Transcription
I used to spend over 45 minutes on a single photo edit inside of Lightroom. Now, I can get the same result in under 5 minutes on the exact same photo. The difference isn't skill or knowledge, it's having the right system to follow. And for me, that's three steps in the same order every single time. So, if you want to use the exact same system that I use on my edits, here is exactly how it works.
The first step is to correct your shot. Think of this step as a way to correct any mistakes you might have made in camera. This is where we're going to be adjusting the white balance, exposure values, and the crop of our shot. So, let's dive into Lightroom and let's get step number one knocked over.
So, here we are inside of Lightroom and the first thing that we are always going to kick things off with is the crop. So, we're going to open up the crop tool and then here is where we get to decide what aspect ratio we want our image to be in. I'm going to be cropping this to 4 by 3 as I want this shot to go on Instagram and I'm going to just center our subject a little bit more. We've got a little bit too much space on the left, so we're just going to make sure that Amanda is right in the middle. And then, the last thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to straighten this shot up. All I'm doing here is looking at the back of our shot to check out the horizon that runs across the entire shot. And once that is level, and I think that's looking pretty level in my eyes, the crop is now done. Some photos are going to need a lot more work in the crop tool than others, but cropping your photo before you do anything else is a really important step as this way we know exactly what we are and what we aren't going to be editing.
So, with the crop now out of the way, let's head over to our exposure adjustments. We're going to adjust these before we adjust the white balance as I want to make sure that I can see everything correctly in our shot before we start playing around with any of our colors. So, I would say overall this image is pretty well exposed, especially given we've got a really bright sort of light source behind Amanda here and Amanda is sort of in the shade a little bit. So, overall I would say the image is exposed pretty well. However, it's still definitely on on the dark side. So, what we're going to do is come over to our shadow slider. We're going to increase the shadows just a little bit. We're also going to increase the exposure of the overall image a touch as well. And then, we also might look at just reducing off the highlights a little bit. Now, with that being done, we have reduced the contrast inside of our image just a touch and that can sort of sometimes leave your image looking a little bit flat and a little bit meh, if you will. However, don't worry, we're going to be able to add a lot of contrast back in in our second step. So, for now, all we want to do is correct our shot to the point where we can look at it and say, "Hey, that looks pretty well exposed to me." I would say things are still a little bit dark, so we might just increase the shadows a touch more and I would say things are looking pretty good.
Now, moving on to our third step inside of step number one, we've got our white balance. This is where we're going to be correcting our image if it's a little bit too warm or too cool or a little bit too pink or a little bit too green. And a really easy way to sort of detect if your image is either, you know, not the correct white balance or not, is if you have a subject in your shot like we do here. We have Amanda and we can clearly see her skin tone. That is a dead giveaway if your image is too warm or too cool. So, if we have a look at Amanda's skin tone here, I would say overall it's actually quite accurate and quite good. However, I would say it's a little bit on the warm side. So, all we're going to do is come over to our temperature slider here and we're just going to reduce the temperature a little bit. Just a touch, like just a smidge. As adjusting your temperature just any of the white balance sliders can have a massive impact on your shot, so definitely tread pretty lightly.
Now, there are two other ways that you can set your white balance if you don't have a subject in your image or if you can't just get a good idea by eyeing your shot, and that is by coming over to the white balance dropper here and then selecting something that should either be pure white, pure gray, or pure black. So, if we have a look at our image here, white, gray, and black probably aren't on probably we don't even even these white jeans probably shouldn't be pure white. The beige jumper probably shouldn't be pure white either. Maybe the background here overall maybe the white balance dropper isn't the best solution for this shot. And then, we also can come over here to the white balance drop-down menu and either hit auto, which will let Lightroom correct things for us and that looks great there. It actually is pretty much what we already have set, just a touch cooler. And then, you can also go through here and apply one of the presets that Lightroom has. So, if we shot in daylight conditions and we wanted to apply the daylight white balance preset, we could do that here and so on and so forth. But, I would say for this shot, it has now been corrected. A little before and after. No, we haven't moved many mountains here. However, our image is correctly exposed, it it has the correct white balance, which has corrected all of our colors in our shot, and of course it is also cropped as well. So, that is step number one out of the way.
Let's now move on to step number two, which by far is the most important step of the entire editing process. And that is the shape your shot. Look, let's be honest. We really don't always have the best lighting conditions when we go out and shoot, do we? However, inside of Lightroom, especially with the masking and the tone curve tool, you can pretty much create great lighting out of most lighting conditions. And I'm going to show you with this image here. I will have to be a little transparent here though. I very, very rarely do this step manually. I will be doing it manually for this video so you can apply this to your workflow. However, when I edit my photos, I'm using my AI editing system every single day of the week on every single photo that I edit. And it is by far one of the biggest ways I've been able to increase the speed of my edits inside of Lightroom. Hence that title down below. That is very much so thanks to the AI editing system. The AI editing system automates the masking workflow for you and it just allows you to have so much control of your image in an instant, which is a huge level up. Anyway, if you want to go ahead that out, you can do so in the first link in the description. There's a little video over there as well sort of showing you exactly how it works and how it's going to be able to benefit your photos as well. But, like I said, for this video we're going to be doing everything manually.
So, let's kick things off with the tone curve first and then we'll dive in to masking. Let's make our way down to the tone curve here and we are going to place three additional dots on each intersection here on our tone curve and we sort of just raise the highlights there, that little point right there, just a little bit. But, we now have a total of five points on our curve. We've got the blacks, shadows, midtones, highlights, and then whites in the top right-hand corner. So, to shape this image, we are going to add just a little bit of contrast back in and then look at enhancing the light. So, what we're going to do is just drop the shadows a touch, just just a little bit. I'm I'm talking just a smidge. And then, what we are going to do is just increase our overall exposure or the midtones in our shot. And then, we are also going to do the same thing with our highlights just like that. We are also going to come in here and raise up our blacks a touch, which will give a nice little fade to our shot. And we are also going to reduce the whites, which will also give a fade to the brighter parts of our image as well. Now, if I have a quick look at a before and after with the tone curve on and off, things are definitely way more contrasty. Arguably maybe it's just a little bit too contrasty. So, what we might do is grab that shadows point and just move that up ever so slightly once again. And then, we can have a quick look at before and after. Things are looking great. Now, we haven't done too much to our shot as you could see that even the slightest move on the tone curve for this image had a pretty big impact. So, I'm definitely treading quite lightly.
However, where we will not be treading lightly is in the second step of the second step, which is masking. So, let's uh scroll back up to the top, open up the masking tool, and then think to ourselves, "Okay, what do we want to do to this shot?" Well, we definitely want to enhance the light. We want to make sure that Amanda is standing out. I would say that we want to reduce the saturation of this like brown, dirty rock area sort of thing that Amanda is standing on as that is drawing away a lot of attention from this shot as well. And then, maybe we also want to like balance out the sky a little bit, too. So, with all that being said, let's kick things off. Let's select our subject just by clicking the subject mask and then I'm going to press O, which will see, remove that little red overlay just so we can clearly see exactly what we are and aren't editing. And all I'm going to do here is increase the shadows a little bit, increase the exposure just a touch, and then we are also going to increase the contrast a little bit just like that. I would say things are looking good. We are then going to come down to select background, which will allow us to select everything behind Amanda, which is great. And what we're going to do here is just reduce the exposure a little bit. We really want to tread lightly here. And we also want to come down here and reduce the saturation just a touch. We could also probably cool the background off a little bit, too. And then, we are going to make our way down to effects and also reduce the clarity of the background, too. Just to give it a little bit more of a softer feeling. Cool. That is looking really good.
Let's now make our way in to enhancing this light right here. What we're going to do is draw a radial gradient over our light source right here. Going to expand that out just a touch there. Scroll all the way back up to the top and look at just increasing the exposure a little bit, not too much. We can also increase the warmth of the the sort of light source as well as of course the light source in this shot is our sun, which is great. And then, we can also come down here and soften out the light a little bit by reducing the clarity, too. I'd say that's looking quite good. If I hit O here, this will allow us to sort of find that spot exactly where the light starts to touch Amanda's face. We don't really want it on her face specifically, so I'd say that's looking pretty good to me. And then, what we are going to do is come over to radio gradient once again. We're going to draw a complete one over our image just like this. And then we are going to come to these little dots and hit invert mask four. That's great. Scroll back up to the top. Press O to remove the overlay. And then we're going to drop the exposure just a touch. This is going to help Amanda stand out from the shot just a little bit more, which is great. And then last but not least, we're going to pop a linear gradient on our shot just like that. However, this time we're going to press the little dots here. We're going to come into intersect mask with a color range. And then we're going to draw over the uh that little orange dirt patch that I mentioned before. But, it hasn't it's nailed the selection, but it's also selected, as you can see here, Amanda's hands and a little bit of, I don't know, stuff in Amanda's jumper there. So, what we are then going to do is hit subtract from mask with brush. And then we can just come in here, make sure auto mask is off, and we can brush out these parts that Lightroom has selected, which are I guess are the exact same color as the ground below that Amanda is standing on. So, as we have reduced those, I'd say that's looking pretty good. Maybe a little bit in the jumper here. I'm going to leave that little bit selected there. And we can also reduce some of the selection back here as well. All right. I'd say that's looking pretty good to me. I'm going to press O, and then we can come down here and look at reducing the saturation. Oh, for sure. That is definitely the move. Maybe also making it a little bit cooler. And then we can also make it a little bit darker as well. Not too dark. We don't want to have a massive change like that. Okay. I'd say that's looking pretty good.
All right. So, with these five masks added to our shot, there are now a handful of other little detailed masks that I want to add to this image that are just going to take it to the next level. So, what we are going to do is add a linear gradient up here to our sky. The sky got just a little bit dark, so we're just going to brighten that up to sort of balance it out and sort of keep it as even as possible. We are then also going to make another Well, actually, we're going to make our first people mask, which we are of course going to be selecting Amanda in this shot. Except this time we are going to be selecting her facial skin, her body skin, her eyebrows, not the eyes, not the the lips, and that is pretty much it there. We can create that mask. And then what we're going to do is just warm up her skin ever so slightly, just a little bit. I know we already cooled down our shot, which was sort of based off how Amanda's skin looked. However, I would say even there, adding the a little bit of a purple tint to Amanda's skin just sort of brings her skin a little bit more to life. And while we're here, we're also going to make our way down to clarity, just to back off the clarity to about minus 10. This just flatters any subject that you're working with. And even if they have flawless skin like Amanda does here, it's always just a nice thing to do if your image is sharpened whatsoever. So, with that one now out of the way, I would say our image is looking pretty good to me. I'd say the last mask I want to add is a background mask. And all we're going to do here is look at reducing the clarity just a little bit more. I want to make sure that our background is as dreamy as possible. And I really find that reducing the clarity is the best way to do it. So, just like that, we have pretty much wrapped up our masking workflow. Even though it takes quite a significant amount of time, this is the most important step when it comes to editing your photos because without it, you don't have all the control over specific parts of your image. So, keep in mind, if you want to make this, you know, process take almost no time whatsoever, head down to the first link in the description and go ahead and pick up the AI editing system. Anyway, that is step number two out of the way.
Let's now move on to step number three, which has everything to do with color. Now, once again, this is a step I very rarely do manually. I would just apply one of my presets and be done with it. However, of course, for this video, we're going to be doing absolutely everything manually. So, let's go ahead and dive into our color workflow and all of the other little tools inside of Lightroom as well that we're about to run over while we're doing our coloring. So, let's make our way down to presence. The first thing we're going to do is back off the clarity just a touch. This is a little bit of a theme with this shot. I find lower clarity just makes light look way dreamier. So, we're just going to back that off a little bit. We've already knocked over our tone curve, and then we can make our way into our color mixer right here. What we are going to do is first make our way over to the yellows. We're going to make these a little bit more orange. We're going to make our greens a little bit more orange as well. And then we can look at making our aquas and blues a little bit more our aquas a little bit more blue and our blues a little bit more aqua, just to kind of help sell that orange and teal look on our photo just a little bit. We don't want to go overkill with it whatsoever. However, for this shot, since we have a lot of blues and a lot of oranges, it would almost be rude not to lean in this direction. So, that's looking really good so far. And then we're going to make our way down to our saturation, where we're just going to back off the blues a little bit. We're going to increase the oranges just a touch, just a little bit there. And then we could also maybe do the same thing with the yellows. I'd say that's looking pretty good to me. Luminance, let's reduce the luminance of the yellows and the oranges just a touch as I want to make sure I'm not losing all that much detail when it comes to the edge of Amanda's face there. And I would say that's looking pretty good. When it comes to color grading, I think it would be rude to not push blues into our.
And if I wasn't making a YouTube video explaining every single thing that I'm doing at the same time, it probably would have taken even less than 5 minutes. However, if you can get yourself into a good routine where you have a clear set structure of correct shape and then styling your photos every single time you open up Lightroom, you are going to get way quicker at editing your photos. Are you going to be able to edit your photos like a pro in 5 minutes the first time you try this? Probably not. Actually, no. 100% you're not going to be able to. But, give it a month, give it 2 months, maybe 3 months. And if you just practice this three-step system over and over and over day after day, I promise you that you are going to get so much quicker at editing your photos in Lightroom. Anyway, guys, thank you so much for watching today's video. If you enjoyed it, let me know in the comments down below. If you're new around here, a subscribe would mean the absolute world. And if you want to continue learning about photography and photo editing, you can check this video out right here. And I'll see you over there.