Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing: Objects on a Table

I'm going to go through a few of these and I'm going to adjust them and using light room just know that anything that I do in light room you could also do if you on photo shop you would do it through a camera wrong so if you see me opening image in light room and you shot a raw file you just double click on it within bridge in if you own photo shop he would open up in the camera and you'd have the same sliders so what I'm going to do is coming here in select all of these I'm just going to click on the first one hold shift and click on the last one of the usable ones that weren't me experimenting at the very beginning and then I'm going to go to the develop module within light room and then we could get a better sense for what these look like now over the last three days I did like a full three day class on photo shop and in that we talked about camera wrong which is the same sliders as these and I don't want to go into it is as much detail as we did there but just so you know if you wa...

nt to know more about it then you could refer to that class that just finished yesterday so in this one the first thing I notice is that the area where the radios numbers are seems to be a bit on the bright side we're going to see how can we salvage some images that you've like painted where there's just a small technical area and you're really not rather have to throw away the whole picture so in here we have two sliders that we can use for recovering highlight detail and those are whites and highlights and the way I figure out which one to use is a refer to the bar chart that's at the top of my screen in this bar chart the absolute right edge of it tells me if I have a large area of white if right over here on the right edge there's a spike right now the spikes only two pixels tall right there then it's the white slider I want to pull in if there's not a spike there then it's the highlight slider I want pulling instead because that spike would tell you if you have solid white somewhere. So in this case the spike is only two pixels tall, so I think the highlights or what I can use and you see how that lets me tone down that bright portion of the image and I might be able to salvage it because of that now there is a direct reflection on that folks that's shining kind of plasticky stuff or glass and so I could try to light it at a different angle other things that I will do in here is I might bring up clarity. Clarity is going to emphasize the textures within the image, but it will also emphasize your light painting a ce faras this if you did it in selective areas, then each flashlight puts out a different color of light, and if you use old style flashlights like ten year old flashlight is going to put out very yellow light the fuse, a modern led flashlight you're going to find it puts out more of a bluish or white light. If you want to influence the way the scene looks, you'd want to adjust white balance and sew up here, I can move temperature and slide it over to us the right to warm this up, moving towards the right is pushing it towards yellow's, so I could just warm that right up looks kind of nice when it's warm if it's an antique e kind of feel and then I might adjust tent used to see if I wanted to be a little bit more towards magenta or green like that, then in order to find tune what we have most the time what I end up doing is I grab the adjustment brush the adjustment russia's little paintbrush in the upper right and if I click on it, I can paint in various changes to my image and so what I can do here is we have an exposure slider, and I could say, I want to lower the exposure wherever it is I paint. And the only thing is, if I want to paint freely in here, I need to turn off a check box that's called auto man. So now if that background was too bright, I think over here and paint across it and wherever I paint it's gonna darken up just trying not to paint on the radio and let's see what's going on oh, one other setting. This is the first time I've been in light room on this computer, and whoever used it last had the flow setting turned down flow means how much of the adjustment you're asking for should you get on your first paint stroke and it sets only twenty six percent? I'm gonna max it out. So I want all of the adjustment I'm asking for. So that's when I can paint here and you might start actually seemed to get darker. So if there's any area where I just hit it with way too much light, I can come in here and just painted in and darken it up. He see it dark, anyone to get near the typewriter, I just happen to have lowered the exposure. He and I guessed it how much? If I need to find tune it what I could do it chews on do I can turn down that flow amount let's say turn it down to maybe of thirty percent and then each time I painted only get thirty percent of that adjustment and I come in here and say, I'll darken that just a little I can paint over it a second time to darken it mohr the third time to darken it even more and therefore come in here and find tune that quite a bit gets smaller brushes I use the square bracket keys on my keyboard change my brush size just tryto tone it down if he ever went to much the other slider you might want to consider using if it's a really bright area is there's a highlight slider in the highlights would allow you to tone down on ly the bright portion of your image. So in this particular image, I think the top of the typewriter right up in this area here it is a little bit bright it's calling my attention to it and it's not an exciting area. So I might come in there, try to tone this down in the middle's a little extra so well paint over it more than once saying with this area right in here and if you need more of a change, you either can say you want a new adjustment over on the right side to say I'm done with this particular adjustment and I want to use different sliders, dial in something else, and maybe I bring a different slider down, maybe the shadows down a little bit and paint that in somewhere to further darkening, I can choose new once again to say one a new adjustment into reset any of these sliders you khun double click on them remember the way I got to the sliders and I got to this brush and light room is in the upper right, there's just a brush icon if I'm doing this in camera instead, you're going to find the brush icon of the top of your screen near the left side, there'll be two different brush icons. One will have little specks around it. You don't want that one and one will be just a little bitty brush, and if you click on it, you'll have the same general controls so I might hear decide to bring down my highlights quite a bit and painted across where the dial on the radio is to see if I can tone down that highlight. It's muddying up a little bit when I do that meaning it sze going gray instead of the color that should be there s oh there's a couple things I could do one is back off on the adjustment so it doesn't go is gray and the second thing is it is going great and I wanted to be warm instead you have sliders at the top for the color if the overall color do you want it warmer cooler and I could say push it a little bit towards yellow to try to get to blend in fine tune the slaughters so you're not completely stuck with what you have now if I want to deal with that background a little bit more that's what I might want to turn on auto mask I'll say want a new adjustment and I'll just bring down my exposure in then problem is if I paint in the background is going to be very easy to get over spray on the radio or other things and I don't want that so I'm gonna crank up my flow so I get a hundred percent of my adjustment and I'm going to turn on auto mask with auto mask there's a little cross here in the middle of your brush and it's going to try to keep the paint on lee on the color that is underneath that cross hair so if I never let that cross here touch the radio then hopefully it will allow me to isolate the radio and not get paint on it it's not always great though right now I can see it giving a little bit of over spray but in some cases if that radio was bright red or something it would be able to help me isolated typewriter on the other hand it's not going to really help with because it is similar in color to the background so let's look at what we've done to this particular image if I chernoff this little check box down at the bottom think don't no not that one sorry where is this one? If I turn off the check box that is near the bottom of all the sliders that you use for the adjustment brush, you can see what it looks like before I did the adjustment rush it just disables whatever I did with it then if I turned that check box back on, you'll see what I've done with that adjustment brush you see how I kind of refined in made it so if some areas were overexposed and others underexposed, I'm not always stuck with the end result now looking at the video screen. Unlike my computer screen, the background looks like it needs a lot more black on my computer screen the area at the top of the screen looks solid black and so I'm not used to to monitors and them looking different so this is kind of amusing toe look over my shoulder at the display so what? Yeah okay she said, hey, what about the background? So I turned on a mask off so I can freely paint and then I'll just go over here on the background and in fact had I seen that the background was not anywhere close to pure black, I might have moved in my original adjustment the blacks slider when you're doing an adjustment not painting with a brush but adjusting there's a slider called blacks and it works on the absolute darkest party your picture and it would, uh, make that area darker and darker and I could've gotten it where the darkest part of the picture did go solid black had I seen that at the very beginning I probably would have done that so let's switch between these images here is our first image that we've already worked on a little bit let's go to our second one there's where I got my hand in the frame so I'm not going to adjust that image, but I wouldn't throw it away because if I didn't move my subject matter and I didn't move my camera there's a chance I could steal something out of it that I would put into another one using layers for instance, the camera looks really brightly lit general the chrome pieces and so it might be that in one of my other images I don't get the camera to look all that well and I just mask in the part of the camera from this one so I'm not going to throw it out and then we can continue going here so I'm going now look att the screen that's behind me because that's the one that told me I did not have black of my image and so if I look back here I can actually tell if this is black there's a few different ways you can tell one of them is if you move your mouse on the anything there are some numbers right below this bar chart and they're only going to show up when your mouse is on top your image and if those numbers are zero all three of the numbers that means how much red green and blue light is in there if there's zero you got black and so here it's really close to black but I can see the numbers changing around a little bit right? So if I want to change that I could take the black slider and bring it down a little bit and the problem there is I bring it down and I can't tell exactly when my background goes black visually see a little bit but there's a way to tell exactly what's turning solid black and that is I hold down the option key all time windows and I click on the black slaughter so now it's showing you the stuff that's solid black which shows up as black within the image so I could bring that down like this and say all right, I'm going to have those areas go to black on the back off a little bit I can always bring some that detail back by painting with the brush and so like the light meter and other things that might end up bringing detail back so then I could do other basic adjustments in here again we have highlights which controls how bright the bright part of the image is, so if you ended up going a little too bright with your flashlight you can bring it down, tone it down or if you find your shadows the really dark areas really aren't showing up enough you could bring up the shadow slider, but once I get the basic adjustment in here where I'm starting to like the overall tonality of the image, I just switched my adjustment brush and I find tune everything and in this particular version of the image some of the areas at the very top of the typewriter I don't like right up in here and some of the light spilling onto the table in certain areas is a bit on the bright side in my opinion and a little bit maybe in the back of the radio is too dark so let's see if we can fix some of those so in here I could bring down a slider called shadows to say, make the dark part of the image, get even darker or I could bring down exposure either one and I'm just gonna paint right up here to tone that down tone that down that's what that was way too much I'll choose undo if it's way too much lower the flow setting say, how much of that do you want? Twenty some percent maybe painted in you echo in pain again if you need it to be a little darker so wherever you find it's to be a little bit right if I'm about to paint here and I don't want to get over, spray it onto the typewriter that's when I turn on auto mask his long is what it is he wanted paint on his different color from the object that's near it. The only problem here is with a black typewriter it's a little bit like a mirror in that reflects the color of the wood, and so it will probably still get into it a bit painting and gotta paint multiple times because my flow is only down in the twenties, so I'm gonna build it up a little on the bright side, so but here I'm only trying to do this is a single exposure and that's what I suggest you start out with because that way you don't have to get overly complicated with visualizing your end result well just choose new and the only other thing I'm going to do here is I'll bring up either the shadows and or the exposure to an auto mask off and I'm gonna just do the back of the radio build it up it's not enough I can move these sliders to say no I need a bigger change to exposure all right but you confined to your not completely stuck it's not so much that I'm gonna light paint the entire thing here with the brush but I'm going to find tune it here uh so any areas so looking at the screen over here just a few areas of the radio might be a little bit right all right so that's the general process if you want to refine single exposure images and overall it is to move the the general sliders in here to get the image as a whole to look not bad and then to switch to the adjustment brush in paint in any kind of changes he needs so if in here you needed the tabletop to be brighter go ahead go to the adjustment russians it's an isolated area and you could bring up the exposure slider and you could paint it in here to do all that and just refine the whole thing and that's how? We're also able to get the background to go solid black. All right, so we ended up lighting some of these with color and if I pick one of those let's see here we have one let's look at a few of the details I might use with that in general, the process is the same in this case, the image is a bit darker because the color gel cut some of the light and we're still working with only a thirty second exposure. So it's not like I had more time to sit there and put the light in so it's just a little bit on the darker side. If it's overall too dark, he could bring the exposure up and that's gonna control the image is a hole. It is the dark portion of the image you're thinking about, like we need more blacks in the image or anything like that, it would be blacks. I don't know that I'll be able to get the background to go black without losing detail in the typewriter so that's something right either used the adjustment brush or later on in photo shop I would just make a very simple selection around this edge uh that's here and fill it in with black, same with the other side how did I get my little highlight? Turn on hold on a minute usually that would have not sure what that turn angst I didn't click usually you have to click there there's a triangle in the upper right of the history and that will tell you where you're losing detail in the image and somehow it turned on with my mouse most over it usually have to click on it to get it toe happen on it was staying on, so what I would do in here when I'm working with color image is I would be very careful with white balance because certain values with white balance are going to make everything look too orange or everything looked too yellow, whereas other ones will get those colors to separate better and so that's. One thing I would consider is really being careful with where I end up putting my white balance do you see when I had this direction, I'd get a lot for the blue a lot less read that kind of stuff depends on if you have any areas that you lit with white light if you did, you can't move this quite a ce far around because the white light areas will look unnatural, but if I only let it color, then I could move this around a bit see what I get, then we also can control how colorful the images using either the vibrance or saturation slaughters if we bring it up, we could make the image more colorful bring it down we can make it less colorful himself it's not quite colorful enough you could do that, and the other thing that I consider when working on a color image where used color gels is if I need to find tune the individual colors if the orange or red that I used is not the exact shade that I would like in light room if I scroll down. There is a section of adjustment called h s l in under h s l, which, if you're working in a doe became a raw would be their little tabs across the top of where all the sliders are in in those little tabs, usually you're on the far left town, which is the basic adjust it's one of the tabs just has a bunch of little bitty lines on it just about maybe eight different lines stacked on top of each other, and if you click on that, you'll get the equivalent to what I'm seeing here. Yes, when you're shooting, what is thie color balanced on the camera? But it depends on the flashlight that I'm using in this particular case since we hadn't talked about it yet I just left left it on auto or whatever the cameras set, too, because I can adjust it here and later it all depends on how critical your view on the back of the camera is if you need it to look close to your end result, you have to adjust it and it will depend on the flashlight use if you use a consumer consumers not right we're just the household old fashioned flashlight is going to put out very yellow light and you might need to compensate for it with white balance we could try doing that later on possibly, but if you're shooting and raw format you could move the temperature intent slaughter's too compensate for that afterwards or if you really want to make your flashlight look like it's kind of a white light I bring a great card with me in most places I go, I can shine my flashlight on that card and I can do emanuel white balance for it and that would make it so the light coming out of my flashlight would be like white light even if it's a household yellowy light. So anyway in here we can adjust individual colors and we have different things would get a just weaken just the hue which is the basic color. So if I I don't like the exact color of the gel that I used, I can change it we can adjust the saturation, which is how colorful it is and we can adjust luminant ce which is how bright or dark it iss and there's a special little feature in light room where there's a little bitty donut like thing? Can you see it right there? I think it looks like it, don't it if I click on it, then that allows you to move my mouth onto my picture in click and drag on the picture, and it determines what color that area wass and will attempt to adjust just that. So here I can show attempt to change the basic color of what is in here. I'll be limited in how far I can push it, though you'll find if I push it really far where it blends with another color is going to look weird, it'll you know you have an abrupt transition, so you don't want to move it a lot. You just confined to in the basic color a little bit, then I could go over here to the blues if I want to do the same thing I can then go also go over to saturation and sometimes, like these blues might be a little bit too colorful, I could turn them down in limits would affect the brightness, but I actually rarely change that, but we can try not too bad here, tone it down if you overdo one of the colors, because what can happen is the various gels. Have different densities to him if you put a yellow gel in front of your flashlight is not going to cut anywhere near as much light coming out of that flashlight is putting a red gel on it, and so if you're not thinking about that when you're painting and you paint for the same amount of time with the red gel and then with the yellow jell somewhere else, you might need to go down here and adjust luminant ce of the yellows because they're going to be way too bright. It lets a lot more light come out of your flashlight, so but other than that I'm just coming in here in fine tuning the image in this case, I want a little bit more shattered detail, although I'm not seen it change. Not sure why. Just see if things are changing in general, yes, they're well usually the shadow slaughter would do a bigger change to this image. I'm not certain why it's not on this individual one and in this image I might need to mainly work on the camera in the light meter because they're so dark with the adjustment brush, I'd be able to do that so anyway, that gives you some sense for some of the basic adjustments that I do when I've shot all of the images the one thing they might want to consider is when shooting with just the color of light coming out of your flashlight and not putting color jealous in front of it. One useful adjustment is to select more than one image in light room at the bottom of your screen. On the right side is a little, uh what looks like a light switch next to the word sink. If that light switches in the down position, then even when you have more than one image selected, the changes you make to the sliders will only affect the image that you're looking at only one image. But if you turn on that little light switch, then any changes that you make will affect all of the images you currently have selected and that's really useful when adjusting things like white balance. If you need to warm up all of the images because you don't like the actual color of the light that it captured, and if all of your images were a bit too brighter, too dark, then you could go in there in fine tune the settings for them. Once you've done that, then either turn auto sync off by clicking on that light switch, or just click on individual pictures to work on, and then you confined to them individually, so that's what helps me out quite a bit.