Lessons

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Post Production and Q&A

this is a place called ping on china um it's up in the tops of the mountains and what you're seeing is rice patties so they grow all the rice on the sides of the mountains and uh apparently it's actually not very good rice but it's I guess it's where they used to grow it and now it's just kind of a tourist thing so the chinese government buys the rice because it's not very good so no one else because no one else will buy it so the government buys the rice to keep it alive because it's such an interesting place so pretty cool though don't you think it's specifically like this little hot down in the bottom here this lean to so but I'm going to um unveil what I did to this photograph tomorrow so this is all raw I haven't done anything to this photograph outside of the raw image so it's still rai image it was all done inside of light room but do you see the fog rolling in here that's not really fog so what I'm telling you is that tomorrow when we get to the end of the day we're going to go...

as far as we can go in light room and that's pretty that's pretty long way you can go a long way inside of light room without ever having to go to photo shop so we'll do things that you didn't know you could do in light room today we're going to come back in here and we're going to start looking at your work but before we do that I have asked to do another twenty minutes of question and answer because I know there's a lot of questions out there so I we're going to we're going to turn it over to question and answer and we're trying to answer some of those questions and then as soon as we come back from question and answer we will start looking at our students images which are right here so let's let's answer some questions quote is it all right if I go back to the beginning of this morning when your unveiling what was in your bag yeah ok cool so couple people had the question kneels and fashion tv there wondering about flying and what bags you take wind flying if you check your bags with your camera gear on them and what bags actually fit in the overhead bin okay so I have the mai mai international bag it's called the think tank international hasn't a specific now there's two international bags I have the smaller of the two I don't remember exactly what the number is but the international bag will fly internationally which means it fits in most overhead bins and even if it doesn't fit in the overhead bin you can actually if you find the right seat you can fit it under the seat sometimes too so it's it's pretty travel on dh then I cannot because jail they strapped together so I can I can take two carry ons a purse and so the light bag is my purse and then the the big bag is my carry on and then I can throw my other bag underneath the plane because it's got close and stuff like that that's fine underneath the plane if I'm taking those stands with me that could go into the plane as well but we came here with those stands so what we do is we take that little stand bag and we throw it in with coats and things like that into a golf bag and the golf bag is protecting all of my little stands because got coats around and stuff so it just looks like a golf bag and so I've got two bags underneath the plane golf bag which has stands and stuff like that in it and then my my suitcase that has all of my stuff my clothing and stuff and then I'm taking on the plane I'm taking my international bag and I'm taking the light bag and if I'm taking my laptop bag I have a very thin laptop case also by by uh think tank thank you bye think tank and it's it's it's barely big enough to fit the laptop and it actually slides into that pocket on the top of my of my think tank bag and it looks like one bag so the airline thinks I'm taking two bags on my my purse and my bag and as soon as I get on the plane then I ripped that laptop bag out and put it next to my seat put the two bags up on top and so I could fit all of those bags in the places I'm supposed to on the plane but they because they're the two bags air attached when I'm rolling it in they don't see it as two bags they see it is one bag so sneaky I can also apparently get knifes onto planes very smart if I'm gonna get in trouble now you're fine I'm admitting to it right here right now come get your fine so there are there is the airport in national and then there's the airport security so I think those of the security is the bigger bag and then the internationals smaller one of the international it's it's perfect travel size and fits every piece of gear that I need on a shoot so I think all of my friends use that back actually it's a good bad is a good one it's great back and it locks and so it's it's great back okay this is a question from aaron in alaska this goes back to what doesn't matter things that do matter and don't matter okay um aaron ass is full frame versus crop sensor another one of those doesn't matter to the client things I ask because I've been agonizing on whether to invest a limited budget into more lighting equipment versus going full frame the answer that question is based on whether or not you like the file on your full frame not whether or not full frame is important because a crop sensor and a full frame sensor um can be just a cz good equality is each other I have ah one d mark four and its crop sensor and it has a perfectly good file and so if you have a good file on your chip if your chip is actually giving you good signal you know it's got great information on it whether it's cropped or whether it's full frame it really doesn't matter there's there's no difference um what what the difference is is that your lenses on a crop chip or longer and so you get greater throw out of him so sports photographers for the longest time love those crop chips because and they sew a nikon was always crop chips so nikon was a great camera for a sports photographer because they could use a two hundred and it became a three hundred so I want one of my assistants have crop chip and anytime we're in a church where we can't get close enough we always throw the two hundred millimeter lens on his crop chip and that gives us a three hundred millimeter lens so it doesn't matter to the client ever client would never care whether using cropper full frame um as long as you're using it right question from vivian hyphen photo hi jarod I shoot mostly running gun type of events corporate events fundraisers et cetera what strategies do you have from me with regards to things like the ever changing lighting conditions from room to room for examples exposures are all over the place and so is the white balance thanks for your thoughts on that type of shooting that's a great question aunt I have my camera okay let me show you this so I'm going to come up to this camera here so when I'm in a any given situation where I have multiple things so I have let's say have four different types of places I'm going back and forth back and forth the first thing I have is the grip and grin I turned around and someone says hey could you get a picture of the five of us I'm like crap and then I had to change it so what I do is I start by turning it to manual I've got my flash on and I set it out the way I would want for standard grip and grin so I go okay I want auto white balance I want the s o to be eight hundred I want the shutter speed to be at eighty because I want to burn the the sconces and the wall lights and stuff below but you know I'm going to hold it steady and then I'm gonna turn this to five six so I get enough that the field for it once I do that I'm going to go into my menu and go down to the customs shooting mode click on it and register the setting as c three okay so now if someone comes up to me and they want a grip in grand I simply turn it mean go back here I'm going to see three and that's grip and grin so I use three because there's three people so more people I put it at c three and then if I want to do documentary stuff now I'm going to go in and set up go back to manual because it it always whatever you're registering a setting from it's registering it from the mod that urine so if I were to go to a v mode it would register an a v type mode and so I'm gonna be an emmanuel mode and I'm going to go and say all right well with this I want two hundredth of a second I wanted f two eight because I'm usually going to be using a long lens and that's as low as it will go on dh I'm going to do it at s o uh let's say I'm going to do it without flash so do I also sixteen hundred soto inside while people are eating or doing whatever I can and then I'm gonna register that go back register custom shooting mode register the settings see too okay now I can go I'm doing documentary on sea to and someone says hey could you take a picture of us you bet see three turn on the flash take the picture go back to sea to turn off the flash start shooting again and I haven't had to do anything I want to change any settings because I've already registered him here and let's say that then I'm going to go outside and it's daylight and I want an auto setting because there's clouds moving back and forth I don't know what it's going to be like and when I walk in this is actually it's better when you're in the church so let's say I'm in a church and I'm shooting a wedding and I know that I'm gonna be following the bride out the door and then all of a sudden blow the lights going toe barrel in right I can set c one to be at so I'm going to go back to my a v mode now and I'm going to say I want this to be a s o two hundred and I want it to be at f say f four and it's going to choose the shutter speed for me and then I'll go in again and mode custom shooting mode register the settings go to see one okay and now I can be walking down the aisle in sixteen hundred documentary mode and then a senna's I get out in that door opens I literally just reach up click it to see one and start shooting again and now it's an auto mode I've changed the so I've changed the aperture the shutter is moving based on what the light's giving me it'll also register like if I know when I come out they're going to be lit but the back of the chapel still going to be dark and so I'm gonna have to compensate I can put the compensation into that custom mode so that all I do is just I don't have to go quick quick and then change I just go see one boom boom boom and I haven't missed a step so that's the answer to that question that used your custom shooting modes and if you don't have a camera with customs shooting modes you need a different camera c efficient way to do it that's right okay this is a kind of a specific question this is from michelle racine who asked for large outdoor groups of say twenty or more people what lighting do you recommend with strong backlighting okay well the first thing is if you're doing a large group and there's a lot of back lighting makes sure the backlighting is really behind them not to the side but behind them or close to behind them on dh that will limit the amount of phil that you have to create wait that's the first thing the second thing is you need a lot of power on the flashes and so in my case if I am using the little flashes I needed a couple of them one flash is not going to do it if I have twenty people that one flash is not going to cover it because what's going to happen is the flashes going toe light the guy on the right it's going to like this side of the face and the guy on the left that side of his face and if there's a guy behind he's going to create a shadow on that guy and it's going to be so we want the lights to be his highest possible so that they come down that way they can go over the head so that the shadow that they create is following on the chest of the guy behind him not on the guy's face so high and you want like three of those lights right here one right over your shoulder one on the right and one on the left and the two here going to create most of the the light on this side and then this one's gonna fill light here so if you have to hear their twice is powerful so if all of them are full power than these tour double the power because they're close together adding light here and then this one's at half the power of these two so you'll get a little direction on it and one side of the faces will be a little brighter than the other side which is good but this one will be filling it in and if they're high enough you don't have to worry about shadows going from the front guy to the bad guy and so generally that's what I'll do if I only have one light turn it up to full power if you need to up your s o to deal with that great and then just said it like right here so it's close to the middle but not quite on your flash but nice and high if you only have one flash so thank you okay an oop from dubai is wondering and actually quite a few people are wondering about low light or night photography and an oops question is with multiple speed lights how do we set up lights but slower shutter speeds to capture background as well we need to second shutter for the speed light when we use lower shutter speed can you explain when do we use the second shutter with flash okay so when he talks about second shutter what he's talking about is you can ask the flash to fire at the beginning of the exposure or at the end of the exposure so if you do it at the beginning and someone's running then the blur will go in front of their body as opposed to behind their body so it will look back it looks like they're running backwards so they've instituted the ability to fire at the end of the shutter so fires and then it closes the shutter so that you can allow for movement behind the subject as it moves across and it'll freeze them I'm not really all that I don't do a lot of movement with long shutter speeds and when I when I do do that it's on a dance floor or something like that and so they're they're doing this so there is no behind or forward or whatever but that being said I always keep my flashes in second um shutter mode so that it's always at the tail end of the of the exposure not at the beginning because just in case someone's moving I don't want it to look on natural if they're moving in one direction so I would just always keep in second shutter mode so that it's at the end of the shutter but that being said um way we showed earlier I think yesterday um this this image here so we talked about this image yesterday um and this is one light up to the right and to the side of the camera coming down and exposing them but the exposure for the background is kind of dragging the shutter to get that but I'm only dragging the shutter toe one twenty fifth of a second it's not a real drag is it but that's because I'm increasing the iast so so I don't have to drag with shutter so the I s o on this isthe sixth I believe it's sixteen hundred so yeah sixteen hundred I s so so I don't have to drag the shutter to get that glow very much I have it so it can't be and eight hundredth of a second but they're not moving around they're not running or anything like that so I don't need to toe worry about movement as much at one twenty fifth of a second and the flash is going to freeze them anyway because without the flash they're just complete darkness they're just they're just shadows e I mean you can see them but you can't see them well and so one flash off to the top and to the right helps delight them and it looks great so and at sixteen hundred aiken still print this you know to a decent size I'm not going to print this up to be a thirty by forty anyway but if I did it would just look a little bit gritty but it's it's it's you know like if we just normal grain it's the same kind of grain that I was shooting it like four hundred on film so anyway so that's thank you okay I've seen this question a couple times this is from joanne leboeuf who says can you shoot through a diffusion panel with speed lights to get a soft box effect absolutely it just costs you in power okay every time you go through a defusing anything or if you bounce off something you lose power and so if you shoot through a diffusion panel you just have to test and know how much diffusion you're giving it because there's different there's different types of diffusion like those westcott scrims that I have are great I could just have an assistant or stand hold those and then put a flash on the other side and then my flashes now this big instead of you know that big and so those were great to use just realize that once it hits that diffusion panel it's going to lower the power quite a significant amount and so you just have to account for that quite a few people have asked about those manual flashlights that you said that we're under one hundred dollars so I want to let you guys know that we are searching for that information and we'll let you know as soon as we have it for you we'll drop the information in the chat rooms but another question we have from the internet is from yapa from santa clara california in weddings do prefer using policy buff lights or the cannon speed lights um at a wedding I have when I go to a wedding I'm prepared for anything I'm a boy scout and so in my trunk of my car I travel how I called heavy and so when we travel heavy we travel with an entire studio in the trunk of my car just in case we come to a situation where we're losing light and again and I think we crashed the website last time I said this but if you go to my website jared platt dot com and you look at the slide show for the hindu wedding you will see in that and also just on the block post you'll see a portrait of the bride and groom in front of the mondavi and it's pitch black outside okay so the wedding ended right at sunset and then they had to go and change from there there there one outfit into another outfit so when they came back out it was pitch black there was nothing and so while they were changing my crew was was putting up lights toe light this up and and that shot is shot with one light here a sixteen hundred speed uh are sixteen x sixteen hundred white lightning here another one right here and then another one right up here at a lower setting just to kind of fill in the front and then there are two of my speed lights behind the mondavi and that's what you see coming forward towards the camera and so there's that one coming forward and so if you if you look at that shot that's a big heavy studio that's been created so sometimes you you need power you need the light up a place and so when you need that much power you're gonna have to have big studio lights but those but the white lightning's air inexpensive enough and they're easy enough to transport that again I mean I brought my lights here and I didn't have to pay any extra baggage fees because it was only one extra bags so I'm still traveling light enough that I can pit it all in the trunk of ah regular sedan type car and so when I travel heavy that so that I can come in and put up a portrait studio if needed but that's an exception to the rule most of the time when I go to a wedding I use nothing but one speed light with my assistant on that mono pod and we run around with that one speed like I use the sun as my as the background light that's lighting up it's lighting up the trees it's lighting up everything and it's giving a hair light so it's doing two things at once and then I used the other flash too fill in and that's mostly what I have done so almost every shot that you see in my work is one if there's flash it's one flash it's a speed light it's off camera did you want to take a few more questions let's go to more questions more questions ok anouk from dubai would like to know can we use flash communes bracketing with the group mode I don't know if you want to get into bracketing do want to talk a little bit about flash sports marketing you know let let's table that all I can say about bracketing is bracketing is problematic because you're going to be wasting most of your shots so I would rather get a great shot no I got it and have to deal with the fact that it's a little over a little under then having to take three shots for everyone and find out that the one that's over is still the right shot and I still have to deal with it so bracketing to me he is wasting this shot on the dark side and the light side just just try and get it right in the middle that's I've never bracketed for that very reason I'm a documentary shooter though so that's different I know people that bracket because they were shooting a building and that's perfectly appropriate but I'm not that kind of talk okay last question see welch photo is saying I'm assuming it's okay to use various flashes and one shoot older models with newer models like four thirty p x five twenty x and a six hundred e x together can you confirm this or have any input it is absolutely okay to do it as long as you can communicate all of them together so if you can trigger them all then you can do it the question is can you trigger mall so the six hundreds are triggered via radio frequency so that's great but when you go to other ones you may not be triggering radio frequency like a five eighty is triggered through infrared and so you have to trigger it that way or you have to get a pocket wizard stick it onto it or you know things like that so as long as you can trigger them all if you put him in manual you can do whatever you want I can in fact as proved by the shot that I was talking about on that the hindu wedding it was it was my white linings and some speed lights so those air completely different systems and were triggering them both with a pocket wizard and my um my my transmitter for the cannon so you absolutely can okay all right so let's go into your work here as students so we're gonna go back to our student work here and we're going to go through these images in our develop module so we're gonna go the develop module and I'm gonna look a each image and I'm gonna tell you what I think of it and then I'm going to tell you what I would have done to it and post to either fix what I don't like or to just give it a little ex or something so the first thing I see in this image and this image is christine's the first thing I see in this image is a problem and the problem that I see is that we zoom in and look where this tree is it's coming right out of their heads so it see the bulk of the tree is coming straight out of their heads I would have shot it such that their heads were here I like the fact that the tree is there and I love the sun coming through the tree but to put them in the center of the tree means that the mass of the tree is coming out of there it's like a telephone pole coming out their head but if they were over here just just move them over so that that the center of that post is coming down like to his arm or something like that then it would have been much more pleasing shot and and besides that I've never I've never been a fan of centering everything together it's like you know when the stars align in a line or something than calamities apparently occurs something the same with a photograph so when you will line up everything in a photograph than artistic calamities occur on dso you've got too much centering in this right at the center of the photograph see that there's just this line that happens and besides that you got this extra tree over here that doesn't need to be in that's just a waste of visual interest so when we look at it we kind of end up over here looking at this which we shouldn't your job's a photographer is to force peoples I toe where it should be so your job is to dictate what people see when they look at your photograph and you're not dictating that because you want them to be here but because you hit this because this line hits their head then suddenly were drawn more to the sun and more to the tree then we are to them how do we put him over here we would have been less drawn to the tree more drawn to them because there would be that lack of post in his head type of thing so that being said this is a fairly normalized shot so I see it is is very normalized I'm going to go to and reset this photograph and so this is this is always the moment of truth so when I reset the photograph what was really good exposure so we've got the right exposure I would have come in I would have brightened it up just like you did I would have warmed it up just like you did and that's that's basically the normalization maybe bring the black area is down a little bit so that their little richer but then I would have gone straight into cropping it and I like to keep the same aspect ratio but watch the difference between this crop right and actually I think we need to crop it on this side a little bit too watch the difference between this crop here and let me go down to my history so I could go back and forth camera to go from this crop to this okay before this is before after which is a stronger image after um and generally you'll find that that's the case in all all photography if you don't pay attention to the crop you will be you'll be surprised at what you could do with the crop afterwards so always play with the crop if you look at an image and you think it's not as strong as I would like it to be just play with the crop and suddenly things get different okay the other thing that I would have done in here because I would have come in to the tone curve and mess with the tone curve and bring the shadows even more down bring the darks up so that we get a little bit more lightness because I would like to see it's all about them and very little about the background so I would play around with that um get the tone curved going warm it up just a little bit more and then I would come in and do some kind of vignette toe hold everything in so I'm going to go to my vignettes here in my presets and I'm just going to choose a post crop vignette and I'm going to do kind of a wide round one that's going to see how it gives me maur visual interest in the dress and it kind of darkens this and now the other thing you have to notice though is that sometimes when you make a vignette the bottom side of the vigna is perfect but the top side of the vignette doesn't work as well and you can either intensify that or you could go the opposite direction do know vignette and use just the grady in tool but again I'm gonna go in and use a preset here and hit burn one stop and then I'm just gonna drag it down and now we've darkened up that tree a little bit more and we've even darkened up the vignettes some so now the visual interest is coming back down to us plus you start to see the star effect in the tree a little bit more now the only thing extra that could be a value to this shot is to come in and use the brush setting still use this still burn there was once one stop burn increase the size of the brush and just fill in this tree just a little bit see I'm filling in that tree so I'm not hitting them and then I'll come in and fill in the grass a little bit so now the grasses of is kind of holding them in a little bit better too and so that's that's what I would probably I like the colors to it I like all the yellow nous to it and you might even intensify that so let's go over to another pre set here you notice that when I once I've got something normalized I'm always using presets because they're faster to accomplish certain things so I'm going to go into my everyday favorites folder and I'm just going to choose a preset and basically I'm going to do eh a de saturated warm tone on the print and so that looks even better now what did I do with the dis actuated warm tone because I don't want this to be just like hey on lee used presets you didn't understand what he did so first watch what happens here so I'm gonna undo that dis saturated warm tones so I'm gonna go undo and noticed that the saturation when I click it goes down you see that so that's one of the things that happens when I press that the other thing that happens when I do that is if you go to the split toning here I'm gonna undo it again and then we're going to do is de saturated warm tone again and watch what happens to the split toning see that so it's adding kind of a c p a tone in the shadows and that's what's warming it back up again if I turn this off watch what happens so right now if I turn this off you have a d saturated image not as appealing because people when they're de saturated look dead because that's what happens the blood stops being read and goes you know yeah if you're a mortician you'll understand but when people are dead they look a little bit not warm a life and so we want them to look warm still so that's why we add some color back into the shot we d separated it and then in order to combat the d saturation we've added warmth back into the shot and now they don't look dead they look nice and happy and warm so that's what that did but I think I would go that way with that shot so now let's go from what we did so on and by the way when you're in light room you can add snapshots just like you can in photo shop so I'm gonna add a snapshot and this is after and then I'm gonna I'm gonna go back to the beginning the import and I'm going to do before okay so here's the before and here's the after which do you prefer okay good alright next shot but you're doing what I'm telling you in lighting though that's great putting that son behind the subject and especially using a tree is a great way to go toe just keep that light from being too harsh um okay let's go to oh I was looking at you the whole time they're not yours it's yours and now I'm looking at this one and it's you okay on jenny right okay on johnny antony on jenny um such a hard name to say it's okay so we're going to on journeys and this is her shot so I'm going to see what it looked like originally so I like I like the steps I like the ark over here I like the composition of it I love this tree right here that's the part that's a great that's a great part of it s o that little crooked tree so I'm going to see what it looked like the moment of truth is okay so that's great so let's go back because I like them I like the black and white I think it is definitely black and white because if you look at this as a non black and white it's pretty boring it's not about color it's about shape and that's my that's my uh the method behind when I choose black and white and when I choose color if the color is not if if if the image is not about the color it needs to leave it just needs to leave so if in this case the color actually hurts the image once you make it into shapes it becomes interesting so I'm also going to want to do a couple things like for instance those clouds are a bit bright they tend to be blowing out a bit so I'm going to go up into the basics and I'm going to grab these highlights and I'm going to start pulling them down so see that see I'm pulling now I'm getting real clouds in there so let's zoom in on those see that so this is where it wass just paper and we're gonna pull those down so now we've gotten is the brightness under control now we're losing some of these clouds here so we'll deal with those in a minute but let's deal with the rest of this first let's deal with the book so and whenever we're looking at an image and right now we're working on image is a little bit more intensely than I would prefer to generally I want to do things as quickly as possible but I want you to see the method inside of my head when I'm looking at an image so I look at this image and I think okay what can I do to the bulk of the image of same time well I want the this tree to be a little bit more prevalent so the first thing I'm going to dio is there may be some kind of a vignette going on here so I'm just going to go to my vignettes and make sure I remove and even yet so if there's any vignettes going on I know I have just removed him which there weren't so they're no vignettes so now I'm going to go up here and I'm going to take the black I'm gonna bring it up so I'm getting more detail out of the black areas and I know that it starts to look a little bit thin when I do that but that's what this is for the tone curve is a great place to take the shadows back down and they will be more rich shadows and they won't block up the blacks okay so the black point is to to find a true black but what it does is it drinks if you if you watched all of these watch watch the this area of the history ram as I take the black areas down and watch the history ram see how it just all piles up there so you're clipping off black with the black area and so we want to brighten it up so that we get the blacks in the general vicinity of where they need to be and then when we come down to the tone curve watch the blacks now see how they don't pile up a cz much there look it's a softer move so I'm going to move them down slowly and that's going to give me a nice rich black but I'm gonna get a little bit more information in there and I can take the dark areas and brighten them up a little bit so now I'm getting the leaves but the shadows khun still stay nice and rich the next thing I'm going to do is I at this point I like what I'm seeing here I just need to add a little bit of separation of each individual piece and so I'm going to come up to the basic module and I want to take the clarity up a little bit more when you don't have people in the shot clarity could be used pretty pretty heavily when you have people in shot you have to be little more carol so clarity's great clarity is um contrast in the mid tones that's what clarity is and so as you increase clarity you're increasing contrast on ly in the middle of that history graham and so your highlights in your shadow stay roughly the same in the middle of it gets spread out and that's why it gives you so much nice detail because detail is usually inside that mid middle area the midterms so by increasing the clarity we've increased the sharpness or the relative sharpness of stairs we've also look at this now the tree is starting to come out and that's our favorite thing right we want to lead people up the stairs to the tree so what I'm going to do is I want these clouds to be brighter so I'm going to go into my my uh brush tool I'm again going to use a preset because I don't like to slide sliders so I'm going to use a preset and I'm gonna do a uh smart dodge a heavy smart dodge and and I'm going to increase the shadows a little bit so that it doesn't darken those as much and notice what it's doing its bright ning the exposures and the and it's adding contrast and it's also bringing up the highlights a little bit but it's taking the shadows down the reason that we're taking the shadows down while we're trying to brighten something up is that we want the the shadows to remain where they are so watch what happens when I start painting in these these clouds I don't have to worry about that tree getting brighter because it's a shadow and the shadows being pushed back down so now I can quickly go in and just brightened things up and hope that's too much hold on uh let's take our brush setting never do anything at a flow of life fifty or sixty always do it like twenty or thirty somewhere they're like twenty five so that it's a slow movement towards your goal so now I can just go in and brighten it up but look at that see I can and I am just going right over the tree and the tree is not being affected by this it's just it's just my it's just my clouds see that so let's do before and after on that c here's the scene there's before and there's after so now it's starting to look like these other clouds but notice that I didn't have to be super exact I don't have to go in and like make a clipping path and and in photo shop on lee bright in this area and I don't do that on to select anything all I have to do is tell my brush that dark things need to stay dark white things need to start brightening up okay so that solves that I also want to add a little bit of I want to burn right here because that's too bright so I can create a new brush and this time I'm just going to go back and do like a light burn on it and I'll come in here and just burn in that area there so that those clouds don't get too bright and I'm also going to burn while I'm at it I'll just burn in these rocks because they take your interests too far away from that tree so I can burn in those rocks like this and if I create a new pin and do another one and burning over the top of that so I can add a little bit extra burn on that they're okay so now let's see the difference between our shop before and after so let's go down and we're going to create a snapshot after and then let's go back to import jarod while you're doing that just one question that little tree which is my favorite thing to do what I was trying to capture was that beautiful little curve of light on on that right hand side but I don't really know how to just selectively highlight just I just wanted to bring that most of you on the highlight to be highlighter yeah a highlighter I like the highlights okay so here's before and here's after wait for it there we go so you see how now the the clouds are not taking away from the tree now if I want to increase this that's when I would come into the brush again and I would go back to remember our little smart dodge and by the way I'm actually I didn't reinstall my presets so these air the older versions so those of you out there in tv land or whatever if you've purchased my presets before so if you purchased the light room collection the comprehensive collection it's updated now and those of you have purchased it can go back on and re download the updates for free so and if you haven't purchased it then you can go purchase it but once we're zoomed in here now we can take that smart that smart dodge again and we can start painting that in so we can bright not just that and I'm gonna spill over I'm going to prefer to spill onto the trees on the other side as opposed to spilling onto the shadow of the tree and just so that we get a little faster work going I'll pull up the flow a little bit so that you can see it I'm just gonna but it's not really killing it's not brightening up the shadows because why because I've told the shadows right here to stay down so it's on ly really dealing with that highlight so I'm just going like this and I'm going to just keep working on it and now after the fact I can always go in and add brightness to us like we could do like a lightning bolt right so now let's just zoom out and see what that looks like with our lightning bolts so so here's I'll give you before after now so here's before huh after now you really see that light clipping across there right so that's that's that shot let's do what how much time do we have now ten minutes you have ten minutes you've just given me ten minutes having yes you're welcome to take I'm will have ten minutes okay so let's go to this one okay so in this shot the first thing that I notice is that their legs arm or of the shot than there faces and their heads are so this is nikki's so um nikki this shot becomes about their legs so their legs instead of coming out have them sit on their legs so that their legs kind of go behind them a little bit and that way it'll be less about their legs if I want to minimize that amount of leg that they've got I would come in and do like that and then suddenly it's less about their legs so when you crop you could like in the camera you could have come in here like that and it would be less about their legs but if you want the entire um if you want the entire crop like this because you want the leading lines right and you're clearly you're kind of centering them into this little v which is great but you need to get those legs to go somewhere else posing wise it just becomes about their legs okay so that being said the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna update this toe light room for so right now it's using the three methodologies let's let's reset it first I want to see what it okay so good shooting like you got the right exposure is there so I'm gonna update what you've done and I'm going to go from here so I'm gonna go from here I'm gonna first bring the shadows down a little bit but then notice that their faces are pretty bright so I'm going to take the highlights down and the whites down just a bit and now their faces they're more under control and now he got really color going on instead of blown out color they need to be a little bit warmer and they need tio have a little bit more contrast to him so that they they pop out a little bit but other than that the color looks fine so now let's go into here and notice that it's a little bit soft so now I'm going to go in and give them a little bit of clarity clarity helps to kind of make some kind of a false sharpness but more to the point if you want to sharpen something I'm I always I always have several different versions of sharpness so like this uh toolbox here has serious it sharpen it macho and so when you sharpen you can really sharpen something up by just creating extra contrast in it and so I that that's what sharpen it mu chose doing is it's adding clarity contrast all sorts of things to try and fool you into believing it sharp but you'll also notice that in the detail area the sharpening I'm using the detail to sharpen it more than I'm using the amount because when youse amount if you take a mount up on sharpening you get all of that weird poster ization and you get like these little weird grainy things all over that's because it's it's sharpening each individual pixel so the the amount is the wrong place to start so you start with your detail slider and your radius slider and then once you've gotten those then you take the sharpening amount up until it solves the problem without making other problems all right so we just keep moving it until you're like okay that's sharp enough that when we go out here it looks nice and sharp now that being said if this was my photograph I would have deleted it I wouldn't have dealt with it just because it was soft which is totally drives my wife nuts because even on my own personal work if I see an image slightly soft I just deleted and she's like no no you know she wants that image because she doesn't care if it's soft it's her cute kids but for me it's like the queue but there's they're out of focus and my children will never be out of focus like that's that's weird anyway so but that's what I have done otherwise I I like the full color of the image I think it's fine there's some distracting people over here which you you can get rid of in light room and we'll do some of that in light room tomorrow but generally speaking it's difficult sell in the end the easiest way to get rid of distracting people is to do that black and white is the cure all for so many things including watch this if I do black and white and let's just say I'm going to go down to my film pack and I'm just going to go to like a general look let me zoom out here and I'm just going to go toe like a uh let's just do a you know eighteen and nineteen twenties look so see out added a little bit of of and yet to it but it also added grain and now even though they're soft it's the grain that makes them soft it's not your photography it's not the fact that you were out of focus it's the fact that the grain is crossing over those places that should be sharp and so now it just looks like an old photograph that grain really helps to soften things up and make a more artistic and stuff like that so grain is much more forgivable than out of focus so that's I think that's where I would go with that so now let's go down to hear and we'll take a snapshot will say after and then we'll go to the beginning and we'll call this one before there we go now let's see before after so that's after our before after I prefer after okay so we will finish these two after the break that acceptable so that we can but I would like to answer a couple questions if we can like little short questions that would be great so court questions yes short question teo questions okay a guest in the chat room said what our jared's light room settings to make light room function as fast and snappy as possible do you run off on ssd a catalogue cash size or what is your catalog cash sighs oh that's a really easy question answers so that's good so if I want to make light room is fastest possible I need as much ram is my computer could hold that's the first thing that I do add ram the second thing that I do which is a pretty expensively but it can be done for about four hundred eighty bucks is by a solid state hard drive and that's solid state hard drive needs to run the operating system it needs to run your light room so all your computer programs your operating system and the catalog you're on is running off a solid state everything else could be running off of other drives and the best I have this on my pdf download with best drive that I've found is made by sandisk who makes your cards for your camera and it's it's almost five hundred gig about drive and it's almost it's about a dollar a gig and so I have a five four hundred eighty gigabyte hard drive in my computer and it's solid state and so I just run the operating system light room and the catalogue off of that and that speeds it up the other thing that you need to do is keep your desktop a plane if your desktop has files on it that's why light room slow clean off the desktop you should have nothing on your desk top except for hard drives that's all you should see their or shortcuts shortcuts are fine because they don't take up any space but hard drives and shortcuts no files none and you'll speed up your light room so those are the three things that you could do immediately that will speed it up and of course light rooms a process or hog too so the faster the process or the better off you are but that's kind of like buying a new computer so that's a little bit more pricey but I'd go for ram solid state hard drive on the right tip and clean out the desk top it's free cost you nothing but time so just clean off my desk top looks like a christmas tree yes get that's why your computer slow okay all right uh last question m b is wondering can you quickly explain what a snapshot is in light room slash photo shop and what is the purpose of using it okay so snapshot on ly in the developed mode and it's right here underneath your presets right above the history the reason it's next to the history is that sometimes you wanna work on an image and you take it to a certain point you like it that's when you create a snapshot so that you know you can get back to that point very easily you could do history for the same thing you could kind of try and find the spot in history where it was perfect but a snapshot allows you to kind of bypass history and do as many different versions as you want without creating different versions and and when you save this thing as a dmg that snapshot history goes with it so you actually can then any anywhere you are I can look at your snapshot history and go back to whatever settings were on it at any given point even if I don't have the history available to me so one more before we go this is actually from two people will duris and sim t both asked about cropping and um printing how much can you crop and still get a good print size or print ratios were crushing okay so the first thing is when I'm cropping I always maintained the four by six aspect ratio because that's what it was shot in if I was shooting a square image of some sort I would maintain square whatever you're shooting and try and maintain that is the crop unless you specifically wanted to be a weird crop because if you if you were to crop this to an eight by ten and then you were to say posted on picked taj which is my printing partner then if someone wanted to crop that to a four by six they would then be re cropping it down and you would on ly start getting smaller on the file so you're causing a problem so if you're going to crop it all to get rid of some stray thing crop in the same aspect ratio that you had before so that then when they crop in eight by ten there are on ly cropping off a little piece as opposed to if they go to a four by six they're cropping even more so it keeps going down if people read crop your images so try and maintain a cz much of the crop as you can but the answer to that question is it depends on your camera so if I'm shooting with a twenty megapixel camera or an eight megapixel camera I can't crop the eight megapixel camera very much before I start getting a bad file if I crop a twenty megapixel camera I can probably crop half of it and still be better than the eight megapixel camera so depending on your camera so if you're using any of the modern cameras you can probably crop halfway into the photo like if I was looking at this photo on my mark three I don't know what cameras shooting this right now but if this is my mark three camera I love this shot bythe that's good so if I'm cropping it I wouldn't on my camera I would have no problem cropping like that and still printing and good eleven by fourteen out of it okay on my camera which is the mark three okay so so I can crop quite a bit because I have a pretty big chip in a lot of information um but I think that answers the question doesn't it okay good okay and update for everybody that the website to purchase the affordable speed lights that jarod was talking about earlier today we had a couple people in the chat rooms do some detective work for us so special shadow to joe mcdonald and amy show shuman photo for providing us with the link and it is scott robert l a peritus yeah e was trying so hard to rack my brain yeah didn't I say it was an answer you know I thought it was a j but you knew he was in california so thank you but that was a great flashes they're simple but you're just gonna have to manually change them but you can do everything that I was just doing with little cheap flashes that cost almost nothing well I guess a hundred bucks is not nothing but it's not very expensive so for the price of one of my flashes you could have six of hiss