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Lesson Info

Using Lightroom for Local Adjustments

anything that you want to do globally, the photograph is probably best done inside of light room unless you have to do some kind of computations inside of an action of some sort. But then, at that point, you're not doing it. It's the action that's doing it. And light room can actually tell Photoshopped to go and do something. Are light room Comptel Photoshopped to go do something to a photograph without you ever having to do it. So if you have actions that you really love and they're too tricky and crazy to do inside of light room because it does computations inside of the photograph, you can actually tell light room to do that for you. And I'll show you how to do that today. Okay? All right. So let's talk about then, these areas up here. So you got your crop, and you've got your, um, your spot tool here. You've also got a red eye filter. You've got a Grady int. You've got a radio filter and you've got a brush. And these air all your local adjustment brushes and tools. Um, so the first...

thing that will talk about is just some of the things that we can do inside of light room that can also be synchronized across many photographs, so you don't have to do it over and over and over again. You can do it once. If you have, like through for photographs that the model is looking at you in a similar fashion. You can just paste those settings across. So let's talk about that. We're gonna zoom into her, and we're gonna look at some of the things that maybe we might want to deal with. For instance, we have a couple little blemishes here across your skin that we might want to get rid of. That can obviously be taken care of. Inside of the spot tool, there is a clone brush, and if I turn the opacity all the way up to 100% and then I just use the scroll on my mouse to change the size of that brush, and then I just go in and grab those different The and lighter tries to decide where to go to get the appropriate skin. But notice that it's just grabbing all of those. And as I as I go off of it, you can see the circles disappear, and now the blemishes air gone. And if I happen to have three or four photographs like right in a row, it would remove all of those blemishes if she moved slightly. I can always go and grab any of those pins, and I can move them around. So if it was slightly off, because let's say it was slightly off there and you can see how the blemish is still there. You always grab that, move that point and move it down over the blemish, and then it will take care of that blemish. Um, so that gives you an idea of what you can you can deal with with just these points for getting rid of blemishes. Thea Other thing that you can do with the spot tool that's not often talked about is the idea of getting rid of bags under eyes, wrinkles, things like that. You can get rid of those with the spot removal tool because you can also grab on. So if we zoom in a little bit closer to her, I that is really close. But you'll now you can see it. You see that darker area right there? That's the now she's young, so she doesn't have bags under her eyes. But she does have a darker little area there that we want to get rid of. We don't want to just completely get rid of it. Otherwise, she doesn't look like a human because we all have some kind of darkness under eyes. So what I'm gonna do, I mean, zoom out again. I'm gonna grab onto that spot there with my brush and I'm gonna grab and I'm gonna drag underneath her. I like that and whips. It's trying to paint. It's giving her some kind of war paint or something. Um, so it's trying to grab from over here. But we'll just move it to right here, and it's it's grabbing and pasting skin from a different area over here so that it's no longer showing you. But that's not any good, is it? Not at all. However, I can change the feathering on it, so oops, wrong way. So now it's going to be a softer feather, and then I can take the opacity down quite a bit, like we're going down to, like, 30%. And now look at the difference between let me zoom in just a little bit more. See if we can give you a good look at that. Okay, so now if I turn this on and off, watch that under the I do you see that shadow? And now it's gone, and now it's there, and now it's gone. But what we did is we gave her a little 30 or 20% opacity hit. We can do the same thing with a blemish. Now here's the rule. The rule for working with blemishes and things on people is that I only remove things that I don't see in the flux of time. Does that make sense? So if I'm talking to you and I'm looking into your eyes and we're having a conversation and you have a couple blemishes, I don't see those I'm not paying attention to. Your blemishes were having a conversation we're talking, so if I don't see the blemishes, I would remove them because a photograph is forever and people get to look at it and scrutinize it. So we get rid of the things that people would be like. Oh, there's a blemish there. Oh, there's a hair flying off there and we only get rid of those because we don't actually see them in the flux of time. However, if there's something I would recognize on you like, for instance, a beauty mark or a mole or your somewhat wrinkly and I noticed those things, I'm going to keep them in the photograph. I might soften them, but I'm not going to get rid of them. My rule of thumb is if I see it while I'm talking to you and it's a noticeable characteristic, I will leave it in if it's something I don't see when we're talking and we're moving around, then I take it out and that's the general rule, all right. And I promise that when we talk, I do see that you have pores and that you have regular normal skin. So I'm not going to make it plastic. All right, so that's something that can be done inside of light room. And so I'm going to do those types of things inside of light room because I don't want to go over the top. Say, I just grab that, I'm gonna move it right here somewhere where I could grab a little bit of skin tone there and all its see it stayed at the same 19% opacity. And so it's just given me a softer version of that under her eye, and it looks a little bit nicer, but notice that she still has the little wrinkles under her eyes. She still has a shadow under her eyes, but it's just softer, so it doesn't look like she was up late last night. That's it. Okay, so things like that can be done inside of light room, and I'm not going to do them inside a photo shop because they could be done so quickly and so efficiently. And my hope is that I don't have to go to photo shop. That's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping by the time I'm done with this photograph that I don't need to go to photo shop. And so I'm just gonna stay here in light room. Another thing. Do you see this Dent just kind of a dent in her skin? It's kind of a characteristic of who she is, because she it's like a It's like she has a little dimple right there. But it's a long, skinny dimple on DSO. She probably doesn't like it all that much, but it is part of who she is. So at that point, I'm a little debating as to whether to remove it or not. But it's really simple to to take care of that thing, see, and I can still have that line there just a little bit. But I got rid of the darkness of it, and it was very simple to do it. I let light room randomly choose the patch of skin that it was going to use to take care of it. But it's taken care of now, and I don't have to worry about it. Okay, so things like that I'm going to take care of inside of light room. There are other things that I could be doing as well. In the brush. I can do a lot of burning and dodging inside of the brush if I need to do any kind of work with, like, uh, I want her eyes, too. Punch a little bit more, I can go down and just and these air just presets that I've created in order to get something done quicker so I don't have to, because you can just go in here and reset these sliders anytime you want toe whatever you want him to do. But I'm gonna go in and say, like, I'm gonna use an eyeliner. And the eyeliner is simply just taking the black down and adding a little clarity so that I can come in and just just go like this on her eye and I'm just get so I'm just giving her I a little bit more of ah, makeup job so that we're her eyes punch out just a little bit more. So that's very simple. Nothing really crazy about it. But if for some reason I also wanted Teoh click on a new I'm gonna make a new pin. So every time you work, you make a new pin on guy wanted Teoh also, let's say I wanted to give her some smoky brown eyes. I can actually do a little makeup work here on her and give her some more like she didn't wear any makeup that day. And so, you see, I'm putting some of that on her eyes right now. So there I've given her some eye shadow, so things like that can be really, really easily done inside of light room and I'll show you what I've done. For those who are interested in order to do that, I have taken the exposure down because obviously eye shadow would make it darker. I've taken saturation down because usually you don't wear like bright pink whatever. It's a usually a muted tone. And then I've added whatever color I wanted into this color area right here. See that I've added the color of the eye shadow, and that's all I had to do in order to make that brush. So and then once I did make the brush. Then I said it as a pre set up here so that I don't have to do all those sliders again. I just simply grab it. I could do another if I wanted to. I could make lipstick. So if I goto lips, where my lips here, out there, There. Yeah. Okay. So if I wanted to do a little lipstick, um, I could just go in here and just enhance her lipstick just a little bit. Just make it a little bit more red, and that's just a bringing the exposure down on the saturation up. And that just kind of pops. Whatever color she currently has gives it a little bit more color to those lips so that they glow a little bit better. So things like that I'm always going to do those inside of light room because there's no point in going and doing something complicated inside a photo shop when all of that can be done inside of light room. Okay, so and then I'm going to zoom back out. I'm gonna look at my photograph, turn off all of these tools. I mean, look at the photograph and say, Is there something else that needs to be done to this photograph inside photo shop and I just not getting it there?