Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom Efficiency: Develop Module, Presets

starts out like this and let's go in and work on this image in the basic module so in the basic module um you'll notice especially those of you who have worked on light room three we talked about this yesterday little bit there's a change and they've changed the way light room three and light room for work so are when they've changed the light from three work to a way lightman four works and that is that you don't longer have a shadow our recovery and fill light things like that they just operate together so you used to be that I would tell people to not use the exposure knob because the brightness knob was a better nob well they got rid of the brightness knob because they realized that no one was using the exposure knob so they got rid of the brightness nav and made the explosion off the brightness not so now the exposure knob really is the brightness now you're transitioning from three to four so exposure does a pretty good job now of protecting the highlights so what you don't want ...

to do remember we always want to worry about these highlights right here is the only highlight that we're worried about right now um and you can see the highlights over here so right now you want to bring the exposure up but you're watching those highlights because we want the whites to get pretty white because that's a white building so we bring it up as far as we can until we start to see the clip now wait don't need it to go that high there we've got plenty of white right there that's that's what we're looking for that's the target white then we'll take the if we want we don't really need to protect that highlight but if we wanted to we could come into the either the highlights of the white so I'm gonna take the highlights down and see how I'm pulling that back in so now I've got those protected if I want them protected then I can go in and add a little bit of extra black and I don't really care about seeing detail in that shadows I'll bring the blacks down to ricin it up add a little extra contrast and now I'm pretty good on the way it's exposed now a question of whether I want to do the temperature so generally speaking I'm always going to go to the exposure first then to the temperature and there's a very specific reason for that and that is that the temperature can change or look better when it's bright and look poor when it's dark so sometimes you'll if you if you do the temperature first and then you start messing with the exposure especially when it's a drastic exposure change when you get the exposure if you'll end up having to go back to the temperature anyway because once you brighten it up the temperature may change in the way it looks it'll feel different and so I'm always going to do the exposure first and get all that sorted out and then I'll come up and deal with the temperature because I might find that once I do the exposure correctly and it's perfect the temperature looks good but if I do the temperature first then I do exposure I'll generally have to come back to the temperature to fix it because shifts in brightness change color that makes sense I mean if you're out if you've been shooting and you if you shoot someone on red backdrop and you over light that thing the red backdrop will no longer be a deep red it'll be like a pink because there's too much light on it and if you dark innit you under expose a red backdrop then it's going to be marooned it's gonna be a dark red right and so the brightness of something changes its color so we always want to get the exposure correct and then we go to the temperature that's the second thing we do is temperature so I'm gonna warm this up a little bit so I get a little bit more warmth here but I like that that's pretty normalized on dh then I'm gonna come down and just add a little bit of clarity now once I've done that once I've created the basic exposure at that point it's time to stop touching sliders we don't need to go into any of these to do the rest of the work now we're going to go over to presets and work on presets because everything that you could do inside of here in the tone curve in the hse ellen the split tones should be done and his best done through a preset so if I want to you know do some kind of ah funky cross um cross process I can do that just with the touch of one button but it's doing a whole bunch of stuff over here in the sliders so let's talk about doing that you guys want to learn how to do a cross process let's do across process and we'll actually make a preset but you'll notice that when I click on my preset it doesn't change the basic exposures it doesn't ruin the image see that the image stays bright it stays contrast it all that stuff stays because I'm designing the preset correctly and we're going to talk about that we want we want you to design your presets correctly so that when you're using him it's not wasting your time so you want to you want to use presets as much as possible because that's going to help you on the way in you can import with presets or you can spray presets or you can click on pre sets here in the developed module but where however you're using them you want them to be as as well designed as possible so that they always save you time and never waste your time so what we're going to do is we're going to come in and create across process that's probably the most complicated thing we could be doing so well do that so in cross process of several things that have to happen the first thing that has to happen is you have to de saturate the image enough that the other image colors that you throw in will override the natural colors inside of the photograph so we're going to take the saturation down so that those we still want those colors we still want blew in there and we still want orange in this hoop but we don't necessarily we don't necessarily want to lose all those colors but we don't want this to be blue we wanted to be some other from but we want the hint of it to be blue so we d saturated enough that we can override those colors and then we're going to come down to the split tone and in the split tone we're going to change the colors drastically so we're going to go in and and just saturate one hundred percent all the shadows so that's the blues all these areas here are goingto we're going to change those colors and we'll choose whatever color we want to use so let's do like a a very blue shadow and then we'll take the highlights to one hundred percent and let's do a very yellow highlight so that's a little too green there we go that's nice so now we've got that weird look and now we get to choose how much of each so we turn them all back down to zero and now we're going to just bring those things in until we like the amount of what of saturation we're seeing in those so I'm gonna want mohr yellow than I want blue there we go that's interesting okay so now I can I can I can change the balance between those two so I can say okay do I want it to be a little bit more blue or do we want it to be a little bit more yellow I kind of like it a little bit more yellow so that's a that's the way I want this image to look the other thing that I want to do with that is I want teo increase the contrast so I wanted to be a little snappier right and so I'm going to go into the tone curve I'm not going to go notice I'm not going into the contrast because if I go into contrast that's a basic move that's something that you would do to correct a deficiency in an image we always do preset stuff in the tone curve and below so that so that we're adding to the image that you've already adjusted if you start overriding stuff in the basic area other than just the only thing that I allow for in pre set is anything in the presence presence is fine but if you do stuff up here in the basic tone area and in the white balance area you'll be destroying all the work that you just did in normalizing the image so I'm going to come in here and I'm gonna bring the blacks down a little bit I'm going to bring the highlights up a little bit maybe even the darks down a little bit so that it's a little snappier um in the way it looks once I'm done with that now I get to go make the preset so let's go up to the top here and let's hit the plus button so we hit plus and then we're gonna make the preset so when we make the preset we're going to go in and do uh let's just put it in the test presets folder but but notice that I have all these folders named and they're named with a code at the beginning so that it holds the folder in position because you you want to have folders rather than having to scroll through a thousand presets we put them in folders so that there's only twenty or thirty in a folder or ten in a folder and as you find that you're not using a preset like those of you out there who have purchased my presets there's a lot there's four hundred of them you're going to use four hundred presets if you don't use them start deleting them if you don't like him started leading them you want to streamline those as much as possible so that you're only looking at the pre sets that you will use and do use so when we look at these presets well I'm going to put it in the test father but we would probably put it in the film pack that's where we would put it because it's a cross process we'll put it in the test presets and I'm going to name it some kind of a name the first thing that has to be on any name is a code at the beginning that code tells it where to be because it's an alfa america um organization so if you just do it by a name so let's say you call this yellow cross process it's going to be down with the why but if you want it to be up with the stop next to something that starts with a b you can't do it alphabetically you've got to put a number at the beginning so I always put a number like o five five number fifty five so that that way I know it's going to be in the fifty fifth position of all my presets and and then aiken I can move it up or down based on just changing that one little number I don't change the name so we'll call this yellow blue cross process so we've just named it and we named it a very rational names so that anybody knows what happens when you click that you don't want to name it like you know school days because yeah okay that makes sense for this image because it's my school but that doesn't make any sense for other images why would I put school days on a bride or something like it just doesn't make any sense just name it what it does so that we know okay that's the yellow blue cross process then it will be helpful to you and anybody else who happens to share it so we're going in the test and now we check none we don't want to include any check boxes right off the bat because we want to choose specifically what's going to go in the preset now on this every time you created preset in light room for it will always put the process version as checked you can un check it but that's going to give you a warning that says by the way if you don't put this you may use some things that are on ly in light room for and we won't change it toe light room for and so you may not get the same effect so generally speaking because I like to force people the light room for I'll put in the process version however when I've created presets if there's something that is needs to be done a certain way in light room three I'll unchecked this so that it doesn't push you in the light and four and it stays and light in three and I'll actually coated at the end I would put on here at the at the very end I would put l r three so that you would know oh this one keeps me in light room three and his best used in lighter three and this one is for light room for so if there's something that will force you to light room for always put it in light room for so that you would know ow if I click on this I am going to be in light room for or I am going to be in light room three okay so I'm going to include the process version because I want to keep this same look and so I don't want to adjust so then I'll go to the saturation because I want to de saturate it remember we d saturated at the beginning and we also added split toning so we're going to add that in and then we also added a tone curve to give it that contrast that we want from our given film right now we may have do plenty of other things to this image but they don't belong in this preset we adjusted all of these basic exposures but we and we've adjusted the white balance but that does not belong in a preset because if you put those things that we did to this image in the pre set then when I you when I went and use this on a different image that was completely exposed differently it would ruin the image because it would set my white balance at a specific thing so if I was inside an incandescent light and I clicked on a preset that had white balance for something that was outside it would ruin the white balance of the thing that was inside so we on ly include the very specific things that air that are crucial to making that effect and those are the only things that we did that make that effect and so we create it and now because we have that we can go to any image so I can go to say this image here which is obviously a very different exposure I mean and and because I include the process version see this it would update it and see how that change this is my friend kevin who's the musician that I talked about on triple scoop it changes things just a little bit and so that's why you want to know which process version you're going to be in so it'll change things but see watch now this image is very different see how it's different it's exposed very differently from the other image that that were the other image of the school but I can come back down here and use my elbow across process and it changes without ruining the image because we didn't include those basic things and up the temperature and we were specific about what we wanted to dio and because we don't try include everything in the kitchen sink we only say you want a yellow blue cross process there it is but we don't put vignettes on it and crazy things like that because if I want ad james's signature vignette I'm going to do that separately so I'm gonna click on the yellow blue cross process and then I'm going to go up to my vignettes and add the edge burn in orderto ad that effect because I don't always want james may always want the edge burn but I don't always want it I only wanted on some things and so I'll click on edge burn if I want ej burn but if I really wanted a strong weidman yet that I would do that there's no reason for my any time you get a preset that does everything in the kitchen sink then you end up wasting time because you click on it and then you have to come over here and fix all the crap that just ruined and so you want your your presets to be incremental so when I click on an image like say this one this is an old automotive shop um and I click on it and I say okay black and white age see pia I want to do um eight hundred grain and I want to do um kind of extra tone curve and I want to give it a vignette and now it's done but I just click click click click click and it's done I'm adding stuff to things rather than trying to um tryingto push one button that does everything and then come back and fix it I'm really interested to see this is one of the dmg is that people get to download really interested to see what people do with this because it's just so like block so I'm really interested to see what what what happens to it if anyone chooses that so we'll say um any questions out there about presets oh boy oh boy father ever but but this is an important topic presets are huge they will change the way you work on photos if you're not using presets you're wasting time whether or not you buy him or whether you make them yourself you've got to use them because they they're probably the most amazing thing about light room is the preset abilities and the and the easy access to him and of course we'll talk about synchronizing synchronizing in a second and that's also a very important part of your process so questions questions about preset specifically question came up from spiffy picks who asked how do you move formally created presets into a folder how do you organize precept oh good good question okay so if I want teo reorganize presets and by the way if there's a lot of people will buy presets and they'll be like there's too many or there's whatever and that's why I have an everyday favorites holder so I have one folder that's my everyday favorites right up at the top here so that if I like something from say my black and white set here so let's say I go wow you know what I really like when I go to black and white and I love this here let me find it ok I love this ah blue tone with uh with grain like that's my favorite thing I love it so what I do is I grab that one and I drag it I'm just going to keep moving up the scale until I get to the everyday favorites I'ma drop it in the everyday favorites and so now it's moved from the black and white folder up to the I'm going to use this every day so now it's in a completely different folder now I'm going to go look for it there it is right there so it's that blue tone black and white with grain I can change its position if I wanted to be up at the top I can right click it rename it and now all I have to do is put it like say let's make it o for be and I'm gonna cook okay so now it's going to be below four as oh four b so if I am using sayin a type I click on that and it's more sayin and then if I go I want the blue tone I click on that and it's right where I wanted to be and oh you know I'd rather have it under five so I'll rename it again and say we're going to make this oh five b and now it's underneath that okay so and and and one of the things that I like about the way I've created presense is that I'm not expecting someone to use my presets as they exist I want people to buy the presets and then change them to be their own so if you like something else moved higher up they renamed the code and push it further and if you don't if you have a pre set that you're like oh that's a good precept but I don't use that color of sea pia so then what you do is you come over to your split toning and say I actually like my c e p a to be muchmore greenish and I like it to be much more saturated so that's my c peotone right there which is actually a green tone not a cpu tone but if that's what you think a c p a tone is then you could go back to my c p a tone here and you can right click it and you can update it with the current settings check none remember you're going to get rid of that and I turn off the process version because it doesn't matter what process version you're in for like a split tone and then just add the split toning that's the only thing that's in that pre set and hit update and now this one if I click on this one it's this tone but watch what happens when I click on my light cp I totally made it a green tone instead so you can change presets all you like and then they really should be changed nobody should ever get a preset from anybody like don't go buy a pre set and then just use what they're doing by a preset and then make it your own so get the preset and then adjusted a little bit and then re record it and make it your own and change the name of it so it makes more sense to you and if you want to get to you in just a second james if you want to you can hit plus and you can add a folder so inside of when you go to create a preset you khun treat create a comm plete ly new folder up at the top of the list this is new folder you can make a new folder called uh the best presets in the world ok so if you found those wherever they are then that's and I'm gonna I'm gonna put that right at the beginning I want that to be like zero zero the best pre set in the world so when I create that now I can cancel out of here and you'll see that there's a zero zero the best presets in the world are up there and so now I can I can take because I think that my new green tone see pia is one of the best in the world so I can take that and I'll grab it and move it up here to the best presets in the world and now I have one of the best presets in the world right here oh shoot turns out that the light cp is one of the best in the world the green cp is not all that great so especially if you're using people green doesn't look good on people not not usually blue looks okay but greene's a little weird okay so that should answer that question a couple questions you might have already covered this briefly but ah one is from on cue photography and when you upgrade lightened for from light room three how do you bring your pre sets from the preview of previous version and also photographic ce miami is winning when you several catalogs how do you import certain presets which you have purchased for example one nick yeah that's okay got it so those air those are important questions the first thing to understand is that when you if you go to the light room preferences and inside the preferences there's there's one one panel called presets and for those of you on a pc it's under the edit menu goto your preferences so when you're in the preferences and you hit the preset tab at the very middle there's a place that says show light room preset folder when you click on it it shows you the folder so by default light room puts your presets in a folder in your system folder and so anything that's in that precept folder in the system folder is seen by light room as your presets and so if you were to remove like if you were an update to light room for and delete light room three it wouldn't change anything about the position of that folder it would simply say when you open light room for lightman four would look to that same system folder and say oh here are the presets and they would just be there so there's no effort required toe update from three to four to see your presets however there is one tricky thing that people can do that will confuse and that is if in that same preference area to the left use you click on this store presets with catalog then what it does is it still leaves those presets over in that system folder but for this catalog it on lee looks at its own set of presets so when you click on it you're only looking at the presets in that specific catalog and so if you choose to do that which I I I would never do that because it creates a hopes host of problems number one is every time you make a new catalog you have to import new presets which is totally annoying so you don't want to do that but the one advantage to is if you create a you could create a um basically a template catalog and make sure all your presets air in it and then before you ever put images innit copy that and every time we're going to make a new catalog copy that catalog with the presets in it and then start from there then if you were to send the catalogue to somebody they would have your presets in the catalogue so you wouldn't have to send them the presets as well so if you were sharing a catalog to somebody else who was working for you and assistant and you wanted them to be using your presets if you store the presets in the catalog they will go with the catalog the short coming again is that they were on ly in the catalogue and so the next time you create another catalog just on the own like you make a catalogue it's not going to be creating it with your presets you'll still have to reinstall the presets so I don't like the option so if I want someone to have my presets I will then give them my presets so does that answer to those questions thank you don't take another question going okay one more this is from judy bee photography in london what do you think of the pre loaded adjustment presense can we do a lot of stuff with ease no not really I just don't think they do a very good job of making precepts which is surprising because they made the program so the ones that are already there they're okay but they're nothing special I mean there's a couple of them that are okay but I mean do you see what just happened there so I had a picture that looked like this and I click on something that the light room team made and it did that it ruined the photo I I just can't abide a preset that messes up a photo it just shouldn't happen so so I'm I'm always going to be in favor of creating your own presets megan by mine but create your own presets and make them good make them right don't don't trust someone else to make presets that doesn't know how to make him which is weird the light room anyway so they're they're fine you can play around with them and you could you could go in here watch this I could fix this preset so let's look at the blue filter if you want to fix a preset go up to the basic area and watch what happens when you do it okay so it's it's forcing us into light room for that's the first thing that it's doing so let's update toe light room four okay now we're updating the light room for but watch what it does did you see what it did to the highlights why on earth when you're trying to do a blue filter would you mess with my highlights what does that have to do with being a blue filter nothing has nothing to do with being a blue filter and yet they messed that up and so I can fix that by just saying ok the highlights are being messed with I need to remove that so are the blacks the blacks are being messed with so let's go in here and change this so when I click on it let's take the highlights and bring them back up and let's take the blacks and bring him back up so now at least those aren't being messed with but what else is being messed with you know so we go through and you just look at everything to see what all is being messed with and then once you figured out all the things that are being messed with then you go in and re record it you right click it oh look at that you can't even update it ok I've changed my opinion they're not worth messing with I mean my opinion of originally was they're not all that great but now that's really they're not great because can't even update him so so let's go to an image I'm going I'm going to get out of these images and go to a portrait um so let's go to this portrait here okay so this is a very interesting portrait um this is one of those ones that we did with the off camera lights that we talked about yesterday so this was done with three let's see one two three off camera um uh kanan six hundred artie flashes so there's one over here off camera here and there's one over here that's creating that thing that looks like sun is actually a flash and then there's one over here just off this tree and those three flashes are doing all of that and then of course there's a little burning around here to bring us into her stuff like that um so it's ah interesting image to play with but here's the d n j so using the right tools for the job um and and and you and using them correctly so if I want to go in and dodge something out and we did a little bit of this yesterday you saw but I'm gonna explain my methodology toe what I'm doing when I use a brush tool you'll see that I've already done some burning here so see that there's a little burning going on just to kind of you know pull this brightness down a little bit but notice what happens here in her dress see that so here's the dress and watch what happens if I delete this pin see how dark that is and now undo it brightens her up a little bit so we were kind of losing detail right there in the front and I wanted it to look a little bit brighter so I'm adding to it like that okay so my methodology and using a bright ning I did this yesterday and I wanted to show it to you so when I when I used the smart dodge what I'm doing is I'm brightening things up and then I'm pulling the shadows back down so that I can easily over aiken aiken spray over a shadow and I don't have to worry about the shadow getting bright because I'm brightening up the exposure and the contrast on the highlights and then I'm taking the shadows back down in the process andan the other thing that I'm doing is enlightened for you of the ability to take noise out so you can add noise reduction in a brush and so when you brightened something up you're automatically adding noise and so I'm adding noise remover into the process so when you're when you're looking at creating a tool for a job you have to think about what it's what the tool is going to do to the photo as you're working on it before you create the tool so when I'm looking at making a tool if I want to go in and brighten up her face um I'm gonna go into brighten up her face let zoom in and uh and when I go in there to brighten up her face I want the tool to brighten up her face but I don't want it to brighten up say the shadows in her inner ear or maybe say her um eyelashes or her eyebrow I don't want those to brighten up I just want the things that I'm that the shadow areas to brighten up and so in order to do that I have to make sure that I keep the shadows down but then as I brighten things up I'm always going to lose a little bit of of quality and the photograph and so I'm that's why I have the the noise reduction going up as I start painting things in so you kind of counter act things as you go the other thing that you could notice about this images see how see how it's warm up here and it starts to cool down right here so now you you could choose to try and just warm up the whole photograph but then what happens to her face it warms up to and so there's still a discrepancy between a warm cheek and a cold neck and so what we'll do instead is will create a new brush and this time we're just going to do like a warmth and so I'm just adding warmth to this and notice I'm using a preset that specifically made for a warrant for radiant but it also works to paint it in so I'm just changing the temperature toe warmer and I'm going to start painting in a temperature controlled change and now see I'm taking her neck and making it it's obviously becoming too yellow but that's great because I can see it so now I can just paint in that warmth around her skin here where it's gotten a little colder and here on the shoulder needs to be a little warmer and then over here in the shadow here needs to be a little bit warmer now obviously to yellow right but that's okay because now when I zoom out a little bit actually I better zoom in just a little bit here okay now we can set the exact temperature that we want so I can come in here and move the temperature up and down a little bit and I can add a little bit of magenta to it toe warm her up a little bit so it's not quite so green which makes it a little it intensifies the yellow nous of it and so now if we look at the difference between before and after so here's before and here's our here's before see how it's cold and here's after now it's warm so when you have an issue there's there's a reason to choose specific tools and the brush tool is a much better tool to use to deal with a slight change somewhere in the photo than it is to try and warm up the whole photograph and then be like now I gotta go photoshopped to de saturate the face you don't need to go to photo shopped for that you just warmed up the neck in that little spot where it needs to be warmed up so it's a matter of choosing the correct tool and most of your tools that you use can be done here inside of photo shop now our men inside a light room now there are certain things that are better done inside of photo shop you can certainly go in and see this some of these little freckles and moles and stuff you can go in and click on the spot remover and come into a specific one and click on it and you can remove it see that it's gone but if you start doing a bunch of these you're going to notice slightly light room just goes uh and it just slows down and gets really depressed and doesn't want to work anymore because that's a lot of effort that light room is going through to copy and paste stuff on a raw image it's just it's it's taken a lot of effort for it to do that if I do one fine I knew three or four fine but when I do fifty of them you know like that it's slower than it is in photo shop and it slows down light room so there are certain tools that are better left to photo shop and retouching like retouching zits and stuff like that photo shop is better at those so goto photo shop when you have serious retouch ing to do it's a matter of choosing the right tool for the job and the right tool for the job for that job is in photo shop not here this is meant more for little tiny things like a thing here thing there may be a dust spot in the sky or ones it it's just there and you need to just get rid of it those that's perfect for light room not necessarily a good idea is trying to all of it in life although you could but it would just slow lighter and down a bit so you wouldn't want to do it to a ton of images just may be the one and like billions this vital movoto this way words on this job that does in my bedroom than voters job well doesn't do as good of a job as him vote you're right you're right this the spot removal tool in light room is much more basic and doesn't do is go to jobs photo shop you're absolutely right on dso that's why it's a better tool in photo shop