Lessons

Lesson Info

1:45 pm - Enriching Color & Toning Values

Now we get into actually manipulating damage so let's, look at this image right here. So this image we can see there was there was quite a contrast as opposed to an image like this, right, which is lower in contrast. So if we look at this image right here and we look at the history graham we can see that the history ram does not to go across the entire dynamic range, so I don't really have any values here in my highlights and my white area, whereas if we take a look at this image right here, I actually do have values going all the way across my history. Ram so probably the best way I ever heard this explained was gosh, back in like thunder lizard days when michael menace said what you do is you take your image and you break it up into you pretend like it's a mosaic like every pixel is its own unique mosaic a little tile and then and then you take the mosaic off the wall and you stack all those tiles and your history graham is your piles of tiles and it totally makes sense that way like...

you take all the black values in the dark values here well, though it's going to be all of these and then you go to your, you know, there's like there's a a decent number of black values shadows mid tones but then look at all these highlight values right here. Well, the piles of tiles are going to be higher with your highlight area because there's just more of them so there's no right or wrong history, ma'am, your history ram is just a visual representation of your image it's not intrinsically good or bad if most of your values are on the left or right if you've photographed a black cat at night, most of your values are going to be on the left if the photograph a polar bear in the snow most of your values they're going to be on the right now you're going to get you're going to be disappointed if your over or under exposing your image if you over exposure image and you push your highlights to pure white, then of course you're not going to get detail in those whites if you say, well, I never want that to happen I'm going under expose my image well then the values that should be in your mid tones are going to end up in your shadows because you're under exposing and then if you go in the light room and say, well, I'll just fixing the light room when you lighten the image in fact let's go to this flat image right here when I say, oh, this is underexposed I need to go in here in my basic panel on let me tap the are key to put the crop tool away if I say, all right, I want to increase the exposure here, as I do that look what happened to all of the values that were in the shadows there now in the mid tones? Well, that's good, because the file looks brighter and it looks lighter, but what do you get in your shadows that you don't get in your mid tones? When you take a picture with a digital camera, you get noise? Exactly. So you don't want tio under expose you don't want to say, well, julian told me never to overexposed, because then I want to detail of my highlights, but julian did not tell you tow under expose, right? Because people like we'll just play it safe and under exposed, but then you've got noise because you're going to have to brighten the whole image, you're gonna get noise and the shadow areas and bring him up. So we use light room to do creative things, to take our photography to the next level, not to fix stuff that we shouldn't have done right in camera, okay, so the best and the easiest way if you have a flat image. Meaning that your history graham let's reset this my history ram does not extend over the entire dynamic range. I have some dark values here, but I don't have any bright values. So this is one of those times where we can just click auto, you know, people shy away from otto, but in this case, auto is just going to reset my black in my white point, it's going to extend the dynamic range of my image over the entire history am from black to white. Now it made it to light in my opinion, but that's ok, I can just take the exposure slider and move it down a little bit. When I did that, I might need to finesse my highlights here. So the good thing is is because this is all non destructive. It doesn't matter how many times you go in here and change the sliders, right? Because I go and I can change the sliders up and down and I can go in there and then tomorrow I can come back from the next day. I can come back and next week and next month, and I can always re edit this with no loss of quality, all right, I'm going to hide this for a little bit, just so we get a little bit more space over here, okay, so the thief history um here is you roll over it you notice you've got your blacks or shadows your exposure, your highlights in your whites they corresponded the sliders right down here by default they're all set at zero if I wanted to reset them I could double click tone and they all reset it once so don't worry about getting yourself in a mess you can reset them all quickly if you click auto we just take the exposure down just a little bit and you need to readjust my white because I can see there's a gap in the history and so I bring up the white and why am I using the white? Because your blacks and whites are going to be setting your black and white points your shadows and highlights and we can see is we just move our cursor on top of it it actually highlights you know that area in the history ram and right below it it actually says shadows right there, right? And it says blacks and exposure whites and highlights and this is interactive so I could actually just click in the history of I'm clicking and dragging left to right and it will actually change the corresponding slider so you don't even have to go down to the sliders if you don't want to go right now in this case I do have some dark values if I want to see what's clipping I can tap the jakey so the jakey tells me that I've got some areas that are pure black so I pushed the blacks here all the way to black if I move the black slider over more to the left that whole blue highlight area tells me there's no detail in that black okay, now some people say don't ever do that you want to come up here so that you have detail on everything you know? It depends on your image it's an artistic call that you're going to make. There are beautiful photographs looking like greg orman's portrait photography he pushes those blacks to black and their their deepest, darkest, richest blacks. They are fantastic so this if you're pushing something the blank, that is an aesthetic choice. Now what most people are talking about those you don't want to push something that has important detail something that's revealing something that's telling your story I don't want to push that to pure black all right, whites are a little bit different if I move my whites way over to the right here, and I pushed my whites to pure white that's not well, it could be an aesthetic choice as well, but let me just say your eye a super sensitive to especially if you're going to print this here I a super sensitive to patterns, right? So when you print this, like if you printed with an ancient, there would be part of the paper that would have a dot and part of a paper that would not have a dot your I's going to go immediately to the dot pattern and look at the break between dot versus no don so you're I would go right to those clouds and go, oh there's, no detail in those highlights, so I would say that people are usually a little bit more cautious, they don't want to push their whites to pure white, so we'll just back off on that. So those air the jake he was just showing those the black and the blue and red overlays there and you can also you don't have to tap the jakey we can turn it off for a minute if we just position are cursor on top of the shadow clipping here on the highlight clipping here they were just temporarily turn it on and turn it off. So let me just overexpose it for a second see how when I cover my cursor there, it would show me all right, so that's a nice way to check without toddling and on or off ok, so we don't want those piles of tiles going all the way up the left or the right hand side of the history all right then from here it's really aesthetic choices if you want to look into your shadows you want to open them up a little bit you can see right there than the side of the door where I can now see more information that see more detail there the highlight areas so there's some areas here that I feel are a little bit too bright so I'm going to take down those highlight areas it's going to bring down a little bit of information so that I get a little bit more detail a little bit more tooth I don't think tooth is the right word to say they're but a little more detail all right, so we didn't talk about color temperature in this case I think the color temperature of this image is just fine let's move to a series of images here in fact, I can select more than one image here if I want tio we've got auto sync turned on so if I correct the color temperature of this image they will all be corrected at one time. All right, so we come up here to the white balance eyedropper so we can just tap the w key that will give us our white balance tool and that you should be t for turkey baster the thing's so big I don't understand but we'll just go with white went w for white balance that also toggles it away so it'll put it away, and if I'm over here in grandview, just having the geeky if I'm like, oh, those images need to have their white balance change just tap the w key that takes you to the developed module and get you the tool, just like the archy takes you to the developmental and get you the crop tool. All right, so now I want to click in part of my image that I know to be neutral, and in this case, you might not know anywhere to be neutral, in which case you're just gonna have to guess to mate. But what I do see a lot of people do is they're clicking in the very, very light areas, like, really night, like they say, it's a well, it's a white balance till I should click in the white, you want to click in a neutral value you're earning in a value that you think should be neutral, right? So I wouldn't pick the very, very brightest values here. I might come over here and say, well, I think this is supposed to be neutral and click, all right? You can see that really warm this up, it was way too blue before if I undo that's what it was before we click on this it definitely warms it up if we come over here we look at the temperature intense lighter look at the temperature is set fluorescent here it's way down thirty eight hundred come over here and click and now we've got a fifty five hundred all right, so what's going on we've got a loop anywhere that I position my cursor it's going to show me the colors underneath where the eyedropper is I can turn that off if I don't want to I can change the scale of the loop if I want to I can also auto dismiss the tool so this is great if you know what you're like, I'm just going to click in one spot and I am right ninety percent of the time click on auto dismissed now it's like all right you get one chance click puts the tool away it's a feature if you don't like it if you're like clickety click click click click click then just don't turn that on right go back to them and say no no no don't auto dismissed now I can say well, well, well well ok so the best thing would have been the best thing but I could have done if I if I needed this to be accurate like scene actor like it's crime scene I need this to be accurate what would I dio before I took the picture use one of those currents? Yes, exactly! You either use use like a white balance card. I don't think there's much confusion left, but just in case there is either we used to have these things called eighty percent great cards when we were photographing film and eighteen percent of great card is not a mutual like white balance card, so don't use those because if you hold like five of those next to each other, there is about as accurate as television's, which is to say they're not accurate at all the white balance cards those are accurate and that's why they cost more money because those are known neutral you won't get like the eighteen percent great cards you know one might have a yellow tent, one might have a blue ten it didn't matter because you were trying to get eighteen percent gray. You weren't trying to get neutral gray when you get these white balance cards than they need to be neutral and when I could have done is just I reached my hand in front made sure it wasn't part of the scene took the first picture with it in take it out, take the whole rest of the shoot under the same mining conditions than I would have a known neutral value in my first image click on it with all the rest of them selected and they automatically all been corrected I'm turning off this auto sink right now because it's starting to freak me out yes so one of the questions like wrestle with occasionally is on that white balance and what constitutes a neutral because in a lot of times whether it's at a party or something there's a lot of different colors there's a lot of mixed lighting the only thing that is relatively uh consistent is the white of a napkin or a white collars or that fabulous card that you're going to bring to the party so no, I don't know what you mean and sometimes especially you can even be like is cement gray not always it really isn't there's tons of different colors of cement so so what can you do well, you can get it is as best you can if you don't have a card and no little value and let me tell you the no neutral value isn't always going to be what you choose that's just like if you want that to be the right color the right color well, you might like this a little bit warmer there I actually think that looks better the sand looks better with it warmer so it's it's all subjective but the mixed lighting that's when you're going to start using the adjustment tools the selective adjustment tools because right now white balance is that this is going to be global it's going to affect the whole image and right here where it says custom, you'll notice you can also just select you can say oh no you know what? This should be auto or they're not auto that this should be daylight or this should be fluorescent or this should be shade or this should be cloudy you can also select from this list if you've got a j peg file this list is not going to have everything on it it's going to be very short, I think there's two things there's like auto and embedded maybe yeah, yeah, I realize this may be beyond the immediate scope trying to use something like a great rog color matrix card too correct or standardize with yes, so what's the recommended neutral there beyond the so do you have one of those little ones in the clam shells that opens up? You have the full one? Um so do they have the gray squares on him? You know, they all the color squares both. Ok, so you have one with gray squares and color squares. Then I would do not the brightest one. But if you're going to put that in the scene, you mean police for an initial scene? Okay, yeah, you put that in the initial scene, then I would go on not the brightest value, but the next one down, yeah thank you. You're welcome. And if you really want to get all into you could actually, like, make your own camera profile under those lighting conditions, but that's a whole nother thing ok, all right, so white balance. I think we're going to my balance. We're good on the basic panel. No, we didn't talk about clarity of vibrance and saturation. So the three of these that's one so we, uh, this one's fine right here. So clarity there's a contrast slider as well. I didn't mention the contrast sider if I want to add some contrast, let's watch the history and for a minute. So if I add contrast, you'll notice that the entire hit in this isn't going to be a good filed to demo this on let's go to a more a broader range. Ok, here we go. So with this image, when I do contrast, you can really see the whole history. Graham moving right now when I go down the clarity, the whole history, graham doesn't move as much clarity is biased so that it's it's going to be making the changes in the mid tone that's. Why some people say, oh, that's, your mid tone contrast what it's doing is it's biased not only looking in your mid tones, but it's also bias to looking at edges and when it finds an edge when it does is it takes that edge and on one side of the edge it makes the edge darker than the other side of the edge it makes the edge a lighter what that does is it fools your eye and the thinking that your image is sharper so that's why they say that clarity is like a kind of a sharp named cider but it's not it's a mid tone contrast slider that contrast is fooling your eye into thinking that your image is sharper the exact same work the the way that on sharp mask works in photo shop all right, so so that's what the clarity slider does there's also negative clarity so it actually can soften it but it doesn't really get rid of the details so it's quite a nice slider but um just just don't go too overboard with it all right vibrance and saturation so these two let's go to a really colorful image right here all right so here we go we've got vibrance and saturation vibrance is also a biased slider meaning that if I go all the way to the left and take out all the vibrant there's still color in that image and and so if I go all the way to the right what the virus says is it takes in mine it says you know this red was really saturated to begin with so oh I'm not going to add set like ok if there's a continuum of this is sort of red and this is really read it so you say you know I'm gonna and whatever you put plus twenty plus thirty plus forty plus fifty but once you start getting up here if I keep pushing and compressing everything is going to be the same red so I'm going to keep a relative distance even though you're trying to squish this and make it red red, red, red, red it's like yeah, but you want to be able to tell the difference between this red in this red otherwise the detail in your image is going to be lost it's also biased and that it doesn't affect skin tones so that would be kind of your oranges and yellows as much as it does your blues like your skies your green grass so it's an excellent slider if you're taken on location portrait I just want to add a little pop you know you want to make that blue sky blue and the green grass greener it's an excellent slider to use for that because it won't make your people look really sunburned right? In fact, if I back off on that we look at saturation and one of the zoom in on that so here we've got in fact let's tap the not the tiki let's tap the y key so the waikiki shows us a bit foreign after what I wanted to compare was I wanted to compare vibrance at one hundred percent and saturation of one hundred percent but you'll notice that when you tap the waikiki and you go into this compare this before and after let me get rid of the white balance tool I'll just tap escape to get rid of the white balance school when you do this the before and after state that before state always goes like so far back in history that is kind of useless it's like ok, well I've made all these the other adjustments I only want to compare these two things so what you can dio is you can go to your history state or you're history panel and you'll notice that I've got a lot of states in history here see how it's going back it's going back all the way to import I don't want that I want to take a look at two different states that are up here so I want to look at vibrance at let's say minus one hundred so I just drag and drop it over there so now I can compare any two states right? So I said ok well let's say I want to look at saturation plus one hundred ok so that's what it looks like here and then I want to look at vibrant at plus one hundred ok well I come back to history I said, all right, I've got it vibrance plus one hundred I want to see what saturation is plus one hundred so we drag and drop that and now you can really see the difference, right? So here we have vibrant see how the reds are, you can still see detail in them. Where's the reds over here, they're really, really going to just way overloaded. You can't see the detail as much, so history you can drive from any state at any point in time. You can also split this differently if you want, so you could do a left right split, which is kind of nice because then when you're zoomed in, zoom in, there we go. When you're zoomed in, you can actually move around and see what things would look like in the before and after state. So if I tap the waikiki no, sorry, not the y que the wiki again to go black and white. It'll be maybe a little bit more obvious so you can see that's what I mean by it split the screen so that's nice when when retouching and stuff and then you can also split it top bottom. If you want to, all right, so just have the white key again soon, back out. All right and then tap v in order to get that back to color, why is that zooming out so much let's look at my navigator because it's set to one to sixteen and I want that I want one to one and fit okay? All right, how we doing there on the questions coming and going lots of comments and people are really into this up I'm not a photographer, but but I take hundreds of pictures when I'm traveling I'm so fascinated by what you're doing here, julianna really and this is something that your children will never be underexposed again I mean, I mean, I'm finding out some of them we've learned about each other I think today that you travel a great deal as well in chris is certainly a traveler as well, so I'm really fascinated by what you're doing because I could see so many ways to improve photography that I'm doing and you're never going to believe anyone's travel photos ever again, you know, for some time in tow hawaii I was like, wow, it's a lot less saturated than I thought that hdr that was going on all right um shall we take if you actually take a shot? Okay let's take a few questions you got one just come straight in from the west from marrying again is saying what would you do to an image to just normalize it I personally just do w b and exposure for normalizing is that correct yes but I find it depends on the image itself so we started with the flat image here right and I said ok let's go ahead and white balance it it was already was white balance and then I would click auto I don't know if it's my photography or if it's what I like how I like the look to be but a lot of times I think that my images look too bright after I do auto so I'm pretty consistently taking down the exposure slider right afterwards just to get them to be to be kind of neutral seen accurate if you take this image here though s o this image is much there's much more contrast in this image right so if I come here and I think the white balance on this image is fine as well but we could we could go over here maybe say I don't really want to click in the clouds because the clouds are going to have a lot of blue in them I think now actually it's a little bit um it's a little bit to warm so I'm going to bring that back down right to about there and then I would go ahead and click auto here now when it moved it across you know when it expanded the dynamic range it was already really hot here like I'm barely seen any detail in my highlights so here I really need to come and take my highlights down if I want to get some detail in there and I probably want to see into the shadows here a little bit but right this is like right in the middle of the day so I'm gonna have to scoot up my shadow slider and I'm even going to take down my exposure a little I think it's still a little bit too much, but if we tap the waikiki we can now see so you can see how much well I think I remember my cursor has this little highlight so if we just look at the before state there's a lot less detail in the sky and if we look at the before state especially in that big rock in the center see how we can't see into the shadows there at all where is on the right hand side? You're really seeing a lot more detail there, so what I typically do is I won't quite I don't know when I'm when I'm re touching this I'm going to go a little bit overboard with I'm going to make my shadows a little bit too bright and make my highlights a little bit too dark um because I know when I add presence it's going to add contrast back in there so even though I have lifted the shadows so that we can see into them as soon as I add more of the clarity it's going to make them darker again, so you might want to bring up your shadows just a little bit too much because it does tend to bring them down a bit more so again, you'll just have to kind of get a feel for it, but I think I think the it's kind of hard to see on that monitor, but I think that the after image looks much better here now. Personally, I would also go in and I would add a a local adjustment so I could come over here, for example, and we've got these three adjustment tools, right? We've got our graduated filter, we've got our adjustment brush and we've got our new radio filter in the center here, but I would use my gradual my graduated filter and you can see here that a lot of these sliders have been moved, so if I want to reset them, I could just double click the word effect that resets them all at once take down my exposure setting and this is all non destructive, so I'm going to take it down a lot, click and drag and then go ok, well, that was too much so that I can back off on that a little bit, and maybe we could even add a little bit of contrast in there. In that sky and kind of bring it out that I think it's still a little bit too much with the but you can see how right now we're really just talking about global effects but we'll go into selective effects all right? So we will go teo to the tone curve next so sometimes and I noticed this a lot when I am photographing aerial shots so because I'm taking them out the window of a commercial plane it's not liking so there's a lot of glass there it's something an idea actually published a book on it called window seat and it was really fun because I'm terrified the flying and so for me putting the camera between me and the scene remove me from the scene and allowed me like take pictures presents a relaxing place is beautiful and one hundred fifty years ago how many people ever have the chance to look down on the earth like we just totally take for granted so it was a great project but I was noticing that I couldn't even get enough with the sliders like I couldn't it's so through all those glad the glass and everything I couldn't get the dynamic range pulled apart enough so one of the things that you can do is you can also use the tone curve so the tone curve is right underneath the basic panel here's our tone curve and that's going to allow me to make I can either make a global adjustment meaning to all three channels red, green and blue or I can go in and I could make a local not a local adjustment but a per channel adjustment so therefore I could do some cool like color shifting if I want to or I could I could correct color if I want to but basically if you need to add more contrast here image you're going to be adding what's called an s curve right? So we're going to be lowering the shadows down and we're going to be raising up the highlights here so that's your typical s curve but the great thing here is you have a lot of control so I could say you know you know what? Leave my shadow areas alone it's only this area right in here that I want to pull up and then let's leave my highlights alone right here and you can add up to sixteen different points on this curve so you can really go in and refine and just add slight little adjustments to different areas. So in this case, if I might want to say like well I actually want to bring down the highlights a little bit there and then let's bring them back up here the only thing you have to be careful is if I bring this up too far see how I'm getting this flat area here so you've only got a certain number of values going across the tone curve, and so just think of it this way where the slope of the curve where it gets steeper, you're adding more contrast, but where the slope of the curve gets less steep, that's, where you're going to get flattened areas of your image. Oh, and something else really important point out sorry, I went directly to the point curve, so if your curve looks different, it's probably because you're in the parametric curve if it's got this little highlight over it where you know you can on ly drag the curve so far, that's because you're in this other curve so you need there's like two curves, but kind of stacked on top of each other. You have to click right down here in order to change over to the point curve. All right, so now that I'm in the point curve so we can do this, like I said, all the channels or I could go in here and say, you know what? Let's go into the blue channel, and if I click and drag up, I didn't want to drive there. If you want to yes, I did because I wanted to show you that if you add an extra point on your curve and you need to get rid of it, you just drag it outside the curve. If I click and drag up here, you'll notice that I'm adding blues to my shadows if I click and drag to the right, you can see how I can warm up just my shadows will do it pretty extreme as opposed to bringing it up this side see how the shadows were getting more blue, right? So I can go in here, and if I convert this image to gray scale, which will do it a little bit, I can actually do any kind of cross processing that I want that in any kind of shadowed color to my shadows, to my mid tones to my highlight, so it's little bit more powerful than like just you're straight split tony. So again, that's, if you go to a paper on a per channel basis versus a a composite tackle one last thing, all right, this is going to probably won't do it justice, so we'll come back to a little bit, but we also have the ability to go in here with a chess l so h s l is hugh saturation limonense is a great panel, super powerful its own allow me to narrow in on just a single color ranger, multiple color range and change either that the huge so I can shift the color or eye khun d century eight or more increase saturation or aiken decrease or increase the luminous of it, and we can do this. H s l and color are very similar there just the tools or just laid out differently. I prefer hs l because I've got what's called the targeted adjustment tool the target adjustment tools, a little dot I just click on that dot it is now selected, and now I can actually click on any color and if I click and drag up, see how the saturation is increasing over in my saturation panel over there. See those those sliders by click and drag down aiken d saturate so I can choose any color range that I want by just clicking on that color. If I think the reds air too saturated and click and drag down, come back over to the yellow, click and drag up. If I don't want the blues, click and drag down to d saturate them so that's how like if you had, like a bride with some flowers or something and you wanted well, no can you probably have to paint for that, but this is a great way. To just make selective color adjustments which we'll do a little bit more of in a minute with a different image but I could also shift the hugh and I could shift the luminous so if I click in the yellow and drag down the yellows they're going to get darker or lighter so if we take an example like this tree let's say for example I actually want to go in and you can see I've already done it so I brought the luminant of the blue down so the sky looked like that before so I just wanted a little bit darker sky and in fact if we come back here to saturation I get this let's just reset by double clicking saturation so now if I come in here to saturation go I just want that blue de saturated a little bit because that's more southwest color for me like I wanted it more muted I gotta luminant I click and drag it down now I've got that darker blue I come down here and click and drag up or down in kind of the orange areas here and is picking the corresponding sliders for me makes him darker and if I want to increase the saturation maybe there were come over here to the yellows and the greens in here we go ahead and make our changes all right so super powerful tool we will doom or with h es el as well as use it to convert or images to great skill. Yeah, this is wonderful. I'm actually riveted by what's going on here said just a few minutes ago, I take enormous number of photographs, but I'm not actually consider myself a photographer, but I'm so fascinated by what you can achieve with this tool, I think it's great, I mean, this is for me, so I find this fascinating because and I don't know it's just the way like I love making my composite images. So for me, getting to the getting each image to the state where I'm then ready to composite it, anything that I can do to make that faster for me is better because I like spending time in photo shot. Now most people like know, any time, you know they want this part fast so they could go back out and shoot more. Not me. I got thousands of images I want to make composite so for me, it's just speeding up this process to kind of optimize each one of my images and then get that ready to go into photo shop where I can actually do some really cool stuff that's what's exciting for me. S o we need to talk about the selective adjustments definitely we want to talk about special effects, how to convert tio grayscale, how to save all this is pre set, so we don't have to do it to every single file every single time and optimize that work for wonderful. We're looking forward to that. This is going to be our last break of the day of day one with revitalize your workflow with light with five thank you for your comments. We got some great comments coming and I just read a couple for you before we go to break scott and is saying julianne is hitting so many speak tips I haven't seen in so many other tutorials, joanie saying, julian must surely be watching over my shoulder when I'm coming through and rating my photo oceans, I can't believe how she has described exactly the problems that I've been having as a beginner somebody's just going by the name of guests two, two, two, eight, six says this is that this has to be one of the most cost effective classes creative life has done. Julianne is fantastic on boca guy double oh seven could be a secret agent there saying he's just bought the class and julianne's that awesome instructor julia raising awesome instructing everybody agree.