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Editing and Processing in Adobe Lightroom

Lesson 4 from: Mobile Food Photography

Andrew Scrivani

Editing and Processing in Adobe Lightroom

Lesson 4 from: Mobile Food Photography

Andrew Scrivani

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Lesson Info

4. Editing and Processing in Adobe Lightroom

Lesson Info

Editing and Processing in Adobe Lightroom

So now that we have our shooting done, I'm going to take you into both light room and the apple, um, camera setting so that we can edit our photos. So the first thing I want to do is go over the light room. And in just some of the photos that we've already taken, I'm gonna create a new album. We're gonna call this edits, and I'm gonna add them from where we just were. And here we have the edits. So now I have six edits here in light room, and I'm gonna go in and select one, and I'm gonna get ready to do some basic corrections on this. So we have light corrections right here. We have sliders. So whether we're in the Apple software or win light room, basically we're gonna be working with sliders, and they're all very comparable. So I'm gonna do one foot one or two photos in light room, and then I'm gonna flip back into apple so that you understand that there's so much there's so much alike and that you have to trust your eyes when you're editing on your phone. I would suggest turning you...

r screen brightness as high as it'll go so that you are not under exposing your You're not pushing out your whites and your highlights. Because if you're in a lower screen mode, you may not understand that you are blowing out your highlights. So I'm gonna show you like here I am. I'm almost at the very top. Then I pushed myself all the way to the top there. So my exposure, I feel like my exposures. Okay, so I'm not going to start there. I'm going to start with the contrast. I want to pull some contrast into this photo because it seems a little bit bright to me, but I don't want to just my exposure. So I'm just gonna touch the contrast ever so slightly, and I'm going to start playing with that and you could see as I get higher, that image gets much more contrast. It's a little too much for me, so I'm gonna just goto about plus 50 on contrast, then usually what I also like to do is play with the black and start to pull that black down and up until I find a nice balance. And once I feel like I notice it with my eyes that I back off. So you try to pull it up until I start to really notice it, and then I'll back off a little bit. So I'm gonna pull it down to about I see, like, I really start to notice it here in this minus 90 66. So I think I may bring that back to something like 40 or 45. Ah, that feels pretty good to me. You also have lots of other, um, adjustments here, but I feel like I'm uncomfortable with that adjustment. But what I want to do is I want to crop this photo. I want to get a little tighter. So there's a crop tool like in most of these programs, that gives me the opportunity to kind of close down and be a little bit tighter. I feel really good about that. I take the check, Mark, I really like that photo. I can play with it endlessly if you really wanted to. But I think I'm really content with that one. So I'm gonna go back to select this super macro that we played with, cause I feel like the more I pull shadow and contrast into this photo, the more dramatic it's going to get. I'm in the adjustment panel for exposure light contrast like I was before. I want to try to start immediately adding some black to this. So if I get that slider moving for my blacks, you could see if I start to pull that down and how far you notice it. I really noticed it there. So I'm gonna pull it back to maybe again, like 45 to 50 make a little bit more drama and then go right for the shadows again and do the same polo shadows up and down and see what I get again. Once they start to really notice it, then I start to back off. But I feel like with the whites to I can actually jump in there and play with the highlights a little bit and start to really start to see a difference between them. I start to really notice. It may seem a little blown out at 65 66 so I'm gonna just add a little bit to it. So I'm gonna go like about and then maybe pushed the entire exposure up just a tiny hair, and that's a pretty cool looking shot in terms off other things you could do with this. If, um, let's say, for example, we wanted to use the healing tool. This is This is an interesting tool that toe have on a phone that you don't have in the Apple software, where you basically select an area and then it mimics it, and then you can drag it to correct the section that you just highlighted. So if I go back there, you could see that it gives you the opportunity to drag and replace with these different selections. It's a little bit clumsy at times. It's not as precise is doing it on a desktop in the same program, even, but it's definitely something that you have an opportunity to correct those little things like crumbs or some smudge. Or if one of these swirls wasn't really giving you, you know, it looked like something had interrupted it or or smudged it or something. It gives you the opportunity to fix that. All right, so I'm gonna go into the Apple software now. We're gonna go into the album that I just shot for some of this stuff that we did in the dark room. So I'm gonna select one of the ones that seems like it has a lot of contrast. Is the one with my hand in it So that's kind of cool. Ah, we're in here and we're gonna hit the edit number button. And again we have now we got a whole different screen off correction tools. So this one here gives me that same contrast exposure, so I could start with the exposure and you could see that when I start to play with that pushing it pull. But that's really not the feature I want here. I want to start playing with those shadows and contrast. As you could see, That's the thing that I tend to gravitate to first because I really want to manage my highlights in my shadows And you could see like a soon as they start dropping the shadows out, those blacks start to get richer and my color start to get deepened. And if I go here he is again about the contrast that could pull down. And I think what I'm noticing is that my highlights or something I want Oh, uh fix a little bit. So here my highlights. And they seem you could see when I push him, they get really hot or really, really warm. So I'm just gonna play with them until I feel good about the color. Honestly, I think I'm gonna stay right where I waas. And that's what you find sometimes is that when you start to play around with your photos, understanding what each individual tool does gives you a better sense of like, Oh, if I shoot it this way, I'm gonna have this flexibility. Or if I shoot it that way, I may not have the flexibility I want in these particular areas. And that little dot there tells you where it starts. So, like, whenever you go to a given, go to a given. When you see this little dot right here underneath the line, it tells you where you started. So let if you wanted to kind of get back to where Baseline was, you could. We already played a little bit with the brightness we played with the black point that haven't touched yet. And I'm really, really zero out those blacks as much as I can and get some real drama there, So I like that. And that's sort of the orientation in which I played with it originally. But let me flip it and see if it gives me something else. If I reorient the photo, it doesn't really. I think it's still better, True to where I was in the beginning, so I just leave it there again. It's not hard, and it's all about doing the things that make your eye that please your eye. But it's also about trial and error editing on your phone. There's a lot of tools. There's a lot of ways to do it, but ultimately it's up to you.

Ratings and Reviews

Fotomaker
 

Andrew is a very talented food photographer. The title of his recent book says it all... The way he shows the impacts of different lighting, different "camera" (iPhone 11) directions or orientations relative to a light source, different types of lenses and ways to process captured images in this quickie roughly 45 min. class is very practical to get someone started with mobile food photography. He's also got a likable, pleasant personality - which plays a big factor for me when viewing online (or, any) classes. He's not over-hyped or condescending and his voice is a pleasant tone & well-paced (which is important to me because I've watched some CL classes with people who are the antithesis of that and had to stop watching the content). I've bought a few of Andrew's CL classes for ongoing reference. And, after getting introduced to his work, via CL, I now follow him on Instagram.

a Creativelive Student
 

Nice short little course with simple and straightforward instructions.

Michael Buse
 

Well presented, in formative, but I'm old school and I want my camera. I am always up for well-crafted food porn.

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