Lessons
Class Introduction: Develop Module Overview
10:15 2Profiles
11:34 3Basic Adjustments
11:45 4Basics Panel: Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze
05:31 5Basics Panel: Saturation and Vibrance
02:40 6Tone Curve
09:26 7HSL
04:48 8Split Tone
08:19Lesson Info
Details
all right, so let's go back to detail and let's talk a little bit about working with details. So I'm gonna go into our portrait session that we were looking at before, and I'm going to Let's just go back to our original image, which I like a lot, and I'm gonna zoom into it at 1 to 1. So I'm looking at it, and it's a little bit soft. If I'm looking at 1 to 1, which is fine for a portrait. It's nice, but I would like a little bit more Christmas on her glasses and on her hair, that kind of stuff. And so I'm gonna come into the detail area, and this is where sharpening happens now. I think it's a mistake. Um, that light room has started to increase sharpening from the beginning, so it used to be maybe two versions ago. Light room would put your images at about 25 on the amount, so you can see that there's an amount here of sharpening. They would usually put it about 25 was kind of normal, normal sharpening for every every image that comes in, and now I find that it comes in 40 which is way...
, way too sharp. Everything looks too crunchy and to crisp. Um, and so I generally try and keep mine around 2025 something like that. That's that's about the right amount of sharpening. So let me explain what these things air these items air about. So amount sharpening amount is how much it's going, because sharpening is just creating contrast at an edge. That's all it's doing, so that if you have an edge that has a light and a dark area, there's there's there's a cliff there, and if you brighten up the white and you darken down the black, that cliff becomes sharper and it looks more sharp, even if it's still not sharp. But it looks sharper because there is a higher contrast between those two edges. So when you tell a sharpening amount, what you're doing is saying, How much do I want to increase the contrast that those edges? And that's what's creating that sharpness. So for me, I don't want that edge to be super crisp. Um, I don't want to sharpen, like, for instance, watch this. If I zoom in here and I take sharpening up to all the way. Look what happens. I'm gonna zoom in further, see, see how it finds every edge of even pixels, and it starts to look like I'm sketching her on. Ah, like with pointillism or something that gets really not good looking, So we don't want to do that, Um, but it makes it really crispy and crunchy and no good. It looks like someone kept saving a J peg over and over and over again. So what I want to do is instead, I want to use a tool that's proper for creating contrast edges, but not everywhere. And that is in the radius. So the radius is a great tool to increase. So what I want to do is I. Instead of increasing the amount, I immediately go to the radius and increase the radius somewhere between, like 1.42 about almost too. So somewhere around there. And you get a lot better, look out of a radius increase than you do out of a sharpening amount increase. And then, of course, detail is further adding a little bit of detail to that. It's very, very subtle, and so it's hard to even see what it's doing. But if you take it to zero and then you take it to 100 just watch closely what it's doing, you'll get a sense of what it's doing. But what it's what is trying to do is is help to find detailed edges and increase that contrast there. So and then masking is specific to, um, usually skin tones. Um, if you mask, you're basically saying, I don't want you to start sharpening until a certain level, and that usually helps to avoid sharpening in like the skin. But it will still sharp in the hair because sees a lot of contrast changes in the hair, but it doesn't see it in the skin, so it avoids the skin and does the hair. It's not always super accurate, so I would rather do those that kind of sharpening on my own by masking using a targeted adjustment like the brush or something like that. So I'm asking. I almost always leave it. Zero radius is always fairly in the middle. Sharpening is always at about 25 or six, and less had to do something heroic. Um, and then detail kind of fluctuates between about 20 and 40 ish. So that's generally my settings for sharpening. Um, the other thing is noise reduction. Um, and this is a great opportunity for you to see. Um, so I'm just gonna click on a bunch of images, and I'm going to go up to library hopes. I'm going to go upto library filter, and I'm gonna go into metadata. There's a great opportunity for you to see metadata in play. So I'm just going to go in and say I want any image that has a I s O of 8000 Let's say 6400 or higher. Okay, so now Iowa, I s 0 6400 or higher, and I'm gonna look for an image, and they're ago. So we're looking at an image of dancers, and I'm just zooming in and and I'm going to zoom in enough that we can see the actual noise, and then I I want to turn off the noise reduction so you can see what the noise reduction is doing. So right now, it still has some noise. And this is 6400. Ah, I eso on a Sony. I think it's in a seven r three or something like that. Um, so I'm gonna turn off the noise reduction, and you can see that there's quite the Sony is a pretty good camera for noise, but you can see there's quiet of it annoys in those shadows and by simply turning on the noise reduction to about 20 or so. It really softens up what looks like that kind of J peg artifact ing. But the thing that I want you to notice is here in the exit sign, which is not important. But it's a good indication of how well it softens the noise, but did doesn't soften the actual edges of things. So watch, this is I go to 2500 watch the exit sign. The exit signs still saved sharp, and the noise in the the shadows here kind of softened up. And I can keep going with that until it's really soft. And still the exit signs stays fairly sharp now. Part of that is because the detail is high. So if I take the detail all the way down, you can see the exit sign got a little sharp, a softer and if you take the detail all the way up you can see that the exit sign get sharper, but also it with the detail all the way up. You end up getting a little artifact ing towards the edges of that exit sign, so it's important to keep the details somewhere in the middle. Um, and luminous noise reduction. There's nothing wrong with a little grain, so feel free to use. Ah, luminous noise reduction, especially with modern cameras, cameras, anything that was made by before, like around 2017 on uh, basically in the canon family, it's like five D Mark four and on is really good at noise reduction. And so a little bit of noise reduction goes a long way. Um, there's also cook color noise reduction, which is generally just sat at 25 just stays the same, and it pretty much works all the time. But if you get to a point where you do have some color noise, this is it's right in the same place. Just simply increase it until the noise disappears, but otherwise just leave it at 25. It should stay that way and and it it it won't matter one way or the other. As long as you keep it at 25 Um, and it's pretty much on every image. If you take that to zero, you will see color noise even in the best of cameras, because the computer has to remove some noise from all digital files. Have a little bit of color noise in them, no matter what I s o your at. So generally speaking, your color noise reduction is just given that your computer is going to do that.
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