Lightroom Day 2: Developing in Detail

Objectives

By the end of class, students will be able to:

  • Feel comfortable within the Develop module
    • View options
  • Edit photos using more advanced tools
    • Editing tools marked by icons (Spot Removal, Red Eye Correction, Masking)
    • Editing tabs (Tone Curve, HSL/Color/BW, Color Grading, Detail, Lens Corrections, Transform, Effects, Calibration)
  • Export photos

Practice files: files.learnsoftware.org/lightroom – Download Day 2

Outline

Introduction (2 min)

  • Any questions/experiences since last time?
  • Show a before/after image that you’ve edited using Lightroom tools

Viewing Options (3 min)

  • Navigate between regular, reference, before/after, and proofing (how photos appear when printed)
  • Backwards slash to view your photo before you started editing it
  • Virtual copy – creates a copy of the photo as edited, use as a reference
  • Snapshots
    • Saves a photo as it’s edited so if you click on it, it goes back to that edit.
  • Throughout the class, you will go through the editing settings one by one, you can turn edits on and off using the toggle switch to the left 

Spot Removal Tool (5 min)

  • Shortcut “Q”
  • Heal vs. Clone – heal blends, clone is more cut and dry
    • Select the blemish/spot and it will use surrounding areas to cover it up
    • Drops gray pins that you can move around or delete.
  • When would you want to use spot removal?
  • Size
    • Adjust size of brush by scrolling on your mouse wheel or using [ ]
    • Adjust size after already selecting the area by clicking and dragging the outline of the area
  • Feather
    • Controls the softness at the edges of the brush. No feathering, hard edge. High feathering, softer edge.
  • Opacity
    • How “see-through” the brush is
  • Visual Spots – right under the picture, helps you notice any imperfections in the inverted version of the picture
  • ACTIVITY: Fix some spots that you find in these pictures.
  • Red Eye Correction (next tool)
    • We don’t have an example photo for this but it is pretty self-explanatory if you need to use it. Just click on the red eyes.

Masking (10 min)

  • Applying basic edits to just a specific part of the photo
    • AI can detect the subject or the sky for you if you’re wanting to just edit those parts of the photo
    • You can check “show overlay” under the picture to show which part of the picture is being affected by the edits – shortcut “O”
    • Brush – shortcut “K”
  • Gradients
    • Linear – shortcut “M”
      • Make your edits and click and drag a gradient
      • When might this tool come in handy?
        • Useful to adjust a large portion of the photo with a gradually fading pattern that creates soft transition – blown out skies
    • Radial – shortcut “shift + M”
      • Same thing but in circular form
      • When might this tool come in handy?
        • Good for customized vignettes, brightening subjects’ faces
      • You can Invert Mask (check box at the bottom) if you want it to apply to everything BUT the circle
    • Hold shift for a perfectly straight line or round circle
  • Ranges
    • Color Range
      • Select a color, all corresponding colors in the image will be selected and adjusted
    • Luminance Range
      • Select an area with specific range of brightness, all areas with the selected range of brightness will be selected and adjusted
      • Slider and Map option help you decide the exact level of brightness you want to select.
    • Depth Range
      • Select areas based on their distance from the camera. This tool is enabled only for photos containing depth information.
      • You can then add or subtract from any of these masks using any of the tools mentioned above.
  • ACTIVITY: Give them time to practice using the masking on different images

Tone Curve (5 min)

  • A lot like the histogram, but a little more specialized. Do you remember how the histogram worked?
  • Highlights, lights, darks, shadows
  • More powerful because you can anchor one part of the photo (midtones) while changing the highlights
    • Why would this be helpful?
  • Regional sliders – like training wheels, more controlled adjustments
  • Custom tone curve – add your own points; the larger the S, the more contrast you have
    • Create 3 points on the curve at the quarter, half and three quarter marks
    • Pull the shadows point down
    • Raise the midtones point slightly, or simply anchor them by not moving the point at all
    • Raise the highlights point
  • You can also use it to add RGB tint to the pictures
  • ACTIVITY: Give them some time to mess with the tone curve as this is a bit of a complicated tool.

Color Editing (5 min)

  • HSL/Color/B&W (5 min)— adjust the colors off a picture; Color options is just another way of organizing the same options as HSL (by color rather than h, s, l)
    • Hue: another word for color
    • Saturation: the intensity/strength of a color
    • Luminance: the brightness of a color
  • Color Grading— Colorize the shadows and highlights of an image individually of each other
    • When would this tool be helpful and not tacky?
      • Can look tacky if not done tastefully but can actually be really good for these landscape shots (making the shadows a different shade of green can really boost the color in them)
    • Another way to change around the HSL, but this time in specific parts of the photo – the midtones, shadows, and highlights.
    • Change the color and saturation by moving around the circle on the color wheel
    • Change the luminance by moving the slider underneath the color wheels.
    • TIP: Increase saturation slider first, even if it looks like too much, and then change the hue, and once you find the color you want, tone down the saturation slider. Hold alt/option to see colors saturated while manipulating balance.
  • ACTIVITY: Give some time to mess with the HSL/Color and Color Grading.

Other Edits (5 min)

  • Detail— Increase sharpening, decrease noise (noise is the fine grain that comes from a high ISO camera setting). Hold alt/option to see what edges are being sharpened.
  • Lens Corrections— Lr knows what lens you were using because it is in the metadata of the RAW photo – lenses are made of curved glass and generally have a little bit of distortion, so you can check “Enable Profile Corrections” if you want to reduce that distortion
    • Chromatic Aberration is the weird purple or green halo that is usually around bright highlights in your photo (the cheaper/worse the lens, the more chromatic aberration you will see). Check the box “Remove Chromatic Aberration” to fix this.
  • Transform— Use to stretch, rotate, scale, or move an image to fit within a specific frame
  • Effects— vignetting, grain, dehaze in particular
  • Camera Calibration— Like the settings in your camera for Portraits, Vivid, Landscape, etc. 
    • Best for skin tone correction
    • Much more nuanced than color grading
  • **Extra tips**
    • Click on photo to zoom, or use spacebar, click
    • Right-click > Edit in > Photoshop. Then save in Ps and Lr will automatically update (and create a copy with the new edits)

ACTIVITY (~10 min): Give them a good amount of time to edit a photo with all the new tools they’ve learned.

Exporting (3 min)

  • Multiple ways to get there
    • Right click – Export
    • File – export
    • Library module – export
  • Export Location
  • File Naming
  • Video
  • File settings: Change settings based on whether you’re trying to preserve quality to edit in another program, to print, or to upload to the web.
    • Best image format for super high quality is TIFF, otherwise jpeg is best
    • For the quality, if you’re just uploading to web, 80 is a good balance
    • You can also limit the file size if you don’t want it to be too big
  • Image Sizing
  • Output Sharpening
  • Metadata
  • (We’ll cover Watermark in a later class)
  • Post-Processing

Conclusion (2 min)

  • Recap
  • Next time, we’ll focus a lot more on editing large groups of photos with presets/batch processing and doing some of the more specialized edits that Lightroom does.