Finishing the keepers in Lightroom

- [Chris] Hello, friends, this is Chris Orwig and welcome back to Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode we will pick up where we left off in the last episode. And in that one we talked about the importance of having a critical eye when you're selecting the keepers, trying to find the keepers from a set of photographs. Here we'll look at how I would process these images that I have selected as the keepers. And in this case what I wanna do is more of a real world scenario, so I'm just gonna go through this. I've never processed these images, this is really as I'm working, as I'm seeing, as I'm thinking, so you can see how that process works.

And in this case I have the set of photographs, I would begin by going to the Develop module and selecting an image that I think is kind of cool or representative of the set. And I like to begin by going to my Presets. And inside of Presets what you can do is just kind of hover over different presets that you have and see how that affects the look. And sometimes you can get some ideas on how you might process your photograph. And one of the things that I'm seeing as I'm just kind of scrolling through these really quickly is I'm really digging kind of cooler color tones and skin tones which aren't quite so yellow and red, but have much less color in them.

So I'm gonna use that as a little bit of an inspiration. And so what I would do next then is go ahead and select all the images. In the Develop module I'm gonna go ahead and with my syncing I wanna sync everything, so I'm just gonna go ahead and sync everything minus Spot Removal, so make sure those are all checked. And then flip on Auto Sync. Now as I make changes, for example, if I click the Auto button that will auto-apply settings to all of the images. And for example, let me do something more drastic, if I make these all blue you can see how they now all have that blue tint.

Or if I reset all the images they're now all reset. All right, so what do we wanna do first with photographs like this? Well, before I get too carried away with color and tone I actually like to drop down to a few things like Detail. I know with my camera and lens combo that this amount of Sharpening tends to look really good. And in this lighting scenario about this amount of Noise Reduction. I also know that with Lens Corrections I wanna remove Chromatic Aberration in case there is any. I'm not gonna Enable Profile Corrections, because I actually don't like, let me zoom out so you can see this, how it brightens the corners.

I kind of like a little bit of a vignette on this image. And then down here for Effects I'm gonna add a touch of film Grain, 'cause I'm gonna go for more of a film aesthetic. And I might even darken my corners just a smidge there, so I'm gonna do a little bit of that, little bit of vignette to add to that natural vignette that's already there from the type of light that I have and the backdrop that I'm using, this concrete wall here. All right, so I've dialed in my essentials. Now the fun part, now we get to play.

What the heck are we going to do? Well, one of the things that we can do is we get in the Basic panel and I know that I'm gonna probably want a little bit of Clarity and a little bit of a loss of the brightest colors, so I'm gonna lose some of the Vibrance. I actually think that right there is almost pretty cool. Like I could almost finish with that, but I'm not going to. So I'll brighten up my Shadows a touch. Add a little bit of Contrast, just a smidge. Drop the Highlights down. And then the Blacks I'm gonna bring down as well.

Now one of the things I'm seeing with the color in the skin tones is I mentioned I want less color there, so I would take care of that by going to HSL. If you go to the Saturation tab in HSL you can control the colors in the skin tones really with your Reds and Oranges a lot of times, right? And so I'm just gonna drop that down a little bit and then go to Luminance and then brighten that up. So see how it's kind of becoming a brighter white there? And I'm not going for something that is photorealistic.

Remember, this is something which more has a certain mood or feeling about it. Now so far our kind of deeper tones and colors are pretty close to what they were. If I wanted to fine-tune those the way that I might do that is try Split Toning or Tone Curve. I'm a little hesitant, 'cause Split Toning doesn't always work, but if you hold down the Option key you can drag this around and find a color for the Shadows and then bring in a little bit of color maybe into the Shadows. But as I drag that up can you see how because the image is so dark already it's almost like everywhere it's dark.

So to get more precise I need to go to Tone Curve. So Tone Curve is really cool. What you can do is go to the RGB composite channel, you could work on your contrast, add a little snap to the photograph. You can also get into specific channels, like the Red channel. And you have these end points. And I don't know if you've ever messed around with those, but what you can do is drag one of them up or to the right. So either up and down or right and left. Do you see how when I go right the darker tones become, they have a little bit more cyan in them.

Kind of cool. Let's go to the Blue channel and do the same thing. So take a look at this. So I go up, darker tones blue, darker tones yellow, so I want a little more blue in them. And of course, we can correct the rest of the curve too if we feel like the blue is spilling over into the other areas of photograph, so I can modify that. If you have a point that you made a mistake, like I did here, double-click it and it will delete or remove that point. And here, let me just see, I actually kind of think maybe somewhere, somewhere around there.

It's kind of hard to talk and to look at the images at same time. And I'm feeling like I went a little too far with the blue. So I'm going for a pretty subtle look here. I want kind of these moody, artsy type of look in the images. And then I'll use the arrow keys and I'll go around to my different photographs. If I come to one where like one, this one's just too dark, the exposure's different, and I need to deselect I use a shortcut to do that. Shift + Command + D on a Mac or Shift + Control + D on Windows. Write that one down, because that is the fastest way, the best way to deselect and just choose the image that you're on.

And then I'd go to the Basic here. This needs more Shadow love, right? It needs more in the Shadows. And so I'm gonna bring that up. And again, this is stylistically just my own opinion. You may differ. You may kind of like like the really dark, kind of moody thing like that. But for me, I want a little more detail in that part of the image. All right, well there you have it. Kind of a quick look, but hopefully it's somewhat helpful in the sense of kind of showing you how I might go through this process of trying to change the way these images look.

Let me take a little bit of a closer look, maybe four up, so you can see those side by side. Here I've selected images and then pressed the N key, this gives us the survey mode. But you can see how I've created this cohesive set of photographs, which all have the same exact look and feel. And was able to do that pretty quickly. And again, the reason why I wanted to show you that process was to get you to think about your own process and how you can go through to try to create expressive looks in your photographs, whatever the look is, whatever look you like, but do so in a way which really maximizes your time, increases your efficiency.

In other words, I was able to select the keepers pretty fast, process them pretty fast, and now I'm done and I can export them and move on with other projects. All right, well that wraps up this week's episode. I hope you picked up a few tips or tricks or maybe a little bit of inspiration as well. And I hope that you have a marvelous, fantastic rest of your day. I'll see you next time, bye for now.