Lessons

Lesson Info

Edit 03

This next photograph is my favorite from the entire shoot. Everything came together and just worked very nicely. And I'll just go through what I'm saying in this and why I think it works so well and why I'm just hyped on it. First off, I love what Eli's doing. He's fixing his plow, messing with it with all the snow coming down. I shot at a 1/15th of a second shutter speed handheld. Somehow he was not too blurry, which was amazing but that blurred the snow. So you have all that motion, all that atmospheric texture going on. That just was brilliant, like I couldn't have asked for better. I'm really hyped on that. And then with that, you have these great leading lines. On the whole left side of the frame, you have the grill of the truck just being a perfect leading line right into the center of the frame, and on the bottom right you have another supporting leading line with that snowplow lines leading right into the center of the frame where Eli's doing and by happy accident, this composi...

tion with Eli and this lamp right here. So you have Eli here and you have the light right here. Just two, like in a way they almost mirror each other. It's really cool. You have Eli with this white emblem on his hat and the black jacket. Then you have the black light with this white light going out of it. And it just worked really nicely and they happen to be framed like almost on the rule of thirds. I'll fix that in post-processing here in a second to frame them perfectly but that just worked out brilliantly. It was a semi-happy accident. I saw it while I was down there and was like, oh, I'm hyped on that with all the snow going down. It just worked out. like this is my favorite image from the shoot. And a lot of things lined up to make that happen. So with that, let's get into the edit. So with that, the first thing I wanna do with this edit is really fix that composition and just really dial it in perfectly. I'm gonna hit "enable profile corrections." See what that does. I don't think I'm gonna mess with that distortion too much. I think it looks good like that. I'm gonna bring back some of that vignette. Cool. Not too big of a difference there. And then on the "transform" tab, "command seven" I'm gonna hit "constrained crop," and then I'm going to adjust that horizontal that away. So I hit the "R" key to bring up the crop. So now I have those rule of third minds and I can really frame my image and balance it while I'm doing these transform tools. Just changing the vertical there. I'm gonna lock the crop so it's two by three. What I think I'm actually gonna do, I'm gonna take it out of two by three and just make my own crop ratio here. That's a little off, I'll bring this to the right. Cool. And then the last thing I wanna do is just dial in that vertical and mess with this aspect. I think with the aspect ratio, we're gonna go like negatives on that. So negative nine looks good and just a little "before," "after." Not a huge change, but it does make that a bit more tighter. It's not a huge change, there's the before and after but it does make it a bit more tighter, which I'm fond of. Let's jump into the basic panel, "command one." I'm gonna go to the temperature. And one thing to note too, is I'm a big fan, like my blues. It was funny on the last image, when I showed it to the people in the studio, they were like, "oh, that looks great, but I would've kept the blues similar." And that's the fun part about this because you'll have that same raw file and if you want your blues or the skin tone or whatever to be a bit different than what I did, you can apply your stylistic tendencies to my own frames. So just something to note as I'm editing, like I just thought it was funny when they said that because I would've never thought to keep the blues there 'cause that's just not my style preference. So to each their own. But with that, let's put the blues where I like 'em I think instead of the temperature, I'm actually gonna come into the HSL panel for these blues. The reason why is this temperature is affecting the light, this light right here and making it very warm or cool, depending. It is affecting that blue in the back, but I think we can just target that blue with the HSL panel. So "command three," "command alt shift." Let's start with the hue. So H. Nice. So more to my taste, but a bit too saturated. So "command alt shift S" and desaturate that quite a bit. (hiccup) Excuse me. Hmm. Maybe desaturate it a little less, so like right there, mess with the luminance and a hue. So you're just jumping between those panels. So that's before, that's after. I'm a fan of that. I'm gonna keep it that way. And I'm gonna jump back into the basic tab where I'm just changing the white balance, seeing what I want from it. Honestly, I like the warm tone that it's giving. So I'm not gonna change it much from the 7,900 it shot. We'll just leave it there. And then, man, there's really not too much I wanna do to this. Like it looks so good outta camera, but with that, we can probably mess around with some color stuff. So from the basic panel, let's get an overall exposure that we're keen on. One thing I wanna keep in mind as I'm editing this exposure is keeping that snow prominent, like that's just such a good atmosphere texture to the image. And I'll be honest with you, like this photo, I really like how it came out. So if I were to edit it just without teaching, I probably wouldn't do too much to it. And so I'm probably not gonna be doing too much to the photo, to be honest. Sometimes it's like that. But there are a few things I noticed that can be changed. One thing is these shadows right here, it just feels a little too warm. And I want to come into the color grading and make 'em a little more cool. I'm also gonna see where the mid tones are affecting. So it looks like the mid tones are affecting where this light's hitting, which is perfect. And then the shadows is affecting a lot more than I want it to, but that makes sense, 'cause it's all dark. I'm gonna make the shadows a little more blue. And in fact, since it's affecting so much, I'm actually gonna reset what we did earlier to the shadows 'cause I think it's gonna affect it far too much. So what you can do is come in here to the blue and the purple. And if you double click these on the hue saturation luminance, just resets 'em. Pretty handy. So let's go back into the color grading and this is how my editing goes, honestly, it's just back and forth, back and forth, just a constant frenzy. That's nice. I like that, that blue right there. It's kind of a cross between-- it's a little more on the warmer side than where we started. Still not that warm, but that's fine. And now I'm gonna go back into the hue saturation luminance and do the saturation. Target that blue and desaturate it very slightly. Very, very slightly, so. Maybe a little more. And then with this mid tone, like I said, it's from this light, it's affecting most of this area. Once again, I'll show you where it's affecting. I want that to be a bit more warm but I want it to be balanced. It's definitely a tricky edit to make it better than it came out. Like I think it's pretty difficult, to be honest. There we go. I like that. So that's just a subtle red touch to the, to the highlights there, or the mid tones. And I'm going to change that luminosity slider, make it a bit brighter. Change the luminosity on the shadow slider. So that's before, that's after. I'm gonna desaturate those blues again, really struggling with these blues. Maybe just, maybe deluminate them. There we go. That's a bit better. And then, one thing I wanna do is come into the graduated filter. Make a dark one and then run it at the bottom here. So just on the exposure panel and I'm gonna take down the highlights a bit to soften that. Yeah, that's subtle, but that's nice. And then I'm gonna come into the basic panel, push up the shadows on his jacket there. Or I guess I'm just looking at his jacket but it is targeting all the shadows and then change my white balance to a little bit cooler. And what I'm trying to do here is I'm really just looking at his hat and the warmth of it and the background blue. So finding and striking a good balance there, which I'm finding to be quite difficult but, that's how it goes sometimes. Bring down the shadow slightly. Let's come into the curves. I'm gonna add three points, just one near the top, middle and bottom. I'm gonna push the mid tone up a bit and then take down the highlight just to soften it a tad. So that's without it, that's with it, you can see it really helps defuse this shovel right here 'cause that's a pretty bright point of the image that's distracting and that helps soften it quite a bit. And from there I might run a gradient filter from the top. Looking good. So that's before, that's after. It's not bad. There are certain things like, so one thing I'm noticing right now, so the before and after is not looking bad, but the one thing I do like about in the before is that it feels a lot darker around the edges. So like if I hit before, I lose a lot of this right here in the shadows, which honestly helps the image 'cause it helps you draw into this brighter part in the center. So that's after. You can see what I mean by that. And then let's go back into lens corrections. So maybe bring back in the vignette. Maybe that will help. And then also maybe bring down not the black slider, but maybe the shadows. Yeah. That actually, that helped quite a bit. So that's before, that's after. I'm gonna just make those blues a little more purple, deluminating them slightly. So that's before, that's after. And that's another thing as you notice throughout this, I'm hitting before and after constantly. I like to compare and contrast and see where I'm at, especially with this photograph because I really like the, like how it came outta camera. So I don't want to veer too much from that. One thing I do like about this background in the before image is that it's a lot darker. I think I made this one a bit too bright. So what I wanna try to do is actually come to the dehaze tab instead of affecting the exposure value and just up the dehaze. So it does, yeah. It's accomplishing what I hoped, where it's darkening that background a bit, it's making the whole image a little more, like, clearer and in that, it's just dehazing it, making it a little more, for our purposes it's making it a little more contrasted. It's working nice. So that's before, that's after. I really like how the snow's coming out. Maybe we can try to make it a little punchier with clarity or maybe actually take clarity out of it so it softens those lights and then add texture. Yeah. That's really nice. Very subtle things. So here's the before, here's the after. The only thing I'm really noticing right now is, where the warmth is, it does have a green tint to it, especially you can see it in the jacket, not a big fan of that. We could probably just go into color grading and maybe the shadows and take it down lower. A little less. So like right there. I'm just gonna try desaturating it and seeing what happens. That looks really bad so we're not gonna do that. Maybe, maybe a lot more subtle. No, we'll just keep it warm like it is. I do like the warmth of it, I just don't like that green tone that's coming out of it. That helped a bit. So what I just did there is "command alt shift H" toward the hue. And I, when I did that, as you can see, it made everything a bit warmer and you can see over here in the hue, it just took the red and orange down very slightly. But I think it did the job. The last thing is, well, maybe the last thing. We'll hop into the curves here. I'm gonna hit two points on the blue and on this upper one, I'm gonna drag it down to add, to take out the blues and add yellow. So actually, if you look right here where the highlight is on the shovel, we're just gonna drop it down, take blue out of it so it makes it a bit warmer. I think that's a nice subtle touch just doing before and after there on it. And then coming back into the main channel, I'm gonna hold "alt," click on this shadow, and just push it up ever so slightly. So that's without it. And that's with it. I actually really like what that did there. It made it, it keeps that contrast there but it just makes it a little more, a little brighter which I'm a fan of. So here's before total and here's after. I feel like we kind of just did a full circle almost, to the original look but you definitely see the snow a lot more. You see all those textures a bit and yeah, we could keep going. But I think that's a really solid edit. Like I'm happy with that. And at the end of the day, like I said, at the beginning of this image, I really liked that. Like, that's just a great image straight outta the camera. The colors are already really solid. And I find when I try to overdo it and overedit these images that are already good out of camera, it doesn't really work. So I think we'll stop there before I ruin it. (laughs)