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1:15 pm - Straightening & Cropping Images

Lesson 7 from: Workflows with Lightroom 5

Julieanne Kost

1:15 pm - Straightening & Cropping Images

Lesson 7 from: Workflows with Lightroom 5

Julieanne Kost

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Lesson Info

7. 1:15 pm - Straightening & Cropping Images

Lesson Info

1:15 pm - Straightening & Cropping Images

I want to straighten damage right? So this was something where we had emmanuel area before but now I want to use up right so uprights in your future and light room five and enables us to straighten the perspective of the image right because a minute ago we were just removing any distortion from the lens. Now we're actually going to straighten the image the perspective of the image so one of the things to know is that if you're sitting there and you're taking a photograph of something and you're you're having to tilt the camera up or down or you're off angle here you got to know that if you're going to use light room to straighten the perspective, you probably want to shoot a little lighter because we need more data if you're going to be squishing in or expanding out, you need more information to play with get that area straight and otherwise what'll happen is something we'll probably get cropped off that you need and then you'll have to make it up and you have to go to photo shopping n...

ews content where phil and way would rather use photos have to be creative and not just, you know, fix stuff ok? So in an image like this, you'll notice in the basic panel before you get too upright there's a reason that the engineers put these options here they're encouraging you, they're saying could you please enable the profile corrections and police removed chromatic aberration. And if you want to, you can constrain the crop. But we'll get to that in a minute. As soon as it does it. That it's. Easier to explain. All right. So what can we do here? Well, there's. Four different options. So, honestly, you're just gonna have to try the options to see which one works. Ok? Level on ly levels. So if you've got a horizon that's off, you know, you could fix that in in the crop tour using angle tool. But here, if it's obvious, lightman will just level your image that's all it does, it's just looking for a horizon line at a level it vertical says well, let's, go and do it would. Well, it do it. It did a little bit here, so there was off there's level. Ok, vertical. Okay. We need to re analyze this. Let's reset this final where you're doing anything here. Level vertical. There we go. Okay. So sometimes because I used the same files over and over and over again. No, I don't. I never use the same files over again. To demo is the first time I have ever used these. But I practiced with him so what happens is when you click these options like the level in the vertical that information gets cashed with the file this is way too much information there's only like five percent of people will even care about this but it gets cash and we have to do that because if you think about it when light room six not that I know anything about another version of light room but if another version were to come out of light room and we change the math we want to make sure that we don't change what you've already committed tio so it cash is this information in the file which is why we have this little reanalyze so if you're in here messing around and you go and you forget like to turn these on and you're playing around with all the settings here and you go oh, I forgot and julian told me that I should do that and you come in here and you enable these you might want to go in and re analyze that if you need tio all right, so the button will become enabled when there's cash data that it wants to say I'm going to throw that away you're making a conscientious choice because you want to try it now with these other options okay, so vertical straits straightens the vertical lines right? But the horizontal lines are not straightened and sometimes when you do the vertical lines, it starts to look really weird because it just doesn't look natural so that's, why you might want to try auto so auto, those lines or not, vertical here it is off here it is auto, so yeah, it looks a lot better and it looks more natural. Ten vertical does you know this you might not be able to tell us much because a simple door, if it was like, you know, chicago street line or something and there's like a ton of buildings and you're really far back when it has to straighten those buildings, you just would never see the buildings that straight, so it starts looking weird and then full actually does all of your horizontal as well as your verticals, at least it tries to right? So once it's done this, you can see that we've got these little issues on the side that's what I meant by if you're going to need to change the perspective, you're going to want to shoot a little bit wider and that's where you can use the constrained crop to tell light room, okay, just go ahead and crop it as big as you can, but we're going to need to crop out those areas that are just white now in in a case like this. When I unchecked the constraining crop if we go to the crop till we actually have to tell it to reset so I just tapped the archy that got me the crop till it I'll say reset we'll come back down here tio lens correction so in this case yeah, this side is going to be difficult to make up the side would be pretty easy. Just take that over in the photo shop selected and do a film with content where would probably get you where you want to be. Okay, so same with this image again you can you know, you can try to say all right. Well, which would this look better? What? It look better. Vertical. Uh, julianne, don't do that. Undo what do we do? We enable and remove? I'm an enabler lens profile enabler. All right. Okay, so I thought the joke would be a little bit funnier than that, but evidently not ok, so we can just come in and you could say all right, which one do we think would look the best here? Vertical? Yeah. Here, what's going on. Ok, see, I forget to do that and then I say reanalyze we gotta go vertical no off vertical, no reset oh, I had some color changes that's all right, all right, otto there we go say sometimes I don't know I don't know why it does that to me I think it's because I mess around with it so many times on the same file all right and then full full does a much better job especially for looking down at the bar at the bottom so you could take an educated guess levels going toe level verticals really only concerned about the vertical lines auto is a much more natural and then full is actually a full perspective correction where it's actually trying to rotate it in three d space and you'll get your verticals and your horizontal street ok all right ok two things sometimes if you have like a person in your image and you do this full corrective perspective correction really terrible things can happen to people and pets and all that stuff so what you want to do is you want to go to the manual area and we have an aspect slider so you can make things either narrower or wider with the aspects lighter because sometimes like the dog all of sudden will look like super thin or super squished something like that and you can kind of stretch them out appropriately because that full perspective correction can be pretty drastic all right, what else do we need to know about this if it doesn't work and come in we have all the manual options right here if you want to show a a grid over here I think the keyboard short get hasn't oh in it let me look all right it's either going to command oh shows an overlay is that right? Command oh oh no it's just you just don't even need that so oh is going to show me the overlay but that's because it's not the one I was like ok, wow sorry you guys are going to confuse you on that one oh showed an overlay because I had the crop tool selected but it's not showing me the grid overlay that is associated with ok see how when I'm on over the lens correction area we get the grid automatically like it automatically pops up and then if we hold down I think it's command because it's command option oh, I bet someone online already posted that oh all right command option oh, we'll get you your grids and your guides and while they're visible if you hold down the command key or the control key while they're up, then you can change like the grid size and the grid opacity. So if I oh it's terrible filed show that I'm like all right, so they'll pass it e let's go to a different image maybe, but you can see that we can see that grid overlay so you can use that like when you're in the manual area, okay all right. Lens correction ok. Like any of our other panels except the basic panel there's a way to toggle on and off just the lens correction so if you had a bunch of other things like in the basic modular something else it wouldn't show the preview for everything that's just the little light switch for lens correction all right, enough with lens correction let's turn that off so command option o or control fault oh, that will turn that off and let's talk about cropping. So how do we want to crop this? Well, we want to tap the archy that's going to give us the crop tool. Now if we come up here under tools, you'll notice there's a few shortcuts here the way that it's set up by default is to always show the overlay I don't actually like in this mode I wanted to auto show what auto show does is it turns it off and then as you melt down it will show whatever overlay you have on top so okay always show what we can go and pick what we want tio to view in fact, if we just tap the okie see how it cycles through so you can cycle through and this is a new feature actually it's really cool seeing what puts up these aspect ratios here so that's nice like if you are using light room in the salesroom because not you know, people don't really understand you say well, we're gonna have to crop this still before by five aspect ratio if you want that and so we're going to need to just trim off someone either side and I'll be like how much? Well, just like a little bit on your side I can't visualize that right now because you're the photographer you're usedto aspect ratios you could just say oh four by five would be that much and find by seven would be that much all right, so um so that is defined right here you can choose which aspect ratios you want and you can also choose what you want to see. So as I was tapping the okie we were going through grid and thirds and diagonal in triangle on all these different options you can also choose which ones you want to cycle through because some people were like, well, you know what? I like the grid and I like the rule of thirds and I like aspect ratios, but I don't want to see any of the other ones, so if you select this, you could just say, ok, I just want to toggle on these so as I tapped the okie, I just want to cycle through these don't cycle through all the rest of them, all right? And then if we go back there to tools you'll notice here that when you go to choose aspect ratios you can tell it exactly what aspect ratio you wanted to display maybe you just want one maybe you know while we're going we're going to crop this before my five so that's that's what we're looking at trimming off the side so it's just a visualization tool it doesn't actually do it you would have to go get the crop tool and dragged the crop to that to that location ok so that's the ok and you just talk all through I think shift oh like oh shift oh will reverse like the golden spiral it puts it in all four different like it'll rotated and flip it all right so the next thing I want to show you is under tool overlay where it says always show I started to talk about this see how the overlay is showing right now well I don't want it to show all the time I only want to show it when the mouse is down so I'm going to say auto show now it disappears but as soon as like click and drag it will show so there's a little misleading and when you click and drag when you when you rotate you will always get the grid but if I click and drag one of the anchor points either the middle of the center now you can see that I'm getting that rule of thirds overlay but when I let go of the mouse, it just goes away. So I only get it when I want it, when I'm actually changing it and it doesn't just sit there on top of it. So I prefer that option for the for the crop till okay, what else about cropping? If you want to pick an aspect ratio, of course you can. That's right over here. So right next to the loch. It says as shot or you can pick any of these aspect ratio. We have some video aspect ratios here. You can enter in a custom inspect ratio. I believe we let you have five is the maximum. So be a little careful because the only way to delete one of your custom aspect ratios is to add other ones so that the fifth one falls off the list or the sixth one falls off the list. So if you have five, just go. Okay? I know which fine I'm going to need and then enter those one after the other after the other after the other. So you get those five. Unfortunately, I wish it was like some preset file that we could save somewhere is going, but you can't say you got to load him up on each one. All right, that's, the aspect ratio we've got the angle tool. If you prefer to come in here, you can select the angle tool and then click and say, all right, if this is supposed to be straight, you click and drag, and when you let go, it automatically straightens it. Maybe that's very useful if you went into the upright correction in the level, didn't work or something like that. All right, um, what else do we have? As far as crop aspect ratios? Ok, so if you want to reset it, it's nice that you can just reset the crop and not reset everything else in your image. You can also crop in the library module. And why do I bring this up? Because sometimes I've had, like customers that might photograph like school portrait, right where? Something where each person's like security stuff, where each person's head is supposed to be a certain size, and they just know that they needed a certain amount cropped off the top on the bottom. So they just know that they have taken the image of two by three and they need it for by five, so you could certainly come in here, select all of the images that you wanted to come up here, and they're quick develop, and most of the time, these triangles kind of hide a lot of the features so you want to make sure that you use the disclosure triangles to see those and then right here in their crop you go and say no all these images they all need to be four by five and it will just cropped them in the center so if your people are moving around or something then yes, you might need to go back into the develop module so we'll just tap the deaky that gets us to develop and then you could go in there and you could say all right well with the are key because that gives me my crop tool this one might need to be shifted a little bit this way and we could go to the next image and say oh yes and this one let's go ahead and crop that up a bit more but at least it gets the crop overlay in the right you know aspect ratio at one time top returner intern in order to apply the crop obviously there's nondestructive crop so we can come back at any point in time and say, oh, I don't like the way that was crossed tapped the archy come back here and reset it and you're good to go so all non destructive if you wanted it what how would you I want this crop four by five and five by seven what would I do virtual copy exactly right. If you need same image, you don't want to duplicate it on disk, but you want to different settings. Virtual copies. All right, we can also synchronize a crop. So what I did a minute ago in the library module I just said, hey, I want all of these two have a four by five crop and it did it right in the center. You can always synchronize your crops. So again, I have multiple images selected down here in the film strip. Let's make that a little bit bigger, but the develop module very similar. Teo, the library module in the loop. You in that whatever I do to this image right now by default should only be happening to this image, but they're going to get there eventually. Yeah. Okay. It's the auto sink. Yeah, they were going to wait till I messed up, so the auto sink, but this you had to have turned this on julie. Um, you had to have turned this on, and I did so by default. It's not set to auto sink because out of sync, I mean, look, when you when you are trying, tio edit an entire wedding as fast as possible super great feature, turn on autos think you select six images in the er in the ceremony and you correct the white balance on one and they're all fixed and you go to the next twelve images and you have to increase the shadows and all of those boom they're all done but as you're just starting out with light room you'll forget that it's on the auto sink and what'll happen is you'll be really focused on this image and then all of a sudden you're like uh you changed everything for all of your other images without realizing it so just know that you turn it on it could be a super useful tool but you got to remember that it's on all right so I'm gonna turn it off for the moment um well it yeah if I was a beginner I would turn it off and I would say ok, I want this image to be cropped so let's go in here and I wanted to be a one to one crop that's great all right? And we'll just spring that down a little bit and hit returner enter now if I wanted to crop all of the images that I had selected I could then use the sink option so synchronize will then synchronize whatever it is that I choose in this case I'm gonna check none and just check on the crop and then I would hit synchronized and we can see that all of the images have now been cropped to that exact same location so you can see how cropping one clicking sink, setting the settings correct and sink and then clicking okay is going to be slower than just selecting all of the images, flipping on auto sink, grabbing your crop tool and just cropping, because now I don't have to go into synchronizer anything, whatever ideo if we watch those thumbnails, they're all being modified, but it could be dangerous because you can forget that you have all those files selected and be making changes to images that you didn't think you were making changes too. Ok, I think that's it with a crop till one other thing, which I haven't played with theirs to constrain to wrap box. Yeah, so I believe the only time this is used is with the lens corrections with distortions, so basically await. What did the little tool tip say, concerns the crop to the original image area, as opposed to because you can't crop outside of the area? No, you can't it would be, oh, sorry, that would be a great question. So is that like photo doesn't work like photo shop, where you make it larger to get extra canvas. I know because you can't do that in light room, so that was that was the good question, so maybe if I go here to manual and I do like a a vertical? Yeah, see how? Watch if I do see if I put that distortion on it see the white bar at the bottom so as I let go that's going to disappear, it's going to constrain that crop and if I undo this, see how I can get that white bar now. So so I shouldn't have said no, because it's it's kind of like were we're not cropping outside the original image area, but we're warping the image inside of it, and we're stretching it, and basically that constrain crop is hooked to this constraint toe warp. So if I click it on here, it's clicked on here so basically it's saying, when you work this and it gets all weird and it gets that big white area with nothing in it, let's say I didn't want to go to photo shop. They say I couldn't go to let's say, I don't have photo shop, I don't want to go to photo shop, so you better just crop it in to get rid of that white area because I don't want to see that white you don't have to, you can say no, no, I want to see that white area let's add more distortion here. Come on. I want to have more distortion to there. We go, okay, because now I own photo shop, and I could go to photo shop and fill that in. But if I didn't have photo shop, I might say, no way need to constrain it.

Class Materials

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LR5 Shortcuts Tips and Quick Reference Guide.pdf

Free Bonus Material

LR5 Develop Module Shortcuts Tips and Quick Reference Guide.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Valerie Pinsent
 

Julieanne Kost has an amazing way of sharing her knowledge on photoshop Lightroom, with humour and simplicity that keeps you wanting more. The 2 days that this workshop lasted could have seemed long but was in fact very, very short. This course gives you all the ropes to use this amazing program, with all its shortcuts and techniques that probably aren't in manuals with a few extras from photoshop which are just as amazing. She is so contagious that you want to pull an 'all-nighter' just to put in practice all the wonderfull things one has learned. Thank you very much Julieanne!!!

a Creativelive Student
 

I follow Julieanne on FB and on her blog, and looked forward to this event. It did not disappoint, and in fact offered a few surprises. The exactitude of her content is always there. But the free-form, informal nature of this course kept it engaging over the many hours. I admire her style of speaking seamlessly to all skill and experience levels at once. Quite a trick -- I've had the good fortune to learn from the best, and I count Julieanne among them.

Julie Coder
 

I started using LR about a year ago, but I hadn't yet set up my database and work flow process. This class was perfect and really helped me dive deeper into into the program. Julieanne knows her stuff, and she provides some excellent tips for both organization and editing. Love her teaching style, as well as her photography. Some of the more recent tools (such as the range mask) are not covered, but the content is still relevant and Julieanne's tips are fantastic. Highly recommend!

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