Original subtitles

Welcome back.

In this lesson, we're going to learn

how to use Lightroom to make your images

the best that they can be

and we're going to do that by performing

tone curve adjustments, color adjustments

and we're going to be sharpening your images.

In a previous lesson I talked about

the contrast slider

and how you can use that to impart contrast

on your images throughout the entire image.

But I also said that I don't typically like

to use the contrast slider

because there's a more effective

and much better way of performing

contrast adjustments on the image.

And that's the tone curve.

So let's take a look at how I use the tone curve.

Okay, so let's open up the tone curve panel here

in the develop module in Lightroom.

And you're gonna find the tone curve panel

on the right panel of the screen.

The tone curve does a couple of things for us.

One, it allows us to apply

different levels of contrast in

the brighter part of the images

versus the darker part of the images

which is very important.

But what that really does for us

is actually add a lot of punch to the images.

Make the images look a lot more three dimensional.

So that's why I love using the tone curve.

A lot of people are intimidated

when they first look at the tone curve

because it's easy to mess up

and make your image look a little bizarre.

But I'm gonna show you a really easy trick

on how to use it.

Now, the tone curve panel in Lightroom

has two different modes.

One is the parametric tone curve

which has all these different sliders here.

The sliders in the tone curve

are here to help you out.

And they help you prevent

making too coarse of adjustments.

But, at the same time I find them

a little bit hampering

because you have to make adjustments

to four different sliders

to make the effect that you want.

Now, Lightroom has also a

what's called a point-curve adjustment.

You manipulate the tone curve directly

and that's what I'm going to show you

cause I think that's the most effective

and simpler way of using the tone curve.

What you want to do is click on this

little button down here

on the lower right-hand side of the tone curve panel

which will then switch the tone curve panel

into the point curve mode.

And what you can see is

that all of the sliders

or what I like to call the training wheels

go away.

And now you can manipulate the tone curve directly.

Now, what we're trying to do

is increase the contrast in the image.

So we're trying to increase the whites

or the brighter parts of the image.

Making them a little brighter and lighter

and deepening the blacks or the shadow areas

in the image as well.

Making them a little bit deeper and darker.

That's what's gonna increase the contrast

to make our images really stand out.

Now, this is really simple.

What we want to do with the tone curve adjustment

is create what I call a gentle S curve.

What we want to do is create two grab points

in this linear graph that you see on the tone curve.

We're gonna click on the line

at about three quarters of the way up

to make a little grab handle.

Then we're gonna do the same thing

three quarters of the way down

and create another little grab handle.

Now don't worry if by mistake

you put a grab handle somewhere else.

You end up with three grab handles in here.

You can click on that grab handle

and drag it off the screen

and that makes it disappear.

Now, what we wanna do is take

this upper grab handle and move it up a little bit.

And you can see how the brightness in the image

has increased.

And then we wanna take

this grab handle on the bottom

and lower it down a tiny little bit.

And you can see that what I've done

is create a nice, gentle S curve on the tone curve.

And what that has done is really

increase that contrast between

the brighter part of the image

and the dark parts of the image.

But, what's remarkable about the tone curve

as opposed to the contrast slider

is that I can independently control

the contrast in the dark parts of the image

versus the light parts of the image

which is something that you cannot do

with the contrast slider.

So, for example, in this case

I wanna apply more contrast

to the light part of the images

but not as much on the dark part of the images

because I have a lot of dark right here

on this bear.

So this curve is very gentle, you can see

but the upper part seems to be

a little steeper than the lower part.

Let's look at another image

and do the same exercise.

Here's an image of a small stream

in western North Carolina.

I'm going to, again start by creating

my two little grab handles

at the upper third quadrant

and the lower third quadrant.

And I am going to start creating my gentle S curve.

One of the things I'm trying to do

is make those whites in the water whiter

but also add contrast and punch to that foliage

and to those dark parts of the image.

And I'm going to show you the difference

that just these little adjustments have made.

I'm gonna add a little bit more dark contrast.

I'm gonna turn off the effect

and turn it back on.

And you can see that just that little bit

of adjustment in the tone curve

really adds a lot of punch

and dimension to the image.

So, again this is one of

your best friends in Lightroom.

It's gonna be one of your most used tool

because it packs a lot of punch.

But, you've got to use it judiciously.

You gotta make that S curve very nice and gentle.

Okay, now that we've made our tonal

adjustments to this image

what I want to do is actually manipulate

and adjust the colors in this image.

And I can do that by using the saturation

or vibrance lighting we saw in the previous lesson.

But, I don't necessarily wanna saturate

all the colors in the image equally.

Thankfully, Lightroom provides

a very easy and convenient way to be able to

manipulate each individual color separately.

So let's take a look at that.

We're gonna go into the HSL panel.

And HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminesce.

When you click on the HSL panel

you have three different sections here.

You have for hue, for saturation and luminesce.

You also have a sort of sub-panel or tab

to the HSL color panel

in that it sorts out the colors in a different way.

The colors are the same, the same controls

except when you click on color

they're grouped by color.

When you click on HSL, they're grouped

by either saturation, hue, or luminesce.

I typically like to use it on the HSL panel

and start off with saturation.

What you can see is here when we look

at the saturation, is that I have

all sorts of colors that I can

adjust the saturation on individually.

So, for example, in this image

I can move the green

and saturate those greens a little more, or less

and leave all the other colors in the scene the same.

So we're gonna set that back to zero.

Now, the other control here

that's really important to use is the luminance.

I tend not to use the hue tab all that much.

Hue is important for when you want to

remove some color casting image

and say you have a green cast on the image.

Well you can use the hue tab

and use the green slider to the left

to remove some of that color cast in your image.

Luminance will actually decrease

the brightness of that specific color.

And often times this can be a more effective way

to actually increase the saturation of an image.

As you saw earlier

when I looked in the saturation

and I moved the green back and forth.

When I moved it to the left

and I removed the saturation from the green

that was a pretty dramatic effect.

But when I added green saturation to the green

it really didn't make that much of an effect.

But let's look at the same effect in luminance.

I'm gonna go back to the green

and then gonna move the green to the right

and you can see how it really effects those green

and makes them brighter or darker in the image

and actually makes them look even more saturated

or less saturated.

Now, you wanna experiment a little bit

with the saturation and luminance sliders

for each image to make sure

that you get the effect that you want.

One additional item here

and I'm gonna show you another example

in another image in a second

but before we go there

Often times you'll want to saturate

or want to manipulate a color

that is not just a simple green or a simple blue

and because it's a mixture of colors themselves

and often times it's hard to determine

which colors you need to mix

in order to saturate that specific color.

Well, luckily Lightroom helps you do that.

There is a color picker right here.

This little round button that you can click on.

I can click on that button

and my cursor will change

into a circle with two arrows and a cross-hair.

I can go ahead and put that cross-hair

in any color in the scene

and Lightroom will automatically pick up that color

and it increase or decrease the saturation

or luminance depending which tab you have selected.

So, for example, let's say I want to darken

or saturate this brown of the rock here.

I can simply just click on that area

and then move up to increase the luminance

or down to decrease the luminance

on that specific area.

Let's so that with saturation as well.

Again, I'm gonna click on that brown area

on the rock.

I'm gonna click, go up to increase the saturation.

You can see how it turns a little warmer

or more orangie.

Or I can go down to de-saturate it.

If you look on the right-hand side

on the sliders on the HSL panel

you can see that those are moving

as I move my mouse up and right

to increase or decrease.

But you will also notice that multiple sliders

are moving at the same time.

We have the orange and we have the yellow moving

in different proportions.

Because the color of that rock

is composed of both orange and yellow

and Lightroom is smart enough to know

which colors are in the area you clicked on

and increases or decrease the saturation

or luminance accordingly.

Now, let's take a look at another image.

And this is one of the best trick that I have

for increasing the blueness in the sky.

In this particular image here

of the waterfall in Glacier National Park

in northern Montana.

I got a beautiful sky here with some clouds

but it's a little bit lighter than the foreground

and I'm losing a lot of that blueness in the sky

but I can bring that back

using my HSL sliders, really easily.

So, what I want to do is

increase the saturation in the blues.

That will bring some color into that sky.

You can see that.

However, one thing I have found

that if you just increase the saturation in the blues

the sky doesn't look quite natural itself.

It looks like what I call "Windex blue."

So, what I wanna do is go into luminance

in addition to that

and bring the luminance in the blue down a little bit.

To make that sky a little bit darker.

Now you can see how big of a difference

just those two little adjustments made in blue.

Increasing the saturation

and decreasing the luminance.

Look at the difference in that sky.

Pretty remarkable.

Now let's talk about sharpening.

Sharpening is something that

a lot of people don't understand

how to do well within Lightroom.

It's a little bit tricky, but it's pretty simple.

Let's take a look.

Okay, let's go into the detail panel

and this is where sharpening lives.

One thing I wanna tell you about first

is that because of the way

the digital imaging process happens

every image that you want to display

or you wanna use really needs

at least a little bit of sharpening applied to it.

So, you always should think as sharpening

as one of the processes that you're gonna do

to your image.

But I also recommend doing it

as one of the last steps.

So here we have an image of a luna moth

on a red bud branch.

And, I said before that while you do

wanna apply sharpening to all of your images

you do not wanna apply sharpening

to the entire image.

You wanna apply what's called selective sharpening.

And what that means is that

I only wanna apply sharpening

to the parts of the image that are sharp.

I do not wanna apply sharpening

to the out of focus areas of the image.

And the reason for that

is because if I do apply sharpening

to the out of focus areas

I run the risk of accentuating

the grain or digital noise sets there.

Or if you have areas that have

really fine detail color gradations going on

you can introduce some banding into that

and it loses nice, smooth gradients in the background.

So let me show you what I mean by that.

I'm gonna zoom in here on this part of the image

and I'm gonna apply sharpening

by moving my amount slider

in the sharpening section of the detail panel.

And if I move that over to the right

and I apply sharpening

look what's happening in

the out of focus areas.

You're accentuating here a lot of that digital noise

that's there in that out of focus area.

Yes, you are sharpening the moth

that's in the foreground

but you're making that background

kind of look clumpy and not at all desirable.

So how do you do selective sharpening in Lightroom?

Well it's pretty easy to do.

That's where the masking slider comes into play.

Now, if I take the masking slider

and I move it right to left

you see that nothing is happening in my scene at all.

So you're wondering

what is this masking slider doing?

Well, the proper way to apply masking in Lightroom

is you want to hold the option or alt key

on your keyboard, then click on the masking slider

and what you see is happening

is that your image is turning all white.

And what this means is that the entire image

is now receiving sharpening.

As I move my slider to the right

you can see that what's happening is that

parts are out of focus are turning black

where as the parts that are in sharp focus

are remaining in white.

So what you wanna do is

you wanna move this masking slider

as far to the right as possible

to the point in which

all your out of focus areas are black.

So that meaning that they're not

gonna receive any sharpening at all

while you're still sharpening those parts

of the image that you need to sharpen.

So now, we zoom back into this area.

Look at that background.

That background remained the same.

Now I'll move this amount slider a little bit again.

And you can see that as I move my amount slider

the moth itself is what's getting sharpening

but my background is not.

My background is staying nice and silky smooth.

So that's the proper way to apply sharpening.

By creating a mask.

Now, there are two other sliders here

in the sharpening panel.

There's radius and detail.

Now, what the radius slider does

is increase the intensity.

Not necessarily the amount

but the intensity, if you will

of the sharpening process.

Now, you gotta be very careful

about using the radius slider.

I typically will use a radius of 1.1 to 1.9

on the extreme.

Usually I do not go beyond 1.9.

I'll go up to 1.9 only when an image

is not critically sharp

and I want to salvage it a little bit.

Because what's happening is, as you increase

that radius slider over to the right

you are increasing the amount of sharpening

that's going on and your image

is gonna look, what I like to call "crunchy."

It just doesn't look natural itself.

So typically my radius slider's gonna

hover somewhere around in the 1.1 to 1.3 setting

and that's usually enough.

Now, often times what happens

when you apply sharpening.

You lose a little bit of detail

because what sharpening's doing

is increasing the contrast between

the edges of your image.

And that's how it achieves sharpening.

So, what the details slider tries to recover

some of that detail that's being lost in there.

But, if you apply too much detail

you're gonna lose a little bit

of the sharpening itself.

So you want to be very careful

about using the detail slider.

I typically do not use the detail slider

all that much.

If I do, I don't go beyond like a 30 or a 40.

Somewhere in there.

But often times I don't even touch it.

I work more with the amount, radius

and the masking sliders.

Let's take a look at another image here.

Here's an image of a snow goose

coming in for a landing.

I took this image in New Mexico.

And again, I do not wanna apply

any sharpening to the sky.

I only wanna apply sharpening to the goose itself.

So I'm gonna hold down my option or alt key

and move that masking slider over to the right

until my entire sky goes dark.

And I'm applying sharpening only to the goose itself.

This looks pretty good for this image.

And the masking slider is gonna be different

depending on the image.

Images that have more detail in the background

like clouds or what not

you may have to move that masking slider

further to the right.

But an image like this

where the sky is nice and clear

you may not need to do as much

to the masking slider.

Now I wanna zoom in into the goose itself

and move my sharpening amount to the right

until I get the amount of sharpening that I want.

Now, by creating that mask

one of the things you've been able to do

is give yourself a little more leeway

and push that amount slider further

than you would have if you had not created a mask.

But, there is such a thing as too much sharpening.

So you wanna be a little bit judicious

and not push it all the way to the right every time

because again, your images are not gonna look

all that natural.

So do it to the point where

in this case, for example

the goose eye is nice and sharp.

I can see it.

Especially when I zoom out.

It really comes into focus.

Another adjustment that's related to sharpening

is noise reduction.

And we want to apply noise reduction to an image

that we've taken at very high iso's

like 1600 or 3200

or when we did a very long exposure.

Typically, a lot of these images

will end up having a lot of dark areas

and that's where the noise, the digital noise

really shows itself more.

So let's take a look at this image here.

This is a lighthouse that I photographed

with the Milky Way in the background

on the coast of Maine.

And, as we zoom in over here

you can see that this image has

quite a bit of noise.

This image, by looking here at the camera settings

I know that I shot this image at 3200 iso

and there is a great deal of noise here

in the dark part of the sky.

And I want to do my best to remove that.

And that's where the noise reduction sliders

come into play.

There are two types of noise reduction

that you can apply.

Both luminance and color type noise reduction.

In most cases, when you're shooting images

of the night sky

what you want to work with

is the luminance noise reduction.

But in some images

the color noise reduction may be more effective.

All you have to do is really experiment with these

until you find the right one to use.

So, let's play around with this image a little bit.

Let's move around the luminance slider

and let's take a look what happens

to the noise in this image.

You can see that I've actually reduced

quite a bit of that noise in there.

Let's do a before and after view.

Look at the amount of noise

that was there before hand.

And after I did my noise reduction

a lot of that noise has disappeared.

Noise reduction is kind of the enemy of sharpness

because what noise reduction is trying to do

is kind of smooth out all those areas

where that digital noise is showing through.

So you have to balance out sharpness

with noise reduction.

Again, if you look here in the luminance sliders

or the noise reduction sliders in the luminance

you'll have a detail slider

and that's similar to the one

that we saw earlier in sharpening.

It tries to bring back some of that detail

that you may have lost by applying that luminance.

So you can play with that a little bit

and you can see how I'm bringing back

some of that detail.

But I don't wanna bring too much back of that detail

because it's now introducing some artifacts

into the image.

So, very important for you to be zoomed in.

I like to be zoomed in at 2:1 or 1:1

to be able to see these changes

nice and close up.

On other images

you may find that color noise reduction

is a little bit more effective.

Again, it really depends on the image.

You've gotta experiment with both

to see which one will be more effective.

And the last slider here for the luminance

is gonna be the contrast.

You can actually adjust the contrast

of that noise reduction that's taking place.

I typically do not move the contrast slider

all that much because, again

it starts bringing back in some of that noise

and some of those artifacts.

So, again you've gotta be very judicious

with the contrast slider

when you're working with luminance noise reduction.

When you're working with the color noise reduction

the smoothness also comes into play

and this is, again, how much of that noise

is being sort of smeared

or smoothed out of the image.

So, with those you have to be very judicious.

Look at the image

and there's not one right setting for every image.

Every image is gonna require

a different level of adjustment

in here and noise reduction.

You may have noticed that when you make an image

some lenses may impart some sort of distortion

or vignetting on your images.

A vignetting means that

you get some darkened corners.

Even the most expensive lenses are not perfect.

You may still encounter some of the distortions

and flaws with, you know

even the best lenses that you can find.

Luckily, Adobe has profiled a lot of these lenses

and Lightroom can actually correct

for a lot of those deficiencies.

Let's take a look how to do that.

We're gonna go here into the lens correction panel.

And I recommend that you go to the profile tab

in the lens correction panel

and you can simply click on

"Enable Profile Corrections."

And you can see how this image

has actually changed a little bit.

I'm gonna redo that

so you can see the effect.

If you look over here

on the upper right hand corner of the image

is where you'll see the effect more pronounced.

I'm gonna uncheck it

and you see how this part is darker?

And I click on it.

The perspective has changed a little bit

on the image, and it has actually lightened this area

where the lens imparted some vignetting.

What you'll notice is down here

is that Lightroom has actually detected

not only the lens that's being used

or the make of the lens that's being used

but actually the model of the lens that's being used.

And, like I said

Adobe has gone ahead and profiled a lot of lenses

and most of the common lenses

from the most common manufacturers

and built in corrections to compensate

for those deficiencies in those lenses.

If we pull down the menu here

you can see all the different lenses.

All the different Canon lenses

that Adobe has profiled

and actually applied corrections for.

So, I encourage you to go ahead

and always enable the profile corrections

because it not only will fix any vignetting issues

and distortion issues, but some lenses

are more prone to chromatic aberrations

and the profile corrections

will try to compensate for those as well.

Another neat feature that Lightroom has

is perspective correction.

And what that is, is the ability to correct

for converging lines

especially when you're shooting buildings, for example

using a wide angle lens.

Let's take a look at an example here.

This image is of the electronics district

in Tokyo, Japan.

And as you can see by looking at these buildings

they look like they're falling over.

That they're falling backwards.

And that has to do with the way that the lines

are converging into each other.

They're not really straight up and down.

And we know that buildings

the edges of buildings are typically nice and straight.

Often times this is something

that you would have to go into Photoshop

or another program to correct manually.

But Lightroom now can do this

under the lens correction tab.

What you want to do is

under the lens correction section

go into the basic tab

and before you even try to do

what's called the upright correction in Lightroom

you want to enable profile correction

so that Lightroom can actually determine

the camera and lenses that were being used.

Now, the next thing that you can do

very easily is just to hit the auto button

under the upright section

and Lightroom will go ahead

and straighten out those lines automatically.

It actually kind of works, almost like magic.

Now, one thing that you notice is that

you have these white sections here at the bottom

because of the way that Lightroom had to go

and transform your image.

You're gonna end up with some empty spaces.

So this is where the

constraint crop check-box comes in.

You can click on the constraint crop check-box

and it will go ahead and crop the image down

so that none of those white areas show up.

Now, if, for some reason the auto settings in upright

doesn't do exactly what you need it to do

you may be able to use three different other options

that you have.

The first option here is level

which Lightroom will try to actually level your camera.

Remember how earlier, in an earlier lesson

we used a leveling tool to manually level an image.

Well, if we click on the level button

Lightroom will try to level the image

by the scene that it sees in the image.

If you're trying to just do a

vertical perspective correction

you can just hit the vertical button

and it won't do a level.

Auto and full basically will do the entire thing

both a horizontal and a vertical correction.

Typically I have found that the auto setting

works almost all of the time.

There are some images that may be

more challenging than others

but auto works very effectively.

Now this perspective correction tool

works equally well for interiors of buildings

as well as exteriors to buildings

and it doesn't have to be done with a fancy camera.

For example, this image here I took with my iPhone

and this is the interior of

a cathedral in Barcelona, Spain.

And let's take a look at what the upright

or perspective correction in Lightroom

will do for it.

First thing we'll do is enable profile corrections.

We'll turn on constraint crop as well

and hit the auto button.

And you can see now how those columns

on the left and right

as well as this horizontal line at the bottom

have all been leveled off.

Very quickly, automatically

without a lot of work on my end.

Let's take a look at one last example.

We saw this image earlier

of the lighthouse with the Milky Way

in the background.

This image is a little bit challenging.

I shot this with a wide angle lens at 24 millimeters.

And my horizon here is level.

I made sure that when I took the image

my horizon was level.

But, because I'm shooting this

with a wide angle lens

my lighthouse is not straight.

It is leaning over a little bit

just like we saw earlier with the buildings in Tokyo.

Now, if I went ahead and did a level

as we did earlier, and I tried to level the lighthouse

you can imagine what's going to happen.

Now my horizon is going to be crooked.

So we definitely do not want to do that.

This is where the upright feature

really comes in handy.

I'll click on enable profile correction.

Constraint crop and do an auto.

Now I may need to adjust my exposure afterwards

because it's trying to correct for the exposure here

so my lighthouse is a little bright.

But what you can see now

is that my horizon is still straight

and my lighthouse

although is not perfectly straight

is a lot straighter than it was before.

And you can use this to correct

for even these extreme perspective problems.

The lens correction panel has two more tabs

that I'm gonna touch on briefly.

One is color.

Again, I talked about earlier

how the profile correction can actually remove

chromatic aberrations that

may be inherent on your lens.

So you want to go in here

and click on remove chromatic aberration.

If you have a lens that's particularly prone

to a chromatic aberrations

after you've turned that on

you can actually adjust that

chromatic aberration, the defringing

of those chromatic aberrations manually as well.

And then, let's say that you have

a lens that hasn't been profiled by Adobe.

You can actually go in

and make a lot of these same adjustments manually

by going into the manual tab.

You can adjust the distortion

vertical distortion, the horizontal distortion.

All sorts of settings.

And you can do this manually

for those lenses that may not be

in the Lightroom database.

The last topic we're gonna talk about

in this lesson is processed versions.

Lightroom's been around since about 2003

and in that period of time

there have been a number of different upgrades

and versions of the process engine

inside Lightroom itself.

If I had brought images into Lightroom in 2003

and I'm working on those images today

you'll notice that the controls that I have

for that specific image will be

the same controls I had back in 2003.

I may not have the most up to date

sliders and controls

but that's because Lightroom is trying to

remain faithful to the changes that you made

to that image back when you first imported it.

Luckily, we can go ahead and upgrade

the processes version for a specific image.

Let's take a look at this image, right here.

Here we have the image again of our luna moth.

And, as you can see, when I go down

into the camera calibration panel

is that the process that's selected for that image

is a 2003.

Cause that's when Lightroom was first released.

Now, if I wanted to work on this image again

and I go back into my basic panel

you will see that the sliders are slightly different

than they were when I was working with images

that were more current

or images that I imported more recently.

For example, here i have my main four sliders

are gonna be exposure, recovery

fill light, and blacks.

What happened to my highlights

and shadow sliders?

Well that's because Lightroom is showing me

the controls as they existed

when the first process engine version was used.

If I wanted to upgrade this image

to the latest process version

I simply go down here to the process menu

select it, and select the current process version

which is the 2012 process version

that still lives on

even in this version of Lightroom

which is version five.

Once I select that

you will notice that now my sliders have changed

to be the current sliders.

I have highlights, shadows, whites and blacks.

All my controls are the full controls

I have today for this particular image.

What Lightroom has done has try to translate

the adjustments that I did

with a previous process version

to the current process version.

But it is possible that you may see

some flight changes in your image.

So any time you change process versions

you want to take a close look at your image.

Now, let's talk about homework for this lesson.

As I mentioned previously

I considered the tone curve my secret weapon

to make my images look the best that they can be.

So my homework for you will be

to practice using the tone curve

to improve a few of your favorite images.

In our next lesson, let's talk about creative effects.