Original subtitles

Welcome back.

In this lesson, we're going to use Lightroom

to exercise our creative muscle.

We will cover creating black and white masterpieces,

adding grain to our images,

and creating vignetting effects.

In a previous lesson I talked about

an easy way to convert images to black and white.

By going into the Basic panel,

and clicking on the black and white button.

And that's just a straight conversion into black and white.

But as you can see,

you have very little control

about the tonality and the density of this image.

So we're gonna use a much more flexible

and capable way of converting the image to black and white.

I'm going to undo this change,

and we're gonna go down to the black and white panel

which is bunched together with the hues,

saturation, luminous, and color.

So we'll click on black and white.

And as you can see, what this did was convert my image

to black and white.

Just like the other control under the Basic panel did.

However, now we have all these different colors.

All these different slider for different colors

that allow us to manipulate

each individual color independently

For those of you that shot black and white film,

one of the techniques that was used

for creating different looks in your black and white images

was to use different colored filters in front of your lens.

And Lightroom is giving us that same opportunity,

but doing it in a much more flexible way

in the post-processing.

So let's take a look.

Let's say that for example,

in this sky, the sky is kind of light colored,

I wanna add a lot of density to that sky,

make it look a little more ominous,

so one of the easiest things to do is,

because I know that the sky is blue,

I can manipulate my blue slider

to actually add a lot of density

and make that sky much darker.

And by just moving the slider a little bit to the left

you can see how I'm making that sky a little bit more

foreboding, and much more dramatic.

And I can do the same thing for some of

the other colors in the scene.

For example I can move the greens,

either to the left or to the right to change the look

of the foliage in the foreground.

However, there's certain elements in the image

for which I don't exactly know what the color is.

I can use a color picker like we saw earlier,

in the HSL slider.

I can click on the little circle right here

on the left hand, upper left hand side

of the black and white panel,

and I can select for example one of these flowers over here.

Click on it and move my mouse up or down

to actually change the tonality of those flowers

and make them stand out more,

or less.

I wanna move them up a little bit.

Very simple to do,

but just simply manipulating

all the colored filter sliders

under the black and white panel.

Let's take a look at another image.

This image also is from Mount Rainier National Park

in Washington State,

and I'd like to give this image a black and white treatment.

So we're gonna go into black and white again.

But as you can see,

the image is really kinda dull,

there's not a lot of contrast between the different

elements in the image.

So I'm gonna again use a lot of my sliders here

to bring different contrast

and different density

to the different

features within my image.

So I wanna add a little more density

to the rocks then here.

I'm gonna use the color picker again,

because I don't know exactly the color

that the rocks are.

I'm gonna click on it and bring that down

to actually make those rocks darker.

And I'm gonna again move the green up a little bit

to add more contrast between the foliage that we're seeing,

and the rocks in the foreground.

Let's take a quick look at another image.

Again we, our bear from before,

we've looked at this bear in a couple other lessons,

I'm gonna convert this to black and white

and manipulate the colors a little bit.

I'm gonna start with the greens again once more,

make those a little darker,

I'm gonna select the bear,

or select the color picker and click on the fur

of the bear and actually bring that a little bit

lighter in to add some contrast

between the foreground foliage and the bear.

And then I'm gonna do the same thing with the background.

I'm gonna bring that background in

and make it a little darker.

Now one of the things that we had when we shot film,

is that different kinds of film

imparted a different type of grain onto the image.

A lot of people selected the film that they used

based on the characteristics of that grain

for the different kinds of film.

In Lightroom, we can actually add grain

to our images as well,

to try to recreate what that looked like.

So we're going to go down here into Effects,

and down at the bottom of the Effects panel,

we can see that we have a control

to add grain into our scene.

So I'm gonna add a little bit of grain

onto the scene,

and I'm gonna zoom in a little bit

so you can actually see what that effect looks like.

I know a lot of us who shoot digital and color nowadays

are trying to do everything we can

to remove the grain.

But for black and white images,

sometimes that grain can add a lot of texture

and interest to our scene.

So here we can, as you can see by moving

the grain slider to the left or to the right

I can actually add or remove grain.

I can change the characteristics of the grain as well

by adjusting the size of that grain.

Make it more coarse or finer.

And as well the roughness of the grain

to actually come up with different looks or textures,

depending on the look that you're trying to achieve.

Or the look of the film that you're trying to emulate.

Another great feature that Lightroom provides

for exercising that creative muscle,

and creating really unique and different effects,

is Split Toning.

But not only that, you can use split toning as well,

when you have an image that's a little dull

as we'll see in a minute.

Let's first start with this image of some

lobster boats on the coast of Maine.

There are a lot of colors here,

and the image is,

actually I like the image quite a bit as it is,

but now I wanna add more drama to the image.

And actually saturate these colors

and maybe change the colors a little bit.

So we're gonna go in to the Split Toning panel.

And what the Split Toning panel allows me to do

is impart a different hue, or color,

on the highlights of the image,

and then a different hue or color

on the shadow of the image.

And control that, and control the balance between those two.

I can start by either moving the hue slider,

or actually clicking on this little box

next to the highlights.

This allows me to pick the color using the color picker.

And I just also, not just the color that I'm picking,

but also the saturation level.

The lower I go on this box, the lower the saturation.

The higher I go, the higher saturation.

And I can choose whichever color I want to apply

to the highlights on the image.

So let's go for an orange color

on the highlights of the image.

Then I can close this box.

And let's put in a blue to the shadow.

And you can see this right as you're moving the dropper

on the color picker,

as to what the effect is gonna look like.

So let's choose that.

Now I have another slider here

that allows me to choose the balance between

the highlights and the shadows,

or how much of the orange is gonna bleed into the shadows,

or vice versa.

And the best way to demonstrate this is

by experimenting with the slider.

I can move the slider to the left

and you can see that more of the blue is

coming into the image,

meaning that the blues are now bleeding a little bit

into the highlights, not just on the shadows.

And the reverse happens when I go to the right.

Now I have more of the

orange bleeding into my,

the entire image than I had on the blues.

So you wanna find the right balance in here

to add a lot more drama to this image.

This is a great way

to salvage an image that may have been ho-hum before.

So let's take a look at the before and after.

I'm gonna use my before and after key.

This is what it looked like before,

and this is after the effects.

A lot more dramatic, a lot more color,

and a lot more interest.

Let's take another example.

This image of a polo rider on the beach

I took in California a number of years ago.

And we had pretty terrible light.

The light was very flat,

there was a big fog bank obscuring the sun,

so we really didn't get any of the

dramatic lighting that we were looking for.

But I do like all the other elements in the scene.

I like the horse, I like the position of the hooves,

I like the fact that it's running in the water,

I love the action in the waves.

But unfortunately the light wasn't

all that favorable for us.

So let's play around a little bit,

or experiment with our Split Toning.

I'm gonna do something very similar as I did before,

I'm gonna go for the highlights.

And let's switch it up a little bit.

Let's go for blue highlights

and orange shadows.

And see what that looks like.

Again, this is really all about experimentation

and trying different things.

But to me, the two, the pair of colors that works the best,

or to me appeal to me the most,

are gonna be orange and blue,

and using those in combination.

Sometimes in the shadows,

putting the blue sometimes in the shadows,

or sometimes putting the oranges in the shadows.

And now you can see that what this has done,

is added kind of a more antique photo effect

onto the scene.

And again, because this is Lightroom

and we're doing non-destructive editing,

you can experiment with these as much as you wanted.

Change the colors, experiment with different things,

or even create snapshots.

If you like this, you can create a snapshot again,

and experiment with another set of colors

until you find the right colors

and the right balance that pleases you the most.

The last creative effect we're gonna look at is vignetting.

And what vignetting allows us to do is

create a dark frame around the edge of our image.

And with vignetting,

we can control and guide our viewer

to the specific part of the image

we want them to pay most attention to.

So let's take a look at how to do that.

So we're gonna look at vignetting

under the Effects panel

on the right hand side.

And we have a number of different settings,

our sliders here,

on how to apply vignetting.

Often times we want to apply

a highlight priority-type vignetting,

'cause that's what allows us to create

that dark frame around the edges.

But you can also do it by color priority

and add a color

to the edge of the frame as well.

So what we're gonna do first is apply

an amount of vignetting.

And what you'll see is,

that depending on which way I move this slider,

I will be adding a dark, or a light vignette.

If I go to the left,

I'm adding a dark vignette to the scene.

If I move to the right,

I'm adding a light vignette to the scene.

So it really depends on the look that you wanna

apply to your image.

I typically like to add a dark vignette to the image,

and I can also control the midpoint

of where the circle is going to be.

And in a way, that also helps us apply the feathering.

If I change the feathering all the way to the left,

you can see that I have a very sharp circle.

If I move it to the right, it's a very soft circle.

Now that we've adjusted our feather,

we can also change the midpoint.

And the midpoint allows us to control

how far into the midpoint of the image

the vignetting encroaches upon.

I can also change the roundness,

I can make it really round or more oval,

or squarish,

or I can also change the highlights as well,

to what point the feathering is imparted

on the highlights of the image.

Now in this image, the highlights really don't

make that big of a change,

because there's very few highlights included

in the vignette.

Let's take a look at another example.

Here we have a red fox image

that I made a number of years ago in Montana.

And this is absolutely one of my

favorite images of all time.

There's something about the look of this fox

that really, truly captivates me.

But I wanna add a little bit of vignetting to this image

so that I can really draw the attention of the viewer

straight into the fox's eyes and the fox's expression.

So I'm gonna move my vignette slider amount

a little bit to the left,

and just impart that tiny bit

of darkness around the edges,

which really brings out the fox in the middle of the frame

and makes that viewer really focus on the fox,

and allows the background to sort of melt away.

Now, the vignette tool is a very easy and quick way

to apply a vignetting to an image.

But often times, it's not an effective tool,

especially if our subject is off-center.

So let's take a look at another example here.

In this particular example, we have this white squirrel

that is off-center.

Basically on the right side of the frame.

If I were to apply a vignetting here,

you can see that my vignette is not really focused around

the squirrel itself.

It's really spanning the center of the image.

And if I add the vignette,

or change the midpoint some more,

I am still not really focusing that vignette

on the squirrel itself.

So what are we to do?

We can go back to another tool that we looked at

earlier in this class,

and that is the Radial tool.

What the Radial tool allows us to do,

is also create a vignette,

in a slightly different way.

So I am going to create a circle around my subject

using the radial tool,

by clicking on the center of the subject

and dragging away from it,

it allows me to create this circle or oval.

And then I can create that vignette by

changing the exposure of the image

and changing the exposure of

everything else that's around.

When I create a radial selection,

the effect is being imparted

on the outside of that selection.

So any adjustments that I make,

such as exposure here,

is being applied to the outside of that selection.

So remember, if you have a subject that's off-center,

using the radial tool is a much more effective way

to impart a vignette,

than using the vignette tool itself.

So, let's look at your homework.

Select a few of your personal images

that you think would look great in black and white,

and experiment with the black and white filters

to create different looks

and density in the image.

In our next lesson,

we'll take a look at applying adjustments

to multiple images,

and using external editors and plug-ins.