Lessons

Lesson Info

Making Presets

So the last thing that we want to talk about when it comes to, uh, retouching and editing photos is the idea of how to make, uh, really good presets. Now, again, we just talked about making a preset and showed you how to do it. But I need need you to understand the importance of a really good preset. So when you are making your preset after you have come up with a set of conditions, um, you you need to think through first how you're going to make those, um, and I always start my process of making presets for all of my local adjustment brushes. I start that process by thinking what is going to do the most good in the most circumstances? Because if you have too many presets, it'll take you too long to look through them. And so, really, you want to find the best possible way to create a preset that will work in most conditions. And because you have that slider that allows you to change the amount forward and backward mawr or less don't make presets that are are like don't make us set a pr...

eset one preset. That's light and then one that's a little heavier. And then one that's a little heavier than one. That's a little heavier because you could make one that's normal. And then because you have the normal one, you can lighten it up and you can increase its effect. You can go back and forth on it. Um, so So target him and say, I'm gonna make one that does this general effect and then I'll have you know, the ability to vary that back and forth with the slider. Um, but the other thing that you want to do when you're making him is you need to think through what it is that it's doing. So if, like, for instance, when we were doing lips, what is it that makes lipstick richer? The color well, the darker color is, the more rich it becomes. So pink and red are kind of the same thing. It's just read is darker and pink is lighter, and that's how you get pink. You just add white to red and you get pink. So so think through what it is that's going on and try and make your, um, your preset rational. Based on those concepts of what's going on. For instance, one of the best presets that you can make is a just a bright ning of something. So if you if you want to brighten something up and this is where we'll ah, I will show you this in effect, and that is Let me go here. Oh, here. Okay, so we collected a bunch of lamp images, and so I'm gonna play around with a lamp image really quickly. Um, and the first thing I'm gonna do I'm just gonna show you this. Since we haven't talked about this at all the auto setting, I'm just going to click auto autos pretty good nowadays. So I just click on auto, and it does a pretty good job at getting everything fairly normal. And so once I've got that normalized Aiken start playing around with it and what I want to do because I wanted to have a little bit of darkness to it so that it feels a little bit more like it's night time. But I need the basic area of the lamp toe have some lightness to it. So I'm gonna create a radial filter, and that radio filter is going to do the the darkening for me. So there. So now I've got this radio filter that's going to be responsible for darkening things up just a little bit, um, around the edges and probably need toe Bring that in a little bit more. Okay? Yep. That's what I want to do. Except I don't wanna be that dark. There we go. Okay, so we've got this dark and we want to add a little bit of light, so it looks like it's kind of the waning hours of evening or something like that. So we're getting a little darker, and I need the sky to look a little darker. So I'm gonna grab Grady int, and I'm just going to drag the Grady int down like this, and I'm going Teoh, tell it that I only wanted to effect areas that have a luminous that is in a brighter range, so it's not gonna affect the tree. It's just gonna affect the sky so you can see the luminant, see how it's going around the trees. So they're now I've got this darkness, and now I want to add some light into this area right here. So I want to add. I want to add light right here because I want to turn this light on because I really have a problem with lampposts that aren't on. And so I'm going to zoom in here, and I'm going to think about how I'm going to create this preset to turn my lights on. And what happens when you turn a light on or when you when you when you see lights on, is that you have to, um, create a preset that will allow you to brighten something up So we'll take the exposure up a lot and we're gonna take the highlights up a lot. And we're gonna take the shadows up. No, we're gonna take those down a little bit. We're gonna take the blacks down a little bit. We're going to add clarity, because what clarity does Addis add contrast? What we're trying to do is be able to spill over the edge of this black area here, and we want the the white panels, the glass to get brighter. But we want the dark areas to stay dark just in case we spill over the top of them. And so, by thinking that through, I'm telling this. If you encounter black area, make it darker because I'm just about to take the exposure up all the way. And so it's gonna make the black brighter. So as I And when you do it, when you start making something like this, just kind of play with it and and see what it does, see how it even though I sprayed over the top of that, it kind of keeps that black black, and now you just have to go in and say, Nope. You're not making the black black enough, So let's just keep it down. So this is how you make a preset. You are investigating and playing with the concept. Okay, I think that's pretty good. And then we could say, Well, we wanted to warm things up a little bit too. So we're just gonna add a little bit of warmth to that. That's a pretty good presets. So we could say that's the right kind of preset. And so then we would just go into the custom and we would go and say, uh, go ahead and save. This is a preset and then named the preset something like turned the lights on or something like that. So now what I want to do is I want toe think through the idea of building in a light. So let's do this. Um, first things first. When you look at a light, there's obviously a glow right in the center, and that's the light bulb. So that's the first thing we're gonna do is turn that light on the next thing, we're gonna make a new brush. And now what you see is that you generally will find that the glass is glowing, too. There we go. Now we're gonna click New cause we need another one. And this time we're going to say, Well, what generally happens outside that light being on? Well, the light spills a bit. So what we're going to do now is we're just going to come down here and say, Well, I know that the lights going to spill out here like this, but it's not gonna spill up on top, and it's not gonna like too far down. So see, what I'm doing is I'm just kind of creating this feeling of light, but it obviously doesn't look that way, and so what I need to do is now come in in a race and say, Well, I know that it's not going to come up because that hood is there. So we're gonna go like this so there's no way that effects is gonna glare up. And then I could just simply take the entire effect and turn it down so you can see that there's like, little bits of light coming out, and you'd really have to turn it way down. So there's just kind of like a feel of light, and then the last thing is that there's kind of like a general wash of light, So at that point, I'm just gonna increase the size of this. I've still got my same effect going on inside of here. But now I'm gonna take the flow of the light weigh down, and I'm just gonna let me zoom back out here so that we're way out and I'm just going to Let's. By the way, when you're editing pins like retouching pins, you can come down here to this area and say Auto show or never show the pins. And by never showing the pins, they don't get in the way of what you're seeing. So now I'm just gonna take that whole area and I'm going toe kind of do this. So I'm just adding a little bit of, like, kind of general light that would be coming towards me. And so there there's light coming in the air towards me, and so I get a little bit of a feel of almost Aziz, though it's lighting up the general area a little bit. But really, it's just coming towards me. It's glowing towards me, and my eyes were seeing that. And then the last thing that needs to happen is I need to come down here and I need to paint light right here, and I'm doing it. I started heavy and then I m doing it lighter as it goes out right. And then I'm gonna go in here and say, I only want it to affect, um, the lighter areas. So we're going to do a luminous ah, and we're just going to say I only want to affect the lighter is not that area in the center there. And then I'm gonna come back in to edit after I've done that, and I'm just gonna bring the amount down there we go. See, now that's starting to look like an actual light is lighting up that ground and then the light is there. So this is what we have, and it looks like it's actually on, and it looks like the light is hitting the ground below it. And really, all we did is paint. But we thought through the way we're creating the effect based on what we know about what light does and how it interacts with us and how it interacts with objects. And so we get this really nice interesting effect simply in light room without any major photo shop work. And I really pride myself in being able to create fun, nice images, one image, not not combining a bunch of images, but just one image and burning and dodging. What can you do with that? It's a good challenge, and I and I'm gonna issue that challenge to you to go get a photograph and really play and look at it, adjust it, finished all of the global adjustments and then say What can I do to this photo just by burning and dodging things to make it look amazing? And chances are If you'll just spend an extra 10 or 15 minutes burning and dodging one image, you'll find out how much you really can do with it, especially when you're using these great tools like range masking and the auto masking features inside of light room. But that is the process of retouching and using the local adjustment tools that air inside of light room like the brush the Grady Int, the radio grade in and the spotting tool. So use those, and I think you'll find your images are a lot more, uh, pleasing to you.