Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing Pt. 1

So let's jump into editing. The first photo I wanna start with is a beautiful leopard named Bakari that I shot during my job working with, for FOUR PAWS International in South Africa. With this photo I really wanna focus on intensifying his stare. He already has a really intense look on his face. So I wanna bring that out, even more, bring out his fierceness. I also kind of want to bring in my color palette. So I'm gonna be wanting to make the teal and oranges my favorite color pop. And then I'm also going to be cropping in to really make him the focus, maybe adjusting the angles and also removing some distractions in Photoshop. His whole face and body is covered in a lot of ticks that happens out in Africa and in the sanctuaries, they can't remove the ticks so they just kind of grow all over. So it's a little bit of a destruction. So I think I'd like to remove those from this photo and I'll show you how, cool. So first things first, I am going to crop in on this guy. Let's say we want...

to edit this photo for Instagram. So we're gonna go by the four by five ratio and I'm going to hold Shift to make sure it's all proportional. I'm going to rotate a little bit by bringing his head kind of down. I feel like it kind of accentuates that fierceness. What's nice with shooting the Sony with the Sony A7 R3 or the Sony A7 R4 is you can really crop in because of the high megapixels. And I really value that and use that quite a bit in my work. I wanna do it a little bit more just to really make him intense. I think I will probably crop out that side just to make his head stand out of the photo. When I'm cropping and stuff, obviously there's the photography rule of thirds, but I prefer to not focus on that as much and focus on what feels good to my eye. So I'm not trying to hold myself too accountable to sticking to the rule of third's rule. I'm more just focusing on what feels good visually to me and just kind of following my gut. So that's what I did there. I think he's looking a lot more intense and fierce right now. So I like that kind of crop we just did. Now let's go into this stuff. Oh, in case you're wondering I should say I took this photo of Bakari on my 135. You can see at the top here at 1.8, 2,500 seconds in ISO 800. So the first things I always do is I like the temperature of this photo. So I don't think we need to change the temp or the tint at all, I'm gonna just leave it as shot. Sometimes I will come up here to the profile and I'll play around with these options. For example, if we go to landscape it kind of makes the colors and everything pop a lot more. So I use that and then, portraits for portraits, standard is kind of nice too, but for this I'm gonna go with landscape 'cause I want those colors to be a bit more vibrant and poppy, then I probably bump up the exposure a little bit. I prefer, I know a lot of photographers do a lot of work in this area. I actually prefer to play with that as little as possible because I believe down below your tone curve that is where can be more effective and you can do some good work in there and not necessarily need to mess with this so much. I would say I might bump up the shadows just a little bit because in my work I feel like my kind of biggest struggle is I go too dark and I'm always kind of like a little self conscious of that. So I'm always, maybe bumping up a little bit more just to make sure I don't go too dark. Wanna put on a little bit of contrast here. 10, I never go too crazy with the contrast unless maybe I'm in a more Arctic situations. Sometimes snow and ice can have a little contrast and you can kind of be just, a very all bluey white kind of shot. So sometimes I will go crazy and go like, you know that but I tend to try to edit more subtle at first. With this shot, I would probably just bump up the clarity just a little bit. The clarity kind of brings some sharpness and I guess we're gonna call it peppiness into the photo. I would also like to bring up the saturation and vibrance. So I'm gonna do kind of that that is looking hideous right now but I promise it'll be okay. So here is the tone curve. I find it interesting, a lot of photography classes or workshops that I've taken, photographers will either majority of their time focus on the tone curve or they will not touch it at all. Which I think is pretty strange because it is the tone curve. This is where you find your tones. And for me, that's a massive part of my editing. I've kind of played around with messing with all of these points. So on your own, what you can do is click here, click here, click here. And the most standard, is editing the S curve. They call it because you get this nice S, but you don't have to do that. You don't have to follow that rule. I'll show you in a second, some of my tone curves but you can also from there. So you pick your points like this. This is muting the blocks bringing them up kind of more fade on them. And then this can be muting the whites and such. These are your mids obviously. And then you can go into here and you can do the same exact thing with your colors here. Oh goodness, ignore that. All done. Command + Z that, that was weird. You can do the same thing here and this it's cool to do it in all these different colors because this affects the colors as well. So you can find that maybe you're, let's say you're editing snow. And for some reason, your snow has like a pink tint to it. You can fix that in tone curves playing with all the different colors, but for the purposes of this photo and how I edited it exactly. We're gonna go to here's all my saved tone curves that I've created over the years. I want to also mention that a lot of photographers will create a custom tone curve for every single photo. And if you like to do that, that's totally fine, that's awesome. For me, I was finding that creating a custom tone curve on every single shot, one, it was taking me too much time. And two, I found that I was not able to be as consistent in my editing. So I have these tone curves that I've created over the years. And as you can see they creates such a difference. I find that at least one of these works on any photo I shoot and it helps me to just stay consistent. So yeah, I would encourage you to find your tone curve to help with your consistency. And you can see like here, how I've played with the colors with different points and the tones here. Oh, I guess I also to show you, you can see how I didn't always go with the classic S-curve so yeah, just play around and see what you like. So then let's go into the colors a little bit down here. The yellows obviously are two yellow for my personal preference. So I'm gonna try to get this to be more orange. And I want my greens to go more towards my teal colors which is what I love. So I'm gonna be just adjusting that, oh shoot. There we go. I guess I could just slide these probably be quicker than typing numbers. And so I'm gonna bring up the oranges 'cause that's my jam. For this, I think what's really bothering me is these kind of lime greens that's not really true to my color pellet. So I'm gonna be kind of getting rid of them. That might be a little too much. Let's bring it back a little bit. There we go. And then obviously I'm again wanting my to bring my teal kind of color into the photo. So I'm gonna be bumping up the aqua. This blue kind of right here is a little too intense and that's bothering me a little bit. So I'm gonna bring that down. And then my thing is, is in my color palette I don't like purple or magenta at all. So I always just get rid of that. Well, actually in this instance, I probably wouldn't get rid of it all the way because as you can see, he has some purple in his nose or magenta in his nose. So maybe we actually should leave that a little bit right where it is. We'll bring it back to zero, I think, leave that at the natural color. And then in illuminates this is a great way to make your kind of colors pop. Or for example, you can go like this and see how much that changes the orange and then you could go like that. So it's very extreme. So I try to use this just very subtly probably around there and maybe some yellows too. Cool, then the split turning. So that is obviously plays a huge part in how I get my teal and orange kind of color palette. I definitely encourage you to play with this 'cause you can do some really cool stuff. Let's just go crazy here just to show you how much this affects things. So yeah, this is a great area for you to kind of find your colors and really accentuate them. For this in photo, I think I'm well, I should say for some photos I will go orange and orange and for some other photos I will go teal and teal. And then for other photos I will go teal highlights, orange shadows or teal shadows, orange highlights, but yeah, just experiment and bring out the colors that you love. Sometimes I'll play with the balance because I think it just adds a nice, subtle effect to the split turning. So for this one, I think I'm gonna go more teal, teal just because the photo is already so warm, I wanna kind of bring a bit of that coolness back. So I'm gonna go probably to, maybe we'll go here. Yeah and then I try to also keep it subtle. So, I usually never go over 10, but again, do what feels good to you. I wanna say that I usually don't actually touch sharpening in Lightroom. I do all my sharpening in Photoshop or in this awesome program called Topaz Labs which I'll show you later. But yeah, so just I'm gonna ignore this for right now. I usually turn on removing or removing the chromatic aberration and also the enabling profile corrections. Sometimes I don't know sometimes doing it or not doing it can create a nice kind of vignette which is cool. But most of the times I just leave those checked on and then I also do some color adjustments in the calibration section. And that's also kind of just by feeling as well, for this, I'm still feeling like the yellows and oranges are a bit too yellowy. I wanna make them more orange. So I'm gonna just play around with that here. And I like doing this because you can see how much that changes things. So, if I'm trying to get the oranges to pop more, I'm gonna go more to the right, obviously. And then, same thing you can, I'll just show you how crazy it can go. And this is a great place to make those teals and oranges pop probably go a little more. I think that's probably a little too much. We don't want an orange leopard because that's not super true to the reality of the leopard but we can make the yellow slightly orange. That's fine with me. Cool, so I think this is looking pretty good. Kind of feels true to my colors. So now from here, what I would do is bring it into Photoshop. So I'll show you how to do that right now. You will right click and then you'll go edit in Adobe Photoshop. Okay, so first thing I would probably do or what I usually do is I always kind of maybe add a little pop of brightness. Here if in Photoshop, if you go to adjustments, brightness and contrast, it seems to me that it's a little different than just changing the exposure. I feel like you can just give it a little pop for example oh, sorry. Going like this, whoa, whoa, it gets really bright. So just very subtly making a little pop maybe about there. I think my contrast is pretty good. So I'll just leave that alone. And then I wanted to show you guys kind of the tools I use to remove things from photos that are bugging me. You can absolutely do this in Lightroom. There is the here I'll show you in Lightroom, you can go here and it is the clone and healing brush and you can use it to get rid of all these ticks. But for me personally, I prefer to use Photoshop. I'm just, I've been using these brushes for years and I'm just way more comfortable with them. And I feel like I can get it exactly as I like. So over here you have spot healing brush tool, healing brush tool, and patch tool. These are kind of the three things I use to remove things from photos. So right here, I think this might have been either dust or just something in the background going weird. So I'm going to use that and you just kind of can play around with it but it's gonna be good for removing these guys. So we might wanna hyper or speed this 'cause this is gonna take me a little bit to remove all these guys. So you can see he has a lot of ticks just in his fur, poor guy. So right now I'm using the, what is the exact name? Spot healing brush but you can also go to patch tool as well. It's just kind of a personal preference thing. I kind of just alternate back and forth, sometimes for each given situation. One will be more precise at removing things than the other one. So just depends on the situation. Might go back to this guy and to adjust the size really quickly. You just hit the bracket keys, which is nice, that was a little weird. Cool, I think I caught them all this little hair or twig or something right there is bothering me a little bit. So I'm gonna remove that. Nice, so this is pretty good. So in this photo, I think what I would like to show you is how I sharpen it in this program called Topaz Labs. So I'm gonna hit Save and get out a Photoshop here and you'll see, once you've gone from editing your raw here it will now save to a TIFF once you've edited it in Photoshop. So we, here, I'm just giving you guys a little before and after. We now have this nice TIFF file sometimes I change these to yellow just to kind of color code everything. So I know this is my raw edit and then this is my TIFF. Now I'm gonna write click and I'm going to hit Topaz Labs or edit in Topaz Labs Sharpen. I'm gonna do the original or I'll do a copy of this file actually, just so we can see the progression. Now I, this program is a little more of an extreme method. You don't need to use this program if you don't want to, you can sharpen definitely in Lightroom or in Photoshop as I'll show you later in the next photo. But if you are ever in a situation where out of a whole set of shooting all day, you are absolute favorite shot. Let's say it's slightly out of focus or let's say you were shooting from an airplane window. And because of that, you have a little bit of softness in the photo because you were on something that was moving. This program can save your life. Sometimes I've seen it take completely out of focus photos and completely fix them. It's kind of insane. So I usually just start with going to these auto modes. It has three modes. You can, it'll, it can, if you do auto it will decide which issue it thinks you're having. And it will either correct your focus here, your stabilization or just your sharpness. So we can see by clicking auto hood here, it's decided my focus was just the tiniest bit off and then it subtly corrects it. So you can get a really nice sharp photo from using this program if you choose. I love it, it's saved my butt sometimes when my favorite shot has been slightly off and then we just hit Apply. The downside to this program is because it's doing so much work. It does like take a long time to process. So, give this a second. All right, so now Topaz Labs has done its thing. We have this kind of ridiculously sharp photo and that's great, it'll be great for printing. I'm gonna change the color to green just so I know that that's my sharpened photo. So if we go from there to there, you can see the difference. It's pretty cool if you are like me and become kind of OCD obsessed with sharpening, it'll look great when it's printing, so that's cool. I think we can consider this photo done. Let's go all the way back to the beginning. Just gonna do that, reset, cool. So here we have the original and you can kind of see the progress that we made and there's the final edit. So I'm super happy with it.