Lessons

Lesson Info

Packing efficiently and safely

So I am now going into my files here. And the beauty of working on inside of Lightroom is now I can actually go in and look at them and see, you know, how sharp they are and like, I can really kinda pay attention to them a little bit better now, right? Because I have the entire full file here with me. I really like this one. So I'm gonna go in and look at it. So what should we do to this? So now that we have the full-res file here inside of Lightroom, I'm going to go through and start playing with it. And it's a raw file so I can do whatever I want to it. The first thing that I'm gonna do, it's pretty perfectly exposed, so most people if you are on a file that's not necessarily, perfectly exposed, and let's just say like this one. See, it's a little bit too bright. So let's work on this one first. I'm gonna just git the auto button. And it does a really great job at getting me into the zone. So there's a lot of little sliders that I could be sliding, just hit the auto button, see what ...

it does. If you don't like what it does, you can always hit the undo button at the top and go back but hitting that auto button is a really simple way to start. And then, we're gonna go in and choose our exposure. You can see the auto did all of these. It brought those highlights down. I'm gonna bring the exposure down even a little bit more. I'm going to go into the color and I'm gonna cool it down, 'cause I don't want it to be warm, I want it to be nice and cold looking. I'm gonna bring the coolness down quite a bit. I might even gonna bring the saturation down a little bit so that it feels a little bit more misty. And then I'm going to, the next thing I wanna do, I'm annoyed by the fact that it's not perfectly level. And so I'm gonna go under the crop tool, which is over to the right and I'm gonna do a little cropping on it. So the best, the easiest way is to just hit the straighten tool but it can't figure it out because the horizon line is too soft. So I'm gonna have to do this on my own. So I'm just gonna do that till the horizon line is straight and hit Done. Okay, so, now I'm no longer annoyed by the fact that it's too skewed. So now I'm gonna go into color. If you're familiar with Lightroom, almost every control that you have inside of Lightroom is available here as well. So inside of color I have the opportunity for temperature, tint, vibrant, stuff like that, but I also have the ability to click on my hue, saturation and luminance area here. So now I can actually look at specific colors or if I don't want to try and figure out what the color is, I can just choose whether I want to work on the hue, the saturation or the luminance. I wanna work on the luminance. So I'm gonna just click on this little target thing right up here. So I'm gonna click on it. And now whatever I touch, it's gonna register that color and then I can slide the luminance up or down. So I'm gonna go here to the blue, and I'm gonna grab the blue. See how it registered at the top middle? You see that registration of that color? And I'm gonna start dragging down. See how I'm playing with the hue or I mean the luminance of that particular color. Let's do it. There's some of it in the sky, there's some of it in the water but there's not a lot of it in say, like, the greenery over on the right-hand side. So I'm just trying to emphasize the water a little bit more, so it separates out a little bit. Then I'm gonna take the luminance of the green up. So I'm just gonna click on the green and I'm gonna look for there, and it's kind of a pale green. So I'm looking for the most green version of it and then I'm bringing that yellow-green up. See that? See I'm just playing with the yellow and the green inside of the greenery over there. So I'm just bringing it up a little bit so that it shines a little bit, plus I could take the saturation and I could bring the saturation of the green up just a little bit more, so that the total saturation is fairly normal but the green itself is up a little bit. Okay, so once I've got things the way I like it, I can also go to the effects area and this is new inside of Lightroom fairly recently and that's called texture. Texture is really, really great for these areas here. So if you take the texture up, you can see that, like, the tree gets better, the rocks get better. Like, texture is fantastic for landscapes. The only problem is that it's also adding texture, you know, to the water itself. Although not much, 'cause you can see it's intelligently figuring out. So the texture is not doing too much but if I go to the extreme, you can see that's adding, see how it's adding texture to the water? It's trying to find texture there and create it. So instead of adding texture as a global event, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to my targeted adjustment masks. And so I'm gonna go into here, over on the right, there's a little circle just below the bandaid. There's a little circle and that's where I get my gradients, my brushes, things like that. So I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna click on this plus button and I'm gonna use a brush and I'm gonna choose the size of that brush. Don't need it to be too big. And I'm gonna make sure it's fairly soft, I don't want it to be a hard brush like that, I want it to be fairly soft. And then I can choose it to be 100% or I can choose it to be quite, you know, just decide how much you wanna lay down of whatever you're gonna do. So I'm gonna give it about maybe 50-ish percent. Okay. So now, once I've got that, I need to choose what's going to happen. So I'm gonna go back into the effects and grab the texture and bring it up. I'm also gonna go into the light area, and I'm gonna add highlights so that the little crests of things like on the rocks will be brightened up, but not necessarily the shadows. And I'm gonna go in and just start painting. So now I'm painting that texture that I wanted but I'm not painting it where I don't want it which is on the water. And I need to change my brush size 'cause we're getting out onto the end of that here. And if for some reason I go a little too far and I need to erase something, I can click on the eraser which is right below the brush itself. So click on the eraser and then I can come in and just kind of erase things that I went too far on. There. So now you can see, watch what happens when I start working on this. I can take my exposure up. See, that's the mask that I've created. Now, obviously, we don't even want to do that, so I double-click it. All we're looking at doing is just bringing up some highlights. You can see it happening right there on the bushes a little bit. And then we wanna go onto the effects and play around with our texture. So I'm gonna zoom in so we can see what the texture actually looks like. See that? We're adding texture. So here's a total lack of texture, it's getting kinda soft, which is great for skin but I want to add texture to it. There we go. And there's my file. All right, so now the last thing I wanna do, and this can be the first thing or the last thing, kinda depending on whether you wanna be inspired early or you wanna get the image you want it and then you wanna start playing. Go into your profile browser. And inside your profile browser, you have a whole series, the top ones are things that were added by either your camera. So we talked about color in a previous class here on Photoshop Week 2019. It was the control your color class and we talked about profiles. If you install a profile inside of Lightroom, not Lightroom Classic. So the way to get profiles into Lightroom on your mobile device is you have to open up Lightroom, the new version of Lightroom, so it's kind of the pared-down version of Lightroom and you add the profiles in that program. You don't necessarily have to use that program for anything else. You just sign in to it, add the profiles there, they will go up to the Cloud, they'll be available inside of all your devices. So if you have profiles in Lightroom Classic that you like and you wanna add those profiles or presets to Lightroom on your device, all you have to do is open up the small version of Lightroom. It's got the same logo as Lightroom mobile does, it's kind of an aquamarine logo with kind of rounded edges. So open up that application on your computer and add any profiles and presets you want into there and they will be available to all of your devices. For some reason, they haven't figured out how to make Lightroom Classic talk to the system. So, anyway, that's the workaround. So that's how these were added. So my black and white profiles. So I can go through and click on them and see what this is gonna look like with different color renditions of the black and white. And see how I'm changing the underlying color. So some of these are gonna have the greens are be a lot brighter, and some of them the greens are gonna be a little bit darker. And so I can just play around with that. And I like the idea of it being a black and white image but before I commit to that, I'm gonna go to the color section, I've got some artistic color profiles as well. And I like the idea of it being very cold. So instead of black and white, maybe just kind of a muted, cold look. See, I like that even better, 'cause it kinda feels black and white but see how the green is coming through. I like that a little bit better. That one's even better, I like that one. That's even more soft and misty. So it's taking all of our colors down and neutralizing them and it's understating all of the colors. I like that one the best, plus that little slider at the bottom of the picture allows me to decrease the total effect or increase the total effect. So if I go all the way, it looks like that, and if it goes part way, I can just kinda choose how much of that effect I want to add to the photograph and I think that's about right. So, now, I'm gonna hit the back arrow right by Profiles. So I'm gonna just click on that back arrow and now I have a photo that's worth sharing. So now, I wanna share it but before I share it, there is one little problem. Do you see all that scraggly bushes on the right-hand side? I'm not really keen on that. So I don't like the scraggly bushes too much on the right-hand side, and so I could go into Lightroom here and click on the bandaid tool, and click on Heal. So make sure that the method is heal. Actually, it might actually better be Clone but the problem is it's not gonna be able to do it very well. And that's why I'm gonna show you this. So I'm gonna go in and just paint the bush. And it's probably gonna do a pretty bad job at it because Lightroom is not fantastic at big things like this. But we'll see. It's okay. Then I can drag this around. That did all right. It did all right. That's not bad. So I'll tell you what, why don't we keep that and realize that we still have some work to do, right? It's not quite where we want it to be but it's closer. Lightroom's just a little bit rudimentary when it comes to very large pieces of things but it's okay. Actually, you know what? We're gonna go back and we're gonna double-click that which means we're gonna delete it and we're gonna try a different method. And the different method is going to be going to the Photoshop.