Improving a wedding photo with Lightroom, part 1

- Hello friends, my name is Chris Orwig, and welcome to another episode. Each week I come to you with an episode where we look at some tips and techniques that we can use to improve our photographs, and in this week's episode, we're in Lightroom Classic. Here we'll look at how we can improve the exposure and color of this photograph, then in next week's episode, we will finish it off with some more specific adjustments. All right, well, here's a picture of my buddy Tony, his beautiful bride Ashley, it's a raw capture, straight out of the camera, it's kind of a fun moment, but the color and tone isn't great. So, we go to the basic panel. In the basic panel, we can start to dive in and make adjustments, say, by increasing the exposure, or boosting our shadows, or adding some contrast. But sometimes what we need to do when we make adjustments like this is make sure that we aren't overexposing the highlights or make sure we have detail on the shadows. The way that we can do that is either by clicking on these little icons here, which kind of takes forever to do that, or even better, just tap the J key on your keyboard. That will turn the clipping indicator on and off. Now, the clipping indicator shows me I have loss of detail in my highlights, now if, let me simulate for a moment, we had really deep, darker tones here, you could see clipping indicator in the blue in the darker tones. We don't have that right now, it's mostly a highlight issue with this image. Now, of course, we could try to decrease the highlight slider or bring the whites back, sometimes that works, sometimes it just doesn't get rid of everything, and other times it kind of affects the look of the image in a way that maybe we don't quite like. So if ever you find the basic isn't enough, what do you do? Well, you jump down to the next panel, which is called tone curve. Now, in tone curve, you want to jump to the RGB composite view, and if you're working on highlights you're going to this point up here, if you're working on shadows, you go to the point down at the bottom. Now, for this one up here, what we're going to do is click and drag, and we're going to click and drag this down, yet if you forget, just click and drag it one way or the other, and you'll quickly see how it will affect the image. So we click and drag that down just a little bit, essentially what we did is we brought back detail into the brightest area of the photograph. Now, we could do the same thing with our shadows if we needed to, we don't, but we can click on that and drag that up or to the right. So, if some of you drag it up, it gets sort of that film faded type of a look, which can be kind of fun too. All right, well, either way, we have looked at and we corrected that clipping issue, tap the J key multiple times, make sure there's no clipping, okay, we are good to go. Let's go back to the basic panel. What do we do next? Well, with this image, I like the moment, there's things I want to retouch away, we need to fix the details, we need to fix colors, where do we begin? Well, in this case, where I'm going to begin is by going to my temperature here, so I'll go ahead and increase the warmth of the image, let me exaggerate for a moment. Notice how as I increase the warmth, it becomes too yellow, but it's yellow-ish green. So, rather than just the warmth, we're going to bring a little bit of warmth and also, a little bit of magenta, and can you see how that sort of offset that green color cast a little bit? So we were adding a little bit of warmth, and then also some of those other tones there too. I'm liking the look and feel of that, I also might want to brighten it up a little bit more, and just try to customize this now that we have the overall look with our color dialed in. One of the problems that I'm seeing now is that we have this warmer color palette, tap the backslash key, you can see before and after, and the jacket has become a little bit, say, magenta. So, we can fix that a few different ways. One way that might be fun to explore is to use the adjustment brush. If you go to the adjustment brush, and click on the option for color, and then change some of your color controls, like we will desaturate, add a little bit of warmth there as well, actually, let's add a little bit of cooler tone. We'll make this little more blue than it actually is. Then with our brush, we'll go down here, auto-mask turned on, flow, somewhere below 50 is typically a good idea. Feather, little bit higher feather value there, size, maybe a little smaller, and with auto-mask turned on, as long as we're painting over an area where the crosshairs are covering, it will primarily focus on that part of the image. So again, I'm just clicking and dragging over this, I'm looking to remove some of that magenta color cast that we had there in the jacket. Also, I should say is, as you're painting over this, if you realize the color in the jacket isn't what you had hoped, you made a mistake with another color combo that you had there, we can go back and we can change this. So, here, we could change it to, it's a little bit more of a gray jacket there, or we could make it have a little more blue. Or, if you can't quite get the color right, you can always go down to your color chip down below here, and you can add a color into it. So you can see how I'm changing the color, I can fine-tune what type of a blue jacket it is, and the lower you get, the less color effect you're going to have there. So we could add a little bit of that blue there, and then control this a little bit this way, and maybe like that. All right, well, there you have it, couple of ways that we can improve this photograph, that is step one, looks like there's some more brush work I need to do down here just to get that just right. I'm liking that, there's more I want to do with light, with retouching, with details, so we are going to end this week's episode here, and then we will finish off this photograph next time, so I hope that you have a fantastic rest of your day, and I will see you next week in next week's episode, bye for now.