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Lesson Info

Apply Photoshop Adjustments in Lightroom

Let's take a look at how to transform Photoshop adjustments and make them available in light room. Light Room only has a limited set of adjustments available. Photoshop has dozens more, and you get creative by adding multiple adjustments on top of each other. Well, I'll show you how to get those to be available in light room. Let's start here in Photoshop and let's make an adjustment. I'm going to do a simple one to start with. I'll just do an adjustment layer called Invert, which will make this eventually look like a negative of what we started with. Then I'm gonna change the blending mode menu at the top of my layers panel. I'll change it from normal to a choice called color. That's going to make it so that this can only affect the color of the image and cannot affect the brightness. This is an example of an adjustment, but I don't know how to get light room to do, using its built in features. Instead, we'll have to use the trick I'm about to show you now you have to be limited in th...

e adjustments you work with. It has to be limited to only those adjustments that are available here as adjustment layers. Also, after you've used adjustment layers, you cannot use masks. There can be a mask there, but it has to be full of white. Uh, so no masking. You can adjust the opacity, the fill and the blending mode, and you can also come down here to the letters FX and choose blending options. And you can play with these. They're called the blend. If sliders like, for instance, here, If I don't want this change to happen to the darkest portion of the image, I could pull this over and even hold the option key and split this apart to limit the change so it doesn't affect this portion of the image you can do that stuff. You can also add multiple adjustment layers so I could come in here and layer on top of that, a curves adjustment layer that might pull out a little shadow detail and might reduce the contrast or add contrast to the image. Whatever it is you'd like to do, you can create as many adjustment layers as you want, as long as you stay within the limitations I just mentioned. Now we're going to use a feature that's designed for people doing video with video. There's a whole bunch of devices that don't have any adjustment features built in meaning. I couldn't go in where they would be sliders to brighten and darken or shift the color. But there is a choice where you can choose something known as a color look up profile. I'm going to convert these into a color look up prayer, refine, and therefore we could take, let's say, a video monitor and have this applied to live video. That's what the features designed for. But we're going to get it to allow this adjustment to apply and light room. You'll see. So I need to make sure my original picture is at the bottom of my layers panel, and it's in a layer called background. And if it's not in a layer called background instead, it has a name. Click on it, go to the layer menu, and you're going to find new background from layer. Uh, it's not in this menu at the moment because this is already a background, but you need your layer to be in the background. You need the effect that you're wanting to bring over the light room to be made using adjustment layers and don't have anything in your mass other than white. That's what we have. Now, let's go to the file menu. Let's choose export. And that's where you're gonna find the choice of exporting a color Look up table. Now, up here, The description, That doesn't matter. You can type anything you want up there, so I'm just going to ignore it. I'm also gonna leave copyright empty. I'm gonna come down here to grid points in this determines how accurate the adjustment will be. How closely will reflect the adjustment you see on screen. Right now, I find around 100 is a pretty good setting. If you go a lot higher than that, the file size of what you're about to make is going to go up dramatically. But around 100 you won't usually be able to see a visual difference down here. It's asking what file format do you want it in? And if you have all four checkboxes on, we're going to create four files. We only need one of these, and the one I use is called Cube. So I'll turn off all the check boxes except for that. So all I've done in here is type in the number 100. And I made sure the only thing turned on over on the left side is Cube. I'll then click, OK, and it's gonna ask me to save this file and I'm gonna name it, whatever I'd like. I'm just going to call it to look up. This won't be the final name. So you're only putting it there temporarily so you can remember what file it is. And I'm saving my on my desktop, alright? It just made it. Now that is something that could be used to apply to our image. Let's see if that works. I'm going to turn off these adjustment layers and I'm going to see if I can now re create that same effect by using an adjustment layer that's called color. Look up. When I choose color, Look up. It offers me many choices. I'm just going to have this set to three d lut file because that's what we created in the last step. And I'm just going to click on this menu and choose the very top option, which is to load one of those files that will ask me for a file, and I'm just going to scroll down here and look at my desktop and find that file we saved. That's why I have to be able to remember what it's called in and everything. And now we have, which should look exactly the same as a previous adjustment. This just using a different feature called the Color Look Up Table. If you want to see that it looks the same, I'll come in here and just turn off this eyeball and turn on the two that are above so you can see it created the original method Man. It pretty much looks the same, but it's not yet compatible with working with light room. To do that, I'm going to click on the bottom Most layer, the one that contains my picture. I'm going to go to the filter menu, and I'm going to choose camera raw filter, uh, on the right side of my screen. You see three dots, I'm gonna click there, and one of the choices is to create a preset Well, we don't want a preset, but there's a feature hidden within here that allow us create something that's compatible with light room to get to it. What we need to do is hold down the option key Alton Windows, and then click on those three dots. That's when create preset becomes create profile. And so I had the option key held down in order to get that to appear Alton Windows. Now, this is when we're actually naming this effect. So I'm gonna call this invert in color mode, although I think I might already have one of that name because I practiced this before, so I'm just going to put a number on the side in case we have one already of that, a group is like a folder. It's where you organize your profiles. And so here I can save it into an existing group. If I have any, or I can create a new group to put this in. I have one already called Creative Live, so I'm gonna put it there. Uh, then I can skip down here. I do want my tone map strength at the default, which is low, and I want my look table turned off and it's down here. Color Look up table. That's what we made. I'll turn on that check box and then I'm going to feed it our file it load. And then there's one other piece of information that we need to know. And that is what color space was this image in when we opened it into Photoshop? And I should have mentioned that earlier, but I believe it's an adobe RGB right now. I'll show you how to find that out in a moment. Uh, so there's Adobe RGB. Then I'm gonna come down here and adjust these three numbers. When we're in camera, there's going to be an amount slider in. This determines how much of a change that amount Slider makes in. What I'm gonna do is set my minimum 2 50. So if I turn the effect all the way down as low as it can go, I'll get half of the strength of the effect we saw in Photoshop. Then I'll leave the amount set to 100. That's the default setting, and I wanted to default 100% of what we had in Photoshop, but then it can go as high as 200% that slider, but I don't want it to be able to double this effect. So I'm going to type in 100 and 50 and that way it will allow it to do it just a bit stronger than what we're seeing here in Photoshop. So then I'm gonna click, okay? Before I do that, remember this setting called Space? Because I'll show you where to find that setting. Uh, in a moment. Click. OK, then let's see if this works the way you can find out if it works is here in camera raw. There's this area called profile, and if you click this icon on the right, you can browse your profiles and we saved ours into a section called Creative Live. You might have saved yours into a different section. Or if you didn't tell it to put it in one of these groups, it would be under here into user profiles. But I have it right here inverting color mode one. And it looks just like it did in Photoshop. So it's working fine. These are also available in light room, so this is going to be available in light room. But before we go and check it, let me show you how to figure out the color space your document was in because that's one setting we needed to supply. So over here in this document, we were making our adjustment layers and such. Before I created that profile, I should have figured out what color space this document was in. It's not critical what space it's in. We just need to know what it is. If you go to the lower left of your document, you'll find some numbers listed, and there's an arrow on the far right of that. If you click on the arrow, you can choose document profile, and that would tell you the color space this document was in. It was in Adobe RGB. Then you simply need that to be correctly specified when you created your profile. Now let's see if we can apply this in light room to apply in light room. You first gotta quit light room because light room will only look for new profiles at the moment you launch it. So now I'm gonna launch light room. I have a custom little startup screen in my copy of light Run. Alright, here we are in light room. There's my image, so let's head over to the develop module. And now let's see if it's available here in light room. We have that area called Profile. We have the same general icon on the right that I'll click on here. I'm in my profile browser. I saved mine into a section called Creative Live, and there it is. So now I'm able to apply that adjustment here in light room, even though I don't know how to make that adjustment using the built in functionality of light room. So using this technique, you can take any complex adjustment you're used to applying in Photoshop and as long as it's limited to using adjustment layers with no masks. But you can use blending modes. Opacity is what's called blending sliders, and you can use multiple adjustment layers to create the effect. Then you're going to be able to save that as what's called the color look up table, and then you can convert that color look up table into what's known as a color profile, which is what's compatible with light room. So we had to kind of start working around things to really get this to work, but when we do, we're going to be able to much better integrate Photoshop with light room. In the next lesson, we're going to explore how to have light room trigger Photoshop to create automatic layouts. So with a single command, it can grab multiple images from light room and lay it out into a nice, finished image.