Lessons

Lesson Info

Working With Color in Post

So the next step I think that what I'd like to dio is I'd like to go ahead and we're going to go into uh showing some actual light room stuff uh and so I'm gonna go ahead and over this guy up and where we are and I'm gonna go ahead and import a few images that we I just sort of pulled out and we're going to stay these air here workflow big sur selects okay so I just picked basically five images that aren't necessarily better than the others but these air some images which may need a little more work or some these we're going to try to go through some techniques and such to sort of show you um one of the first things I want to show you I didn't do this on the important yes go ahead quick question before we start digging into you know and deep diving could you talk a little bit about your sort of your big picture behind post processing especially when you comes from a photojournalist journalistic aspect so my my ethos in post processing is I came from a I guess essentially a newspaper jo...

urnalism background I'm not removing anything that is I'm not removing power poles I'm not doing this if it's an advertising job and somebody requests that you know that's a whole separate scenario I'm working for a car company and they want it they want a shot of you know their car in front of this building but then they decide later that oh that that shrub doesn't look good that's a whole different story but this outdoor photography that you see what you see is what you get and I my sort of rule of thumb is anything you could sort of do in a dark room is sort of okay, you know if you can use you know if you could dodge and burn you could use color filters in a dark room etcetera and do some you know, graduated things I'm okay with that, you know, you know, we also there are some technological um, hurdles you know dynamic range is something we talk a lot about sometimes you just can't get much rangers you want so digitally were able to shoot multiple frames, blend them together to shoot you know, high dynamic range images but not for effect but more for so that we can get what are I would see um traditionally I'm not, you know, taking these things and, you know, adding multiple layers and taking things out on adding trees and things like that it's typically a journalistic sort of integrity you remove the clone tool from the toolbar and photoshopped a singer not even tempted to use it uh, no, because it's it's typically they're only for my dust spots, which which is our mother bein even though I'm very clean and you know I'm always playing the cameras it's it's, which is even more important video, which is a whole nother topic that we won't get into but you know, without failure you're out on the beach and you're in a dust storm and eventually you're going to get a goober basic as I call you know like it's all you're like oh jeez on the sky so that is that is the safeguard their so your cameras out tonight con to get to get clean or do you do it all yourself? Typically once a year I will send them out to do a clean and check, but personally I used a company it's called visible dust out of canada and they make very good cleaning tools to clean your own ccds er a little caveat nikon does not endorse you clean your own cameras don't tell them I said to clean your own cameras um and then there's, another company that has a little gel pen, which actually sort of sucks the the dust and grease off of your sensor if you write to me or after the fact I don't remember what it's called but it's a great tool because like I said, if I'm I prefer to be out there photographing and not taking care of despots and dealing with all of these things and I would just want to let the folks out there on the internet let you guys know that you can follow its all one word lucas gilman at instagram correct onda could also go to his web site and he's willing to answer questions so feel free if you have any questions after the fact he's open the door for that so all right back to you call so and in this in this import one thing I did not do was because and we do this first pacific a reason I didn't go in and when you're importing these images and we'll go out and go back here to show you you can basically um go in and you can tell it if you wanted to build a smart previews and or what you want to dio during the import if you want to imply the metadata you know all these sorts of things you can even apply your presets in that when you bring it in typically I don't do that that's just more time applying all the presets and things I like to just bring everything in as I shot it in the camera and then from there make those modifications because I can do that for instance this this image here which you can see is the buck rail fence the way I shot this in the camera this is being shot in a flat format which is nikon sort of flat you'll see the very bottom if you go to the very bottom here under your camera calibration center camera flat and that is something I don't know what that destination and no matter what camera company you work with sony, canon, nikon they all have these picture profiles and adobe his has gone in and they've built these profiles in there as well it's amazing if you just go one stop down to vivid, which is an internal profile all of a sudden you've almost knocked out the blacks to the point where you're not seeing that fence and that was the way I shot it. We're wanted to shoot it originally er a little note to the viewers, this screen here that you're seeing is basically flat as well as you're getting way more uh, it would be blocked up more as faras what I'm seeing here and what I'm seeing here it's it's night and day. So, um, that's that's an interesting thing to do if you don't want to spend a lot of time in light room and you're not really into building your own profiles. Typically the camera manufacturers have a bunch of them built in uh that you can go ahead and just do that landscape flat, etcetera, etcetera so that's kind of a cool way to go in and basically be able to sort of customize your images without having to spend a lot of time, you know, even monochrome there's a black and white in mode in camera mode which is pretty cool so I'm just gonna go and reset that uh and we're going to go ahead and I don't need to see this anymore because I just want to see these images is biggest possible and I'm in my presenter mode so this is the first time I've opened up the new light room in this so it's not customized all this is straight out of the box and so I'm going to just make this a little smaller all right? Cool and the way I work is sort of top to bottom and when I mean top to bottom is I'll go from the top here and figure out um what do I need to do first? So the first, uh ro hear our crop tool our spot clone red eye removal, our graduated filter uh radio filter in our brush filter the first thing I would do would be it's a quickie ofjust sitting the r or hitting this button here, which is your crop tool. This brings up our crop. The first thing I wanna do is get rid of any elements or if you saw earlier in the surf video if one leg was shorter than the other, I'm gonna go ahead and even up that horizon line a little bit uh and I'm just gonna go and straighten this up just a hair because I want this to be his straight as possible moving forward so I'm moving from top to bottom uh, the next thing I would do would be to go in and look at this salo area here and I'm sort of scanning this and you see right above it this history ram right here, but when I go over these clouds, I'm getting rgb readings and what does that mean? The more those air in line, the more they're neutral gray or white if that makes any sense, so if I want to do if I want to make sure that it is one hundred percent correct, I could go in here and I could make sure that there was something that was really white one hundred percent white in here uh in this sense, I don't really want to do that, though, because I'm or interested in giving this a little bit of a theme a little, I'm gonna add a little blue a little bit of ah warm tone here, so we're I'm just looking at this area in the sky so far because I'm working again top to bottom and the next thing that I'm gonna work with is exposure and one one cool little thing little trick if you totally mess up on something just double click that button right there on any of these things and that will bring it back to the value it was set before. So I'm gonna look at that the value looking pretty good in the back, but I'm really bothered by this fence. This is not how I shot it. This is sort of a flat image at this point, so what do I need to do to bring that in? I'm just going to go to the black channel c is here, which is also kind of like shadows, but its shadows are a little bit different they sort of work on more of a middle shadow if you want to call it that something good and fix that and I'm gonna just go back until we're sort of in that black area. So we've now knocked down that buck rail fence, you know, this is we're basically if you're thinking about it in old school photo terms, we're picking our paper how much? How contrast he is it this is almost like or or choosing our film stock? This is mel via or something like that that's really rich and vibrant uh, from there, I'll move down and clarity is kind of like your sharpness uh I don't do it a time, but it's nice because it gives you just a little bit of subtle contrast and brings out you can see the trees the top to spring out just a little bit I don't want to go too far with that, just a hair and then the difference between vibrance and saturation saturation khun b over used a lot basically you do is you start seeing all of this area on the top blocking up I hardly ever use saturation here I'll take that back to zero, but a little bit of vibrance is good. It just brings a little bit of color back into this because we shot this flat and we're just trying to bring it back to, you know, sort of almost like a film stock or something like this. Um and then the last thing I would do and this is something that this is just a personal thing you can either do it in this programme, I prefer to do it in photo shop. Ah, just because it's just easier because if I'm going to do any other postproduction plug ins it's easy to do them there instead of making individual philes because every time you opened a photo in light room in an external plug and you have to build a new tip basically or reopen it etcetera, etcetera so I'm just going to edit this in photo shop cc, which is just going to send it to photoshopped um and it's gonna build me a tiff copy of this so we're exporting that that's going to pop up for us and then I love the nick software plug ins these air great um and the reason I like these is because it gives you a little bit more control or a lot more control um the color effects is great color effects for our four point zero now right here is great ah is well as my favorite favorite favorite is the vase it too so we're gonna go ahead and bring the sense of a visa and the visa is a it's almost like it has this sort of six cents and so instead of masking and things like that um gives us these little bugs or little viewpoints I guess you could say you guys know more about it than I do um to your favorite because I'm going to show you a real quick here I'll just give you a quick tutorial so what this point here this little point right here whatever I put that on it's a color aware basically note so if I want to brighten just that color of the blue it's going toe just do that area right there so I want to just go bring him out on that sky just a hair I can do that really easily um and if I if I felt like the clouds were maybe a little weird there or not didn't have quite the color I thought they had before you know I could go in and add just a hair but a warrant or something like that you know you don't want to go crazy with this obviously and it's really easy if if you did something you don't like, you could go and just delete that guy but we could just go ahead now that little bit of brightness and all of a sudden we could go and view what it looked like before and after and all of a sudden we've added just a little bit of warmth and we brought that back to being you know, a really nice image we haven't gone hog wild here we haven't gotten crazy we've just made this a nice, appealing sort of outdoor image with pretty few steps so all we need to do to get out of this is save that uh and it's gonna build another layer and photo jobs so that if you wanted to go back and do that uh obviously because you see here it's now three hundred sixty eight megabytes because it's a sixteen bit teo to layer tiff um we were just flatten it um because I probably I'm done with this picture flatten that image to bring it back down to only have one layer and then I can just, uh, close it and save it and it will then again live in that light room catalog right next to the other one so I have that original but I also have a high rez tiff there as well, which is kind of cool how do you know when to decide to stop tweaking a photograph? Are you looking at your o'clock? Are you are you is it a client thing? It's it's I think it's really a client thing, but I think it's also you know, I try to never do anything in one session right will be there I'll come back from a trip and I want to get it done I want to get knock all these photos out, but what I find is whatever my mood was that day it applies to all those photos so if I go in and I come back and I'm like, oh, what was I thinking on that that given day so a lot of times I'll just go in and I'll do maybe twenty five or fifty percent of them and then at least I'll look at it and be like, okay? And the great thing about light room is that we could make some global adjustments so for instance, everything was a little too moody like all my exposures were down a little because I was really is like crushing the blacks I could go in and fix that first photo and that that long sequence and bring that back up and then go boom and paste that to all of those images in that timeline on and make that change just kind of cool do you build your own presets for any either light room or for the next software's where they're sort of the lucas gilman set and it's gonna reflect your style of sort of bigger picture nigel's not really you know I've never been a a preset person I think every every image has a custom look that needs to get to and I and I've never found something that just like comes out of the box that doesn't need a little tweaking I end up tweaking the presets so I'm like, well, why don't I just go to get to this point anyway if I'm gonna be tweaking the presets so typically I'm not I'm not doing a lot of that so you know, I know a lot of people I spent hours and then you can share appreciates with friends and you know there's the whole communities where you can buy them you can share them but it's not really my thing you know, I'm really going in on a case by case basis and looking at the image and trying to figure out what does it need to show my vision and you know, I so far haven't figured that out as faras um the one stop shop for presets and such