Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing Pt. 2

So for this photo, I chose it because it was chosen to be licensed by Sony which was a big deal for me. And I've found that on Instagram, many, many people have tried to copy it or recreate it. So that is telling me that I must have done something right. So it also has a special memory for me because I was in New Zealand at the time on a shoot with Sony, and we found this, it was a magical stop on the side of the road where there was this adorable alpaca farm. So we pulled over, you know, and we got to pet the alpacas. And we did like just the little tour of the farm. And in kind of like the back corner was this beautiful little pony, bright ginger, with these crazy blue eyes. And I was freaking out over this little pony and I got this shot using my 100 to 400, I believe. And I was shooting at aperture F 5.6 at 800 seconds. And my ISO was 1250. And I just like the shot because it's, you almost can't even tell that it's a pony or a horse and it has a very macro feel to it. So let's jump...

in. So again, I think with this photo, this time I'm going to probably just start with our tone curve here. I think for this one, you know, I have this old guy, this old curve, and I think for this one, I'm probably gonna go with this one because I know it's more poppy, more contrasty, which this photo really needs. It's kind of, doesn't have a whole lot of contrast in it yet. So we're going to make that happen. So I'm gonna start with my curve here which is usually where I start in all my editing and then I'm going to turn it to landscape to make it a bit more saturated and poppy again. I'm going to brighten it up because I just feel like this is lacking a little bit in that area, and bump up the contrast just a tiny bit. I want to be very aware in this photo of, since you know, there's white here, there's white here. I wanna be very careful about blowing these whites out. You can kind of tell there are two ways I kind of ju-- gauge if I, well, three ways I would say, I would gauge to, if I'm blowing out my whites. One, there's a new update in Lightroom where if your whites are becoming blown out, they turn red. And if your shadows are becoming too dark, they become blue. So that's not happening in this photo right now. So I'm glad. So we know we're good. Another way to tell if they're getting a bit too bright is when you drag your cursor over them, you will see over here in the histogram, the numbers telling you where you're at. The closer you get to a hundred, that's kind of when you're getting to the purest white which will probably be blown out. So I pay attention to that. And another really simple way is just I make my background white in Photoshop. Some people don't do that. Some people keep it gray or black. I believe it's up in preferences. You can change the background here and I make mine white so that I can kind of see how pure my whites are. And if this white starts to match this white then I've probably gone a bit overboard on the brightness of the white. So just to be safe here, I'm gonna do negative just to really make sure I'm not blowing them out. Let's get the colors popping. I'm thinking, the first thing I'm noticing so far right now is I really don't like how the ginger of the horse is very kind of going too red and magenta-y here which is not the color I'm going for since I always want that orange. So let's just start bumping this up, maybe a little bit changing the reds from more pink to more orange. There isn't really any green in this photos. That's obvious, so I think we'll just leave that alone. I might want to play with the colors in this eye a little bit. So I might just bump up the aquas and the blues to try to get more towards my kind of teal color that I'm always aiming for. I wouldn't say we need to touch the saturation too much. Maybe let's bring down that purple and magenta, just cause I hate them. And if there's anything in the, in here that's kind of doing that, which I think there is, you can always like go like this to exaggerate it if you're, if it's something you're wanting to get rid of. So maybe we'll just leave them about here. Maybe we might add a bit more orange just to make this pop. And then again, I want to try to make these those colors pop a bit more. So we're gonna bump up the luminance just a little bit. You can see how much of a difference that makes. I want to encourage you to be careful with the luminance though, because some people do crazy things, you know, where this horrible stuff starts happening here. And we definitely, you know, do not want that in our photo. So just be careful when experimenting with that. Probably around there. Might also play with the blue on the eye. Maybe we wanna make it come down just a little bit. So we have that really solid eye color right there. You could even do this a little bit, do bump up the saturation, but I feel like that, it's not really necessarily like, that eye is already so blue. So maybe let's just keep that the way that it is. With this photo, I think I'll probably do more cool split toning because the horse is already so warm. So probably come up to over here. Let's just find some blues, find some blues and maybe a little bit and a little bit. And then from there I might try to balance this a little bit more. I'm going to, I think I'm gonna show you for this photo sharpening in Photoshop. Although, honestly I think the photo is pretty dang sharp so I don't think we need to do too much but I'll just show you for the for the sake of teaching and turn these guys on, like I usually do. And then I'd go down again to calibration here to try and make the colors that I'm looking to make pop, pop even more. It's really fun to experiment down here in the calibration because you can just make some kind of crazy combinations. Like obviously that looks ridiculous but I'm gonna try to combat it with the greens and the blues. Maybe desaturate a little bit too. I find the blue is kind of where I find my most kind of true colors. We can bring some red back in if we like, maybe tone that down a little bit. I kind of like it more on I think I'm, right now I'm liking it more on the kind of reddish orange side rather than the yellowish orange side. So we'll probably just leave that about there, looking good. Okay. So I think one thing that's bugging me in this photo right now is that this white, the fur on the horse's forehead, is whiter or more pure than this that happened over here. So let's just kind of try to match those to the best we can. I'm gonna do that by using a graduated filter as you can see up here, these are my best friend. I use them a ton and we're just gonna drag. I usually hold shift to make sure I'm being straight. And then you kind of, the more you pull out the ends, the more, I guess you could say feathered, it will be. So let's just go to here for right now. Also, if you click this show selected mask overlay, it turns to red and that kind of shows you what area you're actually affecting. So I think because we can see this is quite brighter so let's start by bumping this up. Let's try going all the way to one and we can always tone it back if we need to. Yeah, that's looking pretty good. Sometimes I might also de-haze it a little bit just to make it a bit more dreamy, which I'm kind of, yeah, you can see if you go there. It's ooh, that's crazy. So just to make it a little more of a dreamy vibe I might add a little bit right there. I think that's looking pretty good, in that these are kind of matching. So I'm pretty happy with that. I would say kind of the final Lightroom step is the crop, because obviously Sony wanting to license this photo, they were wanting to use it partly on their Instagram. So we've gotta make it the Instagram size which can be a blessing or a curse. I like that this is kind of lining up with one of our important focal lines here. I do kind of think that something I definitely want to not cut off are these eyelashes, or I don't know what the technical term this would be on a pony but these hairs here. Lower eye hairs. So I'm probably gonna make sure I have space for them but also paying attention to making sure this doesn't go too high and become not the focal point of the photo. Cause the eye is definitely the focal point. So we're gonna just do that and then let's pull this into Photoshop. Cool. Photoshop, why are you-- okay. Awesome. So here we are. Again, I'm probably going up to brightness. Probably gonna do one of those but actually let's save you some time. So what I would love to show you how to do is create your own action. This is a huge thing that I love about Photoshop because you can set things up so that you can do them in just one click. So for example, rather than trying to remember every single time, okay. Image, adjustments, brightness, I like 20, you know, you can turn this all into one action, which is one click. The only downside to actions I will say is that you can become so reliant on using them that then you don't actually truly remember how you got that edit. If that makes sense. So I'll recreate this. This is my adding right button. So you go here, this is new action and we're gonna call it "Adding Bright Again," since I already have it. And from here, oh, it chose to move it up here. We're gonna. Okay. That's fine. We're gonna go image, adjustments, brightness. Let's say I want to do, let's see what like ten looks like. Ten is looking pretty good. Let's try five. Mmm. Or let's just slide and see that. See, you can see how you can quickly blow out with this button too. So you definitely don't want to do that. So let's probably go to like eight. That's fine, we're gonna hit okay. So that action is now complete. That was all I wanted to do. So we're just gonna hit stop and it's gonna stop recording. I can minimize that. I'm gonna move it into this section since these are my adjustments. So now if we go to the history tab I'm gonna just undo that. And if we go to our Adding Bright Again button or action and hit play here, boom, it does it for you. And then to undo it, you can either hit command Z or you can just go back to the beginning of your editing. One thing I guess I should also say is, technically speaking in Photoshop, this kind of editing that I'm doing is called destructive editing. I'm not creating a layer and doing brightening and technically that is what you should do as like good Photoshop editing. But my editing is always growing and evolving so constantly that I really don't want a ton of Photoshop files on my computer of old edits. So I kind of make the exception to do destructive editing on the majority of my photos because I know that edit's gonna change anyway. So what's the point of saving all these massive files with different layers and things like that? So yeah, there we go. Another thing that I'd probably do on this photo is go to my spot healing brush and I'd kind of remove this kind of spec of dirt right here. That's kind of bothering me. Maybe also these little marks right here. Not really sure what they are but they're just kind of distracting my eye from the main focal point of this eye. So clean that up just a tiny little bit. And then I think this would probably be a good place to show you how I would sharpen this in Photoshop. Let's create an action so that we can use this again on our next photos. So sharpening. There we go, we've got it recording. You can see because the little red light is on for sharpening. So now we're going to come over here. This is our photo. If we hit command J or new layer, it creates a second layer of this photo and we are going to right click it and choose convert to smart object. And it's thinking, and there we go. From there, we are going to go up here and we're going to filter, other, high pass. So high pass is where you can kind of sharpen. What I like about it is you can almost sharpen the area edges or certain aspects of the photo without having that crazy, sharpened, overall like extreme sharpening look. So that's why I love to use this. You can see if you go up to here, it's including more of the photograph, which means the entire photograph, you know, will be sharpened like crazy. So we don't want that. This kind of, the more gray we see, the less the photo is going to be sharpened. So usually I like to keep this around two to three. I think anything kind of over starts to get a little extreme, but maybe if you have a less sharp photo, you might need that. So just play around and kind of see what's gonna work best for your photo. So we're gonna hit okay. From there, we have to go over to this tab and we're going to choose to make this layer an overlay. You can see all these different options and how they affect it. For this one, we're gonna wanna use overlay, cause it's just overlaying this layer over the original photo. And then from there we want to flatten this guy, so it's just one image. And you can see, you know, that's pretty damn sharp. Those eyelashes are pretty sharp. There's that's cool. And then we're gonna go back to our actions and hit stop because now we are done. So we have this little sharpening action here. We can go to the history and we're gonna just undo it. So you guys can kind of see the before and after. So I'll zoom in just to show you. So before, after. So it's a really nice, subtle sharpening that I like. You can still keep the dreaminess but have everything pretty sharp. So also I'll undo it because now I'll show you we can go here. We can go to our actions. If we, you know, in the future are processing photos and we don't wanna redo everything I just did, and take up a ton of time, you can just click this, hit play. And it usually has to think, cause it's quite a big process and boom, we are done. So let's save this and get outta Photoshop. Change this to yellow cause it's now our tiff. And you can see, oh, we'll create a before. There we go, reset. So we have before, Lightroom edit, Photoshop edit. So there we go.