Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing Pt. 3

So this photo I'm gonna edit right now we took yesterday out in the field on Katmai. It was actually interesting because on our trip, I had all these kind of dream shots in my head of what I was hoping to get. And this actually ended up being our first round of shooting in this location in Hallo Bay. And I was in that moment, I was so in the zone, just working on getting into the flow of things and getting all my settings correct. That when I uploaded all these photos I was kind of surprised cause I was like, oh wow ! My favorite shots were actually at the beginning of the day and they weren't even the ones that I had dreamed of and they ended up being my favorite. So I think it's kind of funny when that kind of a situation happens. So, I love this photo because obviously bear cubs are adorable and it was awesome because there was a lot of water on the beach that was creating reflections. And this little bear cub was just kind of curious about us and the backdrop is pretty minimal beca...

use we are on the beach so it was kind of my ideal dream conditions. Okay. So let's jump right into this. Just gonna look at my different tone curves here and see kind of which one is speaking to me the most. I think I'm probably gonna go with this one cause it's kind of a little fadey and also a little more warm. So that's cool. I think I'm gonna actually leave this one on Adobe Color because I think landscape is a little too contrasty for this. I wanna keep this photo pretty dreamy cause I feel like that's the situation that needs to be exaggerated here. I think I'm gonna bump up the exposure just a tiny bit. Might do the shadows I think here. Because the challenge with shooting bears I've noticed is, their eyes can be pretty dark. They get lost in kind of like the shadow of just the way their face is structured and all their fur. So let's bump up these shadows here kind of just eyeing to what looks good. Okay. I think for this scene, I kind of wanna emphasize the dreaminess surrounding the little cub so I'm gonna do actually negative clarity. I don't always do that on photos, sometimes just to show you how extreme this can be. You know, this is very harsh, brings out the detail on the fur though but it also makes the background a lot more contrasted which I do not want. So this time I want to go more dreamy but obviously that is way too dreamy. So I'm just gonna, I think kind of go around there. I'm really gonna wanna try to make this orange kind of 'pop' in this scene because again one of my favorite colors, so we're gonna strive for that. Maybe actually I should do the cropping first on this photo just because I think it's kind of the most distracting. There are two ways I will kind of straighten horizons in Lightroom. So you can either, you know, go to here, grab the angle tool and drag it across this horizon to make sure it's straight. So that's, you know, one option that's great. Or sometimes I'll also go down to here to transform. I'll use this if I have kind of a few different straight line horizons going on. So, and I feel like it's actually more accurate cause you can zoom in and really pinpoint the horizon. So I kind of wanna make sure. Maybe we'll do his feet to make sure he's kind of straight himself and yeah sometimes it's very subtle. Sometimes it will be an extreme transformation with let's say, if you are doing this on a building where a building has a ton of straight lines, it can really transform the photo. It's kind of crazy. So I'll probably do that. On this one, I might also just do this again just to make sure cause I think I preferred that a little more in this instance. And then let's assume again, we are doing this for the gram, so we're gonna make it that vertical crop. For this one, I feel like, since the bear is moving forward I want to emphasize that. So I'm actually going to leave more of the bear on this side and leave room for him to move forward. We wanna accentuate the movement of this photo and we have his face lined up right there. So that's perfect. I might crop in just a tiny bit more just because this you know, harsh line here is a little distracting for me. So maybe about like here feels pretty good. Okay. So I'm liking that so far. Let's get into the color. Again, I always like to make my reds a little more on the orange side. These oranges are pretty yellow right now. So I'm probably gonna do a little bit of turning the oranges down, to the more orange rather than yellow side. If there's any blues in here, I'm gonna make them a bit more of my tealy color. I'm going to saturate the oranges a little bit cause we want make 'em pop and then any magenta. Again it doesn't look like there's much, but in case there is, I like to get rid of it. I forgot to also mention that another way to get rid of... sometimes you'll have chromatic aberration that causes a kind of magenta outline around something. It can be really hard to notice, but sometimes when you zoom in, you might see like a magenta line and you can hit defringe and this gets rid of all that purple magenta. So that's another tip if you're trying to get rid of that. Okay. So then again with this one, I want to make my oranges pop. I'm probably gonna go, bring the luminance up a little bit maybe a bit in the yellows too. Onto the split toning, I think I want to do a bit more of a blue split toning on this little cub. Lets do about, mm mm. Actually, let's bring the balance down here. Bring this up and bring this up just a little bit. Sometimes I turn the 'before and after' toggle on just to kind of get a vibe for what I'm doing here. I think bringing this down a little more towards the teal blue. Cool. I'm liking that. Great. Then sharpening we save for Photoshop again. Turning these on. I already did that. And then back to calibration. Since my photos tend to get very green, sometimes I just add a little bit more magenta to combat that. Let's go crazy here. We wanna make that red and yellow pop. So, but we definitely don't want pink or magenta. So let's go up here, bring this there. Get that orange poppin' Whoa way too magenta. And we don't want a green bear for sure. So we're gonna just touch this one subtly obviously. Cool. And see before and after how much that calibration of color is affecting the photo. Awesome. So I think one last step I'd like to do on this photo is adding a graduated filter. I wanna get rid of this up line here because that's really bothering me. Let's do one and maybe dehaze all the way. Sometimes that can be a little too much. So we'll just try to be subtle with building here. Sometimes what I'll do if I wanna subtly build rather than going extreme and going to like blah so much. I'll just build up the brushes. So if you right click on the little circle and hit duplicate, it makes another one. And then for this one, I might tone it down a little bit. So I'm just, again adding more graduation to the graduated filter. Kinda like the way that's looking there. It's not too bright. It's good. So I'm gonna hit enter and close outta that one. I think one thing that's still bothering me is the kind of details in the sand over here. So I kinda want to make that a bit more dreamy. So I think now I'm gonna do a round graduated filter. Is that the technical term? I was gonna say it's called it's not, oh radial filter. Excuse me. So we're gonna do that. Let's go crazy again. Actually, since we wanna make it more dreamy let's do clarity. So you can, that is way too much. Doesn't even look real and that is extreme. So let's just do subtle and I might turn this on just so I can see. Okay. So I'm gonna wanna bring this out because I don't really want the red on any part of the face of the bear since that is the most important but I'm happy to maybe let the rest of his body look a little more dreamy. So leave that. You can also feather here if you want to make it, whoa, you would never want to do that (chuckling) but make it even more feathered. We'll just leave it at 50 for this, turn this off. I'm thinking the clarity is a little too much here. Like this looks a bit too soft for my taste but maybe you like that. So I'm probably just gonna bring it down. That lights about there is pretty good. Okay, great. Let's do the final touches here in Photoshop. Right clicking, edit, in Photoshop. (coughing) Excuse me. Okay. So the first things I notice that are bothering me in this photo is kinda all these little rocks and twigs and stuff. So I'm gonna remove those again with the healing brush. I wanna make it a bit bigger to make this a little quicker. Obviously, if I was spending a lot of time on this photo which I probably will in the future, I'm going to go crazy and probably spend a long time removing pebbles and things that are distracting me in this photo. But for the sake of all of our sanity I will try to keep it minimal in this demonstration. So, I'm gonna remove that twig cause that is bothering me. Sometimes you've just gotta touch up the edges to make it look okay. And again, I'm doing this really quickly. Usually I would be much more perfectionist about it and you know, I've spent hours and hours removing things that are bothering me from photos before. And by the end of it, I feel like a crazy person. Yeah, So just do what works for you and what appeals to your eye. There we go. Almost done I think. Again, in the photo journalism world this would be completely unacceptable that I am doing this but I'm not trying to be a photo journalist. I'm trying to make this photo pleasing to my eye and make it as minimal and calming as possible. So, therefore I must remove these little tiny messes. Well they're messes in my opinion, but maybe not yours. He's got a little something on his face here. So, just gonna remove that, as well. Cool. It's looking pretty good. I'd like to, on this photo, talk about dodging and burning. You can find it right here. Dodging and burning is a great way to add contrast to a photo subtly in a kind of painterly way which I enjoy. You can, I'm gonna do it maybe kind of extreme just so you can like really see the difference. But, I usually keep my exposure around cause I just try to subtly build this up. So it's very painterly which I like, you just kind of brush it on and it's making those highlights pop. I guess I should have mentioned here. You have the option to choose highlights, midtones and shadows. So it's great. You can do so much stuff with dodging and burning, but for this I'm going to use highlights cause I want to make his little blonde fur highlights become more highlighted. I also am gonna zoom in and dodge his eyeballs. I wanna make these little highlights pop out. Sometimes if I am only at 5%, I have to do it kind of rigorously to build it up or you could just bump it up to a higher number, but I feel like it's easier than to go overboard with doing that. I like dodging this too because you can, oh, that was a little too much I think. You can see it's bringing out kind of like this blue in his eyes. You can also do crazy things. Like let's say we wanted to dodge the shadows. I wouldn't do this for this photo but you could do that and that's gonna really get rid of the shadows around his eyes. But I don't think that looks that great in this photo. So yeah, if we zoom back out and then we go to the beginning of this, you can see the before and after. So before and after. Before and after with these highlights. Cool. And then on the opposite end, if you wanted to burn, you could make the shadows midtones or highlights darker. I'll just bump this up crazy so you can see how much it does. Let's say we wanted to make these shadows on the bear more noticeable then we could go in. And obviously that does not look good but just an example of building those tones and contrast with a brush, which is what I love. All right. And then from our previous photo we made this sharpening action. So we're gonna click 'play' on that and the bear's gonna get a little more sharp. There we go. And I'll zoom in and do before and after. So you can see how that affected it too. So before. After, and you can play around if you think that's too sharp and you'd rather keep it dreamy, you know you can change the strength of this. And then I think for the final step I'm gonna do our little 'adding bright' action that we created. Just to give it a little more pop. And before. After. All right, I would consider this photo done. I'm gonna hit 'save.' Close out, go back to Photoshop. I'm gonna remove these real quick because these were my examples. So I knew what the heck I was doing during this. I'm going to create this copy, reset it to the original. Okay. So you can see this is our before. this is our Lightroom and then this is our Photoshop. So pretty cool. Another thing you can also do if you wanted to just have this is you can have it like that to, that view if you wanna see how far you've come, but yeah, thank you so much for watching me edit this photo.