Additional Lightroom and Photoshop Tips
Lesson 7 from: Integrating Photoshop and LightroomBen Willmore
Additional Lightroom and Photoshop Tips
Lesson 7 from: Integrating Photoshop and LightroomBen Willmore
Lesson Info
7. Additional Lightroom and Photoshop Tips
Lessons
Lesson Info
Additional Lightroom and Photoshop Tips
So we know how to center images to Photoshop, get 'em back, get our settings that we've applied after that back. We know how to stack our images, all that. So it's just a matter of when else are we gonna end up using it, and what are some extra tricks? Well any time I'm gonna do compositing. This is my wife Karen, and there's only one of her. And so if I'm gonna create something like that, I simply can't do it in Lightroom, right? So that's when I'm gonna be heading to Photoshop. But what are some tricks we can use, and how can we push the boundaries of what's possible? Well let me share with you one way that we can dramatically expand what is possible to do using Lightroom where we don't need to go to Photoshop quite as often. Let's say I'm used to doing black and white on a picture. And if I do black and white here, I go to the Develop module. I just Click on this choice called Black & White, and afterwards I wanna add just a little bit of color back in. Well, there's this area c...
alled Split Toning. And Split Toning allows you to put a color in the bright part of your picture, and put a color in the dark part of your picture. To tone it, to make it feel warm or cool. And I can do that just fine. Put yellow in my highlights here. Put blue in my shadows here. And I can create a split toned image. I don't know if you can tell, but the highlights are yellowish, shadows are bluish. But I'm stuck with two colors. If I were to take this image to Photoshop, I'd have much more control. I could get rid of these things, and I could say that what I'd like to do to the image is, let's just Open it in Photoshop. And in Photoshop, we have just a lot more control. So I can go here to my Adjustment Layers. I can Choose Gradient Map. Gradient Map means replace the brightness levels in this picture with colors. So wherever there's black, we'll get some color, wherever there's white, we get another. And so whatever's black in my picture will get whatever color appears here. Whatever's 50% grey, will get what's here. Whatever's white will get what's here. And I can switch what's there. So I can get all sorts of really weird stuff, or if you're careful, instead of just clicking on the presets, you can create a really nice effect, where you're really careful with the colors that you used in those various areas. I'm not gonna spend the time to be careful though. The problem with this, is whatever used to be black, is right now replaced with purple. And therefore, it's nowhere near the brightness the black was, or the darkness the black was. So what you end up doing after applying a gradient map, is you Change the Blending Mode at the top of your Layers Panel, to Color. That allows it to only change the color, and not change the brightness. And then you could Lower the Opacity if it's too much. But, I don't know if you... Can you tell I have more than two colors applied? That's not possible in Lightroom. I'm not saying this is exactly what you wanna try to do when you're setting things, and using the feature I'm about to show you. What I'm saying is, you could use any choice that's in this menu, and you could stack more than one of these on top of it. You could have 10 adjustment layers. And there's a way to take the result of all those adjustments, and turn it into a little thing that we can use in Lightroom to apply that, on any picture in Lightroom. Without ever having to open it in Photoshop. So it's not just for colorizing black and white. It's for anything you can do with adjustment layers. Just don't use any masks, is the limitation. Here's what you wanna do. After making your effect with the original pictures in the bottom, you've stacked adjustment layers to get to where you wanna be, Go To the File Menu, Choose Export, and Choose Color Lookup Tables. It's a feature nobody ever uses, unless you do video. But Color Lookup Tables, that's what you're choosing. You have an image with the original at the bottom, and what your effect is, is built only using adjustment layers. Choose this, this comes up. All you need to do is Set this to 32, and have the Only Checkbox Turned On, called CUBE. You'll only need to do this once. You don't have to like do it every day, you're doing it once, then you'll be able to use this effect. So 32, and CUBE. I Hit Okay, it'll ask me to Save my File, and I'm gonna just call it Multicolor B&W. I Hit Save. Now, I wanna try to use that over in Lightroom. So I'm gonna Go to Lightroom, and how the heck could I use it here? Well before I can use it here, I actually have to still do something over in Photoshop. In Photoshop, is the only place where I can create a special link between adjustment layers, and Lightroom. And let me show you how it's done. What I need to do is Open Any Raw File in Photoshop. I'm just Dragging this one to Photoshop. That'll cause Camera Raw to open. Any time you open a raw file, not going from Lightroom, just directly into Photoshop. In here there is an area on the right side called Presets. We're not gonna make a preset, but there's a hidden feature in here that we're gonna utilize. When you click right here, usually you make a new preset. So to get to this, I Dragged a Raw File directly to Photoshop. Or in Photoshop Go to the File Menu and Choose Open. Send it Directly to a Raw File, don't open it from Lightroom, if you're opening it direct. With this icon I Hold Option, and I Click. Bunk, I get this. At the top, Give your thing a Name. So Call it Multicolor B&W. And you can create a set, which means a folder to hold things in. Down here, Turn Off any Check boxes that appear for all the way down, except for the bottom one called Color Lookup Table. The moment you Click on Color Lookup Table, it will ask you for a file. We're just gonna Feed It the File that Photoshop made. You don't have to understand the process, you just need to Go To that Bottom Check Box, and Feed it that File. Just kinda cross your fingers and say I trust you. Okay, so we do that. Then, you should set this menu to the choice that you use when you open things from Lightroom. Remember how we had it as our preference? And I was either using Adobe or Profoto, but you should choose it there. Then you Click Okay. What you just made is a profile. That profile describes the adjustment that we had in Photoshop. Even if it was made out of 10 adjustment layers combined. You got really, really fancy in there, and piled together all sorts of adjustments to make the most cool effect you can think of. We can save it, so it is usable, both here and Adobe Camera Raw, and over in Lightroom. I'll use it here in Camera Raw, it looks the same in Lightroom. When you're in the basic section, right here is an area called Profile, and you have these little dots. If I click on those little dots, you can choose a profile. This is a relatively new feature, it was added in April. And in here you have a bunch of choices, but do you see this thing called CreativeLIVE? Isn't that what I named, what I called a folder? That's the container. And right here, isn't that my multicolored black and white. Here it's being applied to an image that hasn't been converted to black and white. You don't have to limit it to black and white pictures. But we can get enough of a marriage between Photoshop and Lightroom, that we could get really crazy with our adjustment layers, tweak all sorts of things in our images, and then somehow make that appliable within Lightroom? Lightroom and Camera Raw share the same features, and so here I went to an area called Profile, and I clicked on this icon, so I could scroll down and find it. You will find the exact same choice in Lightroom. If it doesn't show up in Lightroom, just Quit and Restart Lightroom. That'll make it have a fresh look, okay? So hopefully you've learned a bit about going between Photoshop and Lightroom. We got questions or anything else? There are a couple of questions about going back to when we were setting up our fundamental things in the beginning the templates, or sorry, the defaults. And then if you wanted to change those things on default upon export such as the color space, the 8-bit versus 16-bit. Oh yeah. Can you do that upon output? Yeah, and that's actually a great point. And that is, you know those settings that we set up near the beginning? To say these are the settings used when we open something into Photoshop. It was in our preferences in Lightroom. Those settings are just for the file that you end up with in Lightroom, these settings right here. But when you export an image from Lightroom, then it creates like a jpeg file or a tiff file, what I would consider a delivery file that I'm gonna email to somebody. There are similar settings to these in your export settings. Which means in your export presets, if you use presets. And that's ultimately what is used when you deliver something to somebody else. So if you have your color space set to Profoto, which allows you to have really vivid colors, but you need to deliver your file to somebody else, and that's not what they need. They need SRGB, which is what you need for the internet. That's determined when you export the file. If you actually look, by going here to the File Menu, and you Choose Export, I usually use a preset, but under export in here, you're gonna have file settings, and right here is where you actually determine what the final file, when you create a jpeg, or a flattened tiff file that you give to somebody else is going to use. And so if you're gonna do something for the internet, I'd use SRGB. If you're gonna send it to your iPhone or iPad, I'd use Display P3. If you're gonna send it to a friend that you know is knowledgeable about color, and you think they'd prefer more vivid colors, I might give them Adobe RGB, but this is where that's determined.
Ratings and Reviews
Sean
This was a great course. It was very informative and Khara Plicanic did a fantastic job teaching this course. It brought light to and organized the essential Photoshop tools and techniques. Some of the tips are real game changers for me, such as to start learning the shortcut keys have made Photoshop much more fun for me. Fantastic course.
Ryan Redmond
This was very useful. I have been a photoshop user for 20 years but I have just recently gotten into photography and Lightroom is new to me. I knew there was some overlap in features but I wasn't sure how to manage workflow between the two programs. This short course helped to clear up some of those differences and understand and appreciate more the non-destructive image adjusting nature of Lightroom vs the more hardcore creative nature of Photoshop and going between them.
Joe Cosentino
Another great class from Ben, he has one of the most smooth flowing teaching styles I have seen. He always makes it easy to understand how PS and LR work, Thank you