Lessons

Lesson Info

Edit 01

(opening music) Now, you know what I'm thinking when I'm flying through these panels through editing, like I said it's really important to understand how those tools are working so you can know what you want and how to get it. These are all the images I shot from the shoot. I'm not gonna go through each one, cuz that would be tens of hours of editing, but you can see an overview here. And at some point I will go through and edit them, and I want you to see all the images all together. How they look all cohesive in the edits and share the story that we shot yesterday. These are the ones we'll be focusing on editing today. We already edited this one, so we're gonna take it to this one now. Eli with the green truck and a backdrop. And actually during this, yesterday, I was wondering if the Sony would lose all the data in the background cuz it was really bright and it doesn't look like maybe a little bit right here. But if we take that exposure down, you see it saves it all pretty much, ...

even though it was pretty dark in the shadows here where he's in the truck bed and it was pretty bright behind us, so shout to Sony. That's, that's really cool. It's gonna be, that's gonna give us a great opportunity to just go really in depth with editing and have a lot to work with. So with that, let's start in the basic panel. Actually, just kidding, we're going to the crop panel, apparently. I'm just getting a nice composition in there and then I'm going to take down the exposure slightly. I really like the texture of the sky but I don't want it to be like overbearing. Obviously the subject here is Eli. So that's what I'm editing for. Bring that down just a bit, pushing the shadows. I'm looking at his jacket and some of the detail there. I don't want it to be too crazy though. (typing and clicking) And I'm actually gonna come into command six which is the lens corrections, enable profile corrections, cause I notice that Vignette is pretty heavy. I'm gonna have a little bit of it in there but not too much. And then come into the transform panel, get a nice tighter composition. Hit the R button to open the crop panel, bring it down a little bit. And really what I'm seeing here for this composition is this, this area right here where Eli is and the the window is framing him and he's sitting on the seat. That's the center of the image. That's where I want the viewer's eye to be pulled. So I'm gonna have that pretty much in the center. So right there looks great. I like that a lot. I'm gonna hit command one back to the basic tab and just do a little more work in there. Again, just getting a good overall feel for exposure that we want to end up at. I'd say it's like a, somewhere between 50 to 70% of what the final exposure would be like, just a great over at. Like it just gives you an idea of what to shoot for. I'm gonna bring down the highlights a bit, cuz I like those cloud textures and the cloud color is just beautiful. I think it contrasts well or complements well against the green truck, cuz there's like a slight purple warm hue to it. Cool, that's a good starting point. One thing that's bugging me is that the antenna right here is like oddly cropped but I might just worry about that later. It's just really distracting, I think because this, these trees are dark and the antenna's very bright and small. So it's just a very quick contrast that pulls your eye a little bit to the left. I won't worry about that now, but that's just something I'm noticing. A little less on the dehaze, minus 10 on the clarity. Cool, so, pretty solid start. I really like the look of it already. I'm gonna bump the shadows up just a bit and take down the blacks just a bit. Cool, so before, after, really not a huge change to it even though it seemed like we just did quite a bit there. All we really did was just take down those highlights in the clouds in the back. I'm gonna change the white balance and I'll move on to the next panel, which will be, let's do the Curves next. I really like that... (clears throat) (takes a drink) (clears throat) With that first image it was a nice, subtle, like soft decontrasted look, so I wanna try to mimic that just as a refresher. I'll open it up right here. Maybe. Yeah, and it's already looking pretty close to that already. So I'm going to take that down just slightly. Push that up so it's a bit brighter. Put a point right here and then... Maybe just change that point a little bit down, so it brings it darker. And really what I'm seeing here is this dark part of Eli catches your eye, cuz it's just a dark black jacket which is the darkest point of the image. So you're drawn to that because it contrasts against his skin, which is a bit brighter. And it's a nice color contrast, too, against the green truck. What I'm doing here is just clicking alt on that shadow and I'm pushing it up, so you're getting a little more detail in that jacket there. You can see it there, I'm just undoing it and redoing it. Pretty great. (typing and clicking) I think next I'm actually gonna go into the HSL panel. So command three and I'm gonna target the truck cuz I love the color of this truck. It's working really well for this image. And I just want to start there before I go into the Color Grading. I'm gonna hit saturation. HSL. I'm gonna target the saturation, so command alt shift S. Click on the truck and drag it up, and one thing I really like about this truck is the older patina to it. You can see it's just bringing out these yellow accents. It's beautiful. Like it's such a great color to work with and I wanna keep targeting that color with the Luminance command alt shift L, pushing that up, make it a little brighter. So I'm gonna just turn that on and off so you can see what's happening. Really just makes that image a bit more lively. That's beautiful. Maybe a little less saturation. I feel like it's overpowering the subject a little bit cuz his skin is pretty saturated. So when we have that much saturation going on, right there, I just undid it to show you. It's just pulling away from his skin tone a little bit. So we will desaturate that a little bit. Come into the Luminance again, command alt shift L, target his skin. Bringing up a little brighter and then we will stay on his skin command alt shift S to saturate it just a tad bit more. That's looking really nice. I like that balance. I'm gonna push it just a little more saturated in his skin. Sick, so I will turn off the HSL panel and turn it back on and you can see it's really, it's really popping out the subject and it's just creating a bit more lively of a photo. Really big fan of this. And you can always just tinker around a little bit more making the truck a little bit more warmer with that hue command alt shift H on it, clicking. Dragging to see what you like. I think we're gonna call it there on the HSL. So this is the overall before. This is after you can tell, you can see the distortion that was before, that was after. So a little bit tighter composition. Could maybe bring the crop in just slightly. Yeah, maybe not. I think it's fine. Before and after you can see the color changes. Yeah, it's working great. Now I think I'm gonna jump into the Gradient Filter just because I'm seeing that this is kind of bright and I want it to go from bright to dark and Eli in the middle. So everything around Eli, I want it to be gradual bright in the sky and slowly get a little bit darker down to this bottom left corner. That's just gonna create a natural flow for your eye to look across the image. So, you see it's a darker exposure. Graduated Filter is selected. I'm just gonna drag it up. I'm gonna put out neutral real quick and then just go down. With the arrow keys. (mouse clicking) Really, it's just toying around a bit. Like I'm not, I don't have a set thing I'm gonna do every time. I just kind of tinker until it's something I like. And I do know I want a natural flow from right to left because it's darker to cuz it's lighter to darker. And I do know I want a flow from right to left just because it's a little bit and I do know I want a natural flow from right to left because it goes from bright to darker. So that's really all I'm trying to do with this Gradient Filter. Just finding a good position for it, a good value for it. Cool. One other thing I'm doing too, if you click on any of these titles, this pops up modify contrast with plus minus highlights with plus minus, I always keep mine on exposure so I can quickly hit the plus and minus keys to change that value. You can see it just change there. So plus, minus just really handy cuz as I'm looking at this I can be like, oh I want the overall images to be a little bit darker, so maybe notch it down twice. And then from there I'm gonna go to the Radial Filter. As you can see, we're just jumping around, no real order. But once you learn these tools and know what they're doing it's a lot easier to jump around like that. Cuz in my mind I'm like, oh I want Eli to be a little bit brighter, I want that area of the photo. And I know I can solve that with a Radial Filter and upping the exposure just a bit. Not quite that much. That's a little too much, but maybe just a slight nudge of like plus 14, plus point 14, I guess. So that's with it off that's with it on. Yeah, that's looking clean. And then now let's go into the Color Grading. It already has a really nice look to it but I think I want to emphasize that purple in the clouds and then draw a little bit of warmth in the midtones and we'll see about the shadows, I haven't decided on the shadows yet. So let's start with the highlights. I want it to be this like warmish purple. So maybe somewhere around there. Just doing my new adjustments at the start. Holding command to keep the saturation at where it's at, but testing out different colors along the spectrum. Cool. Yeah, so that's a nice little pop of color in those highlights. I'm gonna make it a little bigger. So that's off, that's on. Looking pretty solid. Maybe a little too much. Maybe just a little more warmer rather than purple. Yeah, that's nice. You can hit these little eye icons, too, to turn it off and on if you just hold it it's really subtle, right now but I think you'll notice a difference if I keep moving through here. So let's go to the midtones. Just seeing what colors we want here. I'm holding the command tab or the command key to try out all these colors, take a saturation down a little bit. The tricky part about this midtone is it's affecting his skin tone as well. So what I think I might do is I might come into the, back into the HSL. So command alt shift L, target his skin, bring it up a slight bit and with the Luminance and then come into the midtone with the idea of maybe changing the hue in his skin. So I'll just do that and find a good color on the truck I want. Like that looks really solid. And then his skin got a little warm. So what we can do to fix that is command alt shift H and then target his skin tone and you see, you can really make it look bad if you want, but we can also make it look good. There we go. So what we did, oh, that didn't change anything. (typing and clicking) So I'm not targeting it specifically. I'm just jumping in between the red and the orange to try to get a good hue to his skin tone. Yeah, that looks pretty good. And then again, just jumping around a little bit command alt shift H to target the truck and make it a little more on the warmer side of green. And then command alt shift L to change the Luminance of it. A little brighter maybe. And then to soften those bright tones, cuz I do like it, I'm gonna just come into the Curves panel and soften that. So you can see that shift right there in the sky. The sky's just a little bright, so it can be, it can pull your eye away from him, so that's why I'm softening it a bit. Holding alt as I drag these. Boom, that's looking pretty solid. And then come back into the Color Grading once again. (typing and clicking) Let's look at the shadows now. Let's just try adding blue to the shadows or a cooler tone. I like that a lot, maybe a little more. Sick. It's subtle but it's there and it's creating a nice subtle contrast against the warm exterior, cuz we have those that kind of warm purplely clouds. We have the truck that's green but we brought it more to the warmer side of green. And then we're complementing those, complementing those colors with a little bit of cool blue in the shadows. So I'll turn that off and on. Let me zoom in. If that's with it off, that's with it on. You can see just a warm cast go over the image. It's pretty nice gonna come back into the Luminance, bring up his skin just slightly and then the hue as well. I don't wanna affect it too much. Cool. Then I'll mess with these Luminosity sliders and just see if, see if there's something I like. Overall this image looks complete to me. I'm going to, I think the last thing I want to do, is come back to the lens correction, take down the Vignette a little bit to narrow your focus to him and what it's doing, I guess, let me explain what Vignette is doing. If I just go back and forth you can see the corners just get brighter and darker. So I'm making them a bit darker, so it pulls your focus into our subject, Eli. Then maybe a little bit of change in the vertical of the Transform panel. Cool, that's looking good to me. The only thing I would want to change is probably just removing that antenna through Photoshop. You could probably do it in Lightroom but it would just take a bit too much time and be a lot easier. It'd be like probably one click in Photoshop to take it out. But overall really pleased with that image. And you could keep going too into tone Curves. Maybe just add a little bit of touch of warmth to it or maybe a touch of blue in the highlights. Yeah, that looks nice. I said I was done in here, I am still going. The options are endless but I think we can stop there on it and yeah, export that and go into the next one.