Lessons

Lesson Info

Internet Audience Image Critique and Retouch

so I'm going to start with shelly flanagan's image so that's the image right there um I love huge hay bales and so that's initially what attracts me to the images because I think these hay bales or just interesting and I like I like barnes and like trees and I like clouds and I like blue sky so to me this image could be something but right now it's lacking the first thing that I noticed about the image is that it's very it's kind of thin looking um notice that everything's really bright here see how bright the greens are there just way over bright so that's that's the first problem the other thing I see with this image is it seems like there's a lot of um strange picks elation going on it looks very itt's very rough image so the first thing I'm gonna do is try and figure out what how this image was shot and so I'm going to look at it so I s so one hundred oh okay here's here's here's one of the issues is it's a it's a rebel so rebel cameras do not shoot the same quality and image as sa...

y a mark three and so I'm not used to seeing that kind of noise inside of an image the other thing that I'm gonna immediately look to is in the developed module I'm gonna go the basic and just take a look at what happened to the image in order to there we go so now you can see some things are happening here so we've got a lot of recover mean a lot of fill light happening and we've got a lot of exposure increasing exposure so let's take this let's reset this back to what it wass okay so now if we zoom into this image now we can see that it's not so grainy and it's not so bad and image because when you look at the image itself now we're not getting all that grain in there because we didn't have to do too much to brighten it up james and I were talking about this on the brake when you have to increase the exposure to make up for the wrong exposure at the camera that's when you start introducing a lot of noise and so here we have all this noise being created because we have to brighten it up so what happened at the cameras these clouds in the sky fooled cameron to thinking that it was too bright out and sew it shot the picture based on being super bright in the sky but you lost all this detail in the shadow instead we should have used some compensation and over exposed from what the camera thought it ought to dio so that we would get thes whites to be pure white up here but notice also that she was working on light room three when we go to four we're gonna have a lot more ability to brighten it up without quite as much noise so I'm gonna take the exposure up first that's going to get us into the ball park and then I'm gonna take the blacks down because any time any time you take the exposure up the black areas were kind of coming up with it so you want to take those deep shadows and pull them back down so that they don't they don't try and become too bright okay so now we look at that that's pretty good I was curious about the crop because there was there was a lot of crops just how much was cropped off originally from the image and there was no real need to crop off that image because there's there's a lot of great hey bills and there's a lot of interesting stuff however this area here is a little too bright so I'm going to go in and make a grady int and I'm going to choose to do a one stop burn on the grady in so it's just it's just bringing it down by one stop I start at the bottom and dragged up like that just by doing that watch what that did to the image okay so let me let me go back and forth on that so that's this is before the image and this is after do you see how powerful just one little burn is and this is really useful if you're taking flash pictures on a lawn so like let's say you're doing a group photo in in in a wedding or something take the picture of the flash spills onto the lawn doesn't it and then you got this bright green lawn in front of you all you have to do is take a grady in't one stop radiant and just start at the bottom of the lawn and drag it up to about knee height on the people and the flash disappears so great answer amazing things to work with the other thing that you could do with this is make another grady in't coming down but rather than a one stop burn you could do something a little bit more for the sky itself so blue sky burn is what I like to call that and it's going to come down but I'm adding blue to the sky at the same time and this is too much so now I can take the exposure back up because I don't want oh I don't know I definitely want I want those clouds to stay white so take the exposure back up and I'll bring the highlights back up a little bit but notice that the blue sky became bluer as a result of it so now let's go again this is before and after all we've now we've made that skye look richer but what's happening when we darken up this and we darken up this is we're leading people into this area in the center so that people will really see what we're after um now I'm gonna add clarity anytime I don't have people in the photo clarity is I could go a long way with clarity clarity is just taking mid tone detail and so what it's doing is it's making contrast in the mid tones and that's helping to pop things so watch how how well that that barn starts popping out when I pulled the detail up see that and you're even getting more detail in those trees to see that so clarity could be a very useful tool and then of course now this was a great times talk about vibrance versus saturation if I took saturation and brought it up everything gets over saturated the same time including the hay bells like that they're kind of ugly yellow now and that's because we use saturation saturation doesn't discriminate between one color and another it just seize all color the same and increases it at the same rate and so everything khun look pretty ugly vibrance is a much more intelligent tool its job is to take greens and blues and things like that and increase the vibrance of the vibrate of the colors that are already fairly vibrant and so if it sees a yellow skin tone it's not gonna work on that skin tone so it won't over these little hey bills aren't gonna increase too much because they're more yellow and so I'm gonna take the vibrant up and see how that works you see the difference between that and the see how the hay bells are still normal but the green is a little greener and the blues a little glue so if I'm working on an image like this and I'm going to keep it in color I'm going to definitely want to increase the greens and the blues so let's see the difference between what we did originally this is what we had originally and this is what we finished with far better and did you notice that the crop the crop is so much better I mean she saw the image very well there was no reason to do this this is way too close a crop on this hey bill and it puts this barn way too far over to the right hand side of the image that's just not a really valuable crop and by cropping it it makes all of the grain mohr intense because it's enlarging that grain so this is where I would go with that and maybe even take the highlights up just a little that's so that we get little meant more popping that cloud but I like that hey jared and at w p shelley is in the chat rooms right now this is her image and she just says that she was trying to get the barn and closer on that crop so that was uh let's see there's no reason to get the barn in closer because the beauty of the image is not about the barn this this is not a picture of barn if this is a picture of a barn then I'm going to tell you what my professor told me when I wouldn't go into the mud puddle with my on if you're not interested in the bar if you're if you're interested in the barn go to the barn get into the barn if you have to walk through a muddy grassy place or if you have to climb over and risk ripping your your pants on a barbed wire fence do it get over there and get the barn don't don't crop into the barn walked to the barn if that's really what it's about but this image isn't about the barn it's about the clouds it's about the trees it's about all of the hay bales scattered in front of the barn it's thie place not the barn if you wanted the barn you would go to the bar so quick question from phil birdie how did you get the burn radiant a good question burn grady in so I come into the the grady in tulle and the greatest tool is something you should master because it is the fastest way to get almost everything done the greatest tool is amazing I use it all the time I went to the effects section here and dropped it down and I've created a bunch of presets and we talked about those presets so there's a lot of presets in here but you can create your own preset all you have to do we let's just reset this panel and we will create a a burn so I'm going to create a new one and I'm going to let me just reset this to be hoops I'm just going to reset this so that there's nothing going on in it so see how they're all it zero so I open up the radiant panel and I say okay well I wanted bring the exposure down a little bit and I want to add a little contrast and I want to add bring the shadows down a little bit and add some clarity whatever it is you want to do is a grady int in this case what we did is we brought the temperature down because we're going to put it on the sky and we left the exposure up here I'm gonna add highlights and bring shadows down andi I'm uneven now that that's good enough so then once we've done that if you go to the effects dropped down here you can create your own preset by saying save current settings is a new preset once you do that you name it then it'll end up being here so from here on out you no longer have to run through the process of of putting these sliders in the right position you can simply click on the pre set that you want which would be my you know blue sky burn and then grab it and drag it and you're done okay so again every time you have to change these and slide them back and forth you're just wasting time you need to develop presets that will get you through the process of that fast I mean I know it doesn't take much time to move a slider here there but once you start figuring I do that constantly every day all day long you're wasting minutes hours and days of your life just sliding these sliders is there a way that you can selectively get rid of part of the greedy and like if I was editing that photo I would have gotten rid of the blue over the clouds the top part can you erase what you did but still keep the blue currently in the current iteration of light room the answer to that question is no but there's a lot of chatter and request for that people want that and so I imagine in the future that will happen but in the meantime if I want to get rid of the blue on say this cloud right here I can go over to my brush and remember I've added a temperature change down two blue I can go to the brush and I can change it to a temperature change going positive with no other effect so if I could just double click these so if I double click exposure just by double clicking the names it's resets them to zero I can increase the yellow on here and now when I go in and paint this out I'm removing that blue out of the cloud by painting in yellow because by what you're doing inside of light room when you're working on changing a temperature is you're just changing the underlying image and you're saying instead of assuming that this was a blue color shifted more to yellow so it's not like in photo shop where every time you do something you deteriorate the image further all it's doing is it's saying oh instead of making this a more blue pixel let's make this a more yellow pixel because it's still looking at the original raw image and assigning something to each pixel on that raw image as kind of a global thing so you you still get a much better so I'm I'm doing that now and I'm getting a pretty good result out of it so now that cloud is no longer is blue so you could that's how you would fix that for now and then hopefully when we get to like from five or six or where they end up doing that maybe we'll be able to do some of that selective racing or something okay so let's go to another image I'm gonna go to this one because I'm just this one gives me opportunities to do something really interesting I think so I'm looking at the image I'm not all that keen on the crop you can tell that that's been cropped because it's it's real skinny so I'm not sure what the crop is so let's reset this image and see what's been going on and I'm also not too keen on how it's it's a really drab looking image but I like I like the road and I like the little sliver of sky up there like the girl walking on side so let's let's reset this image and see what we have oh that's what we had okay see that so instead of being in close and shooting at this with the camera we're trying to crop in but the problem is that I think I think most people think that you've got to be super close to make something like this work because it's about the girl but really this isn't about the girl at all this is this is a metaphor it's the road traveled right that's what we're looking at so instead of thinking about this as a fashion statement and a girl walking down the road it's not about the girl stop focusing on the person and start focusing on the metaphor being created here and so let's go for that first thing I'm gonna do black and white there we go done because there's no remember what's the mantra it is not about color get rid of it and this is definitely not about color there's no color in here to be there's nothing in here that's worth color so we just turned into black and white and now it becomes about shape so let's brighten it up a little bit and let's bring the shadows back down and watch how she see how she starts to stand out just by turning into black and white she is she now stands out and especially if I go into the black and white so inside of the black and white settings here so once you turn something the black and white you have the ability than to increase or decrease different colors that are underlying the black and white filter and so I can go in and look at her skin tones and I can either try and guess or skin tones and say I want all the reds to kind of come up and I want all the oranges to come up things like that or I could be much more exact about it this little round thing that looks like a target this is a two targeted adjustment if I click on that I suddenly have a target and when I go on point over her skin tone I can use the mouse wheel to increase that color so watch what happens when I start increasing it it's increasing the color of her skin see it's it's realized that this is red and orange together and it's bright ning or darkening it based on me wheeling it up so I can just point at that and then I could go over here to the green areas so I could just go to anything that I think is green and dial it down and now that's not green let's go find something that's green so I know that this is green down here so let's dial down see how the yellow and the green start going down so then if we zoom out look how bright she is in comparison to the background so let's turn it off and on see that see her skin tone is really popping up there much better then what we want to do is we want to accent this road so we can take the brush and we're going to go in and just do a remember we want to do a smart dodge and we're going to take this road and we're going to accent the road because it's all about the road it's not about the girl it's aboutthe road so I'm gonna come in and just brighten up this road a bit coming around here like that little bit bigger brush here so now we're talking about a road rather than a girl and a journey rather than a portrait and see once I've once I've painted my burn or my dodge then I congrats on this little when I won a point at the pin that represents it see where I where I've done the burning and dodging I need to do a little bit right here then I hold over it I can see what I'm doing but then if I grab it I can shift this way and it will increase the total effect see how all of those sliders air moving together to increase or decrease the total effect so if I go up it's increasing the total effect if I go down it's decreasing the total effect so I just kind of moved back and forth until I feel like the road has become significant enough then I'll click knew because I want to make a new brush so I clicked knew and this time I'm going to go for a one hopes I'm going to go for a one stop burn and I'm gonna burn in the sides of the road just a bit so that their little darker so that we get even mohr information or more of a uh a differentiation between the road and the edges so I'm just going to do that there we go excellent okay so uh I think that's pretty pretty awesome I like that and then we could do now james just because you're here I'm actually going to do james is signature um vignette and I'm going to do but I'm gonna do it instead of on edge burn I'm gonna do a really strong burn like that see now that really pushes us up in the road and kind of it holds us you know one of the problems with light something that's light coming to the edge of the frame if you look at it this way you come here and you see this but then all the sudden you're eyes droop downward towards this and you don't want that you want to lead people in and our I always goes to the light it always goes to the light thing not to the dark thing to the light thing and so if I add that strong burn burn to it then suddenly you're more interested in her and your eye comes in and it it when it gets here it wants to go to the light and so you enter into the photograph rather than sagging down down in the photograph so I think that's a good place to stop I like that one so let's look at the difference between the original what we did quite a little bit so there's here's the original and here is the final better yes any questions out there yes wanderson is wondering um on some of the effects you just put on that image is that only a light room for effect most everything here could be done in light room three except if you do post prom vignette ing in light room three it's not all that great light room four is much better light room two is horrible post crop vignette like it gets better each time but I prefer if I'm using light room for I'll use post crop vignette without thinking about it if I use lights turn three I got to really want to do it to do it because light room three's post crop vignettes not quite as good and of course everything's better in light room for when it comes to just the way it operates and the quality of the image it's creating so um anyway I like that I think it's good you know we might even go in here and just add a little bit more clarity to it and that kind of pops her out a little bit more to sew but I really like that I think that's nice it's a well designed image it was just poorly executed when it was done in the final like why why the crop this is gorgeous the way it was seen and you know it's surprising to me when anybody shoots a really well designed image and then crops it it's like there's there's so much self doubt out there when it comes to imagery that people think oh I need crop this and do this and they never trust their gut instinct that told them this is the shot so when angelika shot this image her gut instinct said this is it this is a moment grab it and this is beautiful and somehow she self doubted and started cropping it and didn't realize what her mind or what her soul was saying when she made the photograph sometimes you got to trust it you've got to trust what your instincts told you when you shot it and then go with it instead of trying to crop it I mean she lost the entire day and she talks she lost the integrity of the image as soon as she started cropping it so trust yourself a little bit more okay next one is there any question shot him out I'm really interested in this one that's supercool so um the first thing that I'm gonna zoom in here just so I can see this minute I'm awesome how cool is that so this is joey board elin bordelon portal in something like that joey board one um excellent excellent image the first thing I'm going to do is remove the diaper e think that's a diaper so we're going to go to the develop module and removed the diaper so we're going to go on the spot tool click on the spot to remember we don't use the spot tool for like tons of stuff but a diaper is a perfectly acceptable remove inside of light room so I'm gonna click on it and what happens is light room then automatically assigns a place to grab it from but I can change that place so I can say okay well this would be a better spot to grab from and put it there and then I'm gonna zoom in and make sure that it's going to look okay when I turn this off on that hopes sorry so my my goal is then to look around and see if I can find where the diaper was taken from I don't think I can see it that might have been right there but if I have to zoom in and I have to guess at it then I think I'm okay so I removed the diaper so that's the first thing that we need to do from in an image um I'm curious though what this originally looked like so I'm just gonna okay so all he did is intensify the didn't remove the diaper and intensified the the yellows and I think probably just took up the saturation so let's take it back to where he had it and okay so one thing that could happen color is a contrast so you could go in here and add more contrast to try and pop them out a little bit but instead of adding contrast color itself could be a really effective contrast and so if I just take the vibrance up on this I'm going to start getting more blue inside the sky and then if I take the the yellow down so I'm going to take the temperature down so that I dial out see ivan by taking the vibrance off I've increased some of the yellows and a lot of the blues but I can remove that by simply going back up to the temperature and dialing out the yellow and I'm even adding more blue and I'm keeping the yellow but I'm kind of muting it simply by dialing it out and look how much more effective this image is once you have a blue sky that's popping the yellow out from it I mean I was looking at that image and I was thinking that's a really cool image but he is wasting his sky absolutely wasting it beautiful beautiful blue sky with those storm clouds and it's just wasted because it's not it's not acting as an effective color agent to create contrast to pull out the person from the foreground so it's a it's a waste of a sky so that's a really great way to get something to stand out okay we can add a little clarity that helps with with the camel on the packs and stuff like that so I like that on dh then we can take a grady int again the grady is one of my favorite tools do a light burn not a one stop but a light burn just to keep this grant this this sand from being too bright and causing us to come down and look at this edge and see how I'm doing it at an angle because this edge over here is pretty dark but this edge needs to be as dark as this edge and then I'm also going to increase the yellows on it because when you darken something what do you do you kind of the colors become less vibrant and so we're going to take that and just just warm it up a little bit so that it doesn't seem so grayish and drab and quite frankly maybe it's a little too burned there we go so I think that's an excellent image um I might want to go in and let's let's let's crop it let's take a crop and let's just I'm not going to crop it but I want to rotate it a little bit and just make sure that we have the absolute best um horizon there see how it's just a little bit skewed so by straightening it up a little bit I think you do a really a lot to it so that it's not it's not leaning this way and he's running downhill it's more kind of it's still little down how you want it to look like it's downhill you you don't want to straighten every horizon but you don't want it to feel lob sided and so I think that does a much better job but I think that's a much more fantastic image once you start adding that blue and it's a simple thing to do it's not difficult but it's just you have to see it yet this is what I was talking about yesterday when I talked about pre visualization you have to see the opportunities so as you're selecting images and as you're adjusting images you have to see opportunity look for opportunities to say something and to do something with an image and and again it's not a matter of of of wandering through the store looking for the outfit that you want it's a hunting mentality it's there's an opportunity here let's seize it and do it and you got to get to the point if you want to be efficient you got to get to the point where you can see something now and do it rather than have tto do this version and do that version and then go back and forth you know I you noticed I haven't once made a virtual copy and done two options and decided between the two I never do that I never do that I know what I want and I go after it and I just do it and then I trust that I did it right if I didn't do it right I just never tell myself that I didn't do it right I I just I I always want to believe in myself that's that's my main goal in life is to believe in myself yeah so with that said I assume you don't give your client's option between black white color you kind of absolutely not I would never ever give my client on option to choose color black and white this that just won't go the client pays me to make decisions at the camera before the camp a client pays me to make decisions as to where to shoot and then went to shoot and how to shoot and then how teo edit and which ones to choose and then what kind of treatment to give it and then how to deliver it those were all choices I make because I'm the professional and then likewise when I go into my dentist I don't tell him how to do my teeth he just does it the way he knows how to do it yeah what's you thumb that say I I was telling you my photograph countries uh would you as the big dish of the same re jaguey oh what you do samsung gays and zag and I you very on how many of the same style okay so so the question is fundamentally this when do you decide to give you take a siri's of images say they're all in the shot in the same time frame of the same portrait do you take three of them and make him black and white and four of them and make him color and such and such and so on and the answer is no if it's a black and white image and it's about black and white then all of the images from that siri's that look the same should be black and white because otherwise what you're telling the client is you don't know you're telling people out there I don't know if this should be black and white or color so I'm giving you half of them in black and white and half of them in color and that just sends a signal to the client that you don't have an opinion and once you don't have an opinion then that's when the tiger's pounds that's when you get ripped to shreds because now they want you to give him this and that and oh by the way I like the color version over here could you change this black and white color and then take that color one and turn it to black and white and then suddenly you're just in this nightmare of a situation where the client is telling you how to create your work and the problem is any time you allow the client to dictate what your work looks like what happens is now you are no longer responsible for the work itself and if the client hates the work they really hate their own work not your work they hate their work because they're the ones that did it you were just you were just doing what they told you to do so now they're judging you based on their inefficiency are there their deficiencies at working and photos I don't want any client judging me by how bad they are photographs so I need to if they want to say my photographs are horrible it better be the photographs I made and chose and I made all the decisions then they can hate my work all they want but if they're the ones that were making the decisions I can't have them hating their own work and calling it mine so I can answer your questions shortly if I'm going to make something black and white everything in that siri's need to be black and white if I'm going to funky colors on something everything in that siri's is that because that's what it deserves that's the best way to see it now very filling the hole the vent or no just the siri's so if you're looking at a set of portrait's on on the beach right next to the water where they're hugging and kissing that whole siri's needs to be looking the same on then when you go to some other set where they're you know so it looks best in black and white everything around it that looks the same as it should also look best ok any questions out there yeah wicked light boy is wondering if there is a difference between a virtual copy and a snapshot of his from the netherlands you know that's an interesting question because technically not know there isn't because of snapshot is a virtual copy within the same image but the difference is if you make a virtual copy you can actually export both of those simultaneously to files so they can they can act as though they're different files whereas on a snapshot you would literally have ta go back and forth toggle the one then export them talking together then export but otherwise for all intents and purposes it is it's a virtual copy within that one image so if you don't want to have a bunch of weird virtual copies out there make a bunch of snapshots and you'd have all the virtual copies within one file no additional things shelling so essentially the same except in the export process you have more options if you have a virtual copy I have a question from phil birdie who wouldn't would like to know when to use the mouth and when to use the walk home or do you use the mouse ever I use the mouse for selecting things and then when my hand gets I'm tired and I feel like I'm getting carpal tunnel I go to this and I and I select here I literally will have I always have my shuttle pro and I rest my hand on my shuttle pro when I'm working because it's just it's natural and it feels good and I could do stuff with it and then I can run around with this all day long but then when I get tired of this I go to this and I just go back and forth during selection process and stuff like that because if you vary what you're doing here with your hand it won't get tight and you won't get a sore because I have lots of problems with like tight arms and I'm always afraid of ming cult carpal tunnel and so I just go back and forth between the two but when I'm in photo shop or when I'm working say on you know this picture here you notice I went straight to the pen because the pen is more accurate in trying to you know maneuver and and use a brush and stuff like that so much more accurate and quick than using a mouse however if I'm in photo shop and I'm trying to accurately pinpoint and this is very seldom that I ever have to do this but I'm trying to accurately pinpoint some selection sometimes it's easier to do that with a mouse than it is to hold your hand steady enough to get the right clicks in the right places so sometimes a mouse could be useful but you can always do this to like in photo shop all most of the time when I'm in photoshopped I'm like this and I'll click whatever I need to do with the mouse and then I'll do this and then I'll click things and then I'll do this so I just kind of depends I go back and forth back and forth I think they're both essential some any other questions out there because I go to another one oh you have a question eyes kind of with james question I just stayed a session where was early in the morning my family was walking around in a park it was foggy and every and there's like like what I saw was in black and white but the family did not dig having every single one of their photos be black and white if you are in the situation would you change it then because I did no way because I can kind of see where they're coming from to they bought nice outfits to wear but it was beautiful and barking wait um if I were in a situation where every image I thought should be black and white then I would have probably had a miscommunication with the client because I know if I were at the scene and I thought all of them should be black and white I'd better communicate without that with the client now and say all of these images are perfect in black and white and we're going make them all in black and white and I would have turned my camera to black and white and showed them and said this is all about black and white we want to do this and this and and it should have been a communication at that time if you didn't communicate that at that time you know they expect something to be in color and so what I would have done then has left everything in color to the best of its ability and then I would have taken my very favorite image and made a custom black and white for it and I was showed him all in color and then I would have said I think they should be in black and white what do you think that okay and if they say ok then go with it you know I mean if you usually what I do is about fifty percent black and white fifty percent color that's usually what how it falls out and so but if I go one hundred percent black and white I definitely need toe communicate to that client right at the beginning otherwise they won't be happy I once did a whole wedding in black and white entire thing flowers everything and it was gorgeous I loved it it was all on a like a is on a like a digital camera and I but I told myself I'm gonna shoot this whole thing in black and white so I turned the picture style on it to black and white and then I on import I told it to be in black and white because I never wanted to see him in color otherwise I'd be tempted to keep the color so all of them I never saw the images in color and it was awesome it was the most liberating wedding I've ever shot because it was so such a great experience to go in just shoot something in completely black and life and think on ly about shapes and shadows and light and darkness it's fantastic is gorgeous if I would have it do it again I would have my wedding photographer have shot everything in black and white it was cool so any other questions out there then yeah yeah yeah sorry bonnie find sir using the great infielder and light room do you ever use the highlights lighter it's very useful in pulling in clouds like bring clouds up but most of the time I'm not using it tio burn all the highlights down usually what I'm trying to do is take like if I'm bringing the exposure down that's going to bring down the basic exposure but if I want the highlights to stay where they are I'm usually adding it in tandem to some other thing so that I'm counter acting something I'm doing so in this image if I wanted to burn the sky in and I were to bring this down like this but I didn't want it to burn the the horse's face see all those little white speckles is an amazing looking horse so I could then brighten those back up and so see what's happening is it's keeping the highlights white but it's darkening the clouds see what's going on there so it's not it's not darkening the horse's face it's just darkening the clouds it's darkening the the mountains back there the burn up here but it's not actually really killing the horse's face there because I've taken the highlights back up if I took the highlights down see what would happen see that but I really on ly want the clouds to be affected so usually when I'm dealing with the highlights or the shadows most of the time in a grady in't situation I'm using those to counter act some other thing I'm doing time all the lighters is like that they take it burger down on negative one point three seven tender gate that could bring the highlights up to one point three seven oh don't negate it so the question is then when you're dealing with an exposure of negative one point five seven do you take the highlights up the same amount no it's all by field because those numbers don't match so this goes this is one hundred to zero so it's like one hundred percent versus zero and so it's it's a completely different scale than the exposure scale and the exposure scale is just one stop that's what they're saying is one stop one point three stops one point so they're trying to put it into stops and then then everything else they do in kind of a percentage scale so the exposure scale is very different than all of the other scales so no they they all are independent of each other but they are exact numbers so so it's always the same every every time you do a negative one point eight four exposure change it's it's it's the same amount of exposure change it's it's definitely a hard number I specifically wanted to talk about this image just because I think it's this is one of the best images that came in I think it's a fantastic beautiful image and I think that they did a pretty good job with it I mean it's it's it looks like it's a little soft in the shoe like when they were shooting it you can see there's a little movement and so we can tell why that would be based on here its one hundredth of a second on a fifty millimeter lens so if there was any wind out there or whatever that there could be a little movement in there so but it's also at f two point two so it's hard to nail exact focus at that so I'm sure somewhere we'll find a better focus point and it looks like it's right here so it's right on it's right on the bridle of the horse rather than on this guy's face so there's a lot of sharpening that's probably occurring in order to combat that but let's take let's reset the image and see what it looked like so that's huge the thing is is that when you're out photographing an image you're collecting raw data and that's okay you're you're you're sole job on location is to expose it correctly and frame it correctly that's your job expose it and frame it and get the right moment that kind of thing so your your job is a compositional job then when you get back here your job is to style eyes and to enhance and so that's that's what they did and I think they did a really great job and enhancing now it's it may be that this is a little too over the top I would be maurin inclined to go more realistic with it but this was a really good representation of this style of tire fi it's like that it's almost like that hdr style of photography and any time you start doing this kind of stuff watch see how he's done this so he I guess jesper is uh he that sounds like a guy named right jesper I'm going to say that there's no way someone names a girl jasper so anyway I think jesper did a great job but look what's happening here and this is the reason this looks so hdrs is whenever you see these sliders whenever you see someone take the highlights down that far and the shadows up that high and then the whites down and then the blacks up you're going to get that hdr feel because now there basically taking everything and trying to equalize the shadows in the highlights there's almost no difference between them which tells you khun do a lot of hdr look without hdr photography but what I would end up doing is I would come down and bring the blacks to a normal point I would brighten up the exposure I would play around with the shadows a bit bring the whites down a bit and then I would probably cool it down oh that's nice I like that a lot I'm trying I'm trying to make it more realistic there is a request from everton who asked how would you recommend tweaking a cloudy day image to make things pop and I guess it was this kind of a cloudy day but yeah kind of I mean obviously saw what I did with this one I made that pop and that was based on a simple method of increasing the vibrance and decreasing the temperature and it made that cloudy day pop but if we wanted to make this pop more we could do similar things but I'll tell you what anytime you really want to do something with clouds and sky that's when black and white really shines black and white shines up for clouds and sky and and I really think this is a fantastic image for a black and white so let's go black and white with it and let's go down into the black and white settings here and at this point we can go in and just the idea is that you take the blues way down see that so you take the blows and ock was and green's way down and then you take the reds and the oranges and the yellows way up and see what's happening there so let's go here's before and here's after do you see the difference between those so now we're really focusing in on this person and the horse and we're and we're kind of making these clouds look a little bit more rough and like they were bringing in a storm so this is a great way to do it and then the one thing you've got to be careful of is that when you start doing this kind of stuff to an image just just double check on the edges and make sure you don't have any really weird fringe is happening because sometimes it can create a were edge on a french I don't think we're getting too much of that here but it can create a very strange fringe on the edges of your of your image so just be careful and if you do get that fringe then that's when you would go into the d to the lens correction section that we talked about I believe it was yesterday and you would remove that chromatic aberration which obviously he's already done that um so I wonder what happens if we turned it out see if we can see any kind of fringe is happening and there's not much fringe to it with the greatest tool is that on lee well can use the ingredient for introducing a variation and focus so for instance let's say you're looking at ah ah horizontal you want to blur things into that yeah or the radiance not necessarily great for it doesn't have an out of focus function however that being said if I wanted to do what you're talking about here I could let's just reset all of these so that there's it's completely reset and let's just take the the clarity all the way down toe minus one hundred and then let's just grady in't that in like this and you'll find that it does kind it's doing several things but it's creating a feeling of softness as I say I'm just clicking and dragging and every time I click and drag it drags another grady in into the photograph and by doing that you've created a feeling so watch the difference between this image and that image see it it seems sharper there and then all send it gets softer on the edges that's not it's not exactly what you're looking for but it does create a glowy softness on the outsides and then it gets sharper's it gets towards the center so if you want to do something like that you could but I otherwise it's not meant for that so there's no where went as if you were shooting with a wider lens like uh wider open so is there any other tool that you could say not in light room I wouldn't I wouldn't find go back I don't think you'll find when you go to photo shop for that um but I will tell you this my favorite thing to do and these air some of the new presets that I put in here are some pretty cool vignette things so this is for you james yeah um so I I've got these cool post crop vignettes that are um let's see where are they always know they're not they're not in there where are there in the uh I don't use them very much but they're they're pretty fun let's see maybe it's in this set of vignettes negative carrier there they are so these negative carriers are awesome is if anybody out there know what a negative carrier is so you used tto take a carrier and you'd put your negative in it if you filed the negative carrier out then you would see the sprockets on the edge of the fillmore or you'd see like this really rugged rough edge so what I did is I created these negative carriers edges so I've got some for light from three and some for four but watch what happens you have to do him on so if you're doing a horizontal you have to choose the horizontal option but watch what happens I love this so here's I'm gonna turn off the info so you can really see it in that cool and that's a preset and what I've done it let me have this see that so that's the priest and then you see though how it it um let me turn off these you see how it it gets weird it like ben's in a little bit here and then it's wobbly right here and then it bends out here it comes across bends a little bit there it's totally not even that's all done you can't do that with the the frame the crop the post crop in yet because you can't get that uneven look to it so I'll show you how I did it I assume people would want us not to do this so I'm going to show you how I did it so if you go to the um see all those pins each one of those pens represents another grady int but the grady in if you look at the grady I'm just gonna click on one of them look at the grady in it's the exposure is a negative for the highlights or negative all the way to the negative one hundred shadows are at negative one hundred so everything I can think of too dark in that thing up is done all the way down to the bottom and then I'm just dragging him and making little tunney grady ins but I'm doing it see that weird angles so here that's one see how that one's at a weird angle and then this one it's straight and then some of these air it like that angle and then this one's not at a complete it's not completely straight it it's just like a little bit skewed and by doing that with all of those things you get this great negative carrier but if you if you don't if you if you make one for horizontal and you use it on a vertical it freaks out and it does other things so like if I go down and do a the same thing on say this shot well let's do it to this one if I did the same thing to this one but I used a horizontal it does see how it makes it too thick up here and then the angle is really weird here because it because it's doing it all based on percentages from this side to that side and because you've changed the the length of the and the wit that it freaks it out so if you were teo if you were to do square stuff you'd have to make sure that you I did one for squares as well so you kind of have to you can only use them for very specific things so but they're great for especially when you shoot full frame and you don't do any cropping you just click on those and they do a really good job so all right any questions out there by the way I like this shot better now even though I really liked it the way it was done but just not my style I would probably do this instead because this to me is mohr this is what I picture cowboy that's that's how I pictured cowboys but let's go back and look at it this is original right there and I think his great great shot very interesting treatment but I kind of like that better so I like them both there it's a great image so what other questions do we have so from had seventeen red had seventeen from liverpool do you ever use the adjustment brush on the sky rather than the greatest tool yeah absolutely if there's enough of a shift in the change or I only need burn on this side or if I need to kind of go over someone's head or something like that yeah absolutely use the brush and if I use the brush and I do like a one stop burn on a brush it allows me the ability oh look he's brightened up the face I didn't even notice that I see all this he's really worked on the face kind of looks funny but if I'm if I'm burning it's better to burn with the brush if you have something like this where you have to go around it because you can do a quick burn so I can go like this and get the burn that I want and then I can come over any race out that burns so I can turn to the eraser and then if I turn on the overlay mask aiken cc where that mask is so now I can zoom in go to the hat right here and I can see where I need to do to erase so now I can erase out the areas of the hat that I don't want to burn like that so that allows me to be much more exact about things so now if I turn off that you can see it's funny um you can see then if I if I am turn this off see that so I always want to be able to race out you can't necessarily a race out of a grady in but you can raise from a brush and so that's a that's a good question allie makbul is wondering how much liberty to think we as photographer should take with the clarity slider I'm always scared that I'll just go to clint eastwood on face yes um if I'm shooting a person then I'm very cautious with the clarity I like clarity and especially light room three's clarity is way over the top it's not good but light room forced clarity is much more natural and so I I'll get to like twenty on a person and then I kind of stop and think that's that's about as far as I can dare go but if I'm on a landscape or something like that I'll go a lot further than that because clarity does a great job so and I very rarely on almost no occasions go negative on the clarity because it just gets too washed out however there are times where you could do something with the with negative clarity for instance I'm going to go to um let me go to a different image here hold on here we go okay see these so like here is there's my son jackson and notice all of the glowy nous going on around here now if I go into the develop module this is all in light room three simon updated the light room for because I want you to see the difference do you see all of that grain and that weirdness in the face right see all that there's like little pockmarks and stuff like that it's just not really great quality imagery and it comes from this a little point and shoot canon camera it shoots a raw image but his point you watch what happens when I update this to the new math in two thousand twelve watch the face see that so how much more smooth it is and the quality is better so there's a huge difference between the math that's going on in two thousand ten to the math that's going on in two thousand twelve in light room for so if that's if that alone doesn't tell you you should be on light room for then nothing else will do so but look how much cleaner it is now but still look at all the glowy nous that's going on all that glow and stuff like that if you reset this image back to start it's just that that's what it looks like but what's happening is we are changing I'll show you what's being changed here so in the basic we're just doing you know basic stuff to it but then when we come down to the black and white area c how are you increasing the brightness of the green all the way up because infrared makes the greens glow and so we're kind of selectively choosing what gets brighter and what gets darker but the other thing that you'll notice about this is that we're taking the clarity down because in infrared film what happens it glows it's very soft it's not sharp and so in order to mimic that we take the clarity down because it does that glowy thing to it so whenever I'm creating an effect inside of light room especially if I'm trying to mimic something that I could do in photo shop or if I can do it on film I'm thinking about what it is that creates that effect and then I'm going and targeting that tool that helps to do that so when I think about clarity and I think about the glowy nous of things well clarity's great so if you if you wanted to mimic a nineteen eighties what was that the soft focus lens that the photographers would put on and it made everything all soft and glowy then use negative clarity and you'll have one of those soft focus lenses on your camera you know like if you really want to go back to the eighties which all of us d'oh then you just use claire negative clarity and you'll be transported back to nineteen eighty so one more question from james can you well quick go ahead and reviews the job and begin oh ok yeah then this may be a good time to do it anyway if I go here and I can see that this is not quite the sharpest image again it's a point and shoot camera so I don't expect it to have the greatest focus I come into the detail area which is where all of my sharpening is and especially now because they use negative clarity so it's all soft in orderto add sharpness to something watch what happens if I use the amount when I go up on the amount all it does is just intensify the pixels which is not what we want to do and we're sharpening something so really when I start sharpening something my sharpening and of course I always create presets for so that I can say oh I want x sharpening so I've got sharpening standard sharpening details scharping super sharp I've got heroic sharpening so heroic sharpening is used when you totally just missed the shot and it's totally fuzzy and then you just sharpen it up so you click on it and it does that and it really sharpens it up but it also so create some grain issues so then generally you have to move from the sharpening up and add a little uh luminous noise reduction and that brings it back into check so but let me let me back out here okay so when I go into sharpening what I'm doing when I'm trying to be heroic about it is I'm taking the first the detail up and I'm going pretty high with the detail and I'm going pretty high with the radius and radius the reason radius sharpens things is it it tells photoshopped or light room they kind of operate the same it tells them the computer that I want teo increase the contrast between a dark thing and a light thing so if there's if there's a line where there's darkness here and lightness here sharpening it means I just have to make the dark thing darker and the light thing lighter and that line will look sharper that's how sharpening occurs and so what we do then is if we increase the radius we tell it okay we're trying to sharpened dark things that are larger rather than smaller if we use a small radius we're telling it each pixel has it's own difference between this pixel in that pixel so it starts to sharpened the pixels from the one line of pixel tow the next line of the pixel in it increases the contrast between two pixels but we don't want that so by increasing the radius we're kind of giving it a fudge factor and saying don't worry about the lines between individual pixels worry about the lines between an eyebrow and a piece of skin so it's a larger area on which it's darkening or lightning in order to create that so the and then once we've got those up kind of high then we can take the amount which the amount all it's doing is saying how much contrast do I put in so now I go up on a mountain and I just keep going until I can't stand anymore you know because at one point I'm gonna be like oh that's horrible so I go as far as I can before I have to stop and just I can't do it anymore and at that point then I can go in and maybe play a round with a little bit of luminous noise reduction to soften up those pixel two pixel sharpening so that's that's detail this is obviously a fairly soft image and we're not helping ourselves by doing the whole clarity thing so if I take the clarity back um you'll you'll have a much see how it's a little sharper there so when I pulled the clarity down he gets really that it's super soft so and then they get super creepy if you do that you know but clarity is great for infrared effects as is the black and white area here pulling up the greens