Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing Pt. 3

When I was shooting Mason walking around that corner I got quite a lot of different angles. I was standing near or far and let's say I want to provide a very similar but a bit different image to the client. So this one right here is just that, it's very similar, but it's a bit further back, and maybe the client wants it more for like a banner shot or something else. So we're gonna come in here, Command C, and it brings up this panel. Usually I'll just undo all the crop stuff I had going on because I'm putting on a new image. And Command V, paste it. And it's pretty close. I don't really like what it did here with the corners. It's very dark. And that's simply because I didn't copy the lens corrections over. So I'm going to come in here and do lens corrections. Copy it again, paste. Boom. That cleaned it up a lot more. And I'm gonna highlight both and click the N key. And it brings up this little situation where you can see both side by side. That one's taking a minute to load. You can ...

tell this one's a bit brighter, so I'm gonna come into it. And I'm going to take a little exposure down once this thing loads. Cool. And you may notice the backpack is not quite lit up like the other one. So I'm gonna go Shift M to open that radio filter, and we'll see that it is not on the backpack. So bring it down to the backpack. And so this is why I like to quick fix stuff, because if I painted that in, if I painted in that last image, I'd have to literally repaint in all that backpack again. So the quick fix, it's a efficient way to get it good enough. If it was like, if I was spending more time on it, I might paint it in. But for this scenario, quick fix is the way to go. And yeah, so hit the N key again, bring up both images side by side. And yeah, those look pretty close. I think that's accurate enough. So that's that image, just a few little quick fixes to really pop out whatever your subject may be. And let's just move into the very last image, which is actually gonna be a photo stitch. And it's the photo I wanted most from this shoot. I call it the hero shot. So we're gonna come in here and highlight these three images, right click, photo merge, panorama. My computer fan is about to scream in a second, but basically what this is doing so earlier on in the workshop you saw I was photographing this big hole in the wall and I went click, click, click. And the purpose of that is to take those images and stitch them together into one. I only had a 24 to 70 on me at the time, and I wanted this big wide shot of this sick hole in the wall, but I messed it up a little bit. I didn't get the bottom part of this left image. And in that, it looks like this on the screen. You can see right there, there's a big chunk missing. So if I crop it normally like a photo would, it would crop right above, it would crop just below his feet. And that just creates a weird composition. So I'm gonna go through and edit this, and I'm gonna show you how to fix that when we get into Photoshop. So I went through and I did some pretty basic corrections. This is the before. This is the after. You can see I cranked up the shadows, bumped up the exposure just slightly, and took down the blacks, creating a good little contrast in there. Took down the clarity 'cause all the rocks are very, they're very featured. So I just wanted to not distract so much from the subjects in the center frame. I didn't even touch tone curves. I put a little highlight in there, and I think that's about it. Yeah, but you can see this weird thing and I don't exactly know what happened but this whole wall is very... Oh, and also this chunk is missing. Hold on. I'm gonna go into the crop so you can just see what's going on. This was the center photo I took. This was that right photo I took. And this was that left photo I took. And what Lightroom is trying to do is trying to stitch them together. But I blew it and I didn't exactly get that chunk there. We'll be fixing that in Lightroom. But another thing you may notice that's a bit weird is the coloring. Like this whole wall right here is orange and this one is not. It's very gray. It's almost green in a way. I did some quick fixes and basically, I'll just turn them on. And it's a pretty dramatically different there. So this whole wall, I'm gonna turn this off real quick. It just looks bad. It does not look like it fits the scene at all. And I fixed it with a very simple boom. You got a little bit more warmth in there. A tad bit of tent. I took down the exposure a bit. I took down the blacks a bit. Again, that's before, that's after. Definitely fits that a bit better. I'd maybe bump up the exposure just a slight. Maybe not. I think that looks good. And the other one is the radio filter at the bottom here. You can see it's just affecting this zone. I'm gonna turn it off. Boom. It looks very gray. It almost looked like someone just desaturated that section. It looks weird. I don't know what happened. So I'm going to turn it on, and you can see I cranked the warmth on this. We're just gonna reposition it a little bit to cover right here. Yeah, looks good to me. So that's without it. And that is with it. So quick fixes, baby. And now the biggest fix I need to do in this is that big old chunk missing, and this is gonna bring us to Photoshop. So to pop it into Photoshop, you're gonna hit Command E, and it'll take a second to load. So here we are in Photoshop. That chunk is still missing. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna select this layer. I'm going to hold Alt and duplicate it by dragging it up. And very simply, I'm gonna hit the L key, which makes this lasso tool right here. Draw a little lasso around that. And you can see that you have these little ants crawling around. I'm gonna right click this section with all the checkerboard. I'm gonna hit Fill and Content Aware, just all of these settings and click Okay. It's gonna load for a bit and my computer's gonna start yelling. Boom. There it is. It did pretty well. You can see it does repeat a little down here. There's like these very similar things. So you can hit the J key. I'm just gonna create a new layer so I'm not destroying that one and I'm just gonna paint over these and hopefully it will just create a differentiation within the frame. It's easy to pick up on those patterns with your eye. So I think it's important to cover up the quick fixes sometimes. Cool. I don't think anyone will spot anything there. It looks pretty unnatural and it looks pretty natural to me and no real patterns in there. So in Photoshop, I'm deep diving. I'm really getting into the image, fixing a ton of stuff. Like if this image, this hero shot is the type of image I could see on a website's landing page. And so I went to doctor it as much as I can, and this is where we'll get a little more nitty gritty into what Photoshop can do. So I just fixed all that up with the spot healing brush. What is this called actually? Spot healing brush and the healing brush. So I just fixed all those spots with the spot healing brush and the healing brush. I'm just gonna take my time throughout the photo and hit all the other spots around it. So yeah. So that looks pretty good. I'll just show you the before. You see all those spots in, and then the after. Just cleans it up a little nicer. I think I'll do to a lot of my images in Photoshop is add a photo filter to it. And the one that comes right off the bat is this nice warming filter. I really gravitate toward warmth and this just adds such a nice, like a nostalgic warmth to it. And you can really target it. Just like the gradient filters in Lightroom, you can do the same thing in Photoshop. You can just target it a bit more, but you have a lot more control in Photoshop 'cause you can gradiate any tool in here. So I'll just show you real quick with the photo filter, what I'm talking about. Throw on the photo filter and all of it becomes orange. And I think I like that. I think I'm gonna stick with that, but let's say I just want to make this side a bit more warmer. So I come over here and I hit this, which is the gradient, and I just hit the G key to pop it up, and then make sure these colors are white and black. And you'll see this little panel here as I draw a gradient. Boom. You'll see this white section is where it's affecting and this black section is where it's not affecting. So I'll turn it off and on. And it's very subtle. You can't really tell in this case, but you can see it affects it a little bit right there in the highlights. But I want to keep it all over, so I'm just going to put a warming filter all around. I wanna bump up the exposure a bit. I'm just going to create a curves panel. I'm just gonna open the curves tool here and mess around in curves for a second until I find something I like. All right, so there's without it. And then there's with the curves. Very simple curve right here. But I want to bring a little bit of definition, a little bit of darkness to this left side of the image. So let's do the same thing. Open up a curves panel and let's make a gradient. Hit the G key and drag it right there, and simply take this. And see how it only affects that side? I'll over exaggerate it just so you can see. Pretty nice. So let's just start over. Curves panel, hit the G key, drag it. And just darken it a little bit till I find what I want. Cool. So I darkened it a little bit, and I also got into the red and the blue panel. I added a little bit of red and took out a little blue just to bring a little earthy, warm tone to it. I actually think I might take out a little green as well so it brings a little fuchsia in. I think that's really what I was looking for and I'm going to reposition the gradient running right there, so it targets that. And that is looking good. So that's without it, that's with it. And I'm just gonna come into the main curve panel and brighten it up just a slight bit. Boom. Looks good to me. So this is our changes so far. That's without it. And that's with them. From there I want to bring out my subjects a bit. So we're gonna do somewhat similar to the gradient thing. So we're gonna do the same method we just used with the curves and the gradient, but brush in some more detail on the subjects. What I'll usually do is I'll open up a curves panel, and let's say I wanna target Nathaniel right here. I wanna brighten him up. So I'm going to just brighten it up and it affecting the whole image as you can see. It's brightening the entire frame, and I'm just gonna bring it down. And I think Nathaniel will look good right there. And what I'm gonna do is go Command I to invert it. I'm gonna hit the B for the brush, and right here, again make sure it's white and black and you see that we inverted this and this panel became black. So that means that anywhere that's black, which happens to be the whole frame in this case is not being affected by the curves. But check this out. I'm just gonna over-exaggerate this real quick and I'm going to paint. And you'll see there's a big white streak that runs through there. So now I'm going to select this just to over-exaggerate. You see, it's just affecting that zone. If you didn't catch all those steps, just rewind it. It's pretty simple, but let's zoom in on Nathaniel here, and we're just gonna paint him in. Awesome. I think that looks good. This is the before. This is the after. He just pops out a little bit more in that frame. And I'm just gonna go in and do it to both the other subjects real quick. I created a little folder here that says, "People," and I just dropped those layers that is just affecting the people. You see, if I turn them off, they get darker. And if you see that I turn them on, they get lighter. Simple as that. It's very subtle, but it's a very nice touch. Like I said, all my editing is just a lot of subtle things added together. So I'll just show you the before and after of everything. That's before. That's our Lightroom edit. That's after. I'm gonna keep going a little bit more. One thing I noticed is so Nora's jacket isn't quite bright enough. It kind of just loses color from that distance. So simple quick fix with that. I'm gonna duplicate her layer, which I believe is this one. Yep, and I'm going to come in here, hit the back slash key. And I'm going to go to my brush tool, and you see it selected on black here. And you see, when I paint over that area, it becomes red. So what's red is not what's affected. So if it's red, it's not affecting that area. Bring it out. So it's just affecting that top half of her. I'm just gonna bump up the curves a little more. Not too much. Zoom out, make sure it looks natural. Just trying to find the fine balance here. Yeah, that looks solid. Another great tool for coloring is this color balance tool. The color balance tool is a little bit like your RGB channels and your curve. It's just simply laid out a bit different. So I'm gonna come in here, go to my shadows, and just like the curves, if I push red side, it's gonna make red. If I take away red side, it's gonna bring in that cyan color. So I'm just gonna go through here. You have shadows, mid tones and highlights, and just color it in. All right, this one's very subtle, but it adds a little more earthy tone to it. That's without it. There it is without it. And if I turn it on, you can mainly see it in the rocks over here. I'll zoom in. There's without it. You can see it's a bit more cooler, a little bit more blue cast to it. And then the color cast turns a little bit more warmer throughout all those rocks. So quick little fix there. Great for getting nice tones and achieving it very simply at that. And so here's the base edit with just from Lightroom. And so here it is from Lightroom and here it is with all these edits. And it's kind of hard to show, like all those edits are so subtle, like I said, and it's really hard to see each one. So again, a bunch of small, subtle things that add up to a different picture. Really, the last thing I want to do here is fix some of the exposure. It feels very dark. So the last thing I want to do here, I think, is just up the exposure of everything. I'm gonna Shift click, Select All, and then copy all of them and I'm gonna do Command E, and they're all gonna become one layer. So all those changes were affecting this bottom layer here. And basically I just merged it all into one. So boom, there it is at the top of my panel. And then I'm gonna come into the Camera Raw filter. So I'm gonna go Command Shift A. It's gonna load up and it looks exactly like Lightroom. I'm just gonna work the exposure and just do some global edits real quick. So that looks pretty good. That's the before. That's the after. Yeah, looks solid. I'm gonna click Okay and it's gonna bring me back into the main Photoshop page. Yeah, I'm pretty pleased with that image. I'm just gonna show you from the start to the end, and just go through all the layers so you can see what we did. So here it is with the chunk missing. We re-chunked it and then we spot healed everything. So this here is the spot heal with the Lightroom edit basically. Added the warm photo filter, added the curves panel, added some changes in the curves, and then fixed this left side. You can see it's targeted there. Warmed it up a bit. We targeted the people, brightened them up, did some color balance stuff. And then I thought it was a bit dark, so I merged all the layers together, opened up a Adobe Camera Raw filter, and that's what came out of it. When you're done with that you just hit Command S. It'll take a minute, but you'll see it pop up right back here in Lightroom as a TIF file. And boom, there it is, right back into Lightroom. This is that first photo stitch we did, if it'll load. This is that first photo stitch we did. There's that chunk missing. Right next to the one we just took into Photoshop, and you can see it's a .TIF file. And one thing I didn't mention is that it is a photo stitch. So it's going to be huge. It's a 10,000 by 6,500 pixel image. And that's also a big reason why my computer's being taxed hard. And that's my general flow through Photoshop. Again, there's no real method. It's just kind of scrappily done. And a lot of quick fixes and a lot of random local adjustments that bring about a good image. But let's say I want to get a good color cast on an image and I don't wanna take all that time. I probably spent maybe 30 minutes on that image alone. I wanna keep it quick. I'm gonna AirDrop it to my phone and just do it through VSCO if I'm just gonna post it on social.