Lessons

Lesson Info

Adding Expressiveness Through Editing

Let's do one more expressiveness thiss image already process, but I'm gonna undo it and kind of say, well, how do we go from here to here this photograph when someone sets a hat in the ladder in a in this empty warehouse in new york you're like I got to take a picture of that but then how do I get it somewhere it's? Not just that you know, on doll that so pretty simple process are key crop encouraging you guys to experiment with crop the best way to I think improve photography is to sort of be mindful and aware of what you're doing as you do it and so part of what I'm trying to encourage and rally here so it's as I'm cropping, I'm like, well, why? Why square not just cause I'm gonna post on instagram but why? Why? Why is this working more for me? Andi, I think part of that is there's a lot of people say if your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough and I've come to believe that's true and important you're I think I've taken it too far that I've used to stand back and ...

portrait's and then now you get closer and closer and closer and then I got too close and so now I have to scoot back but it wasn't about proximity it was about connection and what happened in what? The ladders I saw and I was like, oh, there's a ladder it's, an other it's separate from me and so I took it. But what I needed to do was, like, get to know it like shaka tan. Take a portrait of it's like, well, what are you know? Here you are hat on a ladder? Why why's this interest me and my exposure was off, you know? So I didn't give it the time. So again, giving it that time to do that, all right, let's, keep going here and what du exposure. And we're going to do some contrast it's, the usual workflow. Not to belittle it, right? Because all these things are important. And then when it comes to color tones so many tools at our disposal one of them, which I want to highlight is split. Tony, I'm jumping to split tony quickly by a shortcut. Andi, I got it wrong, which is fine, because you just press, come in here and then a number. And here I am, just pressing these number keys. I'm going command for gets me to split tony and that's on a mac on windows. That's control for nothing was split time, and I think a lot of people overlook is that they are trying to find their hue and so though they bring up their saturation slider and they're like, oh yeah, I want yellow highlights and then they bring this down there's a quicker way right? And the quicker way is to hold down the option key the option keys you guys knows the keenest do something different hold on option mac windows and then drag your slider when you option click and drag it gives it to a one hundred and so that's how you find a spot right? So I option click and drag and say if I want blue not purple I confined the sweet spot or if I want yellow and not green or orange I can find the sweet spot let go and then of course bring up your saturation add the value the other side of equation too and this one maybe I'll go blue just to try that out and I'll find the blue holding down option or all clicking and dragging and then bring up my saturation slider and what not once you add color it's affecting contrast, infecting overall mood so you almost always have to go back to the basic I'm not done with that, so command one control one on windows the image still seems like it's a little bit kind of dull and needs needs a little more little more brightness to it in contrast and so I'm just working that out after I've done some of my color working we could also do a little bit maybe with their temperature all right so anyway for me it's this expressiveness this not nostalgic idea I'm not going for I'm not even just using this color palette because I don't know it's there because I like the convey them it's like how I wanted I wantto communicate something with this image all right so there's an example having fun with color let's do another one this one's going to be more calm plex any questions I'm going forward and also how is my speed on these type of topics be doing ok for you guys out there great any questions we good some folks were commenting on their answer to win as a photo you know let's hear that when is I'm done when I walk away for a few minutes and come back and say wow it's a good one it is can I mind is when I walk away and come back and I'm not embarrassed because I know for me I come back I'm like oh what was I thinking? Because that you get carried away at least seven on a similar vein w and eagle you're done when you are satisfied to the point when you convey bear to hear any criticism yes yeah yeah and having taught in the classroom for years thie other part of it I think is well aziz you know that's a profound statement, actually, but is when you can put your name on it. What my students would do is they would say, well, can I put turning these images but not way you not say their mind would say no, you know you have or can I not stand up in front of class when you show those I'm like, no, you gotta like owning you know, this is your work and so doing that and I think online were a little bit anonymous, but imagine if it's like you're good friends were mentors are there, you know, in what may be my men some my mentors would say of that hat one is christian kind of went hipster too much on that one, and so we really need to listen to that voice. Maybe I need to scale the color back a little bit that would have been a stronger just like in writing right in writing there's different types of language that you can use some of it's a little bit easy on what they would say is will take out all those easy words and rewrite it on dh often and uh often beginner writers will use curse words to try tio convey intensity and what the writing and teacher always says is ok take out every curse word don't ever use that but that same sentiment trying to find that spot right anyway let's go back to this fun conversation it's all part of it um here we are new york again and the old abandoned kind of house in brooklyn of all places and what I want to do with this one is some work on color in tone so um light rooms a great place to start and finish images so so with this one you know that I like brightness I like a little bit of contra I like to bring up my shot is the reason I'm saying like, is to try to empower you to get teo that use these tools in a way that you like but what's happening to me with this image is it looks like digital capture and it's not very imaginative it just sort of looks like a picture and I wanted to have feeling and so a lot of what I'm after another threat for me is feeling its savoring right? And so I'm going to start to do this this one we could do some stuff here in light room, some retouching or some more work on skin but I'm going to jump to photo shop just tow get some time over there command is a big shortcut e for edits so I press command e to edit and photo shop and then I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on this picture and do some basic cleanup work I have one friend is a good re toucher and he always says you have to d'oh kind of cleanup in prep work before you get to the fun stuff, and so I'm always trying to remember that sort like when you paint a house, you have to like taper easing off, put down the drop cloths and isn't necessarily fun like colors fun, but I'm going to do that and I'm gonna call this layer are one for retouching one jakey to select one of my healing tools, you can also click on it and then if you press shift j, you get to go through all the set of your tools and I'm looking for the tool, which is the band aid without the little icon next to it, the healing brush with the healing brush we have brush size above and I'm gonna make the brush a little bigger or maybe I will tap oops, maybe I will tap my bracket key and make my brush bigger and I want to make sure I'm standpoint all layers because what that's going to give me the ability to do is to go through this image, said a source area hang on, grab my welcome stylus year and said a source area and just look to try to bring down some of the wrinkles and with this kind of an image and was like a lot of demos what I tend to like to dio which for some people imagine work some people wish there's mohr is I tend to get going in a direction and not totally finished the image otherwise this whole session would just be on this one image and you'd be like, ok, there goes chris again he's look, he got a little teeny dot and he fixed that little done then there's a tattoo, this tattoo is interesting that's where she's wearing the sleeves cover up her arm tattoos, but whenever you have a line hard line you just when you use this tool, if you could just get that line right where it wass and then go over it, you can fix those issues right on the edge there like that. All right? So not going to do a ton more with that, except just a little bit to say that if I'm going to go for this type of a look, which has this feeling in it, those cleanup steps are essential. Are there more wrinkles we could get rid of? Sure, we got rid of a handful of them, we can kind of see them there on their separate layer, which is nice to do that the arm also doesn't look very good, so I'm going to do some a little bit of cloning groups to hell that up the healing brush is amazing it's it's really strong tool but I find sometimes that betrays you especially on areas of contrast constand saves enough detail work let's get to some good let's get to working on this this image the whole point of it what I want to do is talk about color in tone so I've done my little retouching work and I'm gonna do some color and tone stuff black and white adjustment a phenomenal way to get interesting color and tone is black and white on the photographer's favorite blending mode which is softly so I take this black and white adjustment layer I'm going throw down the soft light two ways to do that we go to the pole down menu and she's soft light or we could also press are short cut which is you select another tool like the move to any anything besides a brush tool and press shift option f max shift all f on windows and why is this a fun one to use what's fun about it is what soft light does is it blends things together with contrast so for example if I take a solid color albeit a hideous color and it changed blending onto soft light we can see through that color to the underlying content so all of a sudden we have a color shift in an image which this is a great way to add color effects andi, we can see these little subtle color ships that we have here, but they're done not just like sitting on top of that blending into the image so with their black and white that's giving us this muted contrasts and then also we have our controls, so I talked a little bit about skin and how I wanted that skin to be a little bit a whiter and a little bit more porcelain you can see I'm changing that the brightness of that we also have our blue in the background over there, which we can modify with a lot of adjustments we have to see them through, commit to him and keep going. The image isn't quite there and this is a little bit too strong, so I'm going to take it back just to touch next I'm going to go to my hugh saturation adjustments I'm gonna create, I think eight adjustments or so and here I'm just going to drop saturation down all over the board, so I'm just dropping out color and I always feel like taking color out is a way of sort of turning volume down just like, ok it's getting a little more quiet, andi, I'm going to do occurs click on curves and what I want to do is bring some light into the face, so I'm breaking up the midpoint here, just adding brightness everywhere in the mask tab what invert that rubber brush beaky for that one grab white when a nice soft edged brush zero hardness little bit smaller there and a little bit bigger and I'll tap a key to change my capacity number keys when you have the brush to active changes opacity so I go to three for thirty percent I'm looking to do is just right in this area because for me it's always so much about the person in the face and I'm looking to bring in some light into these areas it was a sight now I have one colleague of mine it's a nature photographer of all things and he uses this technique but he almost always paints figure eight in his photographs it's really interesting and you wouldn't know it but then if you see it you're like well, so his light is always kind of going like this crazy you would think that's the worst idea in the world until you saw his work I don't know how he does it I can't do it with the mask uh we want add some feather to that that softens the edges, hides or brush strokes even using a welcome tablet if you aren't using a welcome tablet that might go even a little bit a little bit higher all right let's keep going with this one I'm going to do another black and white adjustment layer and on this black and white adjustment layer I'm gonna change the blending moto luminosity shortcut for that shift option why or shift all why and what that does is it just gives us the ability to control brightness and it's not really changing contrast like it did before on dh so this is a neat way if you want to have access to this kind of like the class I did before if you saw the black and white one where we looked at how do we change brightness values this is just brightness values but now we're using it in color and what that means is the luminosity blending mode says try to just effect brightness and try to ignore color that's impossible to separate the two but it's doing some of that for me so it's giving me again allowing me to craft a little bit of a look on the skin tone and I wanted to breaking up a little bit more over here on the arm too right? Okay we're getting close getting closer getting closer all right next click on curves and with curves like to do it old fashioned s curve occasion you hear people say oh s curves they're not they're not that great but they're fun ways to just add a little bit of contrast trying to kind of craft a little bit of that back into the image going to goto vibrance and saturation bring up my vibrance and saturation, why bring up color after you took it down because I changed the colors and now I'm changed him in a different way, right? So if I had brought up vibrance without removing color, it would look different, you know you with me? I don't know explain that, but it's it's a combination and then last one on the sell through some color balance here shadows and they add some blues to my shadows. Highlights I'm gonna add some yellows to my highlights, and I don't know how you guys they're seeing this or how it looks, but let me show you sort of the before and after it least with where we're going. This is what it was it's like, yeah, it's a photograph out of the camera, this is getting closer to having mood and expression and again for me, I'm really an introvert when I work so tio get it where I really would love it. I almost have to do it in quiet, but at least you're starting to see how we were able to do that in the crafting of an image bringing these pieces together to convey something sometimes a simple remember that matt picture it's like, hey, all that image needed was warrant open up our shadows little contrast my gut told me I was done this image especially her hat like how weird that hat is you know and I might change the pink of that hat teo and her dress and this virus what it like you don't know what's happened she's holding her dress and so I need to have a little more expressiveness with my color palette to make the image work at least for me if you hate this that would probably be a really good thing and if you're in your mind like well no what I would do is this and what about you know that and that's what we have to start trusting and listening to our gut one things that one of my mentors taught me early on was to try to be very careful about how many voices you listen to and to try to not go to I don't if I can say this but too many workshops and the reason is is what could happen to us is that you're like well that person's that that person like add condoms with jefferson like eric almost one my favorite photographers his first step is always removed contrast look is work it's mind blowing it's amazing he always starts negative contrast and but I always start a little bit you know and so that's ok you know and trying to figure out what is it for you and what's the voice you know you want to try on with these images all right, let's, keep going. But I again want you guys to engage with the content of a little bit. So with this content is there anything that resonates in a positive or negative way? Meaning, like, yeah, I like that's kind of interesting. I've never seen someone use eight adjustment layers to affect color because I usually is one or two. Or is it you know, no, I didn't like how he did that. I might have tried this that's fine and maybe even good. So ask your neighbor anything that resonates. You could also ask him, is there anything you learned? But I want to try to get to resident guts on dh go for we'll check in with chat rooms as well. So, you know, it's yours, all right? Based on the conversation, which is fine, it's harder to talk about that stuff, isn't it? Andi, but that's a good thing like to grow as an artist, like photoshopping light room. No offense, they're kind of easy, you know? I mean, it's like, ok, you have sliders and you can kind of figure it out after some time. Granted, I know they're difficult there's a lot in there, but the more difficult thing is your voice and your vision. And what you want to say I have a question which is out of software for a second with my students I'm often asking them in okay well what what do you want your photography style to be like what's your threat kind of right and when someone asks you that's like I don't know you know and then I would say well let's try something on and one day I asked my classes said well if you had to describe describe your aspirational style what you're going for not what it is because we all feel like our work isn't good enough my style is it's not good enough it's not what you want it to be what if you describe it via food you said you know and so one person said well yeah that's easy I want my photography to be like a souffle it looks kind of simple from the outside but it's always full of a surprise I was like that's beautiful you know that's something to aspire for you know that you're like you know those images you look at you like oh and you get it that's a great description another guy he was from really from iceland or something he said you know any of this accent is beautiful he said you know every christmas eve my family would have caviar and it was a one time of year we haven't he said I want my photography to be like caviar not everyone gets it. But the people who do are so committed to I was, like, that's. Beautiful. You know that he wasn't trying to go broad, is going narrow and wants that death anyway. So in your eyes, your thinking, through your own voice and style, and how you use these tools, ask yourself some of those comparative questions, you know, or what weather is or whatever it is. You know, and sometimes that helps you get closer and then shapes your post production.