Lessons

Lesson Info

Polishing in Post Part 2

this one doesn't look so good uh if the entire picture or at least that vast majority of the picture looks dark or bright usually the control that I would go to over here on the right side is one called exposure we got a bunch of sliders here with one that will control the entire picture and make the whole picture brighter or the whole picture darker is exposure so you could think of that almost like the exposure compensation dial in the back your camera how many stops brighter do you wish it would have been how many stops darker do you wish it would have been it's kind of like doing that I should have done it in camera here but I didn't and I could bring this up get it quite bright then I only use exposure if the vast majority of the image is too brighter too dark because it affects everything if on the other hand it's not the entire picture that's to brighter to dark instead what's wrong with the images it's isolated into the bright area the picture or the dark area the picture like ...

in this image right now the sky to me it's too bright then if it's isolated toe on ly the brighter dark area the picture that I'm either going to go to highlights for the bright part of the picture or shadows for the dark so I'm going to take the highlights slaughter I'm gonna bring it down and that's going to give me back my sky all right now the only problem with that is the sky is not the only highlight highlight just means generically bright area the water in the waterfall is also very bright and so when I brought the highlights down if you put him back to where they used to go look at what happened my waterfall you see how it kind of mellowed out as well so that might not be ideal there's a way we can fix that if we'd like in what that isn't all the sliders on the right side well in general affect your whole image it's not gonna isolate it into one particular area but we have a tool in the upper left where I can paint things in two just an isolated area on lee where I paint and that's the one that looks like a brush not the brush with little dots around it but just the brush with that tool active I get a limited set of adjustments sliders over here on the right side that I could change and what I can do is tell it bring the highlights up and I won't see the image change it all when I'm doing this because it's waiting for me to paint to tell it where it should happen and since I haven't painted on the image yet it doesn't know where to put that change so I'm just guessing that I want my highlights to be turned up I moved my mouse on top of my image and now I can paint that change on lee into the area where I pain so I can come in here and say I want that waterfall to not have its highlights turned down so much you really get that to stand out and after I'm done painting in here and getting all those little areas of white water then I confined to in the slider because I couldn't see how much I was getting because it hadn't shown up yet I had to paint it in now I can grab that highlights slider we'll move it down with back up and say hey how right would I like those highlights to get in my waterfall and in essence what I'm doing is I'm counter acting the adjustment that I applied to the entire picture I had the highlights turned down to probably all the way I think like negative one hundred in here I'm bringing them closer to the way they used to look if I had this set to the opposite of what is it was applied to the entire picture if the entire picture has the highlights set to negative one hundred and I put this to positive one hundred I'm simply counter acting it in essence bringing it back to zero where I paint so anyway khun die listen the other adjustment that helps with waterfalls if you want to be able to see more detail in them is a slider called clarity and oftentimes if I paint with that adjustment brush on my picture after bringing up my highlights on the waterfall I'll come down here to the slider called clarity and I'll see if it helps I'll just stare at the image and I'll move it to the right and the moving down move it to the right move it down and just see is that going to help me and I think it is helping me give me a little bit more definition but it's making the highlights even brighter so I might decide to back off on that other slider I was applying bring that highlight stan alot like clarity do most of the work it's a personal choice on how you think these things would look there's ever anything you don't like it's your taste your image so you know do what you think is best this is just some things that I think would help if you want to see what the difference is there's a previous check box at the top of my screen near the right side and if I turn it off it'll show you what this image looks like a ziff I didn't use thie adjustment brush and then I turn it back on you'll see the end result before dull waterfall after make it pop also sometimes the waterfall the water within it can look a bit blue or sometimes it looks too neutral and you want it to look a bit blue so it feels kind of colder you could adjust that up here at the top there are sliders for temperature and tent and if you look at him you see blue on this side so if you push the slaughter towards the left you're going to make your image look more blue in the area where you've painted if you move it this side you'll make it look less blue what happens is the colors you're seen on the ends here are opposites of each other so adding more yellow to the image automatically absorbs its opposite which is blue so it's not that you want the picture to look look more yellow is that there might be too much blue in the image and you're pushing this away from blue it's on ly once all the blues have been absorbed from the waterfall that if you pushed it even further that the image was start looking yellow so I might come in here and say do I want that waterfall less blue or do you want it more blue it depends the more blue I make it usually the colder uh it'll feel like the water is it's a personal choice making it just a little bit less what I'm done with the adjustment brush to get out of it and get back to the normal controls that you work with here in camera all you need to do is switch to that hand tool you can either switch to the hand tool of the zoom tool those heir to a tools that don't do anything to your picture to change its contents and that'll just make it to that tools no longer active and now I'm back to the normal adjustment sliders they're here and I could further optimize the image maybe I want to make the image a little bit more colorful you could do that using thes to slaughters vibrance and saturation either one of those too if you move him towards the right if you look on this side you see there's more colorful things on the bar it where is over here they're more subdued colors I'll describe the difference between those two in a little while but for now I'll bring vibrance up a little where the sky becomes a little bit bluer greens come out a little bit now with any of the sliders that you see in camera if you want to see the difference for just that one slider there's a trick if you move your mouse on top of any slider that you've already adjusted and when you move your mouse on top of it if you double click on it double clicking will reset the slider to its default setting then if you don't move your mouse it should still be over where you had that slider a minute ago it is you just click one more time you'll pull it back over there so double click to see what it looks like without and then click one more time to bring it back over there in that way you can look at your picture move your mouse on top of any slider double click to see without that setting and then click one more time to see it with in this cape is it's relatively settled with skye I noticed becoming a bit darker and more colorful when you're done adjusting an image in the lower right there's just done button that does not permanently change the image in any way what happens is when you adjust images in bridge you will find that images that you've adjusted have a little icon in the upper right that I kind of supposed to look like two little adjustment sliders in all it means is that this image has been adjusted if you were to actually look at that file on your hard drive instead of here and bridge which I can do by right clicking on it and choose reveal and find her you would find that there's actually an extra file in here here's the name of the file and just below that is an extra file that ends with letters ex mp it's usually a tiny file that does nothing the file size let's see now I don't know the file size but it's tiny it's like five k something like that in that little file contains your adjustment so the original images actually untouched in that little file right there simply records where you moved all the little sliders and camera if I were to take that file and throw it in the garbage when next time I went to bridge you would see that icon disappear and you'd see the image returned to its original look I'm going to choose undo just command z for undue that made it so it no longer deleted the file you see the icon is back and you see the end result so just so you know when you work in camera it doesn't usually change the original raw files instead of creates a little extra file that this little icon indicates is there and it means that that file has been adjusted let's try another one this image it's most of the image that's too dark but the sky is okay so I could bring up exposure just like we did before so all of the image changes but once I get to a certain point the sky gets too bright so maybe I bring my highlights down because highlights will adjust the brightest part of the image and then where he is is too dark so we have a different slaughter called shadows will bring it up and then if I want to affect the image is a hole that's exposure you bring it down or up a little bit then the sliders that make things more colorful are either vibrance or saturation could bring those up get the color to pop and if I turn the previous check box off I'll see what the image used to look like wasn't very usable air but now it's becoming much more usable so what did we dio if you look at the sliders exposure means overall we made it brighter then we made the highlights darker since in a negative setting and the shadows brighter so write stuff get darker dark stuff get uh brighter and we made it more colorful I think it looks a lot better than the original we could go to that adjustment brush that little guy brush it's going to remember the last settings we used and if those settings are not what you need to apply because these are the settings had use for a waterfall remember that you can reset any of these by double clicking so I can zero out any of these sliders and I could come in here and say well maybe his face needs something to make his face stand out a little bit and I simply guess at what it needs to start with because I'm not going to see a change until I painted into the image so maybe I think where his faces we should have additional shadow detail maybe just a little bit extra contrast I don't know I'm just guessing then I can get a smaller brush you can change your brush size by this little size slider on the right or you can use the square bracket keys on your keyboard it appears right above the returner enter key and I could paint it on to him once I've painted it on then I confined to these settings and decide do I really need more shadow detail there so that's doing to his face going to pop out a little bit do I really need more contrast or less even maybe less contrast there we go maybe I need to make his face a little bit more yellow or anything like that just see what happens who knows less yellow looks better I think the little marks you see on my image usually that would only show up when you're mouses over the image I think there's a checkbox in the lower right called show pins see it down there you turn that off you'd see the image without those little marks on him those marks indicate where you've adjusted the image turn on show pins and you'd see exactly where you've click to mess with your picture so that's what I do when images are too dark I adjust exposure if it's the entire image if it's only the bright areas are only the dark areas that I go for highlights or shadows to find men do you crop to specific aspect ratios so you don't have issues later when you decide what size you might want to print well I frequently print to canvass and with campus have a custom frame made so that I can have any aspect ratio I want so therefore I could do any size I want if that wasn't the case if instead I sent it out to service bureaus all the time and they have specific size is you have to order then I would be thinking about that anytime I cropped the image and it also be thinking about it in the field when I'm framing up the subject but for me personally I can crop kenny ratio I feel like the main thing is if I'm getting really close to a common ratio uh that would be a common frame size then I might as well snap to it so that I might be able to get a imagery produced at a lower cost because I know that they're standard size output you know uh eight by ten thirteen by nineteen those kinds of sizes s o really depends on how you're going to use the image perfect thank you and could you talk a little bit about the difference between vibrance and saturation I will but when we get onto an image that where it would be more effective great thank you awesome yeah so that was overexposed let's look under exposed let's look at the opposite let's look at over exposed if your images too bright well just like with the underexposed image if it's the entire picture that's too bright then on ly if it's the vast majority of the image do I go to exposure bring that down and once the majority of the picture is starting to look acceptable then if there's anything else that's still wrong with it it's usually going to be the brightest or darkest areas in this case I think the sky could use a little more details so I go to the highlights slider and I could bring it down and then if I want the image to have a little bit more vibrant color I can either go to vibrance or saturation and increase it like that but let's look at before and after her turn preview ofthe before after in his long ass when I captured the image the sky was not blinking then when I bring down the highlights slider I should be able to get the detail back but when I captured in camera if a little part of the sky maybe sitting right here against the church if it was sitting there blinken if I had that setting turned on then I won't be able to get it back well I shouldn't say that if it's a tiny tiny area and I shot in raw format there is actually extra sh highlight detail that even if it's blinking on your screen you'd get back but only if it's a real small area what happens is the previous you see in the back your screen when you're done shooting is a process jpeg image it's in order preview it it sends it through the cameras processor to say what would this look like a jpeg and the jpeg file wouldn't have detailed there so it's flashing well with raw files there is a little extra highlight detail that it's not showing you yet and you can get it back we're bringing down the highlights slider but it's limited and how much is available so only if there's a tiny little area blinken uh is there a chance I could get it back if it's a huge area of your sky or something like that that's blinking I doubt you're going to be able to get it back by bringing highlights down now let's do one more overexposed that one looks pretty darn bright so if it's the entire picture exposure after that maybe the shadows need to come up with the shadows maybe I need a little more contrast or a little less contrast is the difference between bright and dark you want a greater difference between brighter dark or less of a difference and sometimes bringing it down can help anytime bring contrast down though the image can often look a bit dull and if that's the case if I need to bring contrast down if that's something that makes the image look better but a bit dull to compensate I'll come to a setting called clarity in clarity will usually emphasize thie small textures and the image the small details and that can help me kind of bring the or break through the the hazy looking uh look that I might get from lower in contrast now in this image I would have had blink ease in the headlight you see how absolutely no details in the headline and up here in the windshield those areas I could tell you were blinking because when I darken the image this much they didn't end up get any detail at all and so that's where I could have done a better exposure but you see how much I could get out of that image because I know if you remember originally did you see it change a second ago there it's a pretty huge change to the image as long as it's a raw file you can get a lot more out of it if you have images that feel kind of hazy ah foggy almost one reason why that sometimes happens even if the scene you're shooting didn't have that quality to your eye is the sun is shining on the front element of your lens if the sun ever directly hits the front element of your lens the contrast your picture will go down in her look hazy and I think I can find some examples tomorrow where I'll show you with him without and how I deal with that but if you notice that if you take a shot it looks like this picture but to your eye it doesn't look like that then just look at the front end element of your lens see if the sun is shining directly onto it and if so that's why it's happening and you need to either recompose so the sun does not hit the front element of your lens or do something to shade your lens ines what I will commonly do is if I have my camera and I see that where I'm getting that hazy look I will take my hand like this put it in front of the camera and then I'll bring it down until I can see it in the frame so I know how low it could get and then I bring it so I'm just outside of the frame and I move it around like this and see if I can get it to block the sun and I can tell it blocks the sun because any lens flare that would be in their or low contrast will go away and therefore I can capture a better looking image but that wasn't the case here this was more of a hazy day and uh so this is what we get to break through some of that hayes what I find is usually when you have a hazy looking image there is nothing in the image that's anywhere close to black you can find out if you're anywhere near black by looking in the upper right corner of camera that's where you find a bar chart that bar chart tells you the brightness levels you have within your picture black is represented on the left side right here white is represented on the right side over here and then everything in between would be the other shades between black and white and so if there's a gap in the history graham there are there are no lines on the left side it means you have no black if this were to extend all the way to the left then you would have black and your image if it does not extend all the way to the right then you don't have any white in your picture and what's kind of cool it's a few of your mouse do you see that highlights various areas here when I'm move across well that will allow me to adjust various parts of that little bar chart if I click and then pole it will figure out which slider down there would affect that part I could try to pull this over I'm clicking right where the history graham is in pulling you see that now I just pulled it over there so you see how it's hitting the end now I had moved to where it was originally pulled and then once he got close to the end I moved a little close to the end and pulled further but now we're starting to get things that are close to black in the image and usually it's going to look a bit less hazy the other thing you can do to pull through the haze is just like when I had that image previously where I'd lowered the contrast and it felt kind of dull is bring up clarity and that can help break through some of it as well this image doesn't look very colorful I'm not sure if it's gonna help or not to make him more colorful but I might bring this up just to see he and I could do all sorts of other things if the highlights air too bright at the top of my picture I could bring the highlights down see what that does to my image and there's something I could do to really pull out detail in here but it's beyond what I want to talk about today and that is curves there's a way and curves like you click on to different areas in here and move them separate and I get contrast in here but let's see what the difference between what we started with what we have now I'll turn preview off before after this has a lot more pop to it and contrast quick question better this's from me that uh you just add I pulled up the clarity do you have ah kind of a happy place with clarity that you work for are just kind of just whatever steve mitch look good really I try to make sure that that it doesn't look like things start to glow literally you can see halos around the edges of certain objects if you bring it up to high like the edge of where this temple is touching its surroundings or the edge of where a dark area touches a light area if I adjust clarity let me bring back down slowly bring it up sometimes those areas could just feel a little glowy or what also happens is other objects will look like they have a dark spot in the middle of them like these little temples in the distance these guys if they'd look unevenly dark in the middle let's see if I can get it to do it by bringing up clarity it's a little bit darker on the tip than it is down here and stuff if that becomes too obvious then I will back off on my clarity so I'm looking for any kind of glowy look maybe around these little trees and things it might start looking that way but otherwise I'm just moving around and visually signing this is its still helping or not in with any slider in camera I find it's best to move it too far and then back off because you never know if it's going to improve it if you continue to move it continue to move it unless you've gone too far so what I'll do with just about any slider is a lot of the times I'll come in there and just take clarity and move it way up and then we were way down we way up and then I won't look at the slider I'll still move my mouse but I'm just looking at the picture and that makes me forget where it started by getting it way high and way lo I forget where it started and now I just gotta find where the image looks it's best and then I can look back and sometimes you'll find you moving in the opposite direction that you thought you needed to it's just whatever makes the image looks it look its best thank you sure here's an image with too much contrast the brights and darks are so different that it it isn't enjoyable to my eye uh if that's the case where you have the brights and darks are dramatically different from each other that's when I go for a slider in here called contrast because that's what contrast controls is how big of a difference is there between bright and dark so if I bring it up it's going to exaggerate that looked terrible but if we bring it down the bright areas and the dark areas will become more similar to each other in this case I brought it all the way down let's see the difference before after they were starting to get more of a separation there then I would look at the image and say well the dark part of the image there's actually a person there looking at me I think that's where I need to see more information so I take the shadow slaughter and I push it up the shadows means dark part of your image if the temple is looking to bright I can also adjust highlights because highlights is the bright party your image so I'll have a slider for each one of those areas and then I can further adjusted clarity could make it pop clarity means emphasized the detail like the texture on those walls that's what clarity will usually make pop and if I bring it up to high let's see if I can get a glowing temple not really make it a little bit more colorful let's look it before after