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Lesson Info

Editing bride getting ready

Welcome to the next lesson. Now we're going to be talking about editing the bride while she's getting ready. Now, I made this a specific topic mostly because well, brides are a very big part of weddings and we're going to get into the portrait side of editing that. But we want to also be able to tell the story of before the wedding. Now, a lot of brides, a lot of grooms, a lot of people in general can be very nervous around this time because this is generally when you're showing up for the first time and if you don't have a previously established relationship with your couple, um this can be awkward sometimes. So I tend to stay back and we talked about earlier shooting the pre stuff. But now it's time to really hone in what your settings may have done to you in a place that you're not used to. I also tend to not use flash a lot for my style and very photojournalist. I kind of fly in the wall sort of side. So there are times when you're trying to capture what's happening, but maybe the ...

exposure was too bright or too low or you're trying to really bring out what is happening in the story and maybe you missed some technical thing with your camera post and editing is really the time for you to make that shine. So let's go ahead and get into it. All right, I've gotten these nine photos from this same wedding that we've been looking at for editing. I just thought it was a good compilation of things and let's go ahead and just get started with the first one we'll click on it and move into develop mode. And of course, there is the hair. Now, this photo isn't all that interesting necessarily, but it's a document. It's, I don't know, a documentary type photo, photojournalist of what's happening to her hair and it's a good way to start, right. Her hair is about to be finished and she's just using bobby pins. Now, something I'll do again is to bring up the brightness because that's just my style and I have been shooting a little bit darker at this wedding. So I didn't blow out the details right away. You can see the window on the left. If we bring down the highlights, there's some detail in there, but I'm actually OK with blowing out some of the whites and the windows in these images. I don't think what's outside is necessarily important for this. So for now, I'll let them blow out a little bit and it'll also add a sort of reason why the whole room is so bright, it gives it that ambience. So add some exposure, do some contrast. I will take this uh remember our white balance and look at the white trim again like we did earlier and it adds a little bit of warmth, we might add back in just a little bit more just to keep it real. Now, the subject of this photo is really the hair. So I'm gonna add a little bit of clarity to bring that out a little bit of texture. There's no human faces, so I'm not worried about smoothing anything out. And again, I am going to make sure that that hair is sharp without it looking crazy, uh you know, different in the entire photo and I will of course add our little vignette to add our little our little thing. Now this is just getting started, right. So we're going to move on and we're going to get to the bride herself. But the idea again is to create a record that looks nice, presentable, detailed sharp for our customer for our bride because often those are the photos too that they will want to see that they didn't get a chance to see or remember because they were in it, their head was spinning, they had people touching them and putting clothes on them and running around and they were worried about stuff. So keep in mind these are more for record keeping than anything else, but also making sure they look good because these are what a lot of other brides and grooms will look at before hiring you, right? They want to see what those shots are going to look like while they're sort of in their getting ready phases. Not all dolled up yet. Here's a really good record shot of the mother of the groom actually getting ready and this photo on its own is actually pretty good without being edited. But we will start with the white balance. I know this is white, it might be a little bright, let's see, kind of nailed it. The white balance is already in there. Thanks to the camera, we'll bring this up just a tad add contrast, bring down the highlights just to sing some more detail in the background a little bit. I want to bring up the shadows because I want to be able to see the mother's face a tad and because there are people now I am going to bring down the clarity a little bit just to soften up. Same with the texture subtle, not a lot just to get rid of a little bit of the, the, you know, harsh skin in the HD and not a lot of colors here. I'll add a little bit of saturation just because it is so monotone. Let's see what else I'm feeling pretty good about this. We'll sharpen it up a little bit and again, great detailed shot right. This is again a photo-journalistic detailed shot of pre wedding things, not details but people getting ready. All right now that we've done that we're moving on to our bride. This photo I have a little bit of issue with because of all the space on the left side. Now I do love shooting the mirror photos of brides getting ready, but it is a bit dark as you can see and something we haven't talked about yet, but we will get into is the histogram in the upper right, you can see on the very right, that is gonna be where all our whites and highlights are. And on the very left is where the black and shadows are histograms like we had maybe talked before was that we want the exposure to land really thick and heavy in the middle. Those whites that side is gonna be the windows over here and those blacks is gonna be the under the table here where it's very, very dark, but we have a pretty good exposure. I want to bring up most of the ambient light in here. And again, I don't care about the window that much. There's nothing outside and it's a sheer. So there's no detail in it necessarily that we want to see. So I'm actually gonna go ahead and bring up the brightness quite a bit to there and you can see how the histogram in the upper right has now shifted from left to right here, let's bring it back. So we were there and it's now shifted. So the mid toes are now in the center of the exposure. And that's generally where we kind of want it to be to see a nice clean photo. I don't want to say that's what we want it for every single photo because we don't want to get stuck in the technical meters and stuff because we don't want it to stunt your creativity. If you see a photo where you want there to be a lot of a darker mood and like a silhouette, we don't need that histogram to be in the middle. But generally for faces and record keeping middle is good for your histogram. We'll start to keep an eye on that as we go on and get wider shots and especially group shots. All right. So we got our bright here. We're gonna add a little bit more contrast. Again, the color is pretty good with my camera that it did automatically will you know that this is white. Remember the white trim that we've discovered earlier? Yeah. Adds a little cleaner. I might bring back a little bit warmth for her skin tone and the walls and because I do feel like it is a little bit of a far photo, I am going to to crop it in a little bit. Now if I just click the crop and move around, it's kind of wiry, right. I like keeping everything the right aspect ratio. So I'm going to hold down shift on my keyboard when I move in the crop and that'll maintain the aspect ratio that you shot at. So I'm going to bring it in just a little bit to about there. I might keep a little bit of the negative space but not a whole ton return. Great shot. That's good. Now, ideally, I would actually spend more time on this and I would bring down the wall a little bit and far as exposure goes because I want your eye to go right to the bride, right to what she's looking at. And so in order to do that, we would use a mask and I use a linear tool. Now, there's tons of ways of doing this. You can usually use a brush or the radiant tool, but I like the linear tool because it just adds a nice, smooth transition between dark and I like the, the, the cross that it's doing. So we added that in and we'll just bring down the exposure a little bit, just natural, just subtle, right? So we don't know what's happening, the subject or the viewers don't know that I've done that, but it does look natural and it focuses your eye a little bit more on the bride. Let's go back to the regular editing and we'll go in and we didn't, we, we didn't crush the blacks a little bit. We'll do that now to create a little bit more contrast, bring the whites up for the same reason. I am gonna bring the highlights down just to tad just to get more detail in her dress here. And you can see if I bring the highlights back up. We start to lose some of that in the window and the dress, but if we bring them down, we're getting a little bit more detail. Nice. That's looking really good. All right. So let's bring up our sharpening. Now, what we want sharpened here is her face. So we're just going to bring up the sharp tad more. That looks pretty good. And there's a little bit of noise reduction that we're gonna do. Oh, we forgot to go do the clarity and the texture. We'll just take out a little bit of clarity to soften her face up a little bit of texture. And now we'll add the noise reduction a little bit. It's a little softer for sure, a little bit clearer and finally just a tad vignette. All right, great. And that's where we're at. So let's reset and I can show you what we did. There's the original photo pretty dark, pretty far back at our edits. We're bright, we're in, we're close natural lighting, really good, really good way to start off with our bride because this is one of the first photos she's going to see when she's looking through these photos. All right. So moving on to the next one and we'll zoom through the rest of these after this one pretty quickly. But this is an example of a really awesome shot. But my camera exposed for the brights in the, in the whites, right? It, it brought the exposure to be, you know, holding those highlights in the background. I think I had it sent and waited at the time and I may not have shifted it. But this is a good example of like if you're on aperture priority, you're on some sort of priority and you expose, but the shot is good, you have to fix it and post. Now, luckily this camera's great. So I'm able to first get the color, we'll use the white seal a little bit warmer. We'll bring it down just a little. Now, I'm gonna bring up the entire exposure just to see and look there we are. Now, you can see the histogram in the upper right that I told you about. It's way far to the left in the shadows because the entire thing is shadows basically. But I'm gonna use the exposure tool to bring up most of it because again, global editing is fine for me because I do not care about the details in the window. I don't mind it blowing out. I think it looks nice and then I'll go down to the shadows and bring those up just even a little bit more. So I'll just work it until I feel like it looks nice. Again, I'm adding some contrast, adding a little bit of whites. I could bring the highlights down to save some detail in the background. I could go, I could go either way. I kind of feel like the detail in the background for me is a little distracting. So I'm gonna let it blow out a little and let those whites kind of melt away just because, yeah, I just feel like it's a little distracting and I don't want to lose the white detail in her, in her dress. I'm gonna take away a little bit of the texture and a little bit of clarity to add some smoothing to her. And again, I'm gonna crush the blacks just to add some contrast as we go down, we gotta find where we want to sharpen. It's definitely her eyes if we can find them and then a little bit of noise reduction because we did bring up the shadows, which usually adds a little bit of noise. All right. So this one's a little bit, I'm gonna have to dive in advance a little bit because we're not in like a typical situation. It is looking a little, you know, a little warm for me. So the whole thing can come down a little bit in the blue, but I also want to fix up her skin in general. So I'm going to go into the masking. I'm going to wait for it to detect the person, person. One, we got the body skin and the face skin. I in an image like this, I like to do all those under one mask because they all are connected. You can tell especially because she has an open dress. If you affect just her neck and not her face or her face and not her neck, there's gonna be a discrepancy in the two in an image like this because they are connected. Now, you can see the overlay. We'll go ahead and start with moving the clarity down, just a tad, moving the texture down, just a tad, just a little, just subtle again, not something we can totally tell if we looked at it in like a very sharp detail but just subtle and make it look nice. Now, I'll also go in and look at the color of her skin tonality wise, right? So the temperature so we can make it crazy warm, which looks silly, right? Like the Simpsons character or you go crazy blue, but we want to just find the subtle subtle area. So we're actually gonna cool her down just a little, just very little and I'll bring up the exposure just a tad to make it seem a little bit more natural. Now, this looks a lot more natural than it sort of did before. Now we'll go out of our masking. We're gonna go down and we also finally need to do the vignette a little bit, which I think is nice because it really hones in where you're looking at in the frame. Again, this is like a quick edit, right? This only took us under a minute to do once you get practiced at it and you make subtle, subtle, subtle moves on it. Here's what it looked like before and here's what we did to it. So we saved this photo even though it was very dark. There's a ton more we could do to it by maybe bringing down the shadows in the corners. But again, efficiency. I'm happy with this photo. I think she'll like it. It'll also look really good in black and white, which we have a whole lesson for, but normally, oh yeah, see, look at that. We'll get there, I promise. All right. Moving on. So same thing, right? I was a little crooked here, but I wanted the moment I couldn't get there fast enough to make it straight. So I'm gonna start with the crop and you can see how your cursor turns into a uh little rotating thingy uh curved arrow in the corners and we're just going to move it subtly till the door frame is straight because that is the biggest thing in frame that we want to be level, looks good. Checking our white balance with the door frame, made it a little bit warmer, maybe too warm. Maybe it'll just come down a little, make it a little bluer and we'll bring up the brightness a little bit, add some contrast, bring down the highlights. Not too much because again, I had to expose for the shadows in the scene which made the windows blow out. But again, don't care nothing outside the windows that I really am concerned with. I'm concerned with the bride and the vibe going through this door. We'll bring down the whites a little just to add some detail in and the shadows I'm gonna bring down because I think the darker the shadow is where that door is. I think it'll bring out the center and where she's at a little bit more. We'll bring down the darks and then tiny bit of clarity, tiny bit of texture we're taking out. We're not gonna oops, sorry, we're not gonna mess with the de haze at all. I like the saturation. We're gonna sharpen a little bit tiny bit of noise reduction and a little bit of a vignette and see where we're at. That's pretty good. That's like a very natural photo. I think I might compensate by the exposures coming up a little so we can see her a little better. But again, I think that I really like the shadows on the doors. So I'm going to go into the masking and I'm going to use a linear gradient and do each side. I'm going to drag over to here and I'm gonna bring down the exposure and the shadows a little bit and then I'm gonna make another one on the left side, let it, let it dissipate as it gets to her. And I'm gonna bring down the exposure and the shadows and there we go, go back to our normal editing. That to me looks pretty cool. I'm pretty into that. So let's look at what it was before and here's our new edit, more style, more centered, our eyes are focused on her immediately. So the rest of these, I'm gonna go through pretty quickly and I'll try and talk to you while I'm doing it, but just so you can see what I'm doing on each one. Now. I liked what we had done earlier in this room and it's pretty bright. So let's go and copy these settings from here. We'll come back. We'll paste. Oh, too green. That doesn't work all the time. So I'm just gonna go ahead and get rid of that. We'll start with the same thing I'm actually gonna crop. So she's more centered holding shift down. I turn a little warmer, a little warmer. We'll go a little blue. This is actually the same spot that I shot the dress in. If you remember from the details, bring up the exposure just to ted, it's pretty bright already contrast. We'll bring on the highlights to get more of that detail. Bring in the shadows for more contrast, bring in the blacks, maybe we'll bring the shadows up. So we see more of her hair, but we'll bring the blacks down to create that contrast a little bit. It's still looking a little warm. So I'm gonna bring the blue down and then bring out the, bring down the clarity and the texture to smooth out the skin a little bit tiny bit of saturation just because it does look a little white down in that area and we'll do a little post vignette. It looks like it's really just from the right side and a tiny bit of noise reduction. Again, we spent less than 50 seconds on that photo and I'm moving on and I'm pretty happy with. It just takes practice, practice, practice, practice. That's all it is. Again, this is one of my favorite shots that I've taken at a wedding. I think one of them was just getting really frustrated with their dress and like it's just a really good moment. So the first thing I wanted to do was definitely center her. So she's in the center of our rule of thirds there. Return. That looks pretty good. I might do it just a tad more and I personally like giving a little bit more headroom. Um I had a comment too. I think I posted this in photography and France plus community that you can join for free these days. Um That someone wanted me to take out the frame on the right, but I kind of think it adds some context to where she is in the room. We'll start with the color again. We're using the door frames that we've been using. It didn't really change much. Might add just a little bit of warmth and we'll add some brightness contrast. Bring down the highlights. It might be too warm. Let's bring it back a little bit. There we go. Bring up the whites, bring down the blacks for the contrast. Here's the clarity and the texture. I can see a little bit of noise in there and you can see I'm shooting at 1600. There's just the tiniest bit of noise in there that we can see. So we will definitely go and use our noise reduction just a scotch more than we normally would. Which kind of smooth everything out you can see and now that I'm looking at it looks a little crooked. Should we straighten out just a little bit? So the door frame is straight. There we go. Yeah, that looks pretty good. That's looking really beautiful. And then again, little bit of vignette just tiny bit and I am going to sharpen, let's see, her eyes aren't open, so let's just sharpen her teeth, make sure everything's in sharp based off her teeth. Great. So it looks pretty good again, like I'd probably spend a lot more time on this one because I actually really love this photo um in the sense that I would just make sure that her skin is smooth I'd probably smooth out her arm a little bit. I might add a little bit more. Another thing that lightroom does is you can just select the background and it's able to do it, but you could see it picked up some of her dress and it didn't pick up the other humans. So we could just bring down the background a little if we wanted to make it pop even more. And that's like a quick edit that you can do just to add the front. So again, depends on your style and how you're doing. But that's the best we can do. Here's a really good one. The dad is in frame here watching his daughter. We'll crop in a little bit. The whole point of this photo is his expression, right? And what he's looking at. So we're gonna go through the same things that add a little bit of warmth that helps with the skin tones. We bring in the shadows a little bit, the highlights we're not as concerned with. Again, although it is blowing out more than it has in the other photos and we're just doing our same things working our way down, sharpening up what should be his eyes or his face and adding the noise reduction just so it doesn't look cartoony and then a little bit of vignette done very quick and dirty edit um gets the point across, right. The idea is that he's, he's looking and again, we're going to have a lesson on it. But for my money, a documentary shot like this looks way better in black and white and in black and white, I tend to weigh over, over contrast them to make them pop a little bit more, but we'll get there. I promise. I'm just obsessed with black and white. That's the problem. All right, here's a really good one. This is where we're gonna start getting into actually editing our bride and her portraits themselves. Now off the bat, this photo is too dark, right? Especially compared to what we've been doing. The histogram looks good in the middle. It's a little to the left. It's a little bit on the shadow side. So we are gonna wanna bring it up. Let's do the color first. We're gonna use the white trim again. That brings your skin tone to be a little bit more natural. We'll pull it back just a tad. Now watch the histogram as I bring up the exposure, we're moving it more to the center. That's great. The photo itself more exposed, exposed. Well, it's looking nice now because it's a detailed shot. We're starting to see more detail of her face and you know, the different imperfections in the human body that people like wanna get rid of her have look flattering. So we'll start again with our normal stuff. We'll maybe bring up the shadows a little bit so we can see her hair, bring down the highlights of her dress a little bit better, bring up the whites. So her dress is a little bit brighter. Bring on the blacks to add the contrast. And then now we will pull down on the clarity and the texture a little bit more than usual. Just to help with the overall smoothness of her skin. Since there's a lot of her skin in this photo, we'll then look at the sharpening and usually when it's something like this, we want to focus on her eye. So we've sharpened a little bit. Again, keeping in mind that sharpening is gonna make our smoothing a little bit more difficult, tiny bit of noise reduction because this was shot at 800 not a ton of noise. And again, like a small little vignette. Now, I still think her skin tone looks a little orange and it's a little dark. So we're gonna go ahead and isolate that. Let's go ahead and find the people face and skin and body skin. It's picking up the person to the left over here, which is fine. That's OK. Like it'll all be blending in together. So that's all right. And it's nice because it is picking up a little bit like the details around the dress and not the actual dress, which is really good lightroom has really come a long way. And if this is an advertisement for lightroom, I'd say this is like one of the reasons I think it's one of the best professional programs out there. So we've created a mask. I'm gonna add a tiny bit of exposure to bring up her skin just a little bit just so it pops a little bit more. Not a lot of contrast. I'm not gonna add any contrast. I'm not gonna touch anything else. If we got too far to the right, you could see her skin changing into like a different human, right? Or a smurf. We wanna be subtle about it. We're gonna pull it back just a tad so it feels natural and then we're gonna go into the clarity and bring down the clarity just a little bit and the texture just a little bit negative 11 that seems fine. You can get used to what you feel comfortable doing and what your eyes doing. I don't want to make it look extreme, right? I don't want it to look fake. I just want it to look natural. That's pretty good for me for now. So let's go back to our normal editing. Let's see what this looks like before. A little harsh, little dark, little contrasty after bright, a little bit more natural. Um Her skin's a little smooth. Now, this is something we're gonna get deep into when we're, when we start to edit our bride's uh faces and our and our groom's faces. But something that you can do automatically for a lot of people, it's gonna happen depending on how good. Your makeup artist is these deep, deep eye socket shadows. Now, there's plenty of ways to do this. We could take it in a Photoshop. We could have our, we could spend tons of time on that. But I'm going to show you two methods that I do uh for quick and easy ways and it just takes practice. And again, subtlety is key here. The first one is just the general healing tool. I'll click on the little band aid, make sure that the healing is selected and not the clone and not the content aware, remove the content we remove is actually really great for hairs and stuff which we'll get to at some point. But for now, just the healing, I like to do the AAC around 75 76 78 and uh the feather in the middle. So it's usually around 50. The size just depends on what you're trying to do. You can use the bracket keys on your keyboard to adjust the size of your brush when it's over it. That way you're not guessing the size and while you're in the right panel, so I'm gonna basically just select, I click and drag the darker area under her eye and then lightroom is gonna, is gonna pick what it thinks. We should be blending it with not her lips. I don't want it to be that. So you have to select, I usually select just under where the eye is because that's still the same skin and it works nice. Cue is to turn this off and on. And now I can see where I have done it. We can also turn it off and on to see what we have done. So we went from that to that again. So subtle, very, very subtle but effective, right? This works better with people who've got much clearer cheek skin than under their eyes and you'll get used to being able to identify that. So again, before oops, before or that's after and before. Very subtle again. And now if we zoom out again, we're so far from it that you wouldn't normally be able to tell, but it makes a big difference in, in, in their eyes. And it's very quick, it's a very quick way of doing it. Now, if I were to reset that we'll reset that completely, the other way to do that, which is actually maybe a little bit more popular is to brush out, basically airbrush that out. So we'll create a mask, we'll create a brush and I have for now, density and flow and feathers all at 100%. That's just the way I like to do it. And you can either use the brackets to change your brush type or you can actually scroll up and down in your mouse. And that will also change the view and I'll just lightly brush here and lightly brush here because that's what I want to get rid of. We have the overlay so we can see what we're doing. Now, there's several ways you can do this, you can do it with color. And so I'll just bring it out. So it's a little bit warmer to match the skin not gonna work on her because, uh, it's such a different tone. We can take away the contrast and add a little bit of brightness and that subtly gets it away, bring up the shadows because it is a shadow. But again, you have to be careful because that looks bad in the other way, looks terrible. So you wanna just subtly change it, bring up the whites, take out the blacks and then of course, crazy amount of clarity and texture. And then de haze is actually the big one on here is if you start to de haze, it, you can get, you can subtly get rid of it. This takes a little bit more finessing to get good at. And I have to admit like I am not even the best at this in deep in a deep eye socket problem. She has a little bit of a deeper shadow there. So this method is a little bit harder. Um But you know, it's definitely the second I want, I want you to be able to see that there are multiple ways to do stuff. I would actually go ahead and reset it and I would use the other method for her specifically. Um Just so that you could see what we are doing. So, again, see how it's selected up here. We want it to be down here and for this one, we want it to be down here, that one picked it up right away and that is a little bit faster and slicker way to do it. Um If it were not as bad, I would say to use the brush tool because that would actually be faster to match the tone of the skin from there to the cheek right there. All right. So that's looking pretty good and we're moving on. So that's a quick way to edit. Um You know, our brides getting ready, let's move on to the uh outdoor ceremony and uh start editing that again. These are just all examples for you to know what I do when I'm editing these photos and a base for you to get started with a lot of these. I think it's a really good place for you to get started in editing naturally as soon as you start to develop your own style and what is good to your eye, you'll be able to build on this. So let's move on.