Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
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[Lightroom for Travel Photography]
In many cases, when you're out taking pictures on a trip you will often find that color
is one of the key reasons that you photograph a particular subject in the first place.
And yet in many situations, converting an image to black and white
can create a unique perspective, an interesting way of looking at a subject
that you photographed in color.
Lightroom makes it very easy to create a black and white interpretation
of a photo with considerable flexibility.
I'll start off in the Develop module on the right panel
by choosing the black and white option for treatment,
and this will give us a basic black and white interpretation of the photo.
But of course we can adjust the interpretation in order to fine-tune the overall image.
I'll go ahead and scroll down on the right panel,
and I'm going to go to the HSL Color and black and white section.
You can see here that the black and white option has been automatically selected
since I chose the black and white treatment.
And now I can adjust the luminance values for specific colors within the image.
For example, adjusting orange will cause any areas in the image that were orange
or that are orange in the color version to be brightened or darkened.
I can also work directly on the image, which generally makes things a little bit easier,
especially if you don’t remember exactly what color specific objects in the photo were.
I’ll turn on the On Image Adjustment feature,
and then I can simply point to an area of the photo
and then click upward to brighten or downward to darken.
Lightroom will determine which color is most dominant in that area
and adjust the appropriate slider accordingly.
So, for example, I might darken this area over on the left
and perhaps brighten this area on the right.
You can see that the left area is predominantly orange,
whereas the right area is orange and yellow blended together.
And of course I can continue working with the individual sliders.
At this point, though, I think I have a pretty good starting point.
I would like to add a little bit of color to the image as well, though.
I’m going to go to split toning.
Split toning is an interesting adjustment.
It allows us to add color to any image--
in this case a black and white interpretation of an image with 1 color in the highlights
and a different color in the shadows,
or of course we can use the same basic color for both.
To get started, all you need to do is increase the saturation
for either highlights or shadows or both.
I’ll go ahead and exaggerate the adjustment here
just so we can get a better sense of what's going on, and then I’ll change the color.
I’ll shift the hue for shadows to a sort of greenish color,
and I'll make the highlights something of a yellowish color,
and then I’ll increase saturation a little more for the highlights
just so that we can see.
We now have the bright areas of the image a little bit yellow to orange
and the darker areas of the image a little bit green.
We can also shift the balance between those
so that we get more areas determined to be shadows even if they are relatively bright
or more areas determined to be highlights even if they are relatively dark.
So we're effectively shifting the balance of how much of each of those colors
will appear throughout the image.
In most cases, I prefer a relatively subtle infusion of color into the image,
so I’ll start off by finding a good value for highlights--
maybe something just a little bit more yellow but not getting into the green area.
And for shadows maybe I’ll shift that down to something
that's just a little bit more sort of orange-ish, almost heading toward the red values.
But then I’ll reduce the saturation, and I’ll reduce that saturation rather significantly
because I’m really just trying to add a very subtle color tint to the image.
I am not trying to make it a color image or make it look like it was painted,
I just want to give it a little bit of warmth in this particular case.
I’ll go ahead and turn off Split Toning--you can see the neutral version of the image--
and then turn it back on, and we get that little bit of a warm tint in the photo.
I think I might also add a vignette to this image.
I’ll scroll down just a little bit further,
and we'll find the option to add a Post-Crop Vignette in the Effects section.
I generally work with the Highlight Priority option for style.
We also have Color Priority if you want to preserve colors
or Paint Overlay, which is an option I don’t tend to use very much.
So I'll leave that set to Highlight Priority.
I can then increase the amount if I want to brighten the edges
or decrease the amount if I want to darken the edges.
I’ll start off with an exaggerated adjustment for amount
just so that I can better see exactly how I'm affecting the image,
and then I can adjust the Midpoint, bringing the vignette further out toward the edges
or closer in to the image.
I can also adjust Roundness
so I can make the vignette effect more round or less round.
And if I reduce Roundness enough,
I’ll effectively get just the edges of the image being affected by that vignette.
I can also determine the degree of feathering--
in other words, how much transition there will be for that vignette effect.
With no feathering we get a very crisp edge for the vignetting, for example.
I’ll apply a bit of feathering here,
and I could also, if needed, adjust the highlights values,
but since I don’t have any real highlights that are showing up in the area being vignetted,
that won't have much of an effect in this particular case.
I think I will increase feather just a little bit more to get more of a transition,
and then I'll increase the Amount so that I don’t have quite as much darkening
of the edge there.
I’ll turn off the effect, and you can see even though I used relatively modest settings,
it's still a rather significant impact on the image.
And in this case, I think it sort of helps to add to that old feel for this image.
It makes it seem just a little bit more dated and classic.
But as you can see, with just a few adjustments
we are able to take an image that's in full color
and convert it into something that has a little bit more of a classic feel.
It sort of, in my mind, better fits the relatively old subject
that was being photographed in the first place.
[Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4]
