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Manipulating Image Structures

Lesson 22 from: Adobe Lightroom Classic CC for Beginners

Jared Platt

Manipulating Image Structures

Lesson 22 from: Adobe Lightroom Classic CC for Beginners

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

22. Manipulating Image Structures

Lesson Info

Manipulating Image Structures

Now let's talk about some other really cool options inside of Lightroom that we could do that we used to have to go to Photoshop for. And that is, if you want to, let's just go to... So here we are. And I've got, let's say this image right here. And I love the image, but I want things to be a little bit more square. You can see how they're kind of bending a little bit and changing. And of course, when you go to the Lens Correction area, you can go under the Profile and you can click Enable Profile Corrections, which will kind of get rid of the warping. And you saw, do you see how that, you see how it warps a little bit. It gets those lines a little more straight, because it's not warping with the lens. So that's the first thing that we can do to work on the image, but everybody knows about lens warping and stuff like that, so that's the easy thing. The next thing we do is go to the Transform area. Now Transform is an interesting area, because it allows you to correct perspective issues...

and beyond. And so in this case, if I think, okay, I want to straighten up all the vertical lines, I can just click on this tool here that says Vertical. And when I click on Vertical, it's gonna try and straighten all those lines vertically. But see how it's like, oh they're already vertical. So it's just left it alone. So I'm gonna turn it off. I can do Auto and it, see how Auto just said, oh you need to actually, it sees the horizon line and it says, okay, when I hit Auto, it actually automatically changes the horizon line so that it's a square photograph. And Lightroom's really good at automatically figuring out how to straighten your images and hit the horizon line correctly. So that's one way to do it. But my favorite way to do it is this thing called Guided. So when I click on Guided, it gives me a cursor that looks like a... it looks like a little target, so it's this thing right here. It's kind of like the white balance tool that you click on. If you click on Guided, see that little weird cursor? When I come back out here, I just simply find important lines. So I'm gonna grab onto this line right here and I'm gonna drag down and show it that that is a specific line that I'm concerned about staying vertical or horizontal. And then I'm gonna go and grab a horizontal line that I'm worried about. Click on that. And do you see what just happened? It made sure that that vertical and horizontal were at perpendicular right angles to each other. Now I can further tell it, oh by the way, I want this line over here to also be critically... So I want this one to be parallel with the left-hand edge. And so it just did that. It just did a small correction on this one. So now this window line is perfectly parallel with this edge. This one is parallel with this edge and this is perpendicular to both of those. And you can put four of those onto your photograph and it's gonna be square. So let's show you the difference between before and after. Before. After. And this is really, really helpful when you fall into a place like this. Right? Because here, you want to, and I've already got the Guided, so let's turn it off. See that? This is before. This is after. And if you wanna see where my guides are, there's one on this window, so it's right next to this side. There's one on the top to kind of get it squared to this. There's one down here at the actual floor level. And then there's one here on that line. And you can see what I'm trying to do. I'm always, when I'm doing a Guided transformation, I'm always trying to make sure that the things that will most likely butt up against my frame edge, what did I say about framing? It's one of the most important things you can do, especially in a photograph like this, because this photograph is all about composition. This is composition, absolute composition. It's so important. And so I can't have the windows be a little bit askew from the edge of the frame, because it will throw the whole composition off. And so I tried, when I was shooting the photo, to get as square as I could, but I wasn't. I was a little bit like this and so, by doing this, I completely squared it up, so that everything is square and perpendicular to everything else. And that makes the photo. So this whole concept of transforming is amazing, and especially when you're in situations like this, because now you've got this really cool photo that you wanna work on, but you need to transform it, because otherwise, it looks like this. We wanna straighten up all those lines and it gives us the ability. So this just like, it looks kind of weird, because I'm looking up on it. But if I go like this, then I can, and the Guided situation on this is that I'm paying attention to this line and this line. But now, see how this one's a little bit going that way? So now I can just grab on to it and say, this is important too, guys. Let's delete this one. So this is an important line. See now it straightens that image and look what had to happen in order to straighten that. That's why you wanna shoot wide, because you're gonna lose some stuff on the sides. But now we're gonna come over here and say, okay, instead of straightening this guy, we're gonna straighten this building here. So that's the important line there. And then, we're gonna say what's important here. Well, we're gonna do a perpendicular line across like that. Okay, so now, when I go ahead and crop it, so I constrain the crop. So there's Constrain Crop. When I click on that, it's gonna crop out all of the white information and now I've got my image and everything square to the edges. But you can turn off the Constrain Crop. Go back to Crop here and then reset it. And then if you send this to Photoshop, you can do Content Aware here, you can do Content Aware here. And you can even probably redesign this building with a little Content Aware and it might work. You can definitely Content Aware out this way and you'd be successful going that way for sure. This would be much harder to do. So anyway, that's just something that you can do that's a very useful tool that you should be aware of, because that tool will allow you to get the perspectives right. Yeah. Could you talk about combining HDR and pano merges? Which would you do first? Okay, that's a great question and I actually have done those HDR panos, but they take a long time, so they're kind of annoying. But I can show you a... let me just, see if I can. Here, let me go to my panos here and go to this. And then I'm gonna right-click this one and I'm gonna say show it in the folder in the library. It's gonna load the photos, it's taking a second. There we go. Okay, so somewhere in here, I got some that I've done that. And I didn't actually finish them, because I am not all that interested in what I got, but here they are. Do you see that? So what I've done is I did, so that's the under, normal, and over exposure. And then once you're done with it, you move. And when you do a pano, you have to move, you have to overlap by a third and so, I go over here and now it's overlapping under, normal, over. And then I move by a third, under, normal, over. Move by a third, under, normal, over. Under, normal, over, under, normal over. All the way across your pano. Then what you do is you have to go to each one of your... you have to go to each one of your under, normal, overs, highlight those, right-click them, do the HDR then go to the next one. Do the HDR, go to the next one. Do the HDR, go to the next one. Go all the way through. Then once you've done the HDR on all of them, and make sure you don't, in the HDR option, there's a little thing that says Auto. What do we do with Auto? We turn it off. And so we don't do the Auto tone on them and then once we're done, we highlight all of our HDRs and then we run them through the pano. That's the only way to do it. Yeah. Do you still get the 10-stop difference in between zero? Yes, so you would have a panoramic image that has 10 stops in between, because it's a HDR panoramic. It would be merging, so it's just-- Just wasn't sure if the-- It's a huge freaking file, but it's stitching together a 32-bit image instead of a... Yeah, I just wasn't sure if, like, the panoramic took away from that 10-stop difference. No, because once it's 32-bits, it's 32-bits. Thanks. So but just be aware, it's a crazy big file. Like, so an HDR is fairly big. A panoramic can be two, three hundred megabytes or something like that, no problem. And then, you put 200, so 300 megabytes for a pano that's also an HDR, it's gonna be very large. 500 megabytes, you know, it's gonna be way up there. And you may be waiting a while to get that done. So only do it, so what I would is, I would go through and I would judge whether or not it's worth doing it, by going to the middle exposure and clicking Command on all the middle exposures, so I'm just going like this. Like that, and then I would look at them in my Survey mode and say, does that look right? Does that look like it's interesting enough? If not, I'm out. I'm not gonna do it, because I don't wanna waste the time. And this is a much longer pano than that, so you know, I would be going through all of these to decide whether or not. And in the end, the light wasn't great and so, I'm not gonna do it. The light was much better, you know, over here. And doing that kind of stuff, so in the end, the pano that I got that we just did over here was beautiful, because the light was hitting it across. It was perfect. So we just had to wait a little bit longer in the morning to get that sunrise hitting over those.

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Ratings and Reviews

Melissa Maxwell
 

Worth every penny. I am completely new to Lightroom and it really is like learning a new language. Jared Platt did a great job explaining the most efficient ways to utilize Lightroom. There's a lot of technical jargon that can often make creatives lose interest, but it's important and useful information. I've watched several segments again and again. He's added years to my life and I am grateful. He's not my favorite instructor on this site, though, and I made good use of the 2x button on the screen.

Kat Jones
 

Well, I've been a Photoshop girl since the beginning and have dabbled with LR and thought I knew quite a bit about it!! It turns out I've just been playing with bits of it! This is an amazing course. I will need to buy it for all the tricky bits that I just haven't quite grasped. Jared is amazing. Clear, concise, methodical, smashing. Thank you, Creative Live. What a service! Cat Jones Wormit Fife Scotland PS - Delightful to see Jared's Scottish piccies - very familiar, although not with the model!!!

Elaine
 

What an excellent class. I'm a semi-beginner, already know the basics, but wow ... this class adds an extra layer of super AHA moments that shave years off your life! What a great teacher, thank you so much Jared!

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