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A Glimpse into RAW Processing

In the last video we talked about in camera processing it in camera crossing is absolute wonderful, especially for achieving while getting closer to your final vision in camera and that's something I always recommend get his closest possible, get your images right in camera and then use raw processing an additional editing to finalize your vision in this video here we're going to give you a demonstration of rob processing and how powerful it is and what you can do essentially to achieve the final vision and the flexibility you have in a raw file and doing all these things now, of course, rob crossing in this example, going to using light room, this is really beyond the scope of photography wanna one rob crossing in and of itself? We have a twenty hour, three dvd course in the light room workshop collection that teaches essentially the entire process everything from importing and managing your files in the light room. All the over the organization and work flow all the way through to ad...

vance artistic effects and howto develop images for hdr looks for high contrast color for low contrast fades for filmic fades for black and white and amazing editorial looks and all that kind of stuff is covered in that workshop collection, so I would say that if this is a topic that interests you, then be sure to check it out because post processing or rob crossing is really as big a part of the artistry in photography as any other step along the way let's go ahead and get started I'm gonna work on this image that we shot for keeping kristine's little shoot right here and what we're gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and just show first we're going to go through in process this just normally and really don't need to follow along as we're going super fast in the actual workshop collection we explain everything in complete detail I don't want to spend hours here I just wanted to show you a quick glimpse of what could be done so just kind of follow along and watch you were doing and it will make complete sense once we process it that this kind of manly we're going to go through and show the power and having a preset system along with it because it speeds up the workflow tremendously all right let's go ahead and start this off we're going to start with the biggest adjustments first and for this image it's exposure so we're gonna just exposure and temperature I'm going to go ahead and add a little tone curve tone curves other these little mathematical looking things that look crazy but in reality they're not we cover this in a lot of detail in the workshop so that you guys have a complete control of your images that actually quite fantastic I'm also going to pull down the clarity just a little bit just to reduce mid tone contrast and let's grab a little bit of shadows and blacks and add those in as well and I'm also going to reduce the reds and the oranges just a bit because their skin tones are a little bit on the orange on red size I was going to pull those out in the saturation is a little bit let's go ahead and we're going to zoom in this was shot on a prime lens it was shot on a thirty five millimeter at f too so you'll notice that's a bit soft so what do we do? Just add a bit more sharpening to this image let's go ahead and increase the radius as well a little bit of detail and that's pretty solid and I might do a tiny bit of noise reduction is too decreased on that fine fine noise grain that's being added by some of the sharpening doing too much noise reduction when you're sharpening is actually going to counter act the sharpening effect okay, so this is a good day basic look at what this image would look like process so if I hit backslash which is the before button on light room, you'll see this is the before and this is the after okay, so we've come quite a long way just making a few adjustments here now if I wanted to say adjust the curve, maybe I want to go for a little more of a matte finish I couldn't do that I can pull up the curve and kind of create more of a subtle kind of matte finish to this image by pulling down the highlights pulling down the shadows so we just pulled down the highlights on the side we pulled up the shadows in the side we get more that kind of matt filmic look I'm gonna drop the contrast a bit, okay? And then I might just a just a little of that exposure we're sorry not exposure a temperature so again here's another completely different look just by adjusting a little act own curve now this is great prosecutors like this you know, it's taken years for me to get this quick as faras prosecuting I can process an image like this in thirty seconds to a minute very, very efficiently. But presets are is what's going to make it that much more carful, in essence, because what we could with presets as we have mork control over the vision and we can get there much quicker so let me go ahead and give you a demonstration we're gonna do is let's go ahead and create a virtual copy of this image and I did that by hitting control a possible command apostrophe if you're on a back I'm going to reset this out and then what we're gonna do is just click there I don't know why I'm telling you all the buttons because there's too many buttons to talk there so let's just go through and and do this so I can do now is I'm just going to do a foundation preset which is basically a pli everything that we just did in one single click all I gotta do now it applied the skin the saturation are sharpening our color facts everything I'm going to do is basically just brighten this up and then I can choose well my temperature ok so I could just bring up the temperature a little bit and we get to that first kind of basic look now let's say from here I'm gonna create another virtual copy now let's say that I want to go ahead and I want to actually darkened down the image what we have based on adjustments here we could actually just crush the blacks a bit get more contrast their fantastic let's create another virtual copy. Okay, now from here I say well what I want to add a kind of film it looked like go up to our stylization and at a neutral matt to it which again add that matte finish in one single click all that adjustment in the tone curve is all done well let's say I want to do a black and white well, I'm going to go ahead and click black and white and fantastic I'm just going to add a little black too that and great maybe adjust my exposure by point five and pull the pull up by point five and then pull the blacks down just a little more let's bring the blacks down great we have this nice high contrast black and white look now what if I want a black and white with maura matte finish well again I'm going to choose a man you can go with a neutral man I could go with a filmic for more film grain and so forth I'm going to go with the filmic I'm going to just my exposure down just a bit and I was going to pull back my blacks just a little bit okay and then we could make if you need to make fine tuning adjustments you can do that by going to the sliders again what if I want to go back to a color let's say I go back to color I'm going dio this time let's go see what a skin d sat looks like that looks nice but I kind of want to kick up the blues and greens so let's do that let's kick out the blues and greens and now let's basically pull down the blacks so now we have a nice crush look to the image again okay, so this is how the presets work in making so many effects very simple very quick and easy to access your not having to go through tons of sliders let's do one last one going to get a little more advanced with this one I'm gonna go with let's go with the color skin d sat and then we're gonna go with a bright wash and then for this when we do bring out the black just a little bit and then what we can do here is that khun go and change the color ization via several different ways ok so first one can do is adjust the curve so I'm going to my let's do a warming curves so rather than just a standard bright wash I'm gonna add amber toning into that dry wash I can choose april got toning if I want to be a little more kind of orange I even have warm cross processing let's go with amber and we'll stick with that and I'm gonna say I'm gonna add one more level of color fax over that with a little bit of yellow violet tony so now we have a kind of vintage like a stylized color look to the image again with just a couple clicks this would take five minutes for me to dial in all these adjustments to get to this point but we have it in just a couple seconds so all those different looks we just create like several different looks to the image it hasn't updated these previous atlas click on it see if it updates it there we go okay in just a quick matter of seconds we got to each one of these again the presets also include things for retouching let's go and try one more image I have this image over here so let's go ahead and do the basics where I'm just going to go up and I'm going to go with a black and white for this image and I dig that the black and white has let me show you this well quick this is really cool and control shift our command shift artists are reset this out this is the standard black and white conversion that leg room gives you this is the preset black and white conversion see how we get teo pretty much a finished images with one single click now from here I'm gonna put a matte finish on it and then I can soften the skin if I need to but really the skin is kind of where I wanted to be. If I want to soften it up I might soften it to that point, then brighten the image but I kind of like it with that little more contrast he looks so I'm just going to pull it down just a bit okay, so from here, let's go and show you just a little bit of the retouching stuff. So in retouching, if we bring up our local adjustment brushes, we have all these options here. So if you want to do a little bit of detail enhancements, let's say that I want a hair just to kind of have a little bit more kick to it. I could just go and paint this in just two. Her hair okay gives the hair just a little more richness, a little more detail, so it kind of makes it pop us a little more cool. That looks nice, let's, say, now I'm gonna hit new, and now I'm going to just do a little work on the eyes so I can go to the I brighten her. I'm gonna zoom in. We're just going to bring this right over the eyes, and this image is a little bit soft to see, right, though it works for the purpose of our tutorial when you're shooting on these prime that's really, really important, tio. Take a lot of shots I think I'm pretty sure I have some sharper images of this but this one just happening is selected here so that's not a big deal okay when you're right in the eyes one my favorite tests to see if you've gone too far with it is to go back to grid viewer, go thumbnail view and then just enlarge the size of it if the eyes look like they're popping out like kind of like alien form like they are right now then you've got a little bit too far so I'm going to do is go back in I'm going to click on that little pin for her eyes I'm just going to pull it back a little bit I'm just clicking and dragon to the left to kind of tone it down a little bit I'm gonna add another one we're going to go this time into our iris enhancer and we're going to zoom in and we're going to go right over those viruses just to kind of make those irs has pop just a little bit again we can kind of adjust that downs by clicking the pen and just pulling it back a little bit and getting it down nice natural look let's get go back a little bit and see still has a little bit too much pop to it so I'm gonna do is just adjust the brining down because that the actual the other painters actually overtime actually it's delete that one is leave the virus so all we're gonna do is just leave it over the iris and it looks fantastic like that perfect we also have enhances we've got black and white on this so it's not going to too much but there's also a lip enhancer which goingto boost colors we have teeth whitening and so forth cash light enhancing for the eyes and just tons of really cool stuff we can even add a flare actually when I show you what that looks like it's kind of cool okay, so let's take a look at this I'm going to go ahead and just hit backslash here's the before image and here's the after get two really nice beautiful looks if we want to do any retouching with a skin we can we have these line diminishes in here as well if you go right here we have a line diminish er but that's why we kind of brightened up the image quite a bit so that these lines on the forehead really don't appear but if you want to diminish them further you can actually use the line diminish if needed okay so this looks fantastic let's go back here just for one quick click I want to show you one nifty little thing and the newest version we added a lovely little sun flare thing to the process. So watch I'ma switch this to a neutral maso has a soft kind of fade going onto it just kind of I feel like it fits with that flare look, I'm gonna go down to our sun flare and when we do just increase the size of this brush now all right? So after I get to kind of appropriate size, I'm just going to drag and drop us in kind of right where I feel like it would fit and so typically to get the best effect, you're going dropped the flare over the area where the lights coming from so kind of in the scene, it looks like the light's kind of directly behind them or directly above them. And so what? I'm going to just place it right here and we get this lovely little flare coming in through the trees. Okay? So very simple, very quick and we have a very convincing flares so here's that before and here's our lovely flare we can actually paint in mohr of this if you want to go across weaken, then hold down alter option and we kind of shape it however we like let's hold down all to bring that over there, okay, so just a nice soft flare coming in from the top, very nice, very convincing all within light room all right, so that's it as far as post processing go. So hopefully that gives you a glimpse into what can be done, how much artistry goes into the raw processing portion, what you could do inside of light you're on your own, and how muchmore speedy and how much more creative options are open up by having a preset system available to you as well. So if you want to learn more, be sure to actually go to star labs. Dot com, ford slashed store you can see the entire light your workshop collection. You can learn specifically, each individual components, so organization and work float. You can learn, develop module mastery, or you can learn the preset system. Weakened by the priest is, um, and also get the tutorials for it, or even buy everything in the workshop collection as well. That's it from this video. Hopefully you all enjoy, and I'll see you in the next one.