Lightroom 4 - Create Stunning Images

[Getting Started with][Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom®4][♫new age music] Hi. My name's Julianne Kost, [Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist] and in the next few minutes we're going to take a look at how we can make the most of our images by applying things like lens correction and perspective correction, as well as making global and selective adjustments to both color, as well as tone. So let's get started. The first thing that you may have noticed is I've created another collection called Develop Module. These are the images that I actually want to take over to the Develop Module. So the quickest way to move to the Develop Module is to either tap the D key or you can click on the Develop Module in the Module Picker, up here. The first thing that I want to talk about is lens correction. So let's go ahead and display the lens correction panel. Now one of the things that I've done is I've put all of my panels in Solo Mode, and the way that I did that was by Right-mouse clicking, and then choosing Solo Mode. What that enables me to do is basically, when I click on the header for one panel, any other panels would close so that I'm only seeing one panel at a time, and that way, I don't have to scroll as much-- especially when I'm working on a smaller monitor, like my laptop. So when we take a look at lens correction, we have 2 options: we have a Profile area and a Manual area. So with this image, if I enable the profile correction, Lightroom is going out, and it's looking at the Metadata for the image; it's looking at the Make and the Model of the camera, and it's going to apply a profile automatically. So Lightroom ships with over 600 profiles for different lens and camera combinations. But if you don't see your profile or if one is not applied by default because you have kind of maybe a more custom combination, you can always go to the Lab site-- which is labs.adobe.com-- and you can download the Profile Creator tool and create your own profile. There's also a community that you can reach out to, using our Lens Profile Downloader utility that will enable you to download lens profiles--custom lens profiles-- that other people in the community have shared. So those are 2 options if you've kind of got a unique camera and lens combination. You'll notice that when I enabled the Profile Corrections, it also corrected the vignetting, and you may or may not want that. If you don't want the vignetting corrected, then you can simply drag the slider to the left and it will leave the vignetting that was caused by that wide angle lens. Now in this image, it didn't make that much of a difference, but let's move to the next image so that we can see, for example, with a really wide angle lens, what happens when we enable the Profile Correction. So you can see, here, there's a lot more distortion going on that's being corrected by the Profile. Again, that was before--and that's after. But before we finish up with that last image, let's return back to it for a moment because, although the correction has been done for the distortion in the lens, there's some perspective correction that I would also like to correct. So I'm going to click on the Manual area here, and you'll notice that, for example, I can move the vertical slider to correct Vertical Perspective correction. I can also move the horizontal slider if I wanted to and I can also choose to rotate the image if it needs to be rotated. Now I've already cropped this image a little bit and, in fact, if we tap the R key, which is the keyboard shortcut for cropping, you can see that image has been cropped. Let's go ahead and scroll up here, and in the crop tool area, I'm going to reset my crop for a minute. And then we're going to return back to Lens Correction because I want to make sure that you understand that, while you make these transformations, obviously, Lightroom is having to transform the image-- and so you might see these gray areas around the edges of your image. If you don't want to see those, which I don't-- I want Lightroom to automatically crop those-- I will click the Constrain Crop area. And what that tells me is that if I'm shooting with a really wide angle lens and I know that I'm going to need to manually correct the perspective of the photograph, I'm going to need to shoot a little bit wider so that when I make the adjustments, there will still be enough information there when I crop. All right--let's go ahead and move to the next series of images, which is these snails again-- and we're going to talk some more about cropping. So again, I'll tap the R key, and that brings me to my Crop tool. We can see the options right up here. This is the Crop tool. So if we didn't want to use the shortcut, we could simply click right here. Now anything that I do, in all of the develop module, is non-destructive--including the crop. So let's say, for example, I drag the crop handle down here and then I reposition the snail within that crop marquee, and I hit the Enter or Return key. I have cropped the image, and yet it's not a permanent crop. If I tap the R key again or click on the Crop tool, you can see that the rest of my image is still there. I'm just telling Lightroom to only display what's in the crop marquee. Now, if I have a horizontal crop like this and I want to quickly exchange it to a vertical crop, I can tap the X key. Of course, at any point in time, I can redo the crop by simply clicking on the crop handle here, and then repositioning my image within that crop. And you'll notice that it is locked to the original aspect ratio. But of course, I can change that as well. So if I wanted a square crop, I could pick 1:1, and then we could go ahead and crop that down. I can also enter in custom aspect ratios if I want to. So let's do something unique--like maybe I want this to be 1 by 6 instead. I just want a simple sliver. When I click OK--well, it's got the horizontal one. I'll just tap "X" and now I have the vertical one. Because what we might want to do is actually put multiple instances of different snails right next to each other-- kind of like a triptych or a diptych or-- I'm not sure what you would call it if you have 5 images. So I've cropped this one image and I'll tap the Return key or the Enter key. But now I want to apply this same crop to this whole series of snails so I"m going to select them down in the filmstrip and then I'm going to click on the Sync button. So in Lightroom--whenever you make an adjustment to one image and then you want to make that same adjustment to multiple images, you can simply select the rest of the images in the filmstrip and then click Sync. Now I don't want to synchronize all of these settings so I will choose to Check None, and then I'm going to select the Crop. I'll go ahead and choose Synchronize, and it's going to synchronize that crop to these other images. Now it might be that I need to go in and refine that crop for individual images. So, for example, I might move to the next image, using my filmstrip; tap the R key, and then reposition the crop; move to the next image and again, reposition the crop. And I can quickly just go through the rest of my images, right here-- that I all want to be cropped to the same aspect ratio-- and simply move the crop aspect ratio to fit wherever I want it to be applied. All right. Let's move to the next image here and talk about the histogram as well as the basic panel, and how we're going to make improvements to this image. Well, the first thing that you might notice is down here, in the lower right, I have a warning icon and that's because I worked with this image in a previous version of Lightroom and it has settings applied to it. And what Lightroom 4 is warning me is that there is a new process version, and so I would need to update this image if I want to apply more changes, using the newer technology. Now, if Lightroom 4 is the first version of Lightroom that you're working with, you probably won't see this warning-- unless you've made adjustments to those images in another Adobe application, such as Bridge or Camera Raw, moving into Photoshop. All right. So how do I update to the new process version? Well, I can scroll down here to Camera Calibration and I could change the process version here-- or I can use the menu across the top and go to Settings and then Process and change it here-- but really, the easiest way to do this is to just click on the Warning, Lightroom brings up a dialogue box. I just want to update this single image, so I'll click Update. And in the future, if you see that warning and you don't want to see that dialogue box, just hold down the Option or the Alt key and click on the warning, and it will update it without showing that added dialogue box. All right. Here is our histogram, in the upper right-hand corner. And what I really like about the new process version in Lightroom 4 is that the histogram is split into 5 different segments. And as I position my cursor in the histogram and move it from left to right, you can see that I am now hovering over the blacks, which corresponds to the Black slider, right down here. If I move over to the right--here are my Shadows. Here is the Exposure area, and here is the Highlight area, and here are the Whites. So we can immediately see the correlation between the sliders and what values in the histogram those sliders are going to change. The other nice thing is the sliders are all starting at zero. So that's new to Lightroom 4. And any of these sliders-- if I move them to the right, they all add more of that slider; and if I move them to the left, it decreases the amount of that slider. All right. So how would I work my way through this image? Well first of all, I'd want to check to see if the white balance is correct. So this is my White Balance eyedropper, and I can simply click on it to select it or tap the W key, and then click in an area of my image that I think should be neutral. So in this case, if I think the clouds are looking too blue and I want to warm them up a little bit or set them more to a neutral value I can click right there with the eyedropper. Now let me tap the W key again to get the eyedropper. You can see that my setting is set to Auto Dismiss-- so that means I click once and then it puts the tool back for me. If I don't want that, I can turn that off and then I can click multiple times in my image, and then decide which white balance I like. All right. For now, I'm going to go with this. I'll put the White Balance eyedropper tool back, by either putting it back in the basic panel or I could tap the W key again. Now I'm going to scroll down and look at the exposure of the image. I can move it left to decrease the exposure, or right to increase the exposure. I'm going to add just a little bit of exposure. I'm looking at my histogram, making sure that I don't push any values to pure black or pure white during this whole process. And in fact, if I want to toggle on a warning, I can tap the J key. And you'll notice that when I tap the J key, that highlights these 2 icons in my histogram so that if I were to take the exposure too far, anything that's clipped to pure white would have this red overlay. And if I take the exposure down too far, anything that's clipped to pure black would have the blue overlay. So it's a nice little visual warning, as I'm working, to making sure that I'm not clipping any of my values. I'm also going to add a little bit of contrast-- just to add a little bit of punch to the image-- and then I'm going to move down, because I've lost a lot of my highlights here. So I'm going to bring down my highlights a bit. You can see that we're now seeing those clouds again, and in fact, I could also bring down the whites a bit. In fact, I might not need to bring the highlights down quite as much because-- remember, the whites are what are controlling the far right-hand side of the histogram. Now, my shadows are a little bit too dark. So if I want to see into those shadows or if I want to add light to those shadows, I can move my Shadow slider over to the right and then I would also use the Black slider, in order to make sure that even though I've added light to my shadows, I still have a deep, rich black. All right. At this point, we can move down to the Presence area. I could add clarity if I wanted to. Clarity is going to visually make my image look sharper because it's looking at edges in the image and it's going to brighten one side of the edge, and darken down the other side of the edge-- which is the same theory of how you apply sharpening. And by doing that, we're going to trick our eye into thinking that the image is sharper. Then I'll move down to Vibrance and Saturation. There's an important difference here. When I increase the Vibrance, this is a relative slider. So it's got a lot less of an effect than if I reset that, by just double-clicking Vibrance, than if I use the Saturation slider. And I would suggest, if you're shooting portraiture, you probably want to use the Vibrance slider to add a little bit of color, maybe in the sky or in the green grass, because the Vibrance slider is not going to increase the vibrance in skin tones. All right. Below this, we have the Tone Curve, which is a little bit more of an advanced tool. There are 2 different ways that you can display the Tone Curve. This is the default manner in which we can go ahead and brighten or darken down the Tone Curve of our image. We can also change this over to the Point Curve. So, for those of you who are familiar with using curves in Photoshop, this might look a little bit more familiar-- where you can actually click and add a point on the curve; click again and add a secondary point. If you don't like that point, you can simply drag it off the curve. And in Lightroom 4, one of the new features is that you can also go in, not just to the RGB Composite Curve, but you can go into individual curves. And this can be used for both color correction as well as some creative color effects. So, for example, if I think that the image is looking a little bit too blue, we can go into the Blue Channel and we can drag that Blue Channel down to subtract blue or we could increase the amount of blue, by dragging the Channel up. And of course, we can add as many points to this as we want. So we could make changes, for example, to just the Shadow area or just the Highlight area. For now, I'll go ahead and tear that off. Now at this point, I'd like to see the difference between where I came from and what we're looking at now-- so I'd like a Before and After view. So I'm going to tap the Y key, but that's the shortcut for this icon right down here, and it enables me to see the Before, on the left, and the After view, on the right. There are different ways that we can view the Before and After. We could split the screen--which is quite nice, because then, when you zoom in and you move the image around, it actually will split the screen right here so you can see a Before and After view. We can also view this, as far as a Top/Bottom Before and After, with the split or without. And then to go back to Loop view, we can either tap the E key or simply click on this icon right here. Now, I'm zoomed in; if I want to move to a different area in the Navigator panel, I can simply drag the rectangle there-- or if I want to zoom out, I'll just click once in the Image area. Another feature to point out is, in the left side in this panel, you'll notice that I've got a History panel. And in that History panel, Lightroom has been keeping track of everything that I've done. So I can go back to any point in time, by simply clicking on that state in history. This is great because, unlike Photoshop, Lightroom keeps this history, so I can quite Lightroom today, come back to this image a month from now-- and I will still have all of that history available to me. Now let's say that I like the results of what I've done on this image, and I have some similar images in my filmstrip. Well, again--just like we applied the crop to multiple images, I can hold down my Command key, select these multiple images in my filmstrip, and then click on the Sync button. Here, I'm going to Check All to start with, and then I'll Uncheck the crop-- because I do think that this image was cropped. And then I'll select Synchronize. So Lightroom has now, basically copied the settings from this image and is pasting them onto the other image. Of course, I could also do that with the Copy and Paste buttons. Now if we move to another image here, we can see that those same adjustments have been applied. All right. Let's move to this image right here. I want to talk, quickly, about the HSL treatments that you can apply to an image. HSL is for Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity. And this panel is an excellent way to selectively adjust a specific color range. So I'm going to click on the Hue first, and then grab my Targeted Adjustment tool. When I position my Targeted Adjustment tool over the image area, wherever I click with those cross-hairs-- if I click and drag up, it's going to change the hue of that region that I clicked on, by moving the slider to the right. If I click and drag down, it will move the Hue slider to the left. I can also change the saturation this way, by moving over to the Saturation area, and then I could selectively desaturate a color range, by clicking and dragging down or, again, I could click and drag up to increase the saturation. And finally, I can change the luminosity. Again, with my Targeted Adjustment tool, clicking and dragging down is going to darken it, and clicking and dragging up is going to lighten it. Now, of course, I could come over and just simply use the sliders instead of the Targeted Adjustment tool-- but a lot of times, when I think something is blue, it might be a combination of maybe blue and aqua or blue and purple. So I find that I get much better results, using the Targeted Adjustment tool. Now, I want to move back to Saturation. But before I do that, I want to reset the Luminosity sliders here. I can reset an individual slider by double-clicking on it or I can reset all of the sliders at once by double-clicking on the word, "Luminance". Now let's go back to Saturation for a minute. I'm going to reset everything here, and with my Targeted Adjustment tool selected, I'm going to decrease the saturation in the blues and then I'm going to position my cursor on top of this more magenta purple color, right here, and drag up, in order to saturate that. So--so far, we've been making global adjustments. But I'm going to return, really quickly, to the image of the horse to show you that you can also make selective adjustments. There are 2 tools to do this: the Graduated Filter, and the Adjustment Brush. Both of these tools have a huge list of parameters that you can load the tool up with. So let's say, for example, I just want to desaturate the sand right here. I've got my Graduated Filter selected; I decrease the amount of saturation and then I simply click and drag up in my image. If I didn't hit the right spot, I can use the Pin to reposition it. I can make this a longer Graduated Filter or a shorter graduation--and reposition it. I can also change the angle of it, by clicking on the center line there. If I've taken out too much saturation, I can simply move the slider over to the right to add that saturation back in. And of course, I can add multiple parameters at once. For example, if I wanted to decrease the amount of sharpening there we could do that, by moving the Sharpening slider over. I'll scoot that up a little bit further. And we could also add a little bit of negative clarity. The same rules apply to my Adjustment Brush. So let's select that for a moment. I'm going to double-click on the Saturation slider to reset that, and I'm going to increase my clarity, and load the brush with that-- plus a little bit of contrast and a little bit of negative exposure. And then--you can see here--I can pick my size of my brush. I want to make sure that the flow is 100 percent, because I want to quickly just paint in the sky area. And you can see that, obviously, this is painting a little bit too much and I'm not going to be super careful in the demo. But if I do paint too much and I need to remove some of the area that I've painted, I can either hold down the Option key to change my Brush to my Eraser or I can actually click where it says, "Erase" here, and then we could subtract the effect from down here and, again--I said I could go in and paint more, but for the sake of the demo--to keep it short-- I just want to show you that I can then go back in and change any of these parameters. So if I decide that I didn't want the decrease in exposure but I wanted more contrast, I can change that. I can add additional desaturation there. I could add or subtract more clarity. And of course, I can add as many pins as I want. So if I wanted to make another change, I could click New, and then I could double-click the Effects to reset all of the sliders, just load this up with a little bit of an increase in Shadows, make my brush a little bit smaller-- and you can just use your left bracket and your right bracket in order to do that-- and then, if you think you've brought that up a little too much, we can just decrease the Shadow area a little bit. And while we're adding light to the shadows that area might get a little bit noisy, so with our Noise Reduction slider, we want to increase that to just reduce the noise in that area simultaneously. All right. That wraps up our overview of the Develop Module and the many tools that you can use to enhance your images. My name's Julieanne Kost. Thanks for watching. [ADOBE® Photoshop® Lightroom® 4][♫new age music] [Crew: Kush Amerasinghe, Erik Espera, Karl Miller] [Presenter: Julieanne Kost][tv.adobe.com/evangelist/julieanne-kost][Adobe TV]