Skip to main content

Image Editing and Enhancement

Lesson 10 from: From Capture Through Edit Using Lightroom

Jared Platt

Image Editing and Enhancement

Lesson 10 from: From Capture Through Edit Using Lightroom

Jared Platt

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

10. Image Editing and Enhancement

In this lesson you will learn how to use each and every tool in Lightroom’s edit panel to adjust and edit your images. You will learn how and why to use each and every slider in Lightroom.

Lesson Info

Image Editing and Enhancement

now here comes the fun part. We get to take the vision that we had at the camera, and we get to bring it into light room and we get toe work on those images and achieve that vision that we had. I love working on images because I know at the camera I'm looking at something, and I know it's special, and I have this grandiose idea in my mind, and I love taking that image and trying to get there with it, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But hopefully, when you're photographing, you actually have kind of a unidentified A of where you want this image to go. And so that's called pre visualization. And part of pre visualization is making sure that you know how to expose your images so you want to get as best and exposure as you possibly can, because that exposure is how you achieve the final goal. And so when I'm looking at an image, I'm pre visualizing what I need in the end in order to make this work, and so you'll notice that some of these images may seem a little dark, but...

that's because I'm pre visualizing what I need out of the image. So, for instance, let's go to our swan because I think our swan I'm gonna go to this swan. So by double clicking the image, it takes me to the detail view where I can see the swan and I'm going to go. If I click the e key, I go to the edit menu. Or you could just come up to the right and click on the edit area. Um and so it pulls up the editing menu here, and then I can start working on this image. So what? I'm working on an image. I want to be aware of where the under and over exposures are on DSO Just like in my camera. I have exposure warnings. I also have those exposure warnings here inside of light room. I have a history Graham that gives me all the detailed information about this image. But I also have two warnings up in the top left and right hand corner of the hissed a gram and you can see those here. If I click on this one and I click on this one, it gives me the highlight warnings and shadow warnings. Now if I had shadow warning is shadow problems. Let's just take that under expose it. There you go. You would start to see blue, and if you have over exposure issues, you'll start to see red. So those air really important to understanding what the data is inside of your image? So the first thing that you notice about this images that I've under exposed the swan just a little bit. And the reason I have under exposed the Swan is because this sky was really bright because the sun was kind of over those mountains and shining up into those clouds. But the swan was in shadow. And so at the camera, I'm specifically looking at when I'm taking the picture. I'm looking at the exposure of the sky, and I'm actually using the spot meter tool, and I'm pointing at the sky and making sure that the sky is not too bright. And then I take a picture. And then I look at the history Graham to make sure that the sky is not blowing out too much. I'm also getting highlight warnings from the camera that tell me with a blinking light in the sky that the sky is blowing out to some degree, but because I know how my camera talks to me and I know what the camera saying. I know what I'm looking at the camera that I can recover that information and the proof is here when I'm working inside of this photo, I can see, Yeah, it's a little under exposed here, but I know that I have that data up in the sky. So when you are in light room in the edit menu, you will see that you have different sections toe edit so you have the instagram up the top, and that's your information. Then you have information. So this edit menu here says auto and black and white. So if you click the auto, it's gonna automatically try and fix the image aan den. If you click black and white, it's going to turn the thing to black and white. Um, then, right below that you have the profile section, and the profile section is where you get to choose the underlying color. Information. Profiles are instructions or definitions of color that rest underneath the image itself, so the image is presented to you based on certain definitions, and those definitions are made inside of the color profile. Now the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna go to the profile and we're going to click on the profile browser, which is this little square button here. When I click on the Profile browser, you get a set of options here on day and light room ships with a number of profiles already. Eso they have camera matching profiles. They have the standard adobe profiles, and as I flow over those profiles, you can see that the image to the left is changing. So this is an adobe monochrome profile, and it is defining the color as no color. But it's also defining how contrast e the images. If I go to adobe color, it looks this way. If I goto landscape, it's a little bit more poppy on the colors. If I go to neutral, it's the purpose of neutral is to be as, uh, minimal contrast is possible so I could get more out of the image. Um, if I go to portrait, it's much better on the warm tones that Aaron this in in skin so they don't have super orange skin standard and vivid, which is kind of a mixture between normal and landscape. It's kind of halfway in between, but these these are simply definitions of color, and you're going to apply those before you start working on the image simply because they're going to change what the what the image can look like to begin with what what the underlying definitions are. Andi, and you can also download your own profiles. For instance. I make my profiles and I sell them, and so you can see that I can change from This is my color art pro pack. So I've got several warm versions that I could use. Or I could go to the cool versions of this photo. Or I could go to my neutral versions of this photo and see how some of them are thin and kind of a softer look. And some of them are a little bit more punchy. If I go to my black and white pro art kit, then you can see that I've got more of a normal documentary kind of look and then I've got, like, a cool tone classic Look, I've got a warm tone classic look so those things are. It's like a preset, but it's actually not changing any of the sliders. All it's doing is changing the definitions of color inside of the photo. It's important to understand what those profiles are before you start using them. So in our case, we're just going to go to the adobe raw and we're just gonna choose landscape. All right, then we're gonna click the back button, and that's taking us back to the main area here. And I like that. It'll it will work just fine. Um, you can see that by choosing different profiles. The amount of over exposure has changed in the sky because of the definitions of how that image can be presented to the to the world. And so it's just a lower contrast version of what we were just looking at. So now we're going to start working in the light area. But before we do that, let me introduce you to the auto button. The auto button is literally going to take your photo from whatever it waas to the best version that the computer can come up with in an instant, and so when I click on it, it did that which notice that it fixed the sky so it wanted to fix the sky. But it did a very bad job in the foreground. So I'm going to hit Command Z and undo that. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. It's always fun to just click and see. But most of the time I find myself grabbing the highlights and bringing them down so that I can get rid of all of that over exposure in the sky. I also want to bring the exposure up because I want to see that swan. So I want the swan to be white. I'm also gonna add a little contrast and I'm going to bring the black down. See that? Because I I wanna ricin up these shadows in the water, especially the shadow right under the swan. So I take the black point down and I'm going to take the shadow up just a little bit and I'm gonna take the white. I'm gonna play around with white. I think I want toe pop a little bit, so I'm bringing the white up a little bit. And that helps these white areas here to kind of pop and then I'm going to go back to the sky now I've got to deal with the sky a little bit more, so I'm gonna take the highlights and play with them. And I could only get to there. But fortunately, I have mawr controls than just my basic light controls Inside of light room. I also have the ability to adjust very specific portions of the image and those air in my brush and my Grady int tool and in my circular Grady int tools. So So I have more options and we're going to deal with those in a minute. But we're gonna keep going down the line and play with this image in every panel so that you were just introducing you to the panels so below The next panel is actually inside of the light panel, and that is the tone curve. The tone curve has a little triangle. In fact, anywhere you see a triangle inside of light room, you just click it and it drops it down and you can see that I've got a tone curve and the tone curve is just a representation of what you want to brighten up or dark and down so I can either brighten up the highlights. I could brighten the shadows. Aiken work on the darks or the mid tones. And I can also work on the Green Channel of that point curve or the blue. I'm sorry, I think I said green Anyway, I could work on the Blue Channel here. I can work on the Green Channel of the Tone curve or the Red Channel on dykan work on all channels at the same time, which is just black and white or just the basic tone. So if I grab the middle and start brightening it up, you can see what's happening to the Swan, because the swan is kind of in those mid tones. But I can also come up to the highlights and just work on the highlights. And now I'm working more on that sky and the highlights inside of the swan and inside of the lake. And then but notice. I anchored the middle, so the middle State exactly where it is, and then I could take the shadows down just a little bit so I can rich in of the shadows. So the tone curve is a really great place to add your contrast. In fact, I would say that the contrast knob up here, the slider up here in the contrast is kind of a brute force contrast. It doesn't have a lot of finesse, whereas your tone curve here has a lot of finesse because not only can you identify very specific points of contrast, but you can also play with the green, blue and red channels a red, green and blue channels. Which means that if I want the shadows in the blue and the shadows to be, uh, darker, I can actually take I can create a midpoint here And then I could take the shadows and say, I want the shadows toe have mawr blue in them. So I'm taking them up and then notice that the highlights are getting the warm tones in them. So I'm adding Mawr blue to the shadows, and I'm adding mawr yellow to the highlights. And this is where people can create a really interesting, uh, cross process effect or kind of an old time film. Look, something like that. And if I want to reset all this, I simply right click and I can reset this channel or all channels. So I'm going to reset all channels and go back to just the main point curve, and I'm going to lock in the mid tones. I'm gonna bring up the highlights just a little bit, and I'm gonna bring down the shadows just a little bit, just so that I have a little bit more punch in the contrast. All right, so that's the point curve. Then I'm going to go to color and inside of the color there's the color basic color tones right up here. That's temperature tent vibrance saturation. Then you have a color mixer where you can identify specific colors and play with them. And then you have color grading, which is really a useful tool as well. So let's start at the top. The first thing we're gonna do is play with the temperature and figure out what the right temperature is. If I click on the dropper and I come over here, I can identify something that I know to be white. So I'm going to say that this area of the swans back is white, so I'm gonna click on it and now notice what it did. Is it whiten that which made everything else very yellow. So obviously that's not actually white. That should be very blue because the swan is in shadow. So I'm in. Instead, click over here on the mountain where there's gray rock, and that's a little bit more accurate, so I'm kind of in the zone. Could play with it until you feel it. It's right. Then take your tent. Usually you can tell when tent is wrong because it looks way to magenta. Well, looks way too green. So I'm just gonna kind of shifted around until that feels right. And when you're trying to figure out color, remember, Focus. Uh, it's the easiest way I get a lot of people asking me, How do you do color? How do you figure out color? How do you get used to color? Um, it's just like focus when you're looking at manual focus. If you're looking to your camera and your manually focusing, generally speaking, you will look and you'll you'll focus this way and you go past focus and then you'll focus back and you go past focus until it goes blurry again, and you'll keep going back and forth, back and forth until and your swings get you go wide this way and wide that way, and then the next time you swing, you swing a little less you swing and until finally you get the focus because the only way you can actually see focus is by going past it. Because it might just get sharper and sharper and sharper. And you think, Oh, it's gonna get sharper And then all of a sudden stops getting sharp, and it starts getting soft again. That's how you see focus. You go past it and then passed it again and keep until you nail it. Same thing is true for color, so you'll notice that when I'm inside of the temperature, I'm going toe to warm. I'm going to cold until I finally hit something that feels right. And then I take through the same thing with tent. I go to green, I go to Magenta and I just keep going back and forth until I hit something that feels right. That's how I find color now. Vibrance and saturation. Vibrance is a really amazing tool because it on Lee takes things that are already saturated and saturates, Um, mawr, and it tends to lean towards greens and blues and things like that in order to protect skin tones. We don't have skin tones here, but I'm gonna bring the vibrance up a little bit so that we've got some nice vibrance back there in the greens and the blues here in the front. And then I'm gonna take the saturation and go down just a little bit because I do like the soft look of, ah, low saturation. But then the vibrance helps to pop just the important colors, which is the greens and the blues. So I like that. And now I can come into the color mixer and the color mixer is specifically designed to allow you to target specific colors. So I want to color or I want to target the greens and the blues more than anything else. So what I'm gonna do is I I could choose either color. Let me zoom into this so you can see it a little bit better. I can choose color hue, saturation or luminant. So what I'm going to choose here is saturation. And I want to find all the blues and I want to increase the saturation of the blue just a little bit So let me show you. I'm going all the way so you can see what's happening If I go the other way it becomes gray and you see how this become black and white Almost completely here And so I can change how my blue looks and I just wanna pop it just a little bit So I'm just plus five on it And the greens I kind of don't want those greens to be quite so open I When there we go I kind of don't want those greens to be so vibrant And they look a little bit weird to me And they're a little too harsh to to glowy green They look like a highlighter on dso What I want to do is I'm gonna take the saturation down just slightly on the green. But mawr importantly, I'm gonna go to the hue on the green and I'm just gonna grab the green hue and I'm gonna go one way or the other See how I can ADM or green so that it gets even worse or I can add a little bit of yellow to the green and now it looks much more natural just by adding a little bit of extra yellow to the greens so that it just doesn't look so neon. All right, so that is the color mixer, which is fantastic, and you can turn it on and off with this little switch right up here. So if you click on and off, you'll be able to see what you did, and it's It's very subtle, but I like it. So now we'll go to the color grading option, which is basically what they used to call split, toning and split toning Used to be. You could add a color tint to the shadow or to the highlights, but now you can actually work on the shadows independently from the mid tones independently from the highlights. So it's just a much mawr subtle way of working with toning your images. So if you look here, you'll see three mid tones, shadows and highlights, and you can work on each one independently. If you don't like this version so you don't like the way this looks. You can also go just to the shadows, and now you see this is your color wheel, and here's your luminous and you're blending in your balance. On the same is true with the mid tones and the highlights. You can also click here and you'll get a global setting, which is I don't use this one because it doesn't have a lot of control. You can drop this down and get the hue saturation luminous, but it's it's very global, and so it just happens over the whole image. It's not the subtlety that I am looking for when I'm working in color grading. If I wanted to do this, I would probably go somewhere else and do it. But this is a kin toe working on temperature and tent all at the same time across the whole image. So I'm going to go back to my three pronged method here because I like the control and I'm gonna zoom out so that you can see what I'm doing to the image, and I'm going to start playing with shadows. Now remember, I could take the shadows and everywhere the shadows I can start adding a tone. See how I'm just using the color wheel to decide what tone toe ad I want a blue tone in the shadows. So once I've chosen a blue tone. If I hold the shift key down, it locks that color in. And then when I slide, I'm sliding saturation of that color. So this is zero. And then I'm increasing the saturation of that blue tone that I'm adding. So I've locked that in, Let go of that. And now I'm going to go up to the highlight. And in the highlights, I want to add a little bit of warmth. So I'm going to click on there and go up here to the warmth and I'm just looking for a color that I want. So I don't want green. I want more of a yellow or orange and then I'm gonna hold the shift key down, and I'm gonna bring it down to zero, and I'm just gonna barely bring that warmth in. So you start to see it happening, especially in those green areas. And the highlights here may be the highlight of the lake and up there on the mountains. Then I could go to the mid tones and do the same thing. I can add a little bit of, ah, warmth to the mid tones, but in this case, I'm just gonna go just barely warm, so I'm not doing much to it, So watch the difference. Now, this is before and this is after. So it just adds a little bit of warmth to everything, except for the shadows. Get a little bit cool, which is actually kind of a natural thing to happen anyway. Then I can play around with the balance in the blending. Blending is blending is essentially how far out you're allowing the shadow to become. Will you allow the shadow to cross over into mid tone and will you allow mid tone to cross over into highlights? So how much are you willing to blend those things? Um, if you blend them less than those shadows, gonna be very specific shadows. But if you blend them mawr so I'm blending less blending mawr and it just helps cross over. And I like more of a blend because it kind of pushes across the boundaries. And then balance is basically which way do you want to go? So it's pretty warm in the highlights, and it's pretty cold in the shadows. Do you want the whole photo to be a little bit cooler, or do you want the whole photo to be a warmer like which way do you want us to identify? Most things in this as the warm highlights. Or do you want us to identify most things in this photo as the cool shadows? So let's just play with it and see if I go to the left. The whole photo starts to become cooler. If I go to the right, the whole photo starts to become warmer. And I think I actually prefer the cooler to the warmer. So I'm actually tending to go about 25% down, so I'm tending towards Cooler. I think I like that better, but you might like it warmer, so go warmer cooler. I'm gonna stick right about there. So I'm minus 66. Actually, it's too much. There we go. I'm, like, minus 48 I like what I'm getting out of that. So we're going to stick with it, and now we know that we have the color that we want, so we're just going to shut that and we're going to go into the effects panel now. The effects panel is where you get your texture, your clarity, your d hes your vignette and your grain. So these air, all of the effects that you could do to a photo, Usually texture is really great for landscapes you get really, you know, great texture and trees, bark feathers, all that kind of stuff. You're gonna get some really cool stuff out of that clarity is like, uh, Mork contrast. It's It's intense contrast in the mid tones, so it kind of helps eyes pop. It kind of helps hair pop a little bit. It kind of gives gives you a little bit mawr definition in things in the photograph, like a coat. A dark coat would get a little their darker, and then the skin would get a little lighter, so texture and clarity are fairly similar, and we used to actually use clarity as a way of getting more texture out of the photo. But now you want to use texture when you want texture, and I'll show you other examples when we'll go into a photograph of a person where we're gonna actually use texture to remove blemishes and stuff on skin. So we're gonna soften skin with that, and clarity is also pretty good for landscape photos, eso and then D. Hayes. That's something you use when there's actually fog you want to cut through, or there's some kind of reflection on window you wanna cut through. Or you can actually add kind of a fogginess to a photo by going negative on D hamza. Swell. So let's start with texture. So I'm zooming into our swan, and I wanna add some texture to that swan and you see, by increasing the texture, I'm really getting some nice feathers. So I'm just gonna increase it until I see the neck feathers nice. And then I'm gonna go to the clarity and I'm gonna play around with clarity and notice how the clarity is also adding a little bit of texture. But mostly what it's doing is it's adding richness to these feathers here. So the darker feathers getting some richness, shadows, air, getting some richness here the beak is getting a little richness. So so we're We're getting a lot of mawr information out of that swan. Now it's doing it globally. But most of this stuff is kind of out of focus in the background, so it doesn't matter all that much. I like what we're getting there So we're gonna stop there. We don't need to use d hes, but just so that you can see what d hes does. It's like severe contrast. So you grab the D A's and you go up. It just really cuts, adds a whole bunch contrast. And the reason it's doing that is because it wants to be able to cut through fog and see things that are very low. In contrast, um, and then, of course, you have the vignette ing option. This is kind of an old school technique. You grab the vignette, you drag it down, it creates a vignette and notice that it creates a vignette based on the photo on the crop of the photo. But it z just a circular vignette that starts on each corner and moves towards the center. You can play around the mid tone. Sorry, the midpoint. You can play without how round it gets or how square it gets so that it follows the crop a little bit better. Um, you can play with the feather so that it's very sharp or it's very feathered on. Do you can allow highlights to cut through, So you notice how this highlight Now just cut through that vignette on dso vignette ing. It could be a very artistic thing. It could be something that makes your images look like they were shot on like an old hold a style camera or something like that. But I'm not a big fan of it, so I'm turning it off. And I very rarely use the vignette tool and the grain grain is a wonderful, wonderful tool. I'm not going to use it on this shot because I don't need it. But if you drop down the grain tool, you have the ability to Let's zoom in here, you have the ability to add grain, and you can see how Let me turn off my highlight and shadow warnings here so that you can see exactly what that grains gonna look like. So I'm gonna turn off the grain. You can see how smooth this is. Um, but then if I hit the grain, there you go it See how it added that grain. And it's very natural looking grain. I can change the size of the grain so that smaller or I could make it bigger. So the film film speed basically and then also roughness. And generally speaking, when I'm dealing with grain, I'll bring grain up to somewhere in the twenties or thirties. I'll bring the size kind of in the 28 range, and then I'll bring rough way up. So I like I like a high roughness on the grain because that makes it feel a little bit, um, chunkier and a little bit more like real grain. So that's how I would use grain if I was using it for this photo. But I'm not going to, so I'm going to simply turn the grain off. Now let's talk a little bit about detail inside of the detail area. This is where you get your sharpening again. We already added texture to this, but notice that there's some sharpness that could happen around that I. So I'm gonna go in and add not so notice that you've got the detail you've got, sharpening a drop down menu on sharpening a drop down menu on noise and a drop down menu on color noise. In our case, we're working on the sharpening first. Um, I don't wanna add extra sharpening necessarily because it gets really crunchy looking. You can see that? That looks way too sharp. Um, instead, what I do is I usually bring the sharpening down just a little bit. And then I take the radius up and by taking the radius up, what you end up doing is you end up, um, deciding Thio sharpen an entire eyebrow. Or, in our case, we're sharpening the eye and this little black area on the beak and the beak itself, rather than sharpening each individual pixel. So the radius is determining how far out does light room look before it starts to sharpen an object? So I'm telling it t to focus on larger objects rather than if I go small on the radius and I go high on the sharpening. Now it's actually sharpening individual pixels, maybe individual hairs. And so things get real crunchy and ugly looking. So I usually go a little bit lower on the sharpening and a little higher on the radius. And that helps me sharpened big objects, which is what you usually are trying to do when you're sharpening an image. Um, the detail just allows you to get a little bit more detail in the image itself. Uh, you could kind of relate that to maybe, uh, the idea of mawr texture aan den masking, masking. I hate using masking, but sometimes it works. And the idea is that it doesn't start using the sharpening until it start seeing a need for sharpening. So like it won't start sharpening your skin until it hits the hair and then they'll start sharpening the hair. But oftentimes it messes up, so just sharpen the whole thing or don't sharpen it. Generally, the masking is a little bit off, so I'm not a big fan of the masking. So the next two tools that we're gonna use our noise and color noise tools And in order to show you these, I can't use the swan image because there's no real noise in that image because it was shot, you know, in brighter light. And so I don't have noise. So I'm going to take this opportunity to show you how to find a specific image that you're looking for based on some kind of criteria. And so our criteria here is I'm inside of my travel folder. So I'm inside of the folder with travel, and what I'm going to do is go up to the search function and notice that it added that whatever I'm looking for has to be in the Travel Europe folder or in the Travel Europe album because that's where I waas. And then I want to go down here and choose a criteria and I'm gonna choose isso. So then I'm gonna choose a really high I s O So I'm gonna go for, like, s. Oh, so now I've got lots of images that were shot at 6400 s O. And I could add, Ah, girl. And then it's gonna look for Onley 6400 eso images that have a girl in them and this is going to be my daughter. So let's let's use that image as the image we're gonna work on. So there she is, and you'll notice that there's quite a bit of noise in it. And it z not ugly noise because it was shot with a good camera. Um, in fact, this camera you can see here is the five. D mark four. It's shot at 6400 I s O at F 2.8 at an 80th of a second, so it's a really I love the shop. I think it's beautiful on DSO I want toe work on that noise. So if I didn't like the grain, which I do like grain and I think that grain looks perfectly fine, so I would probably leave it, but I'm going to show you how to remove it. So if I want to remove the noise, I'm going to take noise and increase the noise removal until boom. Now, I don't see that grain on her face. And then if, if oftentimes the noise removal will start to soften some of the edges, or maybe her eye lashes or something like that. So that's when you take the detail, um, area. So you take detail and you move it up. So I'm gonna try and keep both in the frame for you. So be watching her eyes. But also I want you to see this detail slider and I'm gonna increase and you can see how her eyes start. Thio. So this is no detail, and this is lots of details. See, her eyes start to sparkle again. So I'm gonna bring the detail up. You can do the same thing with contrast, So this is lots of contrast. This is little contrast, lots of contrast. Little contrast. The problem, with contrast, is that it also chunks up the skin so you can see how there's like a texture being added to the skin. So I don't generally do anything with contrast. But occasionally, if I really need some help on getting those eyes back, I'll grab the contrast and bring it up just a little bit. And now I've got an image. I've got an image that is nice and clean. It doesn't have as much grain on it because I use the noise filter here, and I used a little bit extra on the detail. Now if this image was instead of black and white, if it was in color, then you would notice something else about it. And all this is important to note. This is how light room comes, so all images have color noise in them. All digital images have color noise. And so, if this if this was off from the beginning, you would see this. So every image, even 100 ISO images have color noise in them and light rooms going to start right out of the gates at 25 or something similar to that in order to remove that color noise. The only question for you is do I need to remove Mawr color noise? Now, the five D Mark four is a really impressive camera when it comes to noise and color noise. So I don't have to worry about changing this almost, ever. I think I've changed color noise once in a great while, when I get up into the 128 thousands or whatever. But if you see that there's color noise in your image, this is where you come and just add a little bit more. Usually it's gonna be a 25. Maybe you might get up to 50 but once you go beyond 50 you're probably just wasting your time anyway. So, um, this is this is a really, uh, effective tool because it pretty much covers all circumstances right as it is at 25 right out of the gates, just the way they planned it. So you rarely have to use this, but this is a black and white image, so the color noise doesn't really matter to us. And now you know how. Toe work the detail section of light room for the next tool, which is the optics tool. We need to go to a different image. We're going to go to the actual images of buildings because then you'll actually be able to see the optics a little bit better. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna come back into the grid and we're going to go up here and look for, um Let's just call this a church. So we're gonna look for churches. There we go. I've got a bunch of churches in Europe. Onda, we're gonna look for something. Um, let's let's do something like this pipe organ. So I'm looking at a pipe organ. No, I'm not looking at pipe organ. Now I'm looking at a pipe organ, so I'm looking at a pipe organ and I have no optical changes on this pipe organ, and this is actually a good image toe play around with the the details on because I think I have a little bit too much noise for my taste on this image. So I'm just going to grab the image and go up the image noise and go up to like 27 that smooths out my pipe organ, so I like that much, much better. So in that case, I didn't like the grain all that much. So there we go. That's a good reason to use the noise. Cancelation on that. So we're going to go to the optic section, and I want you to watch what happens when we enable our lens correction. So I'm gonna click on lens correction and notice what happens. Do you see how it's changing two things? It's changing the shape of the image because there's a bow to the lens, and so it's flattening out the bow and the lens, and it's also getting rid of the vignette that's natural to that lens. And if I click on this little drop down menu, you can see it's registering that This is a cannon 24 70 millimeter, 2.8 lens. And then it has the option for me to try to remove the distortion, so it's already it's taken out the distortion of lens, but I can add the distortion back. I can say no. I want to keep the distortion. But the lens vignette has been removed or I could go the opposite direction. I like the removal of the distortion, but I want to keep the natural vignette. And so you get to make that decision. I can actually say I want, like, 25% of the vignette removal, and that's where I wanna go S O. This is a very useful tool in helping to straighten out lines in your photographs, especially when you see kind of, ah, Boeing of edges. So when you see like something Boeing and you can see that and that's just a little bit. So it's straightening out those pipe organs a bit. You can see how these this area here is getting a little thinner. It's not quite so wide because it's because the Boeing of the lens actually creates wit there. Okay, now the question is D fringing and D fringing and removing chromatic aberration. We have to go to yet a different photo because sometimes these things don't crop up, and so they're unimportant. So we're going to go toe another photo. In order to really show you d fringing, I have to find an image that has kind of a silhouette situation. Where there's there's bright light coming in through window. Or, uh, there's a silhouetted building with light coming through. Or sometimes if you're taking a picture of a person there wearing a black jacket and then they're against a white background, you'll see this weird edge on their coat that is kind of purple or green or magenta or something like that. And so that's this image right here. So I am here in a place called San Marino, and as I zoom into the image, you'll notice that on this side, and I really have to even zoom in further to see it. But see that green line? That's because of the contrast between the highlight here on the shadow here. It just has a hard time describing that line. That transition is giving it trouble. Notice that here it's a magenta line on this side. So magenta over here, green over here. So it's almost like everything that's on the right is green. And everything that's on the left is magenta. Andi, those come from the fact that you have different pixels. Um, and those pixels are recording separately. They're not. They're not stacked on top of each other. They're sitting side by side. And so there's green being recorded separately from, uh from the blue separately from so all of S, O R G and B red, green and blue are recording separately. And so then when that gets put together, sometimes the on the edges where it has, like, a real harsh edge you get to see this the errors that it's making and trying toe interpret, interpret late all that information and put it back together. So we're going to fix it by simply going in here and clicking on the remove chromatic aberration. So when I click on that, I'm going to zoom in even further and you're gonna be looking either to this left area or this right area. You'll see green and you'll see magenta, and I'm gonna click on remove chromatic aberration and boom! The green over here got removed. The magenta got removed over here, and all is well. So usually that's all it takes. Just click on that button. It's all gone. In fact, there's absolutely no reason why you, as a photographer, shouldn't just always turn on remove chromatic aberrations and you could just save that as a preset on the way in. There's no reason you shouldn't use that because it doesn't harm the photograph in any way. Now, if for some reason that doesn't do the trick, you can also use the manual version. So I'm going to go to the manual version of that tool, and I'm going to go to the color dropper. I can actually choose the amount I want to remove of the green or the purple, and I can change that Hugh right down here. But I could also just go the color dropper and grab the color dropper and going point at the color. I want to remove and click on it, and if you click on it just right, identifies the color. So now you can see that it's identifying that area of color, and then I could just remove it and you can see that I'm if I don't remove it. And if I do remember, I can pull out Mawr and then Aiken spread it. So it's like I only wanna work on this small amount and you can see that it's there. It's not doing it job. I'm removing Ah, whole bunch, but it's not doing it. But then once I expand the color beyond that. Now there, I got it. So now it's this area. It's this amount that's getting removed. Okay, I didn't quite get it. They're now I've got it so you can go a little bit more. There we go. So now you can see that I've removed it manually. So if you get to the point where this remove chromatic aberration doesn't work, then go ahead and use this tool and it will allow you to specifically select what color you're trying to remove. But in my case, it's really simple to just click. Remove chromatic aberration, enable the profile lens corrections and boom. We've fixed that photo, uh, in lickety split, no time flat. So in order for us to do the next tool, which is the geometry tool, I have to go toe buildings because that's where it really shines. I use it all the time, and it's a fantastic tool, but let me let me find a photo and the photo I'm looking for is inside of my travel. Alba Maze's well and it's a building, So I'm gonna look for a building, and I'm also going to look for that building in Regensburg. So I'm looking at There it is Regensburg right there. And so I click on that. So now I've got a building in Regensburg. That's the one I was looking for so you could see how easy it is to find something on Ben. I'm going to work on this photo now. The first thing I'll do is just click auto, so it gets me in the zone. I'm going to go. I don't agree necessarily on everything, So I want to darken it down just a little bit. I definitely want to go into the optics area, and I want to remove the chromatic aberration and the enable the lens corrections that way. It's not bowing. It's straight on bears no vignette ing on it, but still noticed that I'm shooting at a weird angle and I want this to be nice and square. So what I'm gonna do is go into the geometry section of the of the edit panels and I'm going to click on upright guided. So once I'm in the guide and I could choose like, auto, and it will do a decent job of trying to straighten it up. But if I choose guided. I get to exactly identify where all the lines are that I wanna be straight. So I'm gonna click on this little tool over here. That's like a little cross. I click on it and then I'm going to identify the important lines. So I click on the tools and I grab this line and draw a line across it. Then I'm gonna get to verticals in two horizontal. So my second horizontal I'm gonna grab right down here. And I think the ground might not be a Z even as this line. So I'm gonna go for that line right there, and you notice that it straightened everything up. It's straighten the top on the bottom. So now that's level. So now I want to go here, and I'm gonna grab just this Not not the shutters, because the shutters might be, like, kind of wonky, a little bit. I'm gonna grab the actual windows themselves. So I'm just gonna grab the inside of this window and just follow that window so that I'm following the stonework and then I'm gonna grab this window here. I'm gonna follow the stonework on this window, and now you can see that this is a perfectly upright image. And of course, it's cropped off a little bit here and there simply because I didn't shoot wide enough to get all of the windows. But that's OK because now I could go into my crop tool, which is our next tool that we need to discuss. And in the crop tool, I can either choose a specific crop or I can unlock it. So in the crop tool, you have the ability to choose different ratios for your crop. Or you can flip the crops so that it's vertical or horizontal or you can unlock it. And if you unlock it, then you could just grab any side and it'll just reconfigure itself. So I'm just cropping off the edge so that it's fairly similar to that other side. Um, and that will work. Um, I like that. I want to bring this in a little bit like that, and if I wanted to straighten it, I can use this to straighten so I could just do this kind of thing or I can auto straighten it, and it's just going to straighten it back to where it was because Obviously I've already aligned it so that it's very straight. So now that I've cropped the image the way I want it, I can start working on this image again and do a little bit more work on the light area. Um, and I would love to have a little bit more texture. So I'm gonna go in and grab some texture to that wall because it's such an interesting texture, Andi. Then I'm going to go into the color area, and this is where I can really play with this building because I'm going to get the right temperature to begin with. If I just use the color dropper and go and click on White, that's normal. That's what that would look like if it was white. But I'm actually cool it down just a little bit, and I'm going to get rid of the vibrance on that and also the saturation. So I want it to be fairly muted Onda. At this point, I This is where the color mix air really shines because I can go in and say I want the saturation of the red to be pretty high so I can see how I can play with the saturation of that red. So I'm gonna really beef up the saturation on the red, and then I'm gonna take the saturation of the yellow down just a little bit, so it's a little bit more muted that way. I've got this kind of dingy yellow, but I've got these really cool red things here. But I also want to go into the luminous of that same yellow, and I want to darken it down. But I want to figure out what that luminous really is. So I'm going to click on this little targeting tool here. I'm gonna click on the targeting tool. And once I've got the targeting tool lit up, I just simply go here and I'm going to scroll down or up and you can see that it's choosing to colors. Is choosing kind of the orange and the yellow together, and it's darkening down that whole thing because I would have just thought grabbed the yellow and bring it down. But it's actually yellow and orange, so I'm just darkening down both so that I've got a deeper, uh, I've got a deeper color on that building, and then I might need to go back in and rethink the saturation on this yellow because maybe after I darkened it down a little bit, I kind of want some saturation to it. So I think I like that. I could also go into that same tool into the color mixer, and I could just click on on Hugh. And then I could take the actual hue of that yellow again, holding on to this target adjustment tool. I can then dial the hue so that it becomes Mawr green, orm or orange. Play around with that a little bit too there. I like the way that looks on DSO. We have just done some amazing stuff in just a few very short seconds or minutes. Andi and this is a very different photo now from its original. Now, in order to show you another tool. Once you've done stuff to an image and you like what you've got, you can always come down to the versions at the very bottom and click on it, and it will give you all the versions of that image. So I click on the That's what the original looks like, and that's what our new one looks like original new original New. You can also do this and you can create a version so I can click on version and say, Um, almost finished. So now I have two versions. I have the original and I have my almost finished version, and then I can keep adding to those versions. But I can also turn off the versions here, and I can also click on this little button right down here. Andi, that's going to show me the before after. So if I click on it, that's what it looked before. Now it looks like that, um, so those air, all of the tools that you have inside of the edit menu inside of light room and hopefully you'll take the opportunity to play with them because remember, everything in light room is nondestructive. You are not damaging the photo because, like I just showed, you can always go back to the original. If you click on that original, it'll take you right back to the start. You don't have to worry about messing up because it is always non destructive. Plus, anything that you've just done here is also gonna be available on your IPad or on your phone so that you can show your friends. Or you could do a little extra editing When you're standing in line at the grocery store, or when you're waiting for your kids to pick them up at school, you can keep playing with your images and sharing them out to the world.

Class Materials

1. Lightroom Presets and Profiles

JP BW Collection.zip
JP Color Pro Profiles.zip

2. RAW Images To Follow Along With

ENHANCE DETAILS EXAMPLE.zip
LOCAL ADJUSTMENTS TEST.zip
PANO AND PHOTOSHOP SET.zip
RETOUCHING IMAGE.zip

3. Lightroom Creative Cloud Schematic

Lightroom Creative Cloud Schematic.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Teresa Piccioni
 

Great great great class: Jarett explains the Lightroom workflow clearly and thoroughly. I am not a native English person and my English is quite poor but Jarett explains in a very simply and clearly way everything and I understand all chapters perfectly. Thanks guys, great job. I highly recommend this lesson to everybody,

Roger
 

I have watched each and everyone of Jared's classes on Creative Live and they are first class. I've waited a long time for a new one and now we have it and it's another gem. This is a wonderful overview of Lightroom and will repay watching sections (or all of it) several times to absorb the wealth of information presented. For anyone new to Lightroom, this is just what the doctor ordered.

Gabrielle
 

Really in depth, so helpful! Thanks

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES