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Lesson Info

Retouch Workflow Part 2

So I'm going to go into some shots that I took uh so we're going to just do some travel photography so these are some things that we shot out in the middle of the countryside up in scotland and england and london and all that kind of stuff so this's one of my favorites here I love this shot so we're gonna go into the develop module and take a look at this I just love this old building and this nice little road here and we ended up shooting a shot here for for a company and we you know did a model shoot here but this was when I was scouting out so we were scouting the locations and we're looking for places so we we drove around and first day and we got this shot and I was like, ok, this is one of the places that were doing her photo shoot so there was a day of scouting and then a day of shooting and so in this case if I wanted to work on this andi we'll just do some very basic work on this so that we're not gonna do any amazing things to it we're going to just talk about styles that we ...

can put on it and so in this case I want to be fairly you know bright so that you can see it but we don't want it to look like a sunny day and so we got to keep it under control and that's where I would pull the highlights back down see how I can pull that sky back in so that it feels a little bit more moody and dark so the same thing's true with the whites and pull the whites down a little bit and then here's where that clarity comes into being by if you take the clarity down it looks like it's like a foggy day but it's to let native clarity like that is just it it's ridiculous it's too soft on dso you don't necessarily want to do that however you could bring the clarity up a little bit and then you could go to the brush and you can paint in negative clarity and so if you wanted to paint in negative clarity the best way to do that would be to come down and take the sharpness all the way down sharpness um take the clarity all the way down and then um then just pain in a change to my pen here now and so now we can paint in the areas that we don't want a lot of so now we've got kind of a little bit of ah it looks a little foggy on there but it's but the point of focus is still is still fine so doesn't look as ridiculous as it did before so I'll turn it on and off so you can see the hour but we're not doing it to the whole thing so that the texture on this doesn't look off because really that's all about that texture, that texture is really great and so then I can take this whole thing here, but then if I go to the pen and this is this is where a either a brush or a or radio filter or a radiant works really well is that especially with the brush you can come in and grab this little pin, you see where it's all been sprayed, right is I hover over it, but I can take the whole thing, I'm in turn off the I don't want to see the way I want to see the pen, but I don't want to see the overly mask and I'm going to grab it and then I can increase it or I can decrease the total effect see how the clarity and saturate sharpness are going together so I can increase it so I can see it or I can decrease it until I feel comfortable with it if I go too far it's going to go to zero and now it's back to normal and so I'm just kind of bringing it in until I feel comfortable with the way that it looks so I have a friend who in college, his professor said good are is when you go way too far and then back off a little bit so you go past the line and that's how we find focus too you know, we kind of focused like this and then we go like that we keep going past the focus and that's how we see because we think folks getting sharper sharper could get sharper note it now it's not and that's how we know where sharpness is and that's how your teenagers know where right and wrong is because they go past right and they go to wrong and then they had to back off a little bit and so it's the same thing with focus and it's the same thing with color balance that's the best way to learn temperature intent just keep going like this and you'll see wher right is if you keep passing it on the same thing is true here so you'll do in effect do a burn and then back off of it and usually backing off a quarter is about where correct is usually you spill over correct by about twenty five percent most of the time and then you just kind of backing off a little bit and that's where it is so I would also do a lot of burning and dodging and burning and dodging and light room's fantastic so and I'm going to set up presets for that so I come in here and I want to use a preset for my burning and dodging so that I don't have to keep setting up those sliders constantly and so my presets, for instance I have one called smart dodge and a smart dodge is very it's a very specific way of looking at a dodge because usually when you dodge you end up losing it gets milky and ugly just because there's no there's, no blacks and anymore you're bringing the black up and so then there's just no black in there and you need that to have that contrast and so you'll notice here then that the contrast is up that allows the black to go down and the white to go up a little bit and then the exposure is up one stop so I'm brightening it up by a stop, but I'm adding contrast which pushes black back down and then I take the highlights up a bit, but the shadows were being pushed down so that they kind of stay where they are and the mid tones and the highlights are coming up and then clarity's up just a little bit too kind of give it some more sharpness that it might be losing and so all of those things and by the way, when you go up in exposure, you also want to kind of reduce the noise that you're creating by doing that so you create a little bit of a noise filter there so that's what this is doing that's why I call it a smart dodge and this is just one of the many preset that's inside of my comprehensive preset collection and so I am going to then take this right here and I'm going to utilize it as my dodge and so what do I want to dodge here? I want to dodge this area the I want to make this a little bit brighter but notice how I rolled right over the telephone pole and it didn't affect the telephone pole? The reason it doesn't affect the telephone pole is a telephone pole is a shadow the shadow's been pushed right back down so it's easy way ike I can't take this specific dodge tool and just brighten someone's face with it and their eyes stay exactly where they were and their their eyebrows stay exactly where they were in their lips stay where they were because those are all shadows those are all the shadow portion all I'm doing is taking these nice mid tones and bringing them up the hair stays where it is and lessons blonde hair in which case you know that's fine it bring it up a little bit or I can then go to the erase tool and erase that portion out but see I can come in here and just spill right over the top of that black area there and over that fence so I don't have to be accurate I don't need and you know, lightman was nice enough to add this thing called a auto mass and you turn on the autumn ask it will intelligently look for edges and avoid going over the edge so it'll say, oh, he's working on white so as soon as we hit that post will stop working, but problem is in the transition it starts doing it starts choosing pixel by pixel, which one is going to dio and so as you zoom in, you'll see like this weird artifact that happens on the edge so it's not always a really great solution instead just use this and the shadows are being pushed right back down so then you khun you can go over the top of those black things and it just won't affect them at all on dh so now I've brighten up that wall quite a bit don't want it to be that bright, so I'm just going to take it down and up and noticed that all of my all of my sliders air moving based on together oh wait hold on it's a super hold on, let me just close this that's a the weird glitch I don't know why it's doing that so let's let's grab that pin and see if it does it now that's doing it a super weird because this that the settings you see on that are from this pin here that's an interesting glitch to report I am using my mouse now that's what I tried you know I wonder what happens if I do this one it does this one just find it wants to do that one but this one it doesn't want to do but you could take this one and kind of work on it by just sliding this back and forth and it would move all of them like this until you got the right amount or you can come in and just say I don't want it to be quite so bright and so we're just kind of see that we can just darken it until we I like it and we could add a little bit more clarity to it so that we get mohr texture out of it so those are the types of things that I would be working on to finesse this file rather than I don't need to go to photoshopped fore I can do all the burning and dodging another thing that I would want to do to this file here and I could do this with a radio is I just want that road to have a little bit more sheen to it like the light's hitting it a little bit and so I'm going to take my radio and I'm going teo do eh actually the smart this smart dodge will work but even better than that would be the same thing that I used to turn lights on I can turn the lights on but I just don't want it to be over exposed so I'm just going to bring the exposure up just a little bit just a little and I'm not going to do the shadows quite so much but see this color this color is what makes it look like an incandescent bulb so that's going to be way too much for this particular circumstance so I'm going to bring it down but I wanted to have a little warmth because if the sun was actually hitting this road there would be warmth in it if it was like breaking through a cloud and just barely kind of spilling in there it would have warmth to it and so I'm going to add a little bit of warmth to it maybe we'll put a little bit too much in it for now and see what happens and now I'm just gonna take this and go like that see that and now I'm gonna turn it like that and I'm gonna shift it down and then I'm gonna move it like that and then bring it out a little bit like that and now I'm just going teo I really want this toe have kind of ah a little bit less exposure and go and we're going feather intensely see that if I don't feather I just get that round thing we're going feather it really intensely so that you can't see that it's a circular pattern it's just coming through there and now it's just a matter of taking this saturation down so that's nothing and that's just a little bit of warmth coming in across that road and so here's the difference between that so you could do that pretty much anywhere, but it just gives you a little bit of a feel like that's you know, somehow the light is spilling, but because it's a circular thing it's kind of fading off and becoming nothing in the little point because basically all you're getting out you could do the same thing by brushing it but it's pretty easy, you know those radio patterns are pretty pretty simple and they don't they don't call this much attention to themselves all the time so it's pretty easy to do something like that s so that's something that I might do to a photograph like this on dh then after that, you might go in and play around with your tone curve a lot of times the best tone curves or just done here in the shadows darks and highlights that's a very powerful tool but I I I I always have a siri's of grains in a siri's of different types of noise reduction and then also contrast curves so if I want this to be really contrast ng I could go like that and it gives me a and it's just a set contrast curve but it gives I know that that's going to be really cool right off the bat or if I wanted to be more of a medium contrast curve or I could go to more of a flat curve and then it gives it more of a soft feel to it. So any questions out there weii did have a question um d creative one and wanted to know is are there ways to duplicate a point setting instead of adding another one and entering the settings? Yeah, well it's a appoints setting point a point it's a pin I think opinions okay let's call it a pin it is a pen. Yeah that's that's the best thing? Yes. So if I'm doing radials there's a radio right there if I click on it aiken right? Click it and I can duplicate it or delete it or I can reset the whole filter but I can duplicate it and see how got twice is bright then I just the one that's lit now is on the top of the one that's not and so I grab this and I move it and see how there's a pin underneath it and I can move this one over to here and you know put it at the top at wherever yeah so you could hear we'll put it on this transformer right here and we'll go down like this and then we'll go like that and we'll add a little bit more temperature to it and we'll bring this up a bit so it looks like the sun is coming behind that yeah you know then we could just move it so this becomes a flare so here let's do it right over here because that's where the sun would be coming from so let's move it to right about there and then we'll hit shift while we pull on this and it will make all of them expand of it do that and then we'll kind of go like that and then we'll take the exposure down just a little bit they're cool so denham can you shift select multiple pins and edit them oh like click on this one and then go over here and in command click this one yeah our ship this is that's the way they're always independent yeah they're independent thanks but that you work with nick software don't you? I do so you can make pins and nick software where you're and they don't what do they call them? They called I don't know I've just started so in nick's software they have the same ability to create these circular places and it and it reads based on the patterns and stuff that you're seeing in the photograph and then you can link them all together and then they can all be controlled together but that's that's definitely a nick thing cool right room it's they're all independent. Thank you, but there's a great way to create little flares and I could just move this flare around until I feel like it. You know, I like that that really feels like that sun's coming through and there's the reason for this light down here. Okay, so we yes, we gotta add that one. We'll send that one out. Okay, so let's go to another shot where I'm going to show you here this one. So this is I'm gonna create a virtual copy of this one. So if you look at this copy here, I'm going to reset it. So let's, go to develop and reset this image. So this is going to take it back to its original camera default the way it was shot. So if you're ready for this watch closely be watching the actual screen and reset that's the original image. Okay, so here's, the first image here is the original image, and so this is created in that same way where I'm going in and I'm creating brush points and you can see that there's three brush points in here and then there's two along the mountainside if I hover over him you can see one of those is spilling light all the way on here I'll turn this on so you can just see it um they're so this one here is spilling light here but it's also spilling light up here because the light would reach up to the castle itself and so it's kind of spills but noticed I'm going around the undulations of the mountainside then this one here is just doing kind of a bright spot right here so it's adding to this one and it's just giving me more of that this is where the general light would be falling so it's kind of a little bit more centralized eso those to help to mimic that light coming out onto the out onto the grass itself so you always have to think of when you're turning lights on when you're trying to add lighting effects yeah, you want to think of the light source itself and then what is the effect of the light source? So this is all effect of the light source right here, but if you look at the shot there's also look look at the sky here so the sky is normal there and when I click on it to see how the sky has brightened up because that would be the light atmospheric light pollution from the light you're looking through light, and so it would tend to make the light look, the sky look brighter behind it. And so that is one of these pins there, it's that one? So what I've done is I've brightened up the sky with that pin emanating downward and outward from the light, and then we got a zoom in on this one so we can really look at it. And then we've got another one here, another pin that's just dealing with housing itself. So its goal is to make something that's dark look light, so we're just we're basically taking that pane of glass and trying to make it look glowing white, because that's, what would happen on dh then? The other one that we have here is for the central part that's, that that's where the light bulb is, because the light bulb would always be hotter than the rest of the housing. So there's, always a hot spot, and then there's, the housing is filled with light, and then it spills like out, and then there's an effect of the light on the ground. And so you could do all of that simply by making pins and brushes. You can do a lot of this stuff, too, with simply a radio filter you could do all that with a radio filter as well you could like find the make the top spot with the radio filter and that works as well. So I mean there's a lot of tools that you can use to do that and don't forget that you also have the radiant tool which can create effects like that too. So for instance, I could take this grady in't tool in a shot that has, you know, kind of ah, maybe a direction of light so like this one this would be a great one so I've got this, you know, overcast day and clearly the sun is somewhere you know, maybe over there maybe maybe it's over here wherever it is it's probably right right up back there whatever. But you could take the grady in tulle and you could make that side of the sky a warmer s o I have what's called a blue sky burn on dso a blue sky burn is basically a burn that is taking the if you if you do it see how the sky gets blue or two that's because it's taking the temperature down but you could increase the temperature on it as well and then instead of having come down you come to the side like that and you could have a phil that side of the sky with a little bit of warmth so if the sun was coming from over here, it would feel a little bit warmer coming this way a little bit cooler coming this way and that that would be a good way to deal with that kind of an effect that you'd want to produce. So that's that's an option as well. And then well, here's an interesting okay, this this is useful in a lot of different ways. So if you take an image let's, just take this image and it's there's a window here. So the window light is what? What color is that? It's, bluish iet's. A cool light because it's coming from the sun. But the light that's coming from inside is going to be a warmer light. And so if you then brighten up the exposure, you'll have warmth coming from here and cool coming from here. So if you if you expose for the inside, you get a blueish field coming out of here and if you expose for the outside, then you get it too warm in here. And so what we do is we choose one of the other. Choose temperature blue or cold, which everyone you want. I'm going to go with warm here. So now the window looks nice and warm coming in, but I don't want this to be super warm. Then I take the grady in't, and I reset the whole grady into zero, and by the way, whenever you're making presets always make zeroed out pre sets a swell. So notice that all these presets there's one that says reset all all I did is simply go in and put all these at zero and then go in and create a preset that to the very top this is reset also, they all go right to zero, so I'm and then take that that preset reset it all all and then I'm gonna just take the temperature down, and then I'll do a grady in't from here and just bring it in now, that's too much, but it's getting colder here and warmers that goes in, and then I just choose how much of that I want to come in. And now that's a pretty good balance between this light and that light, so it doesn't look like it's too warm or too cool on one side or the other. I find that a lot, especially when I'm doing shots where I'm bouncing off of a wall and bouncing the flash off the wall and the wall is kind of a warm like if I was bouncing off this wall here behind me and I was doing a portrait than that light would be really warm and the other light coming in might be cool or whatever and so I want to mitigate the warm to that light coming so I'll just use a grady in coming across then that will solve the warmth of the light that's coming across and as the light goes further and further away from the light sorts which is that actual wallace the light source when it comes further and further away it gets less and less warm as it goes towards away from its original light source and so the grady and does the same thing it gets less and less cool to combat the less and less warm. So um let's see any questions so far? Yes, my kind of question asking about basically wanting a little bit more clarification on reset does reset take you back to whatever your camera specific default settings are not the actual out of camera shot correct um the reset button inside of light room so if I'm in the developed module and I'm looking at an image and I hit the reset button, it does not take it backto what the camera saw it takes it back to what your default import setting is, which we talked about that yesterday we created default settings that as those images are being imported into light room there, then being applied those settings are being applied and then you're you're seeing that final application when the so if you ever noticed that you're you bring in an image from uh from your camera and on the camera on the back it looked great and then it comes into light room and and it looks great and leiterman then also it goes boom and it changes to ugly okay that's because because the camera's making a j peg and showing it to you in the camera so it's making takes the raw and it converts it to ajay peg shows you the j peg it's making the j peg based on the little settings that you set inside of your picture styles in your camera then when it imports it in delight room light room looks at that little j peg for the moment that it needs to until it has a chance to read the raw image once it reads the raw image it takes the raw image and it applies a default setting to it the default setting khun b default based on what adobe thinks that camera should d'oh or it could be a default based on what you created based on the things that we talked about yesterday it will then take those default settings and apply them and replace the j pig and that's why you see that boot change if you want your defaults to look exactly like the image that you're shooting in the camera itself, all you have to do is shoot a raw plus a small, large fine j peg, put them side by side and then make your default with the j peg next to it like make it so that it looks like the j peg change the saturation changed the contrast change all of those things so that when it comes in, it does look like that j p then set that as the default. So when we showed you how to set the defaults yesterday, yeah, so just just change that set the default, so it looks like the camera's j peg and then every time it comes in, it'll change, but you won't see it because of the j peg will look nice and then the raul will look just like the j peg looked, and you'll never see it a big change except or you'll see a change because if you really scrutinize it, the j peg is really contrast and has blown out highlights, and then I'll send it'll change and those highlights will come in under control because the raw has the highlights. The j peg loses um, which always always bothers me when people say, I'll I shoot j peg, I just get it right in the camera shooting jake really that's like ansel adams saying I'm so good at the camera that I just shoot polaroid just shoot a polaroid not even a polaroid with a negative but just a pole, right? I just you know pull right because it's perfect the way it is it's ridiculous you know like what? You don't want the highlights in there you don't want the shadows you know you don't want a little extra you know we all shot on film and we love because we have like fourteen stops the latitude and then we go to digital and we have like eight or six stops the latitude and we've been pushing and pushing please give us latitude and then there's people who are like I don't need latitude I'll take four stop boy shoot jape, eh it's ridiculous. So if you're j peg shooter out there just taken opportunity to go out and shoot a couple raw images with the same slow, methodical you know passion that you shoot perfect j pegs and your your images will be ten times better because you have the latitude and you can see the actual shadows and you can see the undulations in the curves of the shadows and the highlights and that's beautiful I wouldn't you want that? I don't understand so I don't get I don't get it I'm with you all right ready for one more before we move on leaves excellent this is from esther g when I use a preset on a brush every time I go back to the brush the preset is loaded if I change the preset it doesn't stay the same when I go back how can I get it always to be zero or can you give advice? Well light room so there's there's two types of people in the world there's people who wanted to do what she wants it to do and there are people who want to do what light room wants it to dio and literally they literally are two different types of people and you will never be able to satisfy either so let me tell you what light room wants to do and then you just have to get in line with it and understand it and then once you understand it then you can work around it okay? So if I'm using a brush or whatever so let's say I'm going to use in this case you can see that I was using a I was using a grady int to kind of keep that sky under control see that because I want more of that texture in the sky and so I'm bringing it back under control but let me delete that and start over so when I start with a grady int and I choose a custom grady and I'm going to create my own grady in't I mean I'm gonna create one with a pre set so I'm going to do a one stop burn okay so now notice what this has done the one stop burn has just taken this exposure down but it's based on a pre set if I drag this down I've done my one stop burn and then if I go to any of the other tools if I click on the brush it's showing me the same tool see that one stopped down so let's take that tool and let's just say I'm going to burn over here and I'm just going to go crazy so that you can write so I did this burn and if I do that bern and I and I say okay I wantto change the exposure on that burn to be super super burn and then I want to create a few of those this's this is excellent work I'm gonna make sure I provide this so that people can see what I really did here if I create now radio if I click on it notice that it went toe one that was not the settings I just used it was one because when I first chose this burn I chose it based on a very specific preset so light room assumes I want the preset as my basis and it's always going to choose that pre set that I just last chose if I choose a preset now if I instead let's just okay so I'm gonna create a new one and I reset this so I'm resetting it completely so it's going to be a completely new curves I'm gonna double click here it's kind of its own thing I'm not going to choose a preset I'm just going to kind of drag things and add some clarity and do something here and what I don't know what I'm doing I'm gonna add saturation and bring the temperature way down I just did something and I'm creating a big ufo in the sky so now I've got you have all hillary in the sky right there and that's what's creating all this helter skelter over here and then I'm going to go and create something else I'm going to do some more painting and so I click on the painting thing now it stays do you see that that's because I didn't use a preset to create it I made my own and then I did something and so it assumes now I want to use that thing I created as my basis when I go through the toggles and whatnot and then eso let's just paint you know another little of ufo over here and then if I click knew because I'm going to create another burned dodge pin and I clicked knew it still keeps that same setting because again it thinks that no matter what I do I want to use that set of settings so I can go in here and you know it's it's going to actually beam it's going to be in this stuff so it's being out of three, and so it was beaming out the tree, and I want to create another one, right? But this time, when I created instead of hitting new here, I'm going, teo, I got kind of go off of that so let's, just say I go to got to got to get off of those pins because if I'm stuck on a pin, it's going to create the new one based on the old one, but now if I come back to a pin and none of the pens they're selected and I create one based on, you know, a I wantto, you know, lighten some stuff up, and I use a preset, and then I go in and paint down here in the river so that it's, you know, nice and bright. So now I've made the river bright. If I go and create another pin, it uses that preset as the basis. So you have to just understand that light room is expecting youto want to do the same thing that you did the last tool you were using or the last pin you made. And if that's the case it's going to assume that you're making those decisions are that you're choosing to either make custom one are you choosing to use a preset, and it will always go back to that one. Even if you do a little alteration to the preset on this pin, it's gonna assume you want to start from the basis of the pre set. Does that make sense? And this should I'm gonna provide this one so they can see what we did there. Because that's really that's. Beautiful, I think. Close and carried closing campuses, the pies behind of the platte kind.