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Lesson Info

Editing Pt. 1

We just wrapped up our shoot, got back from the Washington coast into the studio, and now comes the post-processing. In this section, I wanna teach you how I go about editing my photos. And the biggest point I wanna get across is I'm not using presets. This is all freehand editing. And like everything else, I keep it very simple, and I don't really have a specific method or way of doing it. You'll definitely see that as we get into some editing. Before I get into editing, I like to set up my environment. I don't like a lot of stuff around me or like a messy space, I like it to be clean and I also like it to be dark. I find it really hard, especially when at coffee shops, you're editing against a window or something and you just can't see your shadows, because the bright light from the window is just blaring in your face and you're going like this, looking at your photos, trying to make out shadow detail. It just doesn't work. So an environment like this, it's very dark, it's prime for ...

editing. This is better than my usual, honestly. So the first stop in my editing process is Photo Mechanic. So I shot just under 2,000 images from this shoot alone. And so if I took all those photos and put 'em into my Lightroom, it's gonna clog up and slow down Lightroom. And in that too, it's gonna take up more memory space than it really needs to be, and that's where Photo Mechanic comes in. But my favorite part about Photo Mechanic is things load instantly. So if I come in here, hit there, it might run a little slow, 'cause I'm screen recording right now, but almost instantaneously, the next photo loads up. If you're doing that in Lightroom, you probably realize that you click over and it takes that three to four seconds to actually load the next photo. You go to the next one, another three to four seconds. And three to four seconds times 2,000 images is a lot of time wasted where you could just fly through it in Photo Mechanic instantly going to the next one. Also throughout this, my computer fan is gonna be blaring, so you might hear that in the audio, but that's how it goes. So I have already gone through and actually made my selects. It's a pretty long process, but I'll show you simply what I do and why Photo Mechanic is so good. You come to your file organization and you come to your folder here, double-click it to open it up. And then you can click on an image and hit the space bar. It opens up this window where it's bigger and simply right and left changes to each image. And let's say you like this image. So you click the one key, and you'll notice down here a little star popped up. You can also do Command + 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It'll change the colors. You can Command + 0 to undo any of that. And if you just do one, two, three, four, five, it affects the stars. And then if you just do, and if you hit one, two, three, four, or five without hitting Command, it'll put stars on your photos. So in Lightroom, you can do the same thing. And the best part about this is let's say I finished all my selects just now. I come up here to these stars right here and I just wanted see the one and two-star selects, so I go Alt and I click one and then I also hit Shift and click two. You'll see all the one and two-star images are showing up. I've already imported these into Lightroom, so it won't be a live view of exactly what happens, but I'll import one that hasn't been imported yet, which is the one we just starred. You go Command + E and Lightroom pops open and it says. And you can see it's highlighted just right there. You click import. And there it is. Come down here to that folder and there it is right there. You can see the star shifted over as well and as well as the color data that you added. I wanna make a gift out of all these photos later. That's why I highlighted them all red. It's just like an organizational method I use. And the best part about this is we come over here and let's say we shot eight or 1,030 total photos from that day, and we come over into Lightroom and there's only 129 in the Lightroom. So you literally hacked off almost 90% of all the photos that you didn't wanna use. So now your Lightroom is gonna run a lot faster, your catalogs are gonna be a lot smaller and run more smoothly, and you won't fill up your hard drives as fast. So I highly recommend Photo Mechanic. There's another one. I forget what Photo Mechanic costs, but there's another similar program for free. I will find the name and put it in that workshop PDF, but very good program to have. Earlier on in the workshop, we talked a bit about how we wanted this shoot to be a storyline narrative, integrating the brand into those images. With Lightroom and Photo Mechanic, I'm looking for those images that will create and tell that story. I have my own organizational method where I will have most of them be one stars, and the ones I really like, I'll put two stars on there. I'll also do certain color coordination things, like all the red highlighted ones to make a gift later. For this workshop, you'll see some ones are green. Those are the ones I'm gonna focus on showing you guys. Those are the ones I'm gonna focus on and teach on with you guys in this workshop. But the main thing is those two stars are gonna be a lot of images I use to deliver to the client or to tell that entire story, whether it's in the magazine they share, on the website, or my own blog post. At the end of the day, as a photographer, I wanna share my perspective and showcase how I saw the narrative play out. So before we get into the actual editing, I wanna teach you my Lightroom shortcuts. It's a great way to keep things efficient. So we come in here to the develop panel, and I'm just gonna show you how I structure my page first. And the first thing you'll see is there's only one tab open at all times on this side. This is a thing called solo mode. If you right-click on basic, you'll see solo mode right there. And if you don't have it on, it's this massive, like, I'll open it all up for you. If you don't have solo mode on, all the panels that you end up opening are going to stay open, so it's just gonna be this massive scroll fest of wasting time. You right-click, turn on solo mode, boom, collapses them all. And if you click on one, I mean, you can just see right there an example of how it will save you time. And to take that even a step further, I use the shortcuts Command + 1 through 9. So if I go Command + 1, it opens up that first panel, basic. Two, tone curve. Three, the HSL panel. Command + 4, split toning. Five, six, seven, eight, and nine. I will rarely click on the panels. It is so much faster to Command number the wrong panel than it is to click through and find the panel you want. So shaving off those seconds is crucial when you're editing a ton. I don't know what to call this next one, but I call it the plus and minus keys. So if I come in here and click on exposure, you see it says, modify exposure with plus minus keys, and that's exactly what it's doing. So if I hit plus, it raises it by 0.10. If I go minus, same thing, deducts 0.10 from the exposure. And if I hold shift and do that, it expedites that. So Shift + Plus, 33%, 66, 99, it raises it a third stop every time. So I'll usually just have it set on exposure. You can click on anything, contrast, temperature, clarity, whatever you want. I keep mine on exposure, 'cause as I'm editing through, I'll be flying and I can just be like, oh, that's looking good, but maybe it looks better darker or maybe I wanna make it a little brighter. And it's just so easy to boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, do your little clicks. It's just so easy to quickly plus minus and test different exposures and see what you're looking for. If you're not familiar with the HSL panel, the hue, saturation, luminance panel, get familiar with it. It is one of the best tools in Lightroom. Command + 3 will bring you to it, and I'll just show you what it does real quick. Hue will come in here, and this is probably blue or purple. I don't know what that would be targeted as, but if you change that slider, you see it's changing that blue color. Command + Z to undo. You come in here with the saturation. Let's target the yellow this time. If I click on this slider, I bring it up, I bring it down. You'll see it's only affecting the yellow in the image. Command + Z do luminance. Same thing, let's just do the blue and it just brightens that blue section up and takes it down. So very good to edit your colors, but you can also do it efficiently. There's this little circle right here, and if you click on that and click on this blue, you can literally click on the color you wanna target. So you'll see it's also targeting the aqua, 'cause within that blue, there's probably a little aqua shading in there. So bring it down, bring it up. And you may have noticed at the beginning, when we were just targeting the blue, it looked kinda blotchy maybe, like a section was changing, and it wasn't changing very gradual over the image, because you're just targeting blue, nothing to do with aqua. But you can see it's a little more even in this situation. You can do the same thing with saturation. Bring it up, bring it down. And same thing with the hue. Bring it up, bring it down, and changing those colors. And then you take it a step further and you learn the shortcut. Command + Alt + Shift, H for hue. Command + Alt + Shift, S for saturation. Command + Alt + Shift, L for luminance. So I'll be flying through my panels. Like, I'll just mess around with this photo real quick. So I'm gonna brighten it up. I'm gonna do a profile correct there to remove that vignette. Command + 2 to bring into the curves. Change that. I'm just kinda showing you how fast this method is. I'm gonna come into Command + 3, Command + Alt + Shift + S. Bring up that saturation. Command + Alt + Shift + L to bring up the luminance. Command + Alt + Shift + S to bring out the saturation in those clouds. Maybe I want it a bit darker, take it down a bit. I'm flying, like it's just so fast and so efficient. So learn your shortcuts, memorize them, and use them all the time. The more you practice them, the faster you're editing will be, and that just is gonna make you a more efficient, better editor. You'll see a lot in my editing that I am running gradient filters, radio filters, all that to kind of make a bunch of quick fixes. I'm just gonna show you real quick the power of the quick fix. This is a shot I got of my friend, Nathaniel. And I'm not gonna go into how I edit it, but here's the before, here's the after. A lot of the look was accomplished through radio filters and gradient filters. So I'll just turn 'em off real quick, so you can see the difference. Boom. So there's the before, there's the after. Really I just brighten it up, did a few warm touches to it. And as you can see, the jacket is very shadowed in this case. And I literally, I came in here, I went to the radio filter and I made that, which just pops 'em up, quick fix. And you can see right here, if you click on it and click the O key, you can see where it's affecting. So I'll just turn it off real quick and right back on. That pops out the jacket so much more. Again, this was no external lighting and it definitely does the trick. And I noticed the log down here was a little bright, so I just took a gradient filter. Let me turn it on. I took it down just a smidge. You can see just negative 20 exposure. (instructor whistles) This might be a minute. So here's the radio filter on, here it's off. Really that radio filter, let's click in here. I'll hit the O key. You can see where it's affecting there. And it looks like I just upped the exposure. I pushed some contrast, took out some highlight, pushed the shadows and the whites and the blacks a bit. And I did that all by eye, like pretty much just went with what looked good. And then from there I noticed that this log right here was a little bright, so I went into the gradient panel and I'll turn that on. You can see it there, it affects that area, just a little bit down on the exposure and a little bit down in the highlights. So that's with it off and that's with it on. Just pops out in Nathaniel a little bit more and makes it a nice product shot that actually focuses on the product. The power of the quick fix. So we'll come in and edit this one first. I really like how the backpack is centered in this one, but I really like their pose in this one. So quick fix before we edit, come into the... I hit the Q button to open the spot removal panel over here. And we're just gonna paint the backpack. Backpack's gone, but check this out. And then you paint one more. Boom. Make sure you're on the healing brush for that, otherwise, that won't work. But you can come in here and place it wherever you want. Little quick fix, a little cheat code. And so that's before, that's after. Dead center, right where I want it. Another thing too real quick is I edit with a white background, 'cause my website, my Instagram, all that is a white background. So you right-click here and you can choose whatever color you want. I chose white. The first few steps are pretty consistent with each image, but after that, it's kinda do what needs to happen. And those first few steps pretty much go as followed. I'll come into white balance, figure out where I want. That looks pretty good right there. A little before and after. Hitting that backslash key. And the other thing I noticed too now is this whole part's blown out and that white right there in the photo bleeds right into the white background. If that's on your website, it's gonna bleed right into the back end of your website. So Command + 2, open up that curves panel. I'm clicking, holding Alt as I drag the curves slowly. If you don't hold Alt, it kind of goes crazy. If you hold Alt, it moves very slowly. So let's move it down to like there. I'm gonna create two points on the curve, bump that up just a bit. I'll come back to that maybe later, but I'm gonna bump up the shadows, take down the blacks a bit, and a little soften on the clarity. Just soften things up. So that's before, that's after. I like that easier look to it, a little bit of fade in there on those highlights. And then I do a lot of lens corrections too. This kinda plays into the composition side of me. So I'm gonna go Command + 6. You can see it's vignetting pretty heavily, so enable profile corrections. I'll take a little bit of vignette though, not a ton, and just warp. That's not changing anything. So once I do that, I'll come into the manual thing right here, hit constrained crop, and just kind of play around with what I want. I think that looks good. I hit the R key for the crop. And I'm looking at my rule of thirds line here and notice that the margins between each subject is a little bit different. So I'm just gonna come in, hold Shift, click drag, bring it up just a bit, hit inner, hit inner, and I'm just kinda eyeing it now. That looks good. And come into Command + 7, the transform tab. There's that famous saying that the camera adds 10 pounds and it's kinda true. This is kinda how this is a quick fix to take that away. Just coming to the transform tab, mess with the aspect ratio, mess with the horizontal and the vertical, something like that. So I'll show you without lens corrections. And you go, boom, boom. Just brings it upright a little more. Like when you're sitting in front of the camera and you're straight in your back, it's kind of like how I see this. It's just fixing your posture. And from there, I think I want to bring up, I wanna see if it'll look good if I bring up the shadows some more. So bump the shadows, take down the blacks for a little bit of contrast in there. Yeah, I like that. And I think the exposure looks pretty good. I'm gonna mess around with highlights and just see where I want that. Yeah, so that's before, that's after. Another way to look at this is hit the Y key and you can see that before over here and the after over there. And you can hold Shift + Y to see a side by side like that and just cycle through different views. Hit the Y key to turn it off. I'm gonna take down the shadows just a bit. Something like that looks good. And then from there, my process, I just really think about what's next. And I think next. So now I'm just looking at it and seeing what I wanna do next. I think I wanna add a little warmth to the shadow. So Command + 4, come into the split toning. And we'll do a low 6%, drag this over to like right there. Just eyeing it on the photo. Yeah, looks good. Turn that off and then back on. See that before and after. Looks pretty solid. And I'm gonna see what looks like if we add some blue in there. I don't really like it, so I'm just gonna wander around this chart and see if I like anything. It's a pretty bright photo, so I think the highlight is affecting it a little too much, so I don't think I'm gonna add any highlights. I think I'm just gonna keep it as is. So this is our before, this is our after. I constantly hit that backslash key as I'm editing. It's just like kind of a habit now, but I like seeing that before and after. We're gonna go Command + 1, add a little bit of contrast in there, and then I'm going to come to Command + 2, back into the curves. I want to bump this up a little bit. And this is just really, really bright right there, really hot. So I'm gonna go Alt and click right there near the top of the curve and bring it down you see, I'm gonna undo, redo, see how it just softens that image quite a lot. That's a bit too much, so I'm just gonna bring it in like right there. Yeah, I'm just gonna delete it and see what it looks like without it. So that's with it. That's without it. That's with it. Come on. That's with it. That's without it. With it, I think I'm doing it a bit too much. So maybe somewhere right there. Very subtle. The thing about my editing is just like a lot of very subtle things that add up to change the image so, yeah. It's already looking pretty good. And the thing about it is if it's not broken, don't fix it. Like, I don't wanna do too much to change it, but I am gonna come into the curves panel. If you don't know how to use your curves, I strongly suggest you learn it. It is one of the most powerful tools in Lightroom and in Photoshop. So. But for this one, we're gonna get into the RGB channels, the red, green, blue channels in the curves. So if I come down to the blue, I'm gonna just show you what it simply does. If I add blue in, it makes the image blue. If I take blue out, it takes blue out. So the opposite of blue is yellow, so in a way it adds yellow. Come into the green, add it in, you get green. Take it out. You get this fuchsia color. Come into the red panel. Push it up, it makes red. Take it out, it makes blue. And then it also corresponds just like the curves and the overall channel. So I'm just gonna make a bunch of points here to keep it steady. Notice I'm near the bottom of it, so I'm targeting the shadows. If I push it up, you notice these shadows down here turn red. And if I take it down, you notice red is taken away and it makes it blue. And it also, I mean, you can kinda see over here, and you can see in this curves panel right here, if I push that up, it affects the curves and the points. So I'm just gonna delete all the curve points. And if those points aren't there, it affects the whole curve. So if I click there and I drag up and down, it affects the whole curve dramatically. So just keep that in mind. It might make funny tones in your image. The best way to do it is just do more pinpoints to pretty much staple them in. But for this image, I wanna add a little more yellow to the shadow. So we're gonna come into the blue channel and we're gonna take away some blue. I'm just adding a couple points there. Gonna hold Alt, click, drag. This is gonna be really subtle, but I'll show you the before and after after I finish all these curves, so. Just adding a little bit of warmth to the sky as well. Coming into the green, I'm gonna click those, and then take out a little bit of green in the shadow. So you see those shadows, undo, redo. You can really see it right here. I'll zoom in. Command + Z right here, look at that. So it just makes those a bit more warmer. It adds a bit of an earthy tone to it. It makes it feel a bit more natural. So again, Command + Z, take 'em out. Redo, and you see it makes it a little more earthy toned. And we'll come into the red one. I'm just gonna see if I like anything here. Yeah, a little bump up in the highlights, but not a ton. So I'm gonna click over here. So here it is before I did all those RGB curves and here it is with it. You can really see it down here. It really warms up this bottom piece. So there it is without, there it is with all those subtle tones. So makes it a bit more warmer, which is what I'm going for. I think I can come in here and put back in a little bit of green, but other than that, I think that's pretty solid. Now, I'm assessing what I wanna do next. And the last thing I could tell to do is maybe hit the M key. I'm gonna test a few gradient filters and just see if I can get a nicer flow throughout the image. So I'm gonna make a brighter one and just run it down from the top. I'll make a darker one, run it down from the bottom. So that's without 'em, that's with them. I do like that. So just finish them up a little more and then maybe do a low clarity on those clouds. So that's the before image there, that's the after. I really like how that turned out. I like the nice, easy look to it. And even though like I'm shooting directly into the sun and I lost quite a lot of highlights, I still think it came out nice. It doesn't look like I lost it, it just looks really bright. So yeah, let's go to the next image.