Lessons

Lesson Info

Landscape Image Cleanup

Let's shift gears to clean up. All right? So before we kind of finish off the photo, there's always gonna be that time where you have some cleanup to dio it's gonna be distractions. Gonna be spots. It could be a weed. It could be a telephone line. Whatever happens to do this is the spot where all usually do that. So you hopefully you kind of see her progress here. Just working up step by step. So what would I do to clean this photo up? This is ah, such a key setting. Guys, um, wonder you guys comprised barely see it. Am I the only one that's ever printed a photo only to seethe spots in the sky from, like, center? Just yes. Someone. I'm the only one. Okay, so there is nothing worse guys than when do you spend the time and effort and money to print a photo? You get that photo when you look at it and you diss easel spots in the sky and we miss him so much on here. They're just so easy to miss on our computer screen. Number one, my computer screens always dirty. So it's sometimes I never k...

now I'm like sitting there. I'm like trying to get rid of a spot, and it's something on my computer screen, but it's just we missed them. They're really easy to overlook. So luckily, light Room and Photoshopped both have a tool under the spot removal brush up here. If you go look down here, you'll see it's called visualized Spots. And if you haven't seen this tool in action, watch what happens. It shows you just how dirty my center waas Oh my gosh. So you'll just see a ton of little stuff throughout here, right? They'll turn it off and you could see I mean, of course, there's some that are displeased, like here. That's a perfect one. To me, that's a That's a perfect idea of a spot that I would miss. I don't even know if you guys can see it, because it's it's like sometimes when I look away, I actually don't see it, But that's a perfect idea of a spot that I would miss and when you printed it, really, it just sticks out at you. But we can turn on visualize spot and you see it immediately so you can fix all the spots right here in this mood. So that's another one. Oh, I'm not gonna go through the whole entire photo because you guys will shoot me. But you could say there's a bunch of a bunch of little spots in there. So make that part of your process. Even if you don't think there's anything there, it's gonna come across on skies a lot. If anybody shoot and a port in the studio, it all a backdrop, it'll come across on your white and your great backdrops a lot, too. So whenever you have those clear backgrounds, that's that needs to be. That needs to be one of your stops along the way. Um, all right, so we gotta we gotta taking care of. I'm not going to clean up all the spots, but you get the idea. You know what? I have to clean up some of them. It's just gonna bug me. Sorry. Look away. Pretend I'm not doing anything. Nothing going on here. It really bugs me if I don't. So I say I'm not going to do all of them, but I'm going to do about 99%. I'm done not going to anymore. I promise. Okay, that takes care of our spots. Let's go move on to remember Talked about lens corrections again. Pretty easy for your landscape. Voters just click on that little basic enable profile. Correction. Top What that tab does That little check box looks at your lens looks at your camera. There's profiles that are out there that it's built in and it just grabs the profile. It's that fixes your photo, and then effects will go in and and a little bit of darkening. Got to go in there dark and the edges a little bit. That might be a little too dark, so I pull it back. Okay, Um, last step, this was optional is So if you have the creative cloud version of light room, there is a D. Hayes slider here. Okay, so to me, to me, the mountains are a little to me. The mountains are a little hazy off in the distance there. Not only hazy but bright, brighter. They almost tend to disappear in some ways, often to the into the sky. Here, um, the D a slider works really good. The problem with the D hey, slider, especially in colorful photos, is is, it has the effect of of color rising everything. And really, that's a lot of blue toe photos, so you'll see anything with a blue sky is really gonna get very saturated. So D. Hayes's is a tough one to work with on a photo like this. Now, the light room folks have been so kind to include a brush tool appear which will allow us to just brush our changes onto a photo. And if you look D. Hayes is also one of those those sliders here So I can go in here and I can brush on get a little bit closer there so I can go in here and Aiken, brush some D hazing onto the photo. Okay, um, I mentioned I use presets a lot. I have a preset called Hayes Killer on my brush Is that does a really good job, especially on a photo like this. If you add a little bit of warmth and I might even dark in it so you can. And if you look up by the way, I'll give you the formula for its contrast. It boosts highlights. It pulls back on shadows. It as a lot of clarity and a lot of sharpness to it and that you can even kick in some of the D hazing on there. All right, so that's what's inside the brush preset. But you just go through here, all right? I'm not gonna be really particular about it. If you look under the bottom section here, there's an auto mask button, and what auto mask does is that helps keep your brush from affecting the sky. So you see, as I paint along, I don't have to worry about spilling over, okay, but we definitely want to go through and start to de Hayes some of those spots in there, especially what you'll find it in, is you'll find it. Mountains in the distance. Um, it probably would even worked on that last photo. Anything with some of that atmosphere perspective. When it gets off in the distance, it just kind of gets a flatness to it. That's where your your hate your D hazing types of work will do. So again, it's you can kind of see my formula for what I do there. Those brush presets are at matt k photo dot com, but the formula for what's included in that preset is all right inside of there. And it's just hit that on to the mountains and it takes care of it for me. Um, like, you're gonna want to ask about the hazing. Are there other ways to to accomplish that same thing? There's days like far in a way, the same somebody asked if one year earlier techniques waas If you get accomplished the same thing, Um, the problem is like so many things there, like five different ways to do it. And unfortunately, they all work a little bit differently, Like on so many other photos that d hey, slider will work great just cause this one has such blue sky that I have to use a brush OK on it because the D Hey slider is just like a sledgehammer just kind of hits the whole photo. That's why I have to go in. And I use a brush and the, you know, like I said, the D A's control works good enough itself, but I just found by kind of adding that combination ableto kind of fine tuning a little bit. Yeah, there's so many different ways. Blacks and whites just that simple blacks and whites adjustment hopes. Remove that flatness from a photo. And a lot of times it's like is the haze from sun. Flare is the haze from distance Is the haze from cloudy day, you know, is a haze from a Z. You know, there's so many things that it could be so an answer to that question I think I get I don't know. All right, cool. So I'm I'm not gonna go do all the mountains here, but I would just I'll just kind of quickly brush to see you get a feel again. If you're gonna do this and spend some time on it, You want to turn on that masking check box? Yeah. It's really It makes such a big change. So that's before That's after again. Spend a little bit. If it's your photo and you really work on it, spend the extra time on it. Okay. Got questions like the reflection in the lake. Ah, Good question. So what? I behaved the reflection in the in the lake? Probably probably. You know, it's a nifty one, cause reflections aren't necessarily supposed to be as crystal clear as the actual object itself, but yeah, That's the That's the key is whatever. Especially when you have reflections. Whatever you do, the one side of photo got it. Make sure you got make sure you go in and do the other side of photo. All right, so let's go take a look Here. Hit the backslash key. That's before that's after. And honestly, guys, if this is me and it is, um, I'm probably gonna crop this one I don't need There's a lot of stuff in here that I don't think I need to me. The star of the photo is is in there, so I'm probably gonna crop it. And as far as workflow goes, you can crop any time you want, because whether you're doing it in photo shop, whether you're doing it in light room, it's a non destructive type thing. So I could always go back and uncrossed it if I wanted to. I I missed all kinds of spots here. It's really bugging me, but not going to submit you to watching the replace remove all the spots. All right, so we're that's before that's after. Cool. All right, let's take a look at we want to another example and So this is a quick one. But I want I want to introduce one introduced our move to photo shop because there are gonna be times where we're not just the Photoshopped camera raw, but the Photoshopped interface. There's gonna be times where we need to do that a little bit more. One of those times is a photo like this. So pretty easy Photo you guys guys local should recognize this is Mount Rainier. Um, it's kind of funny. I went on a went on a trek to go shoot. So Reflections Lake is like the place to shoot matter near from. And what I found is is you are need to be different. I'm gonna go off the beaten path and find a different league. I can tell you that there's no better lake, the photograph amount. We're here from the reflections because I found another lake that took me like an hour to walk through. And it was nowhere near as nice as affectionately. Anyway, as I was walking back from that to the car, though, like I'm walking up this little hill and like this is in front of me. I put my zoom lens on and is like because that's what I saw. Like I'm looking through the trees and put a wide lens on it never would have seen it. So put my zoom lens on. I obviously didn't see the scene. This way. Um, you know, our eyes can pick up the highlights in the shadows are cameras or cameras Can't. So the way that I saw the scene was with the highlights pulled back. I saw more detail in the shadows. To me, it looked and felt warmer. Okay, whites and blacks option. All click, so pretty simple changes, but that's before that's after. But that's how I saw the scene. And if I can get across anything as you watch all this stuff, that's what it's about, is it's about you documenting what you saw and bringing it back to people the way that you saw that you This is your interpretation of it. So you do people do black and white? Absolutely. If that's how you saw the scene and that's what stood out to you from the scene converted the black and white do people do hdr and crazy saturation? Absolutely. That's how you saw. But my job isn't to just bring back what I saw. So that's why we do a lot of these changes here cause are we all know our cameras don't see it. So as I go through here, um, yeah, I mean, I'm I'm almost I'm pretty much most of the way there. You know, there's not too much I would do to the photo will go into hs l and go into saturation. I want to get the sky a little bit blue, More blue, bluer, more bluer. I don't know what the word is so I can kind of boost up. Thea kind of bumped that up a little bit. Um, you know, as I look at it, another way to go to go with this one would be pulled back on the warming. You almost go to a cooler type of ah, rendering with it and then take my brush. Um, I've got one. That's ah, son Glow got one. That Sun Glo kind of gives you a sunny, sunny type of Yeah, we'll go with sun glow. I had the right bracket key, so that's one of my brush presets. And all it's doing is if you look at the settings there. It's just bumping up the warmth, bump up the exposure a little bit. So that way I'm able to keep most of the blue in the sky rather before what I was having. Trouble was when I warmed the photo. What happened? The blue gets that muddy type of a color. So this kind of pull it back and go with, uh, go with some of the brushes. Okay, so that's one of the brushes that I use for that. Um, close that one up. And then if I did anything here through a vignette right on the end of it, don't forget. Remember? What did I forget? Because I can kind of see that little edge vindicating there. There we go. So that's before that's after before. After now, I introduced photo shop. All right. Beyond Photoshopped, Camera raw. If we open up this and while we could do all the same changes, we just did, um, what would I want to do in Photoshopped? To me, To me, I kind of like the crop of this photo. So could I go in here? And could I crop that out? I could, but it ruins ruins the crop of the photo. To me, Photoshopped does have a retouching tool, but the problem with the retouching tools it's great for spots, and it's great for parts of the photo that have something exact that it can pull from. And that's the way Photoshopped, or that's the way light room and camera work is it can do cloning and healing, but it's got to be ableto pull from part of the photo. An exact part of the photos basically copy paste right? So if I try to do this here were working with a little bit of a larger area. Um, if I try to get that done inside here, it's gonna be a tough one to navigate, because by default, that obviously gave me a bad point to pull from. Um, I can try to move this around and see if I can get it, but because it's a larger area and because it's right up in the sky there, it's going to be difficult to get in there. It's going to start to smudge a little bit. If you look on the edge of that tree, that's a time world will probably want to move to photo shop. Okay, so I'll just get kind of knock out of their photo edit in photo shop. And that's probably one of the keys. So we're talking basics here if you're just new to this. A lot of times, the biggest problem that I see is this photo is stored on your hard drive somewhere. So someone will do this light room, work to it, and then they'll go to the hard drive and they'll take that same photo and open it up in photo shop thinking that's the workflow toe work with the key here is is that that all the stuff we're doing in light room is only visible toe like room. Okay, so in order to take that photo photo shop, we have to go photo edit in. We can't go to the source folder and open it up there. All right, so now we got this photo and photo shop. It's always good. I mean, I I'll make a duplicate layer, or you can make a separate layer for this at a separate layer. Um, probably one of the easiest ways to do this one is just go in here and take your lasso tool. Make a quick selection of it, and then we go to edit Phil content aware Click OK already know nothing's gonna happen, but I'm gonna tell you why in a second click, OK could not feel because there's not enough information blah, blah, blah. So what did I do wrong? I made a separate layer over here, and it's looking at that layer and it's saying there's nothing on this layer, so I can't do anything with it cause I'm not seeing anything. So this is one of those tools that would go that way. I probably have to just go back and do it on a on the original layer, which I'm fine with. I mean, I'm not a big I'm not a big nondestructive guy like I'll. I'll destruct. Ive no problem destructing. So go over here to content aware. And the key for what content aware does is in light room. It's gotta pull from part of the photo content. Aware will make its own. That's the difference. Okay, Content aware will say. All right. Well, I I can't figure out how to fix this. I'll just make my own area. And most of the time it was a really good job. Sometimes it totally botches it up, but most of the time it doesn't really great job. So if you wanted Teoh to go another route with it and you're really crazy about layers, a lot of times also use the spot healing brush. That's gotta content where option on it and that will let us brush on a blank layer. And the results should be pretty close to the same leaves a couple stragglers get rid of. And a lot of other times, guys, I personally like to put my photos when I framed them. I like metal frames. A lot are not metal frames. I like to print like aluminum, not metallic paper. Not a big fan of the metallic metal textured look. I like Aluminum Prince, which are just super high gloss like high death. So I like that a lot. But I also like just a nice black frame with a white Matt for for landscape stuff. And because of that white Matt, you have to look, They call Border patrol, you gotta look around the edges, your photo, and you got to find all those little white spots of trees. You know, the sky poking through the trees and just clone her. He'll amount. I'm just using the spot healing brush. But just find any bright white stuff like I'm not gonna worry too much about all that. It's debatable whether we don't want to worry about this, but I give it a try, Okay? Because what will happen is once that photo gets around a white Matt, those little white sky areas through the trees just kind of wreaks havoc on your eyes as you're looking at it. So it's a good finishing step to go through and kind of finish up the photo with, um all right, so at this point, we're talking workflow. We gotta go to file save. All right file save. Don't do save as don't change the name. Don't change the location file. Save Close it. Go back over here If you look in light room. What just happened? Waas We have our original raw file right here and I'll go ahead and hit. Reset, OK, and then right next to it. We have our layered file that went in and came back from Photoshopped. So light room took care of that whole workflow force. We don't go to the folder. Take the original file. Open it up, Mike. Room takes care, Keeping everything together with it. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a look here and you could see So that was our before photo. And that's her after. Okay, a couple questions. Not exactly about that. But if you want to take him now, we can go for it. Um what profile? To use under camera calibration. So, like, for that shop, for example, is it always different charities? Kind of ago. Two good questions. So what that question is referring to is under this tab down here under camera calibration, you'll see all these profiles. Alright. What these profiles do is they mimic we have these little profiles in our camera. So you ever take a photo? Even if you're shooting, especially for shooting wrong, you take a photo. You look at it. You're like, Wow, it looks nice and saturated in contrast. And then you get it onto your computer. It looks flat, right? And you actually sometimes see it like if you're importing it into light room. You see, the contract is the saturated version, and then it goes flat after it renders. So what that is is your computer is pulling the J peg from your camera, which is what your camera shows you to think that look great and then you're raw file doesn't have any of that stuff applied to it. So that's why it goes flat renders the J peg first, cause that's the quickest thing it can pull. And then it goes flat. What those camera profiles are, they help simulate the little stuff the secret sauce is you have inside your camera. So from answer that question for my landscape stuff most of the time won't go. And I'll goto landscape. The reason why I don't do it all the time. It's sometimes it's a little too punchy, but sometimes it gives you a great starting place. Depends a lot on the camera depends a lot on the locations. There's times where I use the same camera and it looks good for maybe the blue skies. And and then it looks bad on the green field that we saw from another photo, it's ah, it's very, very different. So wish I could say I always use the same thing, but when I do use that I'm usually going to use the landscape, I will say whenever I shoot. Portrait's portrait is usually pretty good, renders the skin really nicely, and that's and you know that's again. We go back to presets. It's a great one to make a preset for Make a preset for every one of them cause then, as I go through my workflow presets, I just click, click, click, click, click, click and I've got a really, I don't have to go digging for the panel. I can go through there and just click on my favorite one.