Lessons

Lesson Info

LRC Adjustments: Complex Masking

1 So I've got another image from my trip to Iceland 2 that I wanna work on. 3 This is a great image 4 because it's got so many opportunities to create some masks 5 and to work in the color adjustments area. 6 I just wanted to give you more options 7 on how you can select things 8 and why you would work in certain tools versus other tools. 9 So in this image, I like the red roof of this barn, 10 I like the green grass behind it, 11 but I wish that I was a little bit more 12 in kind of the summer months or whatever 13 so that it was a little greener. 14 I want that roof to be a little redder. 15 So I'm gonna do a little bit of selection here. 16 Now, I could go straight down to the, 17 and you can notice that I've already done some adjustments 18 on the image itself so it's normalized. 19 The question is what do I wanna do 20 to the specifics in the image? 21 So I'm gonna go down to the color mixer area. 22 And I'm going to, instead of just using the color mixer, 23 and you can see 24 ...

that I've played around with that a little bit. 25 I brought the red hue down a little bit. 26 Saturation wise, I've kind of played around 27 with the saturation on the different colors, 28 even the luminances of the different colors. 29 I brought the blue down, see that? 30 So the, everything that's blue in the background 31 is a little bit darker, a little richer, 32 because if I had left it the way it was, 33 it's just kind of blown-out blue. 34 So I brought it down just a little bit. 35 But what I wanna do is go into the point color. 36 And if I were to just choose with the little dropper, 37 say the green, and then I was also to choose, 38 say the yellow, and in the green, I said, 39 I want this to be a little bit more green 40 and I want the yellow to be a little bit more green. 41 Do you see how it's starting to look more green, 42 but it's also starting to look kind of fake and weird? 43 I can't really do a lot more than shift the hue 44 or shift the saturation. 45 So I could kind of bring the saturation down. 46 I could shift the luminance down and make it darker green, 47 but it's still not looking the right color of green. 48 So then I'd have to kind of play with this. 49 And it's kind of hard to make this work right. 50 But I have another option. 51 So I'm gonna hit the option key 52 and reset the point color here. 53 And I'm gonna go up into the mask. 54 And in the mask, I'm going to choose a range, 55 but instead of luminance range, 56 I'm gonna choose a color range. 57 Color range, I'm going to go in 58 and I'm gonna click the green area 59 and the yellow area. 60 I'm kind of drawing a square around this kind of color. 61 There, you see it? 62 Selected all of this. 63 And I can increase that by holding down the shift key. 64 I'm gonna add another one and get this yellow stuff here. 65 There. 66 So now I've got something 67 that gets all of the different grass colors. 68 I could just click on 'em too, by the way. 69 You don't have to draw a square like that. 70 You can just click on a very specific, 71 so if I were to just click on this yellow, 72 then that's all you would get is the yellow. 73 And then if I shift click and add this green, 74 then I get the green and the yellow. 75 So that's probably a little bit more accurate anyway 76 so I didn't have to draw an entire square. 77 Usually, that's even better, 78 when you're working on someone's face, 79 you just draw a square on their forehead 80 and you'll get all of their skin tone. 81 But once I have this selection, 82 now I can go into the point color area, 83 but now it's inside the mask, 84 so I have actually localized the colors 85 that I'm gonna change into this one area on the photograph, 86 which is actually much more useful for several reasons. 87 First being that I've localized it, 88 so I know exactly where it's gonna be. 89 And so, now when I click this point color option, 90 now I can still go in and choose the green 91 and I can still go in and choose this yellow, 92 so I've got both of 'em, 93 and I can expand the range of the yellow 94 and I can expand the range of the green 95 so that I'm working on a lot more color at the same time. 96 And then, right now I'm working on the green 97 and I can bring the green up, 98 and see, it's increasing the green just like before, 99 and it's still a little bit the wrong color of green, 100 but that's okay, what we're doing is we're just shifting it. 101 So work with me here. 102 I'm gonna go to the yellow 103 and I'm gonna make that a little bit more green, 104 so you start to see a little bit more green going on there. 105 And I'm gonna take the luminance of the yellow 106 and bring it up so that it's kind of bright 107 and it looks like the sun is kind of cascading off of it. 108 And I'm gonna take the luminance of the green 109 and bring it down. 110 Okay, I still have the wrong color of green, 111 but that's okay 'cause in a minute, we're gonna fix that. 112 So I'm not gonna play with the saturation of anything. 113 I like what I'm getting out of my hill, 114 but now I'm gonna go up, because before, 115 when we were just using the point color, 116 all we could do is change the colors 117 inside of the point color system. 118 Because we went to the mask here 119 and we used a color range, 120 that means we were able to select that whole thing 121 and we can use every tool at our disposal now. 122 So now I can go in and I can play around 123 with the temperature and tint. 124 And by the way, when you're trying to make color, 125 the color of grass, more accurate, 126 grass has a lot of magenta in it. 127 And so, I'm gonna go to the tint 128 and I'm actually gonna take magenta up. 129 And see how that grass starts to look more real? 130 So when it's, when the green is used, 131 which people think grass is so much of green, 132 they think, "oh, grass is green", but it's not. 133 It's actually a lot more magenta than people think. 134 And so, I'm going to increase the magenta on that, 135 and suddenly, that grass starts to look real, 136 it starts to look like the right color of green. 137 So I added a little magenta, 138 but it's only adding it to our mask. 139 That's the key. 140 That's the power of having this mask 141 as part of the equation of adjusting the point color. 142 And then I can also come to this hue area 143 and I can shift both ways and make it a little bit more... 144 so I'm just barely shifting it. 145 If I double click that, I can zero it out. 146 And if I shift it more towards the green, 147 I get a little bit more green, but I gotta grab the magenta 148 and go up on the magenta a little bit. 149 And that's looking a lot more accurate-like grass. 150 And if I were to turn this on and off now, 151 you can see, this is what it looked like before, 152 much more yellow because it wasn't summer, 153 and this is what it looks like after, 154 a lot more green, a little bit more rich. 155 So I like that. 156 The next thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna create a new mask 157 and I'm going to select the subject. 158 So this is an AI tool, 159 and you can select people in Lightroom, 160 and we'll do that in a bit, 161 but you can also select a subject, 162 and there's a difference. 163 Subject could be a dog, 164 could be a building, could be a rock. 165 It just is going to know what the subject is 166 based on the photograph, so it's an intelligent tool. 167 If there's a person there, 168 it's gonna be the person probably, 169 but it might be the person and the dog and the building. 170 So kind of it's gonna intelligently figure out 171 what your subject is. 172 In this case, when I click subject, it obviously knows 173 that that building is the subject of the photograph, 174 and then there's some rocks involved as well. 175 We don't necessarily need those rocks to be involved, 176 so I can always subtract with a brush and just go in, 177 and let me make sure my brush 178 is flowing at a hundred percent, 179 and I can just go in and get rid of the rocks. 180 Okay, so now we have the subject, which is the building. 181 And I can go into this settings on this 182 and I can play around with the exposure, 183 just bring it up just a little bit, 184 add a little bit more contrast to it, 185 bring the blacks down just a little bit. 186 There. 187 Perfect. 188 Now, what I can do beyond that 189 is I can say I'm gonna create another mask. 190 This time, I'm going to create a mask for an object, 191 which is also a AI tool. 192 And I'm gonna go into here 193 and I'm just gonna draw a little box 194 right around the red roof 195 'cause that's what I'm interested in. 196 Like that. 197 Boom, it selected my red roof. 198 But see how it selected the wall over here as well? 199 I don't want that, so I'm going to go in 200 and click the triple dot button, 201 intersect with a color range, 202 and I'm just gonna draw across that red. 203 Boom, see how it got rid of that? 204 'Cause it's not red. 205 So now I'm looking at the roof and red. 206 That's all that's gonna be adjusted. 207 So now I can do whatever I want with this roof. 208 So I can kind of richen it up a little bit, 209 I can add some saturation to it, 210 I can kind of play with the actual coloration of the red, 211 I can make it a little bit more orange, 212 a little bit more red. 213 Good. 214 And I wanna give it a little bit more texture on that roof, 215 so I'm gonna grab the clarity and pump it up. 216 I'm not using the texture 'cause I misspoke, 217 I don't want texture, I want contrast in there, 218 so I'm gonna take the clarity up. 219 There. 220 So now this is what the roof looked like before. 221 It was just kind of thin. 222 Now it's a little richer, a little bit more saturation, 223 but it's specific only to that roof. 224 And if I want, I could add another object to the same brush 225 'cause I wanna do it to that red on the front. 226 And so, I'm gonna hit zoom. 227 I'm gonna go in and zoom in a little bit more. 228 And I'm just gonna select this little area right here, 229 like this, down here, like that. 230 There. 231 See that? 232 It found it. 233 And so now, it's playing with that one as well. 234 So now let's see what it did. 235 See that? 236 Gave it a little bit more texture. 237 Although on that one, it kind of gave it a different color 238 because it's not quite the same type of red. 239 But that's okay, 240 I can go in and create another mask based on that object, 241 and I can just draw that object one more time. 242 It was easy to select. 243 So I am going to select that object. 244 Boom, it's selected. 245 And I want it to be more red 246 and I want it to be a little darker, so I'm gonna go in 247 and grab the shadows, deepen it down a little bit, 248 and I'm going to shift the colors on that 249 until they are a little bit more reddish 250 and maybe bring the shadows down a little bit. 251 And I don't want it to be that saturated, 252 so I'm gonna kind of de-saturate it just a little bit. 253 And let me now zoom out to fit the screen 254 and make sure that that doesn't look hokey. 255 No, that looks good. 256 I like that it's a deeper red. 257 So that's pretty good. 258 I'm just gonna darken it down a little bit more 259 so it looks a little bit richer. 260 And I'm gonna take the saturation down 261 just a little bit more and maybe take the highlights up 262 so that you see some of the... 263 There we go. 264 It probably could use just a little bit of clarity as well, 265 so, there, I like that. 266 That's a solid front area there. 267 So this is what it looked like before. 268 This is what it looks like after. 269 This is what the whole photograph looks like before. 270 See how it's just kind of, it's okay, it's fine, 271 but now it's rich and it's popping out 272 against the green background. 273 I like what I'm seeing there. 274 And I could always come in again, 275 click on here, and say select my sky. 276 It just selected the sky. 277 It also selected a bit of the mountain, which is natural 278 because the sky kind of bleeds over the mountain sometimes, 279 so it'll look pretty good when we adjust this, 280 and if it doesn't, we can always kind of manipulate our sky. 281 But I'm gonna take the... 282 I'm gonna take the exposure down on the sky just slightly 283 and I'm gonna take the shadows down 284 so that those shadows in the clouds 285 get a little bit more rich. 286 Actually, you could do that pretty well in the black area. 287 And then you can take the whites back up. 288 That looks pretty good, 289 and see how it doesn't look wrong on the mountain there, 290 so I'm okay there. 291 And then I could take the blue, the temperature, 292 and just kind of richen up the blue of the sky just a bit. 293 So that looks even better than before. 294 So here's the original image before masking, 295 and here's after. 296 It's subtle, but it's nice. 297 It really gives a lot of texture to the sky, 298 it gives a lot of rich contrast 299 between the red barn and the green here. 300 And then finally, if I wanted to, 301 I could also just create a normal linear gradient 302 up the front 303 and just take the exposure down just a little bit. 304 And instead of bringing the exposure down, 305 why don't we just take the shadows down, 306 that way, we still get these white kind of lichen stuff, 307 that's it's basically just a layer of moss. 308 We still get those if we take the shadows down 309 and we take the white back up, we still get that, 310 but we get kind of a darker general look upfront, 311 and that allows our eye to travel here a little bit better. 312 And that is our final photo, and I think that looks great. 313 So remember that you don't necessarily 314 only have to do global effects on the whole photo 315 just because they're so targeting of colors, 316 like the point color tool. 317 You don't necessarily just have to use that. 318 I would prefer to find the exact place that I wanna place it 319 and then use the point color tool 320 in conjunction with other tools, 321 and I'll get a much better result.