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Lesson Info

Color Correction in Lightroom

My develop module here. Well, and we're gonna select my white balance tool. Click on the great card, okay, I've sort of neutralized the color, and now we're going to select the additional shots here, and I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and apply it to the whole shoot, so I've selected everything, and I just hit sink, synchronizing the white balance. Ok, so now we'll go back into our library. We'll just start picking uh, alright, so so these first ones were kind of dry version on let's see if this is where we started getting the shine okay, and on on my monitor seems like it may still be a little bit a little bit dark. Um, so I'm going to go ahead and weigh will kind of figure out just a slight lightning effect here. You don't want to go too far, because I don't want I don't want these highlights to really blast outs actually, maybe I better do this on the shiny one. Yes, here, if I go too far in my exposure boost, and this would be similar to, uh, opening up the camera. So there was a que...

stion about do you overexpose when shooting dark skin in this case because of the way the highlights are playing on the face, I don't wantto I want to push it too far because I'm going to start you know these things going to start breaking the white it's getting dangerously close as it is a peer sai I really can't boost exposure too much in fact down here I may want to kind of keep it just like that so he is dark ok I still have nice highlights on his face but we're going to do some tricks with luminosity blending two actually open him up mohr without destroying that the contrast of those highlights playing across his face but right now I'm just giving a very slight boost here and we'll just apply that uh play that all of these shots on duh yeah on do that I'm gonna sink back towards the beginning to shoot this way as well all right so now I'm going tio we're just gonna look at these and look for some shots here like that one just to clarify for a couple of folks in the chat room question say that the great card is eighteen percent gray or fifty percent right? Uh yes yes to both actually great cards air they're off they're often referred to his eighteen percent grey because the original kodak great card was printed using offset lithography and eighteen percent is a printing specifications that was easy tio to do you know kodak manufactured millions of these great cards and they did it in the cheapest way possible so that was really respect eighteen percent black ink on press and you've got this this great card which was close but not exactly fifty percent luminosity so were we got kind of stuck with that legacy uh we had eso meters light meters and camera meters are calibrated to a fifty percent midtown luminosity this is not exactly the same thing is that eighteen percent great card? Uh in fact in the older additions of ansel adams books on the on the zone system he kind of refers to this sort of mysterious k factor uh and that wass the disparity between actual fifty percent luminosity and the reading you got off oven eighteen percent great card so that k factor was like a happened half stop and answer just ignored it and when he did his testing you just calibrated to the eighteen percent great card and it's sort of stuck now everybody every manufacturer that the patch that should be fifty percent luminosity in almost every case is actually the same luminosity is an eighteen percent graveyard so it's a little bit lighter than fifty percent luminosity uh and s o really technically when we calibrate to that were under exposing by just a third to a half a stop um now when I when I do the iconic test and I'm sort of calibrating the meter it sort of takes care of that any any fluctuation there because building a profile do do adjust for that same thing s o fifty percent luminosity is how every meter in the world is calibrated but for whatever is in every test target their great card is eighteen percent gray, which is slightly different and now we're not we're using more color accurate great cars like the one I've been using today is from robin myers uh and it's it's a piece of plastic that's absolutely color neutral on these days most of these, uh, great hard targets you get the whole point is to get it color neutral. The original kodak eighteen percent grade card is not color natural, so if you have one of those old ones, do not use it. Get a new one and their number available. The patches on the uh color checker the x ray color checker those grayscale patches at the bottom of the color checker are neutral so you can use those. Um okay, I'm not any other questions about that before I should actually continue to pick a few, uh, images here to work with. I definitely want to pick that one because that that needs some real help. I don't know I find this mouse, but suppose anything a little annoying, so sorry about that I gotta turn it off, all right, let's, get into this area so again here it's uh get saying when you when you change the brightness and I'm not sure that you actually no, I didn't change this one because I wanted t do it for this particular lighting because I've got these highlights on his chest. I'm worried about pushing too far with my, you know, my kind of exposure adjustment here. So again, it looks like to me, I'm worried about getting those two hot, um, and I could kind of double check with the numbers here again. I'm I'm running my cursor over over his chest here I don't I really don't get that so close to zone nine, which should be fined up, you know, at, uh, uh, ninety percent anywhere in these channels, it's just too close to a white. So here, seventy nine in the red channel, I'm I'm not quite white on the very light grays I'm looking to make sure that I don't push any of these highlights to close toe clipped out white I want to keep some tone in them, okay, um, so I'm brightening this up here, you know, a little less than half a stop and, you know, uh, it's ok, you know, that would this would sort of be like if I had opened up just like a half stop, maybe I'm not quite a half stop here so maybe a third of a stop would would have worked just as well in camera um we're gonna sink all these and now I need to find ah just a good shot to use for for that lighting situation it's got a nice so there's the uh the old spice guy here's kind of way like that what is funny there's a nice smiling ok that's that's good enough ok so let's uh now filter off all my others so we're using just the the rated ones and I like this one and this one because it has that problem we're gonna fix so the big question is do we go with old spice or a nice big happy smile uh I'm sorry I'm thinking old spice here's what we're gonna we're gonna go with that one all right so hopes I want I want just these three okay so we'll go ahead and just open up open these into into photo shop all right um let's go ahead and crop this time using the new crop tool and photo shops kind of interesting when you get the rule of thirds uh view here aiken select different kind of you know, grid rate relationships here um and the crop the image moves underneath the crop kind of kind of interesting I'm going to go off like we're doing an album cover so let's let's make this a square okay and here's another thing to point out the new crop allows you to keep the the pit the pixels so it acts a lot like the cropping inside of light room so inside a light room or camera you never throw away pixels it just by default it just can't it's going to rear ender the image according to the new new crop but the original pixels air still there you could do something like that and photoshopped now if we if we say delete crop pixels we're going to throw away the picks off if we uncheck it thes pixels will still be there and I can save this document open it up and then change the crop and you know I could go back to square one so in general I'll believe that unchecked and uh ok so we way didn't end up opening all three did we so let's let's open up my other image this one's definitely kind of two dark um crop that as well okay, so um the rest of ah of today we're going to be spending some time in photo shop and really kind of exploring different things that we could do uh to work these dark tone and we're going to be using our strategy is going to be this luminosity blending thing so just we're going to be taking a break here pretty soon so I don't want to get too far into this because we're gonna have to like break for lunch pretty quick here but I'm going to give you a little teaser of basically what what we're going to be exploring here so here this image he's shading his face from the from the main light and it's just it's just too dark but I've got a nice highlight on the side of his face so I can't just you know, it's almost getting close their toe toe clipping and if I just put a curve on this to brighten them up you know, this starts I start losing that nice tonal shape there and that's gonna you know, that's just it's just going to click toe white, you know? So so I probably don't wanna use this curve so I like the shape of this this the light soft light falling across his face there so we won't use the curve. So what or how are we gonna do this so here's here's sort of the trick we look at the channels, the individual grayscale channels and in most cases there's going to be one channel that looks better then the others and with people the channel that's the lightest will be the red channel so we've got the red channel we got the green channel and the blue channels always gonna be the darkest so there's things that we could do with all three of these channels but the one that's going to be our friend here is going to be the red the red channel and the brightness of this highlight is the same in the red channel is it is in the color image but the brightness on the skin it's a little bit brighter in the red channel so here even though he's falling into the shade here I can reach down in that red channel and bring that back to apply to the color image so uh easiest way to do that here is to use the channel mixer so I'm gonna get the channel mixer and use black and white with red filter ok and now instead of creating a black and white if I change the apply mode from normal to um luminosity now I've achieved a lightening of the image and his forearm now is to light it hasn't really affected the dark blue sweater at all but it is brightening up his skin so you see that and it hasn't altered the color saturation when I put a curve on and I brighten up the the master curve whenever I'm manipulating the curve in an rgb it's going toe be having an effect on the saturation of the image is usually adds some saturation in this case the luminosity is pure luminosity has no effect on the saturation so I'm not pushing those those skin colors into a bad range so this is kind of preview action for what's to come for this afternoon and we're going to be doing all kinds of other tricks on dh my lunch break is going to give me a little bit of time to think about where we're going with this. All right? So we're gonna take a break. How about if we ask a couple questions first? Would you mind? Yes, ok, surgeon says don't know if this one has been ass for some instructors say that this is the way to do it in photo shop, but I use plug ins to cut time. How about you lied to you? Use plug ins to cut time are always do it the hard way? Uh, yeah, interesting. Um, I assume you're referring to plug ins to do black and white conversions, and I don't know whether that really saves any time or or not for myself. Um, you know, then nick silver fax plugging is pretty interesting. I don't actually use it too much because I'm so familiar with photo shop that aiken do these manipulations really quickly without the plug. Um, they're they're they're kind of there's, some niceties of having all the controls wrapped into one interface the way nick does, and they have a really great kind of grain simulation things, so if you're really trying to make your really smooth, high quality digital files look like try x film um, you could do it really well inside nick it's not something that I'm really drawn to. I kind of got over that early on, but, um, yeah, I would say that if you if you're really familiar with these techniques, they don't really take any longer than running the plug in, and I find that I, like get more intimate control by directly manipulating the channels rather than kind of being room once removed from it I've sliders to move around with, but, you know, don't let me talk you out of using plug ins if they give you a look picture after, yeah, we're going to be doing some sophisticated things here. You could do something similar in nick by doing a black and white conversion uh, and they have different way they call it different things about how to get access to that red channeling formacion and then just applying that black and white to the color you get something very similar, but we're going to be doing it directly and photoshopped. Cool. Take a step back for some folks a peter peter peter is asking, why does a curve alter saturation? I use it mostly in luminosity mode. Alter light but I don't get why alter salaries well that that would be the trick if you use it in luminosity mode than you can affect the color I'm gonna put this curve on there and the curve in normal mode you can't really separate out lightness from color because each channel red green and blue contains color information that's being used to calculate the color as well as the overall brightness of the image so here you know I'm making that that sure of adjustment you know our lighting even here of all the lighting is good enough that we don't really need tio do anything to trick to get this image into shape but it is you know, boosting the saturation here all I need to do is change from normal to luminosity and now I'm not pushing the color so much and this case it's almost like I'd like half a cz much saturation boost in here so um you know, I could maybe do two curves or something and split the difference but you can see the difference here luminosity is just the lightness normal now suddenly in the shadows he's got a little extra contract like extra contrasts on that means saturation because again because of the channel structure of the color image we got red, green and blue being brightened it also adds more color into the image rightly let's take one more question and then we'll go to lunch alexander says using layers curves erasing only the parts you need can be a way to manage shadows or do you think that is too messy? Uh no I mean, you can certainly do that. Uh the example here would be I've got this curve nice curve I could go to luminosity mode uh but then when I look at the the image it's like now the hand got to light so I can mask that off and it's the same thing using the channel structure tricks that we're going to be exploring uh so I could just mass that off and now I've got a better kind of balance between, you know, the different parts of the of the image. So yes, there's certain things though using these the channel luminosity because the channels already brighter it has kind of a different contrast thing and we can do other little tricks to help the contrast and still get the image brighter and it's sometimes a little easier than just using curves but uh, you know, curves alright are lighting is good enough in these images that just little tweaks with curves would be all really that you would need but we're going to be looking at some other techniques that will really save your bacon excellent let's see how to slip that in yeah, they they will they will save your bacon and more difficult situations. And I may have to pull a few files in tow to illustrate how that works.