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Photoshop Essentials: Set-Up

Lesson 22 from: Post-Processing for Outdoor and Travel Photographers

Ben Willmore

Photoshop Essentials: Set-Up

Lesson 22 from: Post-Processing for Outdoor and Travel Photographers

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

22. Photoshop Essentials: Set-Up

Lesson Info

Photoshop Essentials: Set-Up

remember everything you do in light room is saved his text attached to your picture it's notas metadata remember there is little text file called the next mp file and I could actually open it in the text editor and all it hasn't it's a bunch of technical junk in it but then you get down to the part that just has the names of those sliders in what settings there at and that's how it saves everything we do to our images and there's a limitation on how much you can accomplish with that so let's start thinking about some of the things we might need to get outside of light room can use other programs will first we need to set up light room so it knows what settings to use if we tell it to open a picture in photo shop when it opens the picture and photoshopped most of time it's no longer going to be a raw file it's gonna process the raw file and send the unresolved to photo shop is going to bake in the changes that we made although there are some ways to get it too sam somewhat stay is a wro...

ng but what we do is to go to the light room menu here and I'm going to go toe preferences now in windows there is no light room menu and so preferences is probably going to be either under the edit menu for the help menu I just have to look one of the two because you don't have a light room menu that's ah mac convention it's just to have a menu with the name of the program so I'm going to go to my preferences and there are a couple choices in here one of them is called external editing so if I'm going to get a file out of light room and into let's say photo shop what should it end up using so light room assumes that if you open an image in photo shop when you're done with it you want to save the image back into the same folder as the original raw file and that light room should import that resulting image automatically back in the late in orderto have that work and have light room know what's going on whenever you open a file from light room into photo shop when you're done working on the file don't choose save as I save as is where you tell photo shop where to save it if you do that it will screw up light room light room ago I don't know where you saved that and it won't do anything with the resulting file because you didn't put it back where it expected it to go so when you open an image from light room into photo shop instead of choosing save as just to save just file saver command us and it will automatically save it in whatever file format is chosen right here in this menu and it will put it in the same location as the original raw file and it will import it in the light room so shows up in your catalog right next to the raphael now the only disadvantage of doing that that I can think of that kind of might annoy you is you're used to when you save your file they don't type in a name and you're not gonna have that when you go through this method of working but it's really easy to change a file named light room so just know that right afterwards you'll be able to change it light room so right here I need to choose the file form out that we're going to use if we open an image from here it wants to use tiff or photo shop not j peg j peg is not a good what I would call working file format if the next thing you're going to do is open the image and doom or changes to it stay away from j peg j peg is how would I describe it umm I don't know it's what's known as lossy compression j pegs biggest priority is to deliver a small file regardless of what it looks like it doesn't care what it looks like in general it just says I'm making a small file and that's overly convenient to email things to people to put it up in a web site sometimes to send off to have printed in that type of stuff even because there's a quality setting you can set it up real high so it doesn't degrade it much but the problem is every time you save the image close it up and then you decide to make a change to it later where you open it make another change and you have to save it again to get those changes updated and close the file every time you go through that process it's compressed again and every time it's lossy compression which means it's throwing away detail each time so j peg is a good final file format to deliver images in but it's not a great working file format where the next thing you're going to do is open it and make further changes and that's why in this menu it doesn't even offer the choice of j peg so instead we're going to do is use one of these to file formats because these are our lossless file formats meaning you lose nothing whatsoever in quality when you save into them so you khun reopen the image make additional changes saving clothes and do that over and over and over again in the file format itself is not degrading the quality of your picture each time unlike j peg does that make sense why they don't offer j p so we're going to do is use one of these two and if we need a j peg when we're done we're just going to export the jpeg now I'll show you how to do that later on so we gotta pick between these there's no quality difference between the two it's really up to you it doesn't really really matter but I used tiff and tiff can save a larger files so if you happen to end up like I do with one hundred some layers sometimes I have these light paintings were all they're all separate exposures that I'm combining and they can become very complex sometimes I run into the limitation of how big a photo shop file khun b most people wouldn't run into the ax you have to have like hundreds of pictures in there but if can go a little bigger but tiff has something that makes me really want to use it in that is if you do ht are you khun do it where you can process your hd our image right in light room using the same sliders they're used to applying to normal pictures but it only works if you save and tiff file format so I kind of defaulted tiff if you don't do a lot of hdr though and you prefer photoshopped file format which is what this is go for down here is the color space this determines how vivid the colors could be in your picture in photo shop needs to know if you want to limit that or not and this is a controversial topic meaning you're not going to get everybody agree on what to use but what I will tell you is srg has the most limited range of colors available every picture much and say every ninety eight percent of the pictures you see on the internet rs rgb most images that you get emailed to you r s r g b s rgb is kind of the lowest common denominator it say it's actually based on an old computer monitor imagine fifteen years ago the range of colors that could be displayed on a computer monitor that's what this is kind of based on it's mainly used for the internet it's going to severely limit us if we want to print our images and have really vivid colors in it the dhobi rgb is relatively standard it's what most people use that have graduated away from s r j b and want to be able to get a little bit more vivid colors in pro photos for people that spend the time to learn what it means and want to get the absolute most of their pictures but using pro photo it's too easy to mess up if you don't know what you're doing so it's a matter of you could this is kind of like on your camera this is the green zone on your camera you know when that dial recon shoes shutter priority aperture priority manual program and then there's the auto mode that you I mainly said it too when I'm going to hand the camera's somebody else that doesn't know what they're doing well that's that's rgb used that it's it's great it makes your image usable for just about anything but it's less than ideal going to adobe rgb is like clicking your camera over the programme mode where now you can move the dials and actually change things in going to pro photo is like going to manual mode on the camera which you have ultimate control but you've gotta know what you're doing because a lot of your pictures could end up looking bad if you don't move the dials the right way and so that's some ways you could think of it here the middle choices pretty safe for a lot of people an issue so if you're a color g can you really want to push things to get the absolute most out of your printer and everything else study what this means learn about it we don't time to get into it deeply here so I'm going to go for their below that we have how many bits either eight or sixteen eight bid you could use if you're close to done with your picture you don't need to make any dramatic changes anymore but what it does is it gives you about two hundred fifty brightness levels between black and white that's enough to make your image look good but it doesn't give you any extra leeway to make big radical changes to your picture well if you made the big radical changes to your picture in light room then you could set the state but this just means how much do you need in federal shop but if you need to make big changes to your picture and you want the most out of your picture and you don't mind that your files are twice as big you could to sixteen but a lot of people would never notice the difference though in quality I find though that if you stitch panoramas sixteen bit is going to give you a smoother sky down here's resolution that's just whatever you need for things to forty is good for most desktop printing some high end frontin are pretty impressed with need three hundred but to forty would still work pretty good er and all that I'll just leave compression at none anyway this sets up what file form it's going to be used in general if you use thes settings you're not going to be bad I'm going to close that up and now if you want to bring an image in the photo shop it makesem edits on it all we need to do is click on the image we like to work with go to the photo menu and there's a choice in here called edit in which means that it's somewhere other than photoshopped pettitte and something else you see right here says they edited photo shop or I happen to have some plug ins installed which allows me to edit in some other software you probably don't have those in your list unless you've purchased these pieces of software which are like plug ins you could get for photo shop and stuff but you should have this top choice and you should also have all the bottom choices those come with light room and so if I choose edit in fuchsia it's going to then export a tiff file open the tiff file in photo shop and then I can make changes to it so if I need some text on this image I can come over here not going to make anything overly pretty but it's not easy tio do text in ah light room so I might do it here although if it's bacon it's gotta be red all right and then I can have layers and work with those and everything when I'm done though remember don't do this even though it's what you're used to doing when you just created a branding file because that means save it somewhere else than where light room expects it to go instead to get it saved were light room expects it to dio just to save I just type command s pearlescent windows so I'm gonna do that command us and then when it's done I could just close the file and if I return to light room it sometimes takes in a moment but it will be imported into the light room catalog in the same location that this original wass in this particular case this image is located at the moment in a collection and I don't know if it put it in this collection or not but if I right click on the picture and shoes goto folder and library which means show me where it's actually stored and I look in here there should be a tiff file within that folder it'll have the same happens right there is bacon uh it's got the same file name and what it did is it stacked it with the original so now it's considered to be the kind of master like end result in this is just the original slid underneath it in the stack if I collapse the stack I just see the photoshopped version of the image we'll make a little bigger here the photoshopped version of the image but if I want to see the original which is thie untouched raw file I just click that number expands that there's the originally started from and so has never touches the original we always keep that as your original pristine negative and there's my photoshopped version if I look at the file name I can get the file name over on the side here it'll take just a moment to read it when you get to this area called metadata uh I'll tell you the filing this is the same as the name of the original file that's here this one didn't get renamed out out of the camera and just put a dash on the end in the word edit now right here in this part called meta data that's the file name I can just click on it and change it they're just changed file in on my hard drive the name of the file has changed to whatever I just typed in and so that's um a nice thing just in case you're not aware of it because I haven't mentioned it before if I wanted to rename a bunch of files I could select them all and then over here is his file name it'll say it's mixed because it you know it's not just one file name but you see this little icon over here if I click on that icon it will bring up batch rename feature so I could come in here and say let's use eh setting here if I choose edit where I can set up exactly how it's renamed like it should be the date it was shot at with some text I type in and then it should add a sequence number which means just number of file but I could cancel because I don't want to rename my files but if you have more than one image selected you go over here to the metadata panel and it ever says mix that means you have more than one they don't match in that icon right there will bring you to the batch rename whereas if he only had a single image selected you could just type in a name right there and so that's why I don't really care that I couldn't name it in photo shop as long as I remember right when I get back that I could just click over there works his file name I can do that I'm going to actually change the name to trash this use plus five so if I ever run into that on my hard drive because it's going to be sitting there in that folder and I'm not going to remember why I put it there I'm also going to take that and I'm going to market as a reject from the with the ex key means rejected so I'll remember it's okay to delete it uh now if I want to delete it because I really didn't want to make that I was just showing you guys how to do it what I can do is just click on the image and if I hit the delete key it'll asked me what it wants to do and you want to just remove it from the light room catalog but leave it on your hard drive it's just something you don't want to see in light room but you want to keep or do you want to delete it from disk if I hit that it's going to say uh let's see you one of these files I don't know why I don't see it does not support the trash I'm not sure where oh something's going on where it would have to empty the trash immediately in order teo do it I'm gonna cancel right now because I have to look into this a little bit see what's going on but uh usually it would work fun all right so what do we learn we learned that we first want to goto our preferences to define which file format is used when we open things in photo show and then if all we want to do is open the image work out a photo shop maybe add some layers do some retouching we go to the photo menu choose edit in and write their sense it the photo shop there's a keyboard shortcut command e just think of it is edit control ian windows so if you ever want to edit a picture in photo shop mandy means edit in photo shop so what are some of the things we might want to do in photo shop well here I have two images and if I just those I'll go to my develop module by pressing the letter d remember if you have more than one image selected at the bottom right of your screen there was that auto sync setting and it has turned on it means if I just one and the other one's selected it gets the changes too I'd come over here and optimize this a little bit maybe I bring up some uh shattered detail in such now I'm running into one thing here we have run into yet and that is the names of these sliders are wrong didn't we have highlights and shadows before and we didn't have a recovery what this means is this image it was most likely adjusted with an older version of light room couple versions ago before they updated the sliders and offered ones that could do more to your picture give you a better looking in result and it's simply trying to preserve the look that that old version produced in case you want to make a print or send a file and haven't look identical to the way it used to look and if you ever see it with the wrong names for the sliders over here you'll also find a little icon of a lightning bolt right there if you hover over it it will tell you it's from the old kind of sliders that were available for introduced back in two thousand ten and they've updated it since then and when you hover over that it gives you a little tool tip that says if you click here it's gonna update it to the current process mean that the modern sliders thatyou get ifyou've never ever adjusted an image before in light room these days so all I'm going to do is click that lightning bolt it'll try to maintain the look of the image but let's see here you have new processing technology I only have two images selected I hope so I'm not going to review this but you could review before and after because you're like man I'm made a print of this already and I hope it doesn't look radically different where you could review before and after or I could just come in here and say update the selected photos that kind of stuff so once I've done that then I get the sliders than I'm used to like so I'm glad we ran into an image that had been adjusted with the old version so I'm just going to find in this image a little bit and then let's take a look at what these two images looked like in what we might want done to them in photo shop so here I have a shot where you can see in the un sign of the distance but the window that I'm shooting through had a broken area where I think a bullet came through or something iraq and I decided to use that as a frame to frame the sign and boy be nice if I could find this image one day when I'm done wonder how he could do that when I'm done maybe we'll keyword it him so I have this but then I took also this image with that all I did was take the focus ring in my lens and slide it until the glass was in focus and the sign was out of focus so this in this I'm already shooting in f twenty two I couldn't get them both at the same time also I'm shooting hand held so even if I could my shutter speed would probably be too slow so I decided to just take two shots and all I did was I practiced I focused on one focus the other so I could remember where those twos spots were went click with one and slid my finger around on the lens to get the other click so now I'm going to take those two images and select them both I'm going to go to the photo menu and say I want to edit in and I'm not going to choose this because that would open it as two separate files I want both of these pictures in one file to get that I go to the bottom of this menu where I find a choice called open as layers in photo shop and what that's going to do is create one photoshopped file that contains one layer for each image so if I had twelve images I'd have one file with twelve layers in it but in this case I only have two images so when I choose open his layers and photo shop it's going to now process those two images the equipment to saving those tiff files it's going to send them over to the photo shop and then it's going to stack them one on top of the other so when I look at my layers panel I should end up seeing two layers one for each image and the layers air named with the original file names of those files now what I want a photo shop to do is compare those two layers and I wanted to on lee keep the part of the top layer that sharp if the layer that's underneath his sharper wherever it sharper I wanted to use what's underneath instead and it could do that all I need to do to get it to happen is to tell photo shop which of these layers it wants me to compare right now only one layer is highlighted were active and so it thinks that's all I want to work on if I hold down the shift key and I click on the layer that's not active I'll get it to both of them are active and now it's going to know that it should compare both of those layers because sometimes you do this technique with a complex photoshopped documented it's only some little element over on the side of the document you want then it's only a few layers you need out of a very complex you know thirty layer documents so you gotta get him selected the next thing that I'm going to do is go to the edit menu and that's where I'm gonna find a choice called auto blend layers it's gonna blend those two layers together and the way it's going to do it is it's going to look for contrast it's going to look in see which of the two layers has more contrast in which everyone has more contrast that's the one it's going to use but instead of looking at the images a hole it'll look at every little bitty part of the image individually and decide and anything that's ever in focus always have more contrast on things that are out of focus so when I choose auto blend layers consume up but you just used default settings in here I'll zoom up when it's done let's see what we get we'll choose undo before we're seeing just the top layer because it's obscuring our view of what's underneath and the top players on with the sign and focus choose undoes so that we re apply it and now you see that it has figured out where the sharp stuff iss between those layers and combine them together for me in that nice now all I'm going to do what I've done is same thing I always do when I sent it over to the photo shop just save not save ass save it tells me a percentage up here how far is along and saving you can even click the little close x well that's not at one hundred yet it will close it when it's done but I'll close it and then go back to light room and if I was looking at the folder that contains the originals I would see usually automatically just see the picture show up in this case it might do it in this collection but I'm actually in a collection set that contains all these things so it's just gonna be hard to tell where is it it might be way down below I'm not sure but I'll click on an image right click on it and say just go to the original folder in light room where that resides and I should end up seeing it in here again it's gonna have the name with tiff on the edit on the end but let's see in here is it this one there's my original bacon it's in here now sometimes if I'm not being able to view my file names at the top and things like that what I'll do is up here at the top in my filter bar one of things you can filter for is metadata in one of the things you can filter when it comes to metadata is what file type it is I just set this to file type I'll say show me all the tiff files it's gotta be one of the tiff files in that folder ok let's see if that's it I'll just hit f for full screen that's it and that so there it is now let's change its name so over here on the right you see the file name and I'm going to call that roys through broken glass but now if I want to actually be able to find it in the future I'm of course going to go to my keyword in area and I'm gonna come in here and type in that's a neon sign the neons broken off of it I think but I'm going to say it's a sign I'm gonna say it's glass which I don't know if I've used the word glass before I I haven't so anytime it's a word I haven't used yet I'll just select that word and cut it and remember that thing called z u for the unsorted sauce ese you and decide what category would that be in if it's glass it's not who it's not where it's not win yeo it's what right so that's where I go and I right at the beginning because you see the direction it's doing this little arrow I've got to go with that convention so this is the parent that little thing says this is inside of that so I put the same way and right there just paste in what I wanted ok glass I don't know where it's going to end up in my list but all I know is it's not going to be cluttered it's going to be in that park called unsorted then so then also what else money put in there well this place is called roy's so I'm going to go in here and say roy's and see if I've ever put it in there I haven't so I got to think about where would I store roy's well royce is in a town called amboy california so I'm gonna take amboy and see if I've ever keyboard and anything with that am beat yes I have so am boy I'll take that and then I'll do the little greater than symbol and I'll say roy's cafe now it's kind of it can be a little confusing when it comes to you see how I'm using the opposite direction thing the on ly time I used the one that's going that direction is when light room put some stuff in with those directions and I just gotta follow along with it otherwise if I found a word that's already in my key words right here I used the other direction so anyway all press return and now I'm going to be able to find that but I didn't use the word broken with glass and I don't know where I'd sort that broken broken go I don't know so I'm going to say ese we'll get a pro comma z u for unsorted and that would be a what I think and I'll just say broken so one day I'll figure out where broken go I do have one called broken glass already in there so just broken glass all right so now I know that's roy's broken glass if I knew it was a bullet hole I'd probably say bullet hole or something like that but I think that's enough to be able to find it in the future that's the only thing that's important what's that frame yeah yeah try it's a technique frame thank you frame in the more you get used to key wording the more you just look at it and say just think if this was important to me what in my head would I think of when I'd want to find it and you want to make sure you at least have those key birds in there so now if we actually look at our keywords list it did a lot of work for us if I goto where you see this little tick mark here that means something in there is checked on not everything if every single thing that was in here this had assigned to it would be a checkmark instead of a dash but I can go take it with north america it automatically tagged it with the united states it automatically takes it with california it automatically will not automatically cause I typed in amboy but andy was already there and I just created this entry right here that did not exist before called royce cafe but I didn't have to go through all that navigation did I I just had to remember where test did I ever put anything in their tanks and boy if I hadn't what I would have done was just typed in c for california when it showed up I'd put the little greater than thing and I'd say amboy and then another one roy's so you gotta get used to that but once you do when you're done processing your images it didn't take that long for me to put those words in there but the fact that I did means I'll be ableto find this image forever now and I'll be able to find it in a matter of two seconds or less all they would end up doing regardless of where I am in any of these things is I'll go over here to text at the top I choose keywords and I would type in roy lies in not finding oh no let's try amboy oh because I'm searching this older don't search that folder search all your photographs and then you should be able to come up here and if I typed in amboy horrified typed in roy I'd be able to find it that so we've learned about a few things here when it comes to editing in photo shop and the main thing was we needed to set up our settings first and then after we set up our settings we can either edit in photo shop which means we are just opening the picture might want ad text reducing retouching to it or if we have more than one image and we wanted to create some sort of a composite of of some sort there was a choice called I think it was go load files it's photoshopped layers and that's what stack them so let's see if I can figure out another use for loading files his photo shop blares here is a waterfall in iceland these images haven't been adjusted so look somewhat dull possibly and what I did here is I'm on a little bridge a walking bridge over the stream I took the shot and I just thought the waterfall wasn't quite doing it for me as far as how much water was coming down I wish it would have just rained a little while ago we have mork coming down but I just took a sequence of images because waterfall will look different with every shot and you never know which one is really going to be your favorite so I usually don't just take one and walk away instead I'll take a siri's and also if I take a siri's I could do other things with this I could turn into a time lapse possibly I could do all sorts of things but what I'm going to do is select the images that looked similar there were some that were a little darker I'll skip those just grab these that look like they have about the same exposure optimize him by heading the letter d for develop and I'll just do whatever it is I think they need maybe I want the water a little brighter so I bring up my shadows maybe I want a few other areas a little darker so bring down clarity whatever it is I think this image might need but I'm not going to do much because we want to spend her time in photo shop now so anyway I had auto sync turned on so they all got adjusted in all these images just got updated now I'm going to choose photo edit in open as layers and photo shop same command that we used to stack the two images with roy sign of the broken glass it'll take a little while because I have how many images selected here I have sixteen images in there I think twenty four megabytes or not megabytes twenty for megapixels apiece those air not tiny files and this is my laptop not a desktop so it might take a minute but what I'm going to do is I want it to look as if more water is going over the waterfall and so to do that we're going to cheat if you take more than one photo of the waterfall the water is going to be in a different position in each shot you saw the white of the water in fact you can see it right here in the preview and he's shot it's a slightly different position well there's a way to get photoshopped to compare the layers that we have and let's say had one layer at the top another layer below I can say on lee used the parts of the top layer that are brighter than what's underneath and if I do that if any part of that upper layer contains white from the waterfall and on the layer below there's a gap in the water in that same position the water is going to be brighter than the gap and is going to fill it in is if there was more water there in so I can come in here and make this look like there's a lot more water going down that waterfall now I have to say it doesn't usually go this slow usually be done a while ago but uh I'm not sure what it's taken a while but well given a minute here but the general idea though is that if we haven't compared the layers there this that if you were to look at let's say this layer watch right here to see this empty gap in one of the other layers I bet you there's going to be white water there just watch that spot stare at that little detail you see there right there is a little bit of white in there so if you were to compare these two layers and say on lee used the parts of of this layer that are brighter than this stuff well it would put some water in there let's see if it can happen I'm going to take the top layer and I'm going to change this menu at the top that's known as you're blending mod menu and I'm gonna set it to a choice called light and watch what happens when I let go does that look like more water we turn off this layer before after before after well let's just do it to more than one of these layers let's go to the next one and set it to light mode to and watch what happens more water and let's just grab all these layers at the same time and set them all alight mode dang look at that water so let's look at the difference between a single shot and all these shots put together now you can do that by either clicking on one of these eyeballs and then dragging up the list like this to turn off all of them or if you're lazy like me there's a little shortcut and that is if you go to the on ly eyeball that you'd like to keep on you can hold down the option key alton windows and just click on it and what that means is when you option click on eyeball it means hide everything but this so when I option click that's all clicking and windows that's a single air and then here are how many pictures without with sixteen or something uh put together but you see the difference in the waterfall now the only problem with this not the only but but one of the problems with this are the clouds are moving and when we do this that's also going to do stuff to the clouds it khun you look fine a lot of the times and down here the water is also going to look a little bit different looks great with whitewater I think but with more calm water sometimes it can look a little bit odd there is a way that we could limit where it's happening it all depends how comfortable you are with photoshopped though if you never use photo shop it might be too much for it but I'll do it anyway uh I'm going to select all the layers except for the bottom one and then what I'm going to be doing is going to hide all the layers except for the bottom so hold the shift key click on the top layer and see everything set for the bottom one is selected you can put all those layers into a folder that's called a a group by typing command g control gm windows or under the layer menu there should be a choice called there it is group players if you don't like keyboard shortcuts I'm gonna type command g and watch what happens to all the layers that are selected remembering that the bottom layer was not selected command g it looks like all those layers went away they didn't go away they went into this folder if I were to click on the little triangle next to the folder it expand and I could see everything inside then the other thing that I would need to do in order limit where all the layers are there contained inside that folder is to use a mask and that's where if you've never used photo shop before it might be a little bit of ah uh push to do this but at the bottom of the layers panel is an icon it looks like a little circle inside of a rectangle that adds a mask to whatever is currently active if you look at what's active in my layers panel you see it's the folder and so watch what happens when I click on that icon click that's a mask the way masks work is any part of the mask that is white leaves the later alone but if we introduce any black into that mask but grabbing the paintbrush tool and making sure this top color the bottom of my layers panels black that's what we're painting with uh if we do that and then we paint the paint's going to go into that mask and watch just watch the mask itself I'll paint over here and let go do you see the paint show up over here any part of the mask it turns black hides whatever is in that folder so that means watching my paint across the waterfall you see how it goes back to the look of whatever looked like with only one layer but what I'm going to do is just paint a cross down here where the water is they bring that back to normal I'm gonna paint across the sky to say bring that back to just looking at like one picture and I would also do that if the greenery around the side was flapping in the wind if it's moving around because we'll get a weird look there so I'm going to just paint out on these sides just in case there's some leaves moving or something and then I could turn off the eyeball next to the folder there's before theirs after not everybody likes this look but I like it has a possibility in what is interesting to me is that you can get the the look of more water on a waterfall which is usually what you get when you do a long exposure the white adds up that's going down in different positions but you I can do it without getting the overly silky look some people really like the overly silky look others don't this way I can get every little droplet of water frozen in midair instead of blurred as it comes down by taking like fifteen photos at a really high shutter speed where its facets freezes the water and you get much more detail but at the same time you make it really be a dramatic water folks it looks like a lot of water when really there wasn't anywhere near that much there was just that much so what do we do we loaded files into photoshopped layers we selected all the layers we sent him to lighten with the menu at the top of layers panel that's the essence to it and if we wanted to get fancy and learn enough about futter shop we could throw him in a folder put a mask on it and paint you need this layer underneath though because otherwise what would happen is the black it's in the mask would be hiding what's in the folder and there'd be nothing to fill in that emptiness and so it would look like this in photoshopped a checkerboard means there's nothing there and so we simply needed a layer of fill in that empty part and that's what the bottom layer score so I'm done with this and now what I'm going to do is type command s I'm not going to choose save as even though I might have been programmed do that for twenty years and using photoshopped I'm in a type save so that it goes were light room expects it to go I can click a little x here and even though it's zero percent saved by clicking little x which means I want to close the file once this reaches one hundred it would close the file not sure why it's still in zero but there goes said forty two percent suddenly and then once it's done if I return to light room it will be in the same folder as the original and had I not been working in collections which is where I've been getting my pictures from it would literally be just sitting right in front of me eyes because I'm working in a collection and then switching over to the folder that really contained it that I somewhat have to search for it to find it but I'm just waiting for it ninety four percent come on and this is one where I keyword it iceland waterfall in this is one we're under details or was it effects or something I have categories for effects like panoramas and slow shutter speeds and everything and I might call this a I don't know we have to name this effect waterfall stack or something you know so russ what you got we have got a couple subjects that I think we need to talk about potentially later on either today or tomorrow so I think for right now we are good to go to break I think people love seeing that although they are now disappointed that they can't trust pictures of waterfalls anymore because now they know the lie that were big so not a lie no no if a neutral density filter is not a lie thin this isn't alive I mean I think it's funny yeah no it was great saying that really really cool someone pointed out that that same technique can also work with multiple lightning strikes could really work well the other thing it can work with also is if you have a waterfall and there's a lot of mist coming off the water fall sometimes it's like floating over towards something and you want to get rid of the mist do the same thing but instead of using lightened mode used darken mode and it will do the opposite will make like lookit like next to no water is going down the waterfall and you mask that to say don't affect the waterfall don't make it look like there's no water there just do it where the mist is and make it look like there's no missed so you'd use dark and moated satellite there's a whole bunch of stuff we could do

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Handbook
Bonus Packet
Post Processing Practice Files

Ratings and Reviews

Photoracer
 

After catching parts of each of the three days, I knew that I would need to have access to this wealth of information. What is great about the program is the ability to stop and go back over something that is not fully understood...and be able to do that until confident enough to move on. I saw no "fluff" in the course, just great information imparted with a style that is makes it easy to understand. CreativeLive scored a big hit with this course! The bonus material is SO valuable, especially the presets. That saves an enormous amount of time for me. My appreciation of the power behind the software is becoming ever clearer. Thanks, Ben, for another outstanding presentation!

Shannon Beelman Photography
 

Ben has been amazing! He is a wealth of information on organizing images as well as great tips to make your travel images pop just a little more. I came into this class feeling like I had a good handle on lightroom and have come out with a better understanding of the power of the software to make artistic life easier. He covers tips, tricks and little known options that help make workflow smother. I have sat here watching as much of the free broadcast as I can and in this last week I have gotten control over years of images in my lightroom. This is one I know I will be buying soon.

johninblackhawk
 

Great class! Somehow, it was enjoyable not having Ben default to "curves for everything"! I don't think the title for this course did it justice, tho. This class was 90% Light Room and 10% Photoshop. I was very happy to discover that dynamic and equally as happy to purchase this course! If you are new to Light Room, this class is a MUST. Creative Live offers several LR classes but this is the one to own. Ben is working on his new book about Light Room Mastery - can't wait! In the meanwhile, I'll be watching Ben's thorough approach to LR in this video. So, don't let the title throw you a curve ball, if you are new to Light Room or a seasoned user, there's plenty of great information - delivered as only Ben can! Thanks CL for this great class!

Student Work

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