Lessons

Lesson Info

Culled Edits in Lightroom

So let's go ahead and pick out a couple of these images. Let's do this one. Why do we shoot these images, Guys? You guys know why we shoot this traditional looking straight in the camera shot Mom and Grandma. Exactly. We've gotten so many clients that have in the past, like, five years ago. We get so many clients that they would love their photos and the client would be like, These are amazing. We level the images and that's that. And then Mom and Dad would call us and be like, Why didn't you get this? And why didn't you get that? So we're like, You know what? We need to make some of these traditional shots part of just what we're doing. It takes a couple of seconds. We just need to make it part of it. Let's actually work on one that would offer a little bit more postproduction variety. So this is done. I'm gonna go ahead and reset this out. I process these just for the class itself. So let's go ahead and reset it so we can start from our basics. And from what we did yesterday, we're g...

onna us From what we did in that foundational piece. We're gonna build onto that. Okay, So I'm gonna pump up my exposure a bit. I'm gonna do something a little bit different here. Watch this. We're gonna tweak this a bit. I'm gonna brighten my highlights and pulled down my whites. Okay. We talked about a couple different ways of smoothing skin. Right? Part of your skin register is gonna be in your highlights. So if we just brighten the highlights while pulling down the whites or the wider parts of those skin tones, then haven't we kind of brightens skin tones while pulling down the bright highlights? We kind of did the same thing. It's gonna depend on the image, so tweak it a little bit if you find that pulling down highlights is adjusting your skin tone too much, take it up instead. Take it up, and then bring your whites down a little bit. Okay? We're gonna add back our shadows. I'll press Jade so I can see my highlight clipping alert. Notice how, By the way, notice how that tone curve room we talked about the dynamic range. Push launches. I'm gonna reset this for one quick second. Look at this. If I pressed Jay, there's no shadows clipped. Remember the rule E t t are exposed to the right. We say error to the right. So if you have to make a choice, let a little bit of highlights blowout to preserve the shadows. So I let the highlights below a tiny bit on these columns to preserve shadow detail in the pants in the legs and so forth. But we can do so much with us now. I'm gonna undo what we just did by President Command Z. I'm gonna turn off the highlight repressing J. Okay, so now we're gonna do is just go ahead and drop the clarity. A tiny, tiny bit too negative. 10. The rule of thumb for clarity for us is the further the subject is away, the less were dropping clarity, the closer they are to the camera them or we drop clarity. So as they get closer and there's more detail on more things that we need to soften, we drop clarity, Maura's, they get further away. So, like, if I wanted to, I could leave clarity at plus 10 on this image. It looked totally fine, but we we like that kind of slightly soft look to our photographs. All we really need to do from here is just do our little exposure game, right? We're gonna drop in that radio filter using our local adjustments, and we can pull it down a little bit to bring a natural vignette into the photograph. If we want, we can tweak other colors and so forth. But I really like the way that this looks weaken. Tweak the tone curve if we need to. But I think it looks actually, we'll do just add a little bit of a subtle contrast curve. I'm gonna produce this. But guys for my screen. So hopefully the people at home are seeing the correct thing on the TV. It might be a little bit odd. Okay. And then with sharpening, I know that they have this guy in here. I don't really general like using it too much. It's difficult to gauge into psionic to resume. And if I'm gonna just sharpening, I'm gonna zoom in. Remember if you're at home right this down our general settings for sharpening. Here it is 71.3. You can go to like 1.5. You want 1.3 2060 with 15 noise reduction. That is our typical Porter said you can see how you get a really nice, soft, beautiful look. Like it, like this is ready to go. If we're gonna blow it up to a gigantic print. I might sharpen this a little bit, but it looks so beautiful. That skin looks perfect. It looks soft. It looks great. And here is one thing I ever had to do. Let's do a little split tone. Oops. Okay, we was split toning. We're adding this warmth into the highlights just a bit. I'm gonna add a limit of blues in the shadows just a bit and then give it a balance towards the highlight side. This balanced, by the way, is just telling leg room. How much of the effect do you want to show on each side? Do you want to balance it and show it mawr towards the highlight side or you want to balance it and show it more towards the shadow side? We always for portrait's will balance towards the highlight side because that's where our skin tone is residing. Okay, so this is fantastic. As a really beautiful and polished. Look to the image. Here's the before and the after. You see it over here. Very simple adjustments. Very easy to Dio. Okay, lets go down now. What we do is we take that same setting and we synchronize over the scene. Weaken drop in our radio filters on an image damage basis. But what we typically would do is we're gonna work inside of light room with just our flagged images shown. So once we've cold, we're going to set up a little filter right here. So we just turn on our filters by choosing this we select flag or one star. I always I like to change all my one store images just to flag. So when I get in the light room, I just hippy to market is a flag and then hit zero to take the star off of it. So I don't I don't like stars like flags. Okay, so how we synchronize we would synchronize this entire scene by doing this, selecting a several grouping of images by holding on shift and left clicking control shift s or command shift s we would select check all de select. And this is what you want. A screenshot, decently, local adjustments, lens corrections cropping and spot removal. Those things we adjust on an individual basis. So at that point I would click, synchronize. And what we're gonna do is when we synchronize this, we're going to synchronize this entire scene all the way up to the point where are seen, basically changes, which is right here. So I would synchronize everything from the start of this all the way up to that point. Those 45 images, then all we're doing from there is by press control or command d to de select. All I would do is go from the beginning in the develop view and simply say Okay, well, on this one, I want to drop in a radio filter, so I'm gonna place that radio filter right there. We're gonna put it there and then look, this next one is identical. I'm just gonna hit previous, and then it will drop in that same radio filter right over that next spot he knows. Hit all control V. If you want to do that too now, you don't always need to do this whole like previous thing of putting in the radio filters. And that's why all we're doing is we're moving from image to image, making sure the synchronize settings work usually will just adjust the exposure of the contrast little bit. Make it crop. So we'll make individualize adjustments, then dropping a radio filter if we need to. If the next image is the same or a same composition, you click previous or Ault control V option Command V two do previous Let's do one of these images, so check this out. What are settings now? Look at how it's gonna change the over here. We were at 1 4002nd We stayed relatively sane. 1 4000 F 1.61 4000 f 1.2 I'll I saw 100 over here. Now we're 1 4001.2 I said 100 we're very closely monitoring this guy over here. Okay, we're making sure that these highlights on the face are not blowing out. All right, so let's take this guy. It looks like I wanted more sharpness there, so I actually went to F two and 1 2000 of a second. Sometimes I'll do that just to make sure that if I want both people focused, like kind of they're both my subjects after is like a sweet spot. When you're doing kind of close up shots like that, you'll get both the sweet spot for me. Okay. What was that? I just I didn't hit. Go to next photo. Oh, why did I click? Oh, I pressed you. Control Z Command Z my favorite shortcut in light room. Undo my screwups. Okay, we'll take this photo reset this up. So if I wanted to let's go ahead and go back to one of the earlier images like, let's say this one. Just to show you guys when you I'm gonna take this control shift. See? Command shift. See, we're gonna use those just the global settings that we talked about, right. Press copy. And we're gonna assume that we synchronize this entire area. Just we can see what that image would look like. So this is the shot control shift. Veer command shifty to pace that in. So at least we get the right toning. Now we have the right toning. We have a good amount of shadows. We have the right everything. We're just gonna tweak basically our exposure and bring that up a bit. And then I'm gonna go ahead and grab my burn. This is that 0.5 burn. I'm gonna drop it right over their faces, pull it down a little bit, and I'm making sure that if you look at this, the feather is always at a 100% on burns. I want to make sure that we're not making it look as if it has been burned. OK, I'm also going to drop my clarity a little bit on this particular photo. All right, So when I get to a new scene, that would be the adjustment that I make. And then I would synchronize it across this grouping of images. Basically right. So you work from scene to scene set to set and an engagement session like this that you're delivering 80 to 100 images. It shouldn't take you more than an hour or two to process. That's it. If you have a spending more time than that inside of leg room, you're going a little bit too far with your images or clicking too many times. Okay, so if you click J, you'll notice that there are a little bit of pieces blown out in the shot. So J brings up our highlight clipping alert, right? There's a very simple way of kind of fixing that if you press J and then press your adjustment brush, create an adjusted brush, that's Ah, highlight Onley brush. And so what we want to do is actually rather than doing highlights for this shot, we're gonna do whites. Actually, we knew whites and a little of highlights, and all we're gonna do is strengthen size the brush down and watch that. Can I get a boom? Okay, now it's very easy to do that, guys. And if the highlights are actually gone, if they're actually blown out, we could literally just jump in a voter. Shoppers second and paint a color into that area at a tiny bit of texture to that area and be good. We generally don't need to do that, but how do you recover the lost detail in the genes? You know, the highlights detail is very much just like a plane color. There's not a lot of stuff there. It's just basic skin toner, its basic. You know, it's not a ton of crazy stuff in the shadows. Your detail is generally a lot of stuff like, how do you draw back eyes and pants and those kind of things? So that's why we always say air to the right, exposed the right there to the right. Okay, very simple. Easy fix There. Now, how do you know that you've gone too far on your been getting or that radio filter to pulling the attention? The easiest way for me is to go back to the grid view and look at the image at a thumbnail size. If you see and this is exactly I mean, I'm gonna create a virtual copy of this. So control a possible your command apostrophe. Let's create a virtual copy what's actually add in a heavy have even yet. So let's just go on increase. We'll just do our radio great. And I know that this is something that a lot of people tend to do is that they just really crush their vignettes. If it looks from this bird's eye view, right, if the bird's eye view looks like there's a darkening coming into the shot, that's where I feel like I've gone too far. I want the bird's eye view. I want that outside view in that thumbnail view just to look like I don't want any eyes drawn to that been getting effect. It's just a subtle graduating effect that they think is natural. If you look at and go Hey Nisman yet that's a problem. And I really don't want people looking at any photograph and going, Hey, nice this Hey, nice that I want them looking photograph and saying, Hey, it's a nice image. I don't necessarily want any piece of a photograph to scream above anything else, right? I was sitting in a symphony. I was watching the conductor while he was conducting. This is what it looks like, right? Maybe that's church choir. I'm not all right. So he's conducting and he's keeping like the entire orchestra going, you know, at the same time, with varying like he's basically calling out and saying like, I want you guys to go louder. I want you guys to go up and I want you guys to do this and I'm oversimplifying this process. By the way, in case you didn't know in case you didn't know, I'm not a professional conductor. I'm surprised you all didn't know that. But the whole purpose of that was to keep everything coordinated and in balance with each other. And if you think of yourself as the same thing, you are conductor of your photographs. You want your lighting, you're poses your post production, your composition, everything piecing together in one symphony, no one piece screaming louder than the other. As soon as one section, the symphony, it starts playing to out. It's obvious you go, Oh my gosh, the brass, just like, went off and you can hear it. So that's kind of the way I want you to look your photograph. If there's something that screaming out, like have been yet, then you probably are off on this little balancing game.