Lessons
Photographic Characteristics
06:36 2Camera Types
02:53 3Shutter System
08:51 4Shutter Speed Basics
10:06 5Camera Settings Overview
16:02 6Camera Settings - Details
06:05 7Sensor Size: Basics
16:26 8Focal Length
11:26Practicing Angle of View
04:49 10Lens Speed
08:53 11Aperture
08:15 12Depth of Field (DOF)
12:32 13Lens Quality
06:56 14Light Meter Basics
08:54 15Histogram
11:38 16Dynamic Range
07:15 17Exposure Bracketing
07:59 18Focusing Basics
12:58 19Manual Focus
07:04 20Digital Focus Assistance
07:25 21Shutter Speeds & Depth of Field (DOF)
05:08 22DOF Preview & Focusing Screens
04:45 23Camera Movement
08:13 24Focus Stacking
07:48 25Lens Adaptors & Cleaning
08:24 26Flash & Lighting
04:37 27Tripods
14:03 28Cases
02:53 29Natural Light: Mixed
04:10 30Sunrise & Sunset Light
17:14 31Silhouette & Starburst: Sunrise & Sunset Light
05:25 32Golden Hour: Sunrise & Sunset Light
07:42 33Light Management
10:06 34Speedlights
04:02 35Built-In & Add-On Flash
10:37 36Editing Assessments & Goals
08:48 37Editing Set-Up
06:49 38Importing Images
03:49 39Culling Images
13:47 40Adjusting Exposure
07:53 41Remove Distractions
03:52 42Cropping Your Images
09:43 43Angle of View
14:25 44Framing Your Shot
07:17 45Foreground & Background & Scale
03:41 46Rule of Odds
04:50 47Visual Drama
12:20 48Elements of Design
09:14 49Texture & Negative Space
03:47 50Black & White & Color
10:23 51The Photographic Process
08:58 52What Makes a Great Photograph?
06:39Lesson Info
Adjusting Exposure
with exposure. Modern cameras are very lenient with getting the wrong exposure, and so there's a lot of tools in here that you can use for correcting them. So first off, sometimes images just aren't bright enough. We do want an image that's nice and easy to see, and in some cases it's just raising the exposure. And this is just I missed the exposure by a stop when I actually shot this. And if you miss it by a stop wrong, don't do it again. Ah, but you can fix it. It's not that big a deal. One stop is not that big a deal to deal with. But once again, you don't want to go out and purposely or unnecessarily under exposure images. Because if you try to brighten them up afterwards, you're trying to brighten up areas that don't have a lot of information and you're getting you're gonna get a ton of noise. If you would just shot it properly, it's gonna look a lot cleaner, so you should always be striving for the proper exposure when you're out in the field. In this case, looking at your histor...
y Graham, there's going to be different controls and the exposure is not necessarily the best, because what it's doing is it's moving all the pixels darker and all the pixels brighter, and so it's a little bit crude in that regard. It's global adjustments, adjusting everything that's going on. These other adjustments are gonna target one area, and they'll have what I like to call a rubber band effect on everything else. And so maybe the whites get moved up brighter. It's gonna bring up the exposure part just a little bit, and it's gonna hardly touch the ones at the other end of the spectrum. At the top of the hissed. A gram in light room is an area for turning on the clipping, where you can see areas that have been lost in highlights and shadows, and that might give you some direction when it comes to how much an image needs to be processed. Now, this image here just has some areas of brightness and darkness that are very, very extreme, and it's perfectly OK. There's just not that much information in the highlights and deep in those shadows, there's not a lot of information that we're realistically going to get out of this image. And so that's the type of thing that you can click on and off to really check out your image in another way. How much information have you lost? And you believe this turned on as you're making your adjustments to see how much information you are rescuing at that particular time. And so the hiss Graham is an important tool to keep open and looking at. And so an image like this in the desert. You'll notice the hissed a gram down here. It's a relatively small exposure range. We're not even close to the edges with the blacks and the whites, and so we can add a little bit of contrast to this. We can increase the whites, weaken, decrease the blacks, and when we get a little bit more contrast, our picture has a little bit more snap to it. It's got a little better look to a little bit mother contrast and color to it, and it's a good improvement that I think helps these types of images. And so playing with that contrast, if it's a relatively even tone and doesn't have a wide range, is an easy first step to go with probably my favorite slider is shadow detail, and what this does is target targets areas in the shadows and tries to make them lighter without affecting to many of the other things in the photograph. And so let me go back and forth between the original photograph and one where I just adjusted the shadow detail. And so bringing up those highlights in the middle brings our eyes Maurin to the people that we want to see in the middle of the frame. And so what we're doing in this is we're just raising the shadow levels up, and it's looking over the entire frame right now at the shadow. So it is a what's considered a global adjustment, and it's just looking at that darker area, which happens to be in the middle there because it's kind of in between two doors of light. So this this picture what was a little bit on the dark side, and I needed to do a number of things to adjust it. But it was the shadow recovery that gave me the most amount of information back on this, and so I did have to adjust the exposure. But it was that shadow slider that I really had to crank up in this case to get some more detailed information in those side buildings, which was lost in the shadows. Shooting portrait can be challenging because you want the entire face to look good over on the left hand side of the screen. We have a few too many highlights on the forehead and on the face, and so to fix that up. What I've done is I've gone into the whites, which is the brightest of lights. And then there's highlights right after them and dragged those down a little bit to the left to make the highlights darker so that the skin tone is a little bit more smooth there. And we don't have those glossy reflection areas to some degree, and so a little bit of adjustment. When you get those bright spots that can happen in portrait photography, it can happen in landscape photography upon the top of Mount Rainier. There there's some glaciers that air really reflecting off a lot of light, and when you shoot with the raw image, you are collecting a lot of data that you can work with, and you can pull that back a little bit, going to the whites and the highlights and pulling those back a little bit. Hopefully, you don't have to pull him back too far, but you can pull it back a little bit. Local adjustments are not to the whole frame there to a certain area of the frame, and there's a number of adjustments that you could make in this regard. One of them is the graduated filter, and I try not to use this as a substitute to the rial filter out in the field, because if you don't use this out in the real world, you might end up with completely overexposed sky. And if it's blown out pure white, there's no resurrecting it. If it's just a little bit brighter than you would like, you can tone it down a little bit, and you basically get to choose everything above a certain line or a range of a line. And it can all be darker. For instance, in the image on the right, we just darkened it by about one stop or so to give it a little bit more color in detail. In this case, I actually used it reverse because I wanted to lighten up the foreground so that you could see the foreground a little bit more easily. I got the background correctly, just wanted a little bit more light in the foreground. And so these local adjustments could be used for touching up images quite easily. And it's, ah, it's so much easier these days. I remember back meaning in the years ago in the dark room, trying to figure out exactly how many seconds I was burning in this and dodging this area here. And then. Once you've got it right once and you wanted to make another print, you'd have to remember exactly what you did during that two minute exposure, and now we can replicate ourselves and record what we do so easily. It's fun, all right. So with a portrait photograph, what I'm often doing is doing a vignette in some ways, and this is a different way of doing. A vignette is with a radio filter, and what I'm doing is I am keeping the brightness of her face the same, and I'm darkening in everything else around that oval, and you can create any size, circle any size over where you want it and it does this nice soft graduate filter out there, and I like it cause it's just barely detectable that you used it at all. And it just makes the photo read a little bit more simply and cleanly. In this case, I wanted to just my image just a little bit more on this, and the pathway in fills up a lot of the frame, and it's actually the flowers. But I like the symmetry of the shot. And so what it is. I just wanted to choose this pathway and darken it Ah, little bit and just tone it down. And so what I did is I selectively used to brush to brush in the area of that pathway, just to darken it a little bit. I felt it looked a little bit better. It drew drew your eyes over to the flowers a little bit more. And so those types of adjustments that I make on photos on a fairly regular basis, I don't usually do that much that much of the time, but just a little bit here and there. Just edging your photos to one direction or the other can have a big improvement on them.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Jasna Crnjaric
Ayumi Bechdel
Student Work
Related Classes
Beginner