to each other, but I definitely needed the light on because otherwise what's the light for, um so anyway, that's that's one of my before afters here's, another before after. So this is the original shot and remember, I was talking about this fire hydrant, I wanted to move them over, but once you move them over, there would be too much separation between them in the car. And if I spun around the car over here, then I kind of lose the road coming into the shop because I wanted that I wanted a leading path into the car, and so I couldn't have that if I moved over here, the path would be going that wins that towards camera, and so I couldn't really make any adjustments to it to pull them over, so instead I just removed it and that was all done in light room as well, and so you'll notice that I've brighten up the car, brighten them up, but they are based in so if you want to go into the developed here, you can see that it's based on a lot of little pins, so here's the radial filter on dh that's there there's the radio filter, and then if you go to the brush, then you've got little brush settings there say that that's frightening them up, and this one is darkening areas around them, so the brushes and the radios are what? And then there's also like this. So you got a grady in't coming down here and you've got to grade ian's coming up here to darken the road a little bit, so that's, the stuff that's being done to it, and this is one of the ones that ill provide on lines so that people can take a look at it and kind of dissect what's going on, but there's a lot of stuff going on inside of the split toning that's, creating the blueness here, there's a lot of stuff going on inside of the tone curve, so I did a lot of tone curve work there s oh, it's, an interesting photo to investigate coming from that, but in the end, you know, when we're out in we're out collecting data is really what we're doing with photographing and so what we have to do is look for how can I collect this data in a way that makes it most available to me? And so I have a you can see there's a little flash on the grass here see that bright area there that's the flash that's giving us some kind of a rim here so that she doesn't fade into the background is giving me an edge light on her so that then when I know that I'm going to do this dark stuff she kind of pops out of that of that darkness but I saw this scene and we literally had this guy back up into this area because this is a parking lot back back there because I wanted him on like an old you know, snowy road that's what we wanted and so I knew that when I was shooting this we're gonna have a black and white I didn't at the time know that it would be a blue tone but the blue tone kind of helped to make it a little bit more moody I think and make it feel colder although here we were doing all black and white so we just left it is black and white, it works out well there too, but eh? So those are the things I was thinking of as I was working on as I was shooting the shot I was thinking okay, I want this to be really moody we want this to feel like it's this dark and you know old road that their coming up and notice that we burn out the the bottom here so that we can't see the gravel see how the gravel has like ending point there don't want that's distracting to the mood of the photograph so we get rid of it by doing some burnings and now it just it's like the just some snow paths and stuff like that so um so that's that's the idea behind what we're thinking here's another one this is the before I love the shot absolutely adore this shot and this is just a shot it's just one of those shots where you're shooting and you see you know something she's pickings and she's grabbing something I don't know she's looking down there and you just like I have to get that and you just and you just hope that you get enough of the data in you know and so you turn here and I was particularly interested in all these folds in the dress I love the folds across here her chest and then this stuff here so beautiful and then those come I mean everything about this the light coming across their head and just kind of raking across everything about it is beautiful but obviously it's a little dark and so this is the final shot just absolutely I mean I I adore this shot and then I have another shot closer up that's just literally this area it's her chest it's this so it's all texture so I shot a wider one and then I started going in to see that because it's this relationship with the hand holding the dress and the bodice and all of that stuff is just so texture and movement and love it and then this is the shot that I really was I was telling you about that I really love so that's the original obviously you know we're trying to get so this shot has to be shot dark I could flash it but flashing it would change the way it looks I wouldn't if he flashed it you wouldn't have this like raking in across her face you wouldn't you know it would it would equalize it way too much and so I like the moodiness of it the simplicity of it but I want to keep a little bit of texture here I don't mind if it blows out too much do you want to see something in those and so you you want to see a little bit of detail in the drapes so it doesn't look like just this big open window because the drapes I think or part of the shot and so when you're shooting this is where I tell you I shoot dark a shoot dark because I'm collecting data I'm not worried about my exposure looking perfect on the back of my camera because I'm not that's not where I'm showing people pictures I'm showing people pictures after they've gone to the process of post production and so I like and I'm not trying to compare myself but like ansel adams when he shoots the shot he's not worried about the perfect looking negative he's worried about the perfect print and so he shoots the negative toe where it looks different than a perfect negative he might under expose it he might overexpose it he might under develop it in order to have a negative that prince perfectly because the final thing the print is the important thing exposure's not you don't need to be able to show a client on the back your camera how amazing your shot is you need to be able to collect the data that has all of the shadows and all of the highlights so that then when you come into post you can utilize all of that and that's what we see here so I've got all of my shadows but I've exposed dark enough that I am able to keep my shadows so I've got all the colors in here but I also have the bulk of the highlights I have the data in highlights to use that way when I do this I have it all and so that is I'll provide that one too, because I think it's a valuable instructive one but it's, I just think that this is such a fantastic moment, you know, mom, grandmother her they're all working on the stress trying to make it work and I think for her too, because it was such a moment where they were they were working together to try and make this happen we're a little behind schedule even too, so they're kind of like in the hurry, hurry, hurry, we've got to get this working, but the thing wasn't and then we don't have the right, you know? And and so they're working on it, but there it was just I just love this moment, and by the way, I like that I wanted to take her home with me, so she was such a cute, fun grandma. And so I I, uh, all my grand parents died when I was younger, and so I kind of adopt grandparent's as I walk around, you know, as I go from place to place, I find grand parents and I kind of adopt him is mine, and I didn't know her very much and I didn't get to talk to her too much, but she's still cute, I want to take her home and then doctor is mine, so um anyway s o and then the same thing happens once once you this is the other one that struck me and I was just super in love with this shot and so I did the same thing to that shot and and the point is that when you're working on shots um when you're providing stuff to a client you need to provide the same kind of treatment throughout so that they're not looking at too many choices like if I provided this one in black and white and then this one with this kind of treatment then they're looking at in there thinking, oh well, you know, maybe I should have the black and white treatment on the one that you did color and color treatment on the way to black and white and it just becomes a conf fusion of client and it clearly you know, it clearly shows that you was a photographer don't no what you actually want to do with the images and so I think that it's your job to make those decisions and then live by them and stick to them so that when a client comes back and says yes but we really want it to be this it's time to hold the line and say no you don't you hired me for vision and this is the vision and I believe in what I've done so this is the thing you you're going to take it isthe and it may it may sound very egotistical, but its is your work and it's the vision that you were hired to do. So you need to hold the line and do it, and I believe in it. Now, if if I didn't believe in this moment, I didn't believe in the crop and I didn't believe in the coloring, then I could let it go anywhere, but that means I don't believe in what I'm doing and so it's really important to believe in what you're doing and hold the line on it. So in this one, particularly a z zoom in its is shot with highest, so anyway and so adding a little bit of grain to it helps too create more of that mood on. As I said, there was these air, very yellow cabinets, which are kind of like old school, like nineteen, eighty or seventy type, you know, and so it's like yeah, holds that puts me back when I was born, they made these cabinets, and so they were very yellow. So when you look at him here, they're very orange ish, you know? They're not they're not a deep brownwood or they're not so it's just not an absolutely beautiful wood. And so I wanted to work with the photograph and if I try to make the wood a different color than she's going to be their own culture and so by by increasing the warmth of the entire shot you're able to then equalized to and create the warmth and now the warmth works with it because it almost feels like the shot was taken back when the cabinets were you know that style and so now it all works together because it's all the same as opposed to combating it here's a new bride with an old style you know cabinetry because I really did want I was very interested in all the books back there and so the cabinetry and the bookshelves are as much a player in the photograph is the girl in my mind as I'm shooting they are part of the shot there as is important because she loves books so much yeah can you just the the way that this is both yellow but also so creamy and her skin looks so beautiful but it's still warm but not not always look like she's joking how did you notice this? So I'm bringing this big okay so obviously we bring up the exposure to bring the brightness in back into the print right? But as you bring up the exposure that the window's going to start blowing out and so are the highlights on our skin and so I find myself a lot of the times and you remember when we made our camera default yesterday we talked about what I would do to almost every image and in this case noticed that the shadows are up, but look at the highlights, the highlights of downnegative twenty six and the whites are down negative twenty one that milky nissen that creaminess, a lot of it comes from the highlights and the whites being pulled down. I'm collecting back the highlights, I'm exposing the whole image upwards, and then I'm grabbing those highlights and dragging him back down so that they stay in closer relationship. So what you're seeing is lack of contrast is what creates that milky nous? And so I'm bringing those highlights down the other thing and notice, though, even those that christmas that you still see that's the clarity. So what you're doing is you're taking the highlights, which are up here, and you're pulling them down. You're taking this shadows, which are down here and you're pulling them up, but then you're taking the mid tone and you're spreading it apart with the clarity, because clarity is just clarity is basically mid tone contrast, so you're taking the middle of that shot, so remember, you took the highlights down you took the shadows up, and now you've got this section here that would be kind of blah and you're spreading it apart so that the mid tone contrast is much more severe I mean that's plus eighteen that's a decent amount of clarity and you're spreading apart and that's what's creating the christmas and the contrast in the image is just that mid tone because now all I'm doing is adding contrast in the mid tone if I were to add general contrast here noticed that the general contrast is at one that's not a lot of contrast so the mid tone are the full contrast would spread black and white apart and then suddenly you would get a very moody shot and then you all the sudden the highlights would start blown out on the shadows would start going under and then it becomes it's not milky as you say it's very contrast is very so the milky nous comes from squeezing all of this the highlights and shadows together and then spreading apart the midterms and then of course there's a little bit of extra work here inside the tone curve you see that that tone curve is negating all black you can't get black out of that blacks gone and then if you go to the reds, see how the reds air a little bit curved, the greens are curved and the blues are curved so there's a lot of funky little work inside of there which all it's all part of pre setting it I mean, you can take this right here this tone curve watch this. I'm gonna this tone curve right here I'm going to come over here and I'm going to create a preset and I'm going to call this number five um and we're gonna call it a, uh in in honor of you milky um milky warm film something like that I don't work milky warm film um and I'm a czech none and then the things that are critical to the way this looks are number one, I've got some grain in there. The second thing is that I've got the tone curve in there, the clarity is important to it um now I don't as a matter of course put any tone or exposure curves in it because those air anything to do with basic tones exposures contrast highlights is unique teach image so I'm not going to add this so if you use this because it's going to be on the course page, if you use this, it is not going to give you exactly this because you have to go in and play with your highlights in your shadows find the right spot, but it's going to give you all the underlying parts of it and then you just have to go in and tweak your final exposure to be exactly what you want it to be, okay right because you were not going to allow for this to go in because it could ruin your shot too. So I'm leaving this stuff out here so grain the process version is going to come up tone curve clarity andi let's see if there's anything else that I did that's important hold on before I create this let me yeah that's about it I brought the saturation down I think that's important to to, um so let's go in here uh oh five milky warm film and so we have split tone grain and saturation went down a little bit just to kind of keep it from getting too because orange is dangerous when it gets you know, when you go to saturated in orange it looks ugly so you got to kind of pull it back and so we're going to create that preset and so now you'll if you use that it'll get you in the ballpark, it'll get you close. So if I take this image here and I just bring up the exposure so you can see the shot that's what it will look like just with no changes whatsoever and then if I come over and add that preset, which where is it uh where's all my creative live ones they're they're milky warm film now that gets you right in the ball park but then if you come in and grab the highlights and pull them down on the and the whites and pull them down and then you take the shadow up a little bit on dh, then you know you're going to get more in the ballpark, okay? So anyway that's in there now so now there's five okay? And I'll I'm going to include this one here a cz part of that so just so that people can play around with see what we did in it. Um okay, so that's I think that's enough with the before after is although this is the original of that one and then here's the after which I think is hilarious I love it but there is actually something that I did on this one if you go to this did I do it when they painted in there it is it's pain look at that see that right there that point right there is just clarity because I wanted the fur to really stand out I wanted because of the dog didn't stand out enough and so I painted clarity and so that the fur was like, uh you know, over the top for because it just looks so he doesn't like mad he's just like I think it's the funniest picture ever did your would you mind talking a little bit about your cropping workflow yeah, so across we're asking a little bit about it cropping is I'm gonna include some too I think so um blue so it is blue so cropping is something that's very unique to each image but if I'm in a situation where have a siri's of images that need to be cropped like, say, a portrait or something like that or there was that siri's so here when we were first looking at this siri's let me go to the scott wedding here in this siri's there's a whole set of images that needed to be squared up and so the first thing to do is just highlight the siri's of images that need to be squared up and then in the developed module inside of the linds correction I'll just hit that auto level and just have it level a mall but if there's a crop necessary and then once you have it level a mall then you can go in and tweak it if it needs a little help but generally it's pretty good at getting it but then once I needed crops so let's just say I wanted to these three all needed to be cropped I could go into my crop and I can choose let's say we want an eight by ten and then I'm going to I'm on auto sync right now and then I would you know, fashion this is a horrible eight by ten it's totally wrong you say you go here you crop off the light and if you go here you cross over hand so it's not right for an eight by ten so just know that I think that's a horrible idea but I'm just doing it to show you so then I cropped this and all of these get cropped they're already cropped and now it's just a matter of clicking on the frame of the next one and now I can just move this one in relationship to where it ought to be and maybe, you know, straighten it and then command arrow we'll take you to the next image so that you don't have to get rid of the crop because if you hit the arrows with the crop tool open, it'll move the crop around but if you get command arrow, it'll take you to the next image and so all you have to do is have your hands on command an arrow and your mouse and then you just kind of cycle through your images you put this here and then you command arrow to the next image and do this and then command arrow to the next image and then do that that's the best cropping workflow that there is to get through a bunch of images especially when you're doing like you know you've got a siri's of, you know, vips snapshots that you're taking a hundred people at a event or something like that it's just a matter of crop crop crop the same thing happens when you're doing landscape photography or something like that and you've done all your selections and you've got what you want but you're like all of these need to be cropped to some degree and I'm into all of them is a landscape like a sixteen by nine shot or something so do the crop and then just go through each one and tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet thank you khun cropping so can cropping be sync technically yes cropping cropping is always sink an auto sync cropping ok but then you can also if you turn off the auto sync and you just hit sync dot dot the crop is right in here and in the crop you have two options you have straightened angle and aspect ratio so you khun khun say do you want to just do the crop do you want to dio as a straight angle or do you want to do just the aspect ratio so you have the ability to choose what aspect of the crop you're interested in so you could just have it say I only want the crop as an aspect ratio but not necessarily straightening the angle that way when you crop it it crops but it doesn't like you know straighten and but if you put on the straight pangle then suddenly it's goingto also you know take the angle that you've cropped it out as well. Cool on dh, then can that can cropping be added to a preset yes, anything that's. So anything that's available in this little box can be added to a preset grill. If I go here and create a preset away hold on, no crops can, okay, no problem that's. Why I wanted to know your crops can't ok, we know it stops the process version calibration. So when you go here, the process version calibration, this get it gets stopped here. Sorry, I can't be. Although yes again. It can't be intimate in the left side, but over on the right hand side there is a presence here so you can like sixteen by nine is not doesn't ship with light room. I created that by hitting inter custom and entered in sixteen by nine and so therefore I was sixteen, my nine crop, so it is existing, but it's just not in a pre set over here, so