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How To Move Photos From Lightroom To Photoshop

So let's jump right in and start. And the first thing that I want to show you is kind of the mechanics of how all this works. And after I show you the mechanics of it, I think you'll understand better the specific examples that I'm going to show you when I show you the mechanics. I'm gonna use really simple example because that the near enough to, you know, Wade through all the detail. And you just be able to focus on this idea about how do you get from Leiterman photo shop and back in the most efficient way. Now, if you shoot raw, it's easier to dio if you shoot J Peg or you're working with tiffs or PSD files. In other words, non raw files from the beginning, it's a little bit. The workflow is a little bit more complicated, but not much. There's basically one extra step, so I'm gonna show you twice I'm gonna show you first with Raw and first with JPEG. So let's do with rock. I have light room open here on my desktop, and I have a couple of photos in a folder. This is the folders panel...

over here that I've selected with these two photos, I'm gonna now move from the library module where I'm working now. And if you're like light room user already, you know, the library module is where you organize your photos. But when you're ready to edit them, you're going to move over to another module in light room, the develop module. So I'm just going to click develop up here or, you know, I have to tell you I use shortcuts a lot in life room, and I don't mean to overwhelm you with shortcuts, but I do think it's important to know the most basic ones. And when you're moving from library module to develop module, you just press de for develop. That's faster than coming up here and clicking on develop. But I'll do that now for you. The develop module looks a lot like the developed the library module. You may not even know that you switched modules that looks so much the same. But if you look at the bottom, there's a filmstrip that shows those two thumbnails that are in the folder I'd selected. So I'm gonna just click on one of those. This happens to be a raw file. Now, here's something you may not know even if you've been using light room for a while. Little tip if you're ever wondering about what filed by looking at, is the Terrazas J. Peg. What's the name of it? Try this press I on your keyboard Boom. There's information about the photo. In this case, I can see the file name and when it was shot and the size And if I press I again eyes for information, I get even more good information, like the shutter speed and the F stop and the I s O that I used when I shot this and what lens I used. And you can set this up to get all kinds of information under the hood. But I really like this, especially when I'm just trying to see what photo I'm dealing with. And when I see the photo name. I see it is a raw file because it has this funny extension. O r f You know, every camera manufacturer has a different extension for their raw files. This one happens to be Olympus. I shot this with an Olympus E m t om d e m five was a while ago. So if I want to get rid of that information, I can press I again. So we know we're dealing with a raw file. And remember, I said that the first step when starting light room is to do your basic your fundamental edits. If you do use light room already, you'll recognize what I'm going to dio. If you are not a light room user, don't be overwhelmed by what I'm going to do now because I'm going to go a little faster than I might do if I were teaching a beginning light room class. But the point that I want to make with this little bit of work we're going to do over here in the basic panel is that it really does make sense to do your basic photo edits here in light room. Soto open that basic panel. I click on it, and I'm going to scroll down a bit and see what's here. You know, one of the nice things about doing your editing work in light room is that you can just start at the top of the top most panel and just work your way down. If you're not sure of the best order to do things in. It really doesn't matter in the end. What order you make your edits because light room is what they call a very fancy word. A Parametric editor. What does that mean? Well, it means that every edit that you make in these panels over here is simply going to be in the form of text instructions that are written into a database. Light room is a database of the light room catalogues of database, so that information gets written into the database, and it's it's is if there were a card in a library card catalog and it doesn't matter which information is at the top of the card and which is at the bottom of the card. Doesn't matter what order you do your edits in. So if you like, you can just start at the top and work your way down. But you do not have to. It's totally your preference, so let's do it the easy way. I'll start at the top. I'll think about whether I want to make a white balance change. You know, I really can't tell yet sometimes when you have a photo that's too dark like this. You'd have to wait until you brighten it up to tell if the colors air. Right. So I'm just gonna skip over white balance for now and go down to the next section. In the next section of the basic panel, you can alter the tones in the image. This is just like in the old days when we used to go in the dark room and develop our black and white photos for Lucky and had a color dark room, the color photos. What you're doing here is dealing with exposure and contrast tonal value. Not so much color right now. So I like to start with exposure. And I think this photo is a bit too dark now. What a lot of people do is they just start dragging. The sliders like that were right, and I feel like that's too heavy of a hand. So here's what I do. If I have just sort of drug the sliders and I don't like where it is, I will double click the little head on the slider 12 and it goes back to zero. And here one time I taught this class and somebody said Okay, that was worth the price from admission. To hear that just that double clicking to get back to zero will save you some time. And then what I do is I put my cursor over in the field on the right, and I use the arrow keys on my keyboard to change the exposure. And that way I can be a little more precise. So for the exposure setting, if I just press the up era once it changes it to Ann Exposure Plus 10. And you know and the exposure setting is similar to stops on your camera. So if I change this to a 1.0, that would be like one stop on your camera. So this is just a very small exposure change that I've made. This time I'll go down to contrast, and I'll do the same thing. I'll just start hitting the up arrow. I usually don't increase contrast by much, but sometimes a little bit of darkening of the dark's brightening of the brights will make a photo look better. But where you really get the most control over contrast is in the next four sliders, where you're able to adjust particular sections of the hissed, a gram that represents the tonal values in the image, which you can see up here at the top of the screen. You may already know about his diagrams, but in case you don't the right side of the history Ram represents the brightest possible parts of an image. The left side, the darkest possible parts and the height of these bars in between represents the frequency of a particular tone in an image. So what I'm seeing here, I like that this image has brights, which you see represented by the tall bars on the right. It has darks, which you see represented by the bars on the left. And it has all shades of gray in between, which are across the middle here. That's a good thing. And that Instagram was strung out across the whole bar and that's a good thing to for most images. All right, so now we know how to read the history. I am a little so it will help us to make our changes to highlights and shadows. One thing I want to dio in addition, looking things to gram, of course, I look at the image. And in this image I see a big white sky filled with all kinds of clouds, and I bet that there's more detail in those clouds. In fact, that's what drew me to take this picture because the sky was amazing that day. And so what I'm going to do to bring back detail in the clouds? Actually, this time I'm not even gonna bother using the precise little value field on the right side. I'm just gonna grab that, hissed a grams that highlight slider. Pardon me and go all the way over to the left really far. Now let me do that again. So if I undo that, take a look at the highlights. As I drag way over to the left, see the detail. Come back in the clouds again. Undo. Look at the clouds. Great. That's what I wanted to see. Was the detail appear? And for the shadow, the shadow areas that represents sort of the the 3/4 tone shadows? Probably what's in the foreground of this image? I want to open that up so that there's more detail there, so I'll do something similar with the shadows, and I'll drag over to the right probably go all the way. It would be too bright, maybe just somewhere around, like they're. And you know, there's no right answer to this, and it looks different on every monitor, so you have to use your subjective judgment as to what is correct and what isn't. And then we have the whites and the blacks, which represent the far ends of the Mr Graham and what you want to do with the whites. You want to get a little really bright whites white, almost pushed to white without detail. And so to control that I like to do it this way. Some people you've probably seen the trick of you hold down the option or alter Kia's. You drag the whites and blacks sliders. But I'd like to just turn on the highlight clipping warning up here in the history Ram by clicking it and I'll turn on the shadow clipping warning by clicking there. And now I'll see red for the highlights and blue for the shadows if I drag those sliders too far, so I'm gonna drag the white slider over to the right until he starts seeing the red. That means I'm pushing those pixels to pure white with no detail, and I'll back off on the white slider, going further over to the left a tiny bit. So there's just a little bit of red up there in the clouds. It's good to have something that's bright white so that your pulling out that hissed a gram to as far as it can go without losing important detail. And I'll do the same with the blacks were gonna pull the black slider over until if you look closely, there's a little bit of blue in the gardens here. And then you have to remember to turn off those highlight and shadow clipping warnings or the all of a sudden they'll be read things all over your photo when you least expect it. And so that's kind of the basics that I would suggest that you do when you're working in light room. If you want to do more, there are other things you could do. You can add a little punch to your image by coming down to the presence section of the basic panel and dragging the clarity slider over to the right. I don't get too crazy with this because you get this, like correct ling looking photo if you do too much clarity. So you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of about Here and if I can't tell if I need clarity, not I'll zoom in to see details like here in these beautiful French buildings in Paris. And then I'll move the cider and all sort of look. Oh, see here it's a little bit fuzzy, but it's a drag clarity over to the right. I'm starting to bring in more contrast in those mid tone areas. I'll click on the image to zoom out again, and I think that I might actually add some vibrance, which is color saturation, but with a nice soft hand. It's not as broad or rough control a saturation, so I'm just going to drag vibrance over to the right a bit. Maybe we'll go back there, so I'm pretty much done doing my basic edits. Other things you could do in light room before going to Photoshopped to do special editing or further editing in like room. You might want to scroll down on the right and do something like go to the detail panel and do a little bit of I call this capture sharpening. You know, the very process of digitizing an image. Taking a digital photo, passing it over to your computer tends to soften a little bit. And so what I like to do is just sharpen things up a tiny bit. And here's a little trick. If you don't know what all those sliders do, don't worry about it. The sharpening sliders could be kind of, you know, dense or deep. There's a lot to them. So instead I go over to the presets on the left that come with light room. I'll open up the presets panel by clicking the arrow on presets, and I'll scroll down to the general light room presets right here and look what's in their sharpened, scenic and sharpened faces. And it gives you suggested settings for those sorts of images. Well, this year looks like a scene to me, so I'm just going to click sharp and scenic. And, you know, if I were being a good person, I would scroll into one urge zoom into 100% before doing this, because you really can't see the results of sharpening unless you're at 100% and then I'll click sharpened, scenic And it just did a very subtle job off moving the ciders over here in sharpening for this sort of images seen. And you could tweak them if you wanted. But that's enough. I don't think I'm going to have a noise problem. I don't see very much. Maybe a little noise in the sky. But I'm It's not terrible. And how do you know before you even look at the image if you're going to have annoys issue, Look under the hissed a gram. Look at the I s O. This was shot a 200 I s O so I probably won't have a lot of noise and it doesn't have a lot of dark areas in it either. So I think we're gonna be OK. It's when you're shooting at a very high I s O that you normally have noise in your photo that you need to reduce so we'll just leave everything There is a as it is for now. And another thing you might want to dio let me get out of here is you can look under the lens corrections area and you can see if you maybe you want to check. Remove chromatic aberration. I almost do this every time because what that will do is where there is an area like If you look at the tops of these buildings, where there's dark against light, you will sometimes get little traces of magenta or green up in there. And if you remove, the chromatic aberration takes care of it. In most cases, that's another thing you can dio in light room kind of a basic thing to do, and you might sometimes go to transform if you have. If you shot up in a building, you know how the building looks like it's leaning back. Sometimes. If you do that and you can use this feature in the transform panel called Upright, just click, try clicking Auto. And in most cases, that will change the distortion in a photo that has it actually think this one doesn't. So I'm not going to bother with that. But those are just about all I would ever do. Mostly what I do is what's in the basic panel when I'm doing my initial. Just get it done. Fix the photo quality at it. Okay, All of that is predecessor to the actual thing we're here to talk about, which is taking the photo to photo shop