[Music] [Julieanne Kost] Hi and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost. And in the next few minutes, we're going to look at some of my favorite tips and techniques for creating images with more impact. We're going to be taking a look at color contrast as well as tone. We'll make global as well as selective adjustments. We'll remove distracting elements. We'll also remove noise, and we'll isolate subjects using the Lens Blur. We don't have a lot of time, so let's go ahead and get started. With this image, the first thing I want to do is change the profile from Adobe Color to Adobe Landscape. That's going to add a little bit of contrast as well as saturation. It's also going to compress the highlights and the shadows in the image, which is a good thing because we'll be able to retain and see more information in those areas. Then let's tap the "C" key. That will give us the Crop tool. And I'm just going to crop away that left-hand side because there's not much interesting happening over there. And then reposition this, and that will enable us to get rid of some of that sky as well.
Then we could use the Auto option in order to auto-enhance the image. But I want to actually walk through a lot of these options in the Light panel, so I'll click it again to turn it off. I do have my histogram showing. That's because I clicked on the three dots and chose to show the histogram. I'm also in single-panel mode, which enables me to click on a group of different settings, and Lightroom will automatically close the other groups. All right, before we start moving any of the sliders, I'm going to enable my shadow and my highlight clipping warnings so that when I set my white point, if I move the cursor too far and I push the cursor-- If I move the slider too far and I push some of those values in the highlights to pure white without detail, I'll get this red overlay. So I want to be sure that I back off on that. And then I'm going to do the same for the Blacks. But in the Blacks, I'm going to get a blue overlay. So again, I'll back off on that. Now I want to increase my Shadows. I think this bottom area is too dark, so let's move the Shadows over to the right, and then I'll move my Highlights down in order to gain a little bit more information in the mountains in the background. All right. When I increased the Shadows, we can see a few areas here that need to be retouched. So I'll select my Remove tool and I'll put it in Heal mode. And then we can just remove this area here. Then I'll use the spacebar to navigate down to here. We can see that blue overlay in these small areas, but that's all right because I'm actually removing them anyway. So it doesn't matter to me that they don't have any detail. Let's get this last one right over here. One thing that did happen, though, when we increased our Shadows is I can see a lot of color noise in this image. And just to make sure that you can see it as well, let's go to Color and increase the Saturation. So what you should be seeing is these areas of magenta and green, they're kind of splotchy, and I don't like that. I want to get rid of those. I could try moving the Tint slider. It is set at nine. I could move that to the left a little bit. But if I go too far, they're just going to go the other way to green. So instead, I'm going to use the Detail panel and under the Manual Noise Reduction for Color, I'm going to increase the Noise Reduction and I'm going to increase the Smoothness, which will smooth out that splotchiness. All right, let's move the color saturation back to zero, and then we can zoom out. All right, those are all of the global edits that I want to make. So I'll switch to Masking. I want to add more yellow in this area of the dunes here. So I'm going to select the brush and I'm going to click on the left-hand side. And then I'm going to get a larger brush, and I'm going to hold down the Shift key and click on the right-hand side. And Lightroom will connect those two dots and it will interpolate up the size of the brush in between them.
The problem is that I don't want the changes that I make to affect this area down here, nor down here. So let's make the change so we can see it. I'll go to Color and let's warm that up significantly just to make sure that you can see that, yes, indeed, it is changing down here as well as over here. So masks in Lightroom are fantastic because they can contain more than one component.
This has one component right now, the brush. But I can use the Subtract or the Add in order to add more components. So I'm going to subtract a linear gradient and I'm going to drag my gradient right down here. And then I'm going to reposition it. I might make it a little bit smaller. I might also just rotate it a bit. And that's going to prevent that brush from affecting this dune. I'll do it again. I'll choose Subtract and then Linear Gradient, and then click and drag up here in order to prevent it from affecting this dune. In fact, let's look at that a little more closely. I'll go to White on Black. So what we started with was this brush. Then we subtracted this linear gradient and we subtracted that linear gradient and that is the resulting mask. And what's so great about this is that you can change any of these pins or any of the components at any time. So if I wanted to move this, I would just need to select it. And then I can reposition it anywhere in the image and it doesn't change the other components. All right, excellent. One more. I'll create a new mask on this image and linear gradient and drag down from the top and just move this towards blue, so we get a little contrasting color there. The blue is going to recede and the yellows are going to come forward. I do think that the change that I made to the yellows is a bit much. So let's just back off a little on that. And then, the only thing that I find still distracting with this is all of these little mesquite bushes here, in this area here. So I have selected the Remove tool and I've set it to use generative AI and I'm going to choose Remove. So when you're using the generative AI, you do need Internet connectivity, because it does need to go up to the cloud in order to calculate and fabricate this new data. So, yes, it did remove it in my first variation here, but let's see what else it did. So, second variation. No, I don't like that as much either. I was really hoping that it would actually create a few more sand dunes, but it really depends on how you draw your selection. So let's just click Generate again and see if it will do it, or see if I need to actually redraw that. I probably should have made my selection a little bit larger. Well, that's some sand dunes, but I was hoping for some bigger ones. That looks okay. Nope, I think it's my selection. So I'm going to tap Delete in order to get rid of that, and I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger and come down here.
And now let's try that again and see how we do.
This gives us these nice little tips that are quite helpful. There we go. That's what I was looking for. There's one, there's two, and there's three. I think I like the second one the best. Maybe three. Maybe one. Okay. Anyway, you can go with whichever one you like the best. And you can see how quickly we went from kind of a boring image to an image that has a lot more impact. All right, let me move to the next image. So here we have a coyote. Again, a lot of distracting elements. So I'm going to drag over this first element here and then get a little smaller of a brush and paint over this area down here to remove this wire fence. Now, I am painting in two areas, but you'll notice that between the pole and then the fence, there isn't any overlap. So when I choose Remove, this might actually take a little bit longer this time, because under the hood, Lightroom's smart enough to know that if it generated content that had to expand the entire canvas, because the content that's generated is lower resolution, it would have to sample that up, and it wouldn't be as good a quality, it's actually turned these into two different spots. If I tap "O" to show the overlay, we see here's one over here, and I can move through the variations for that area. And then if I click on this spot right here, we can move through the variations for that area. Excellent. All right, I want to crop this image as well. So I'll tap the "C" key in order to crop it. Let's just crop this down. I do like the reflection, so I think I'll move this over, maybe even crop it a little bit tighter and scoot that over. All right, so we've cropped our image. Let's go to the Light panel. It's already in the Landscape profile, so that's fine. But I do need to make some changes. I can see that it's a little bit overexposed. There's some specular highlights down here. If I want to bring those into range so that they'll have detail, I can use the White sliders, but I can also use the Highlight sliders to bring that down. Great. So that looks good. Now, typically, I would use the Black slider like we did before, but on this image, I want to add a little bit of saturation. So I'm going to move to Effects. And instead of using the Black slider to set my black point, I'm going to use Dehaze. Dehaze moves primarily the left side of the histogram. And if I hold down the Option key, we can actually see what areas get pushed to black in the image. So I'll just back off on that a little bit. And I think I like it right about there. All right, let's turn off our clipping warnings for now. And I want to make some changes to the color in this image. So going to use the Color Mixer. I want to take my yellows more towards orange, but they're a little too saturated, so let's just desaturate those. And I want to take my greens also towards yellow because they just look a little distracting down here in the water, so let's move those. And now, depending on your image, you may want to add or subtract color contrast. So there's actually quite a bit of blue from the sky in this image. We can desaturate it, or if you wanted the color contrast, you could increase the Saturation. I'm going to decrease it because I want this coyote to just blend in with the background completely. I think Mother Nature is incredible how she camouflages and disguises animals. But I do want the whole image to look a bit sharper. It's a little bit soft. There's a little bit of camera movement there. So I'm going to return to Effects. I'm going to increase the Texture and also increase the Clarity. All right, let's go to our Selective edits. I want to add a background mask and I'm going to take the color a little bit towards yellow in order to warm that up, and then I'm going to create another mask. This time it's going to be Radial Gradient. I'm going to hold down the Command key on that, Control key on Windows, and double click. And that creates a radial gradient across the entire canvas and it inverts it automatically so that when I go to my Light panel and I want to change my Exposure and darken down those edges, it's going to darken down outside the radial gradient, which is not typical. Typically, the inside of the radial gradient is what gets affected, but you can always click on Invert. Excellent. So very quickly we went from, really an image that I would have had to throw away in the past to an image that has a lot of impact. All right, next image we've got this little arctic fox. Let's go to our film strip here. So this image was taken at a very high ISO, so it is quite noisy. So the first thing I would do here is go down to Details and choose Denoise, because it was rainy, it was quite dark, and they were moving around quite quickly, so I think it was like ISO 4000 or something. Now we can zoom in, and here's the amount of noise originally. So Denoise is really removing quite a bit of noise. I like the default. You can go higher if you want to, but sometimes it starts looking like a painting. So I'm just going to back off a little bit on that and then choose Enhance. It will take 20 seconds, though, so I already have one created. So here is the enhanced version. Looks much, much better. All right, we've got mom here in the background. She really didn't care what we were doing. And this little guy was so playful. But I'm going to remove mom. So let's grab the Remove tool. Again, I will use generative AI, and then I'm just going to make a selection that is a little bit larger than mom. And let's go ahead and remove that. So again, we're getting completely fabricated or hallucinated information from the cloud. And I think it's just incredible. There's our first variation. The second one I really like. How about the third one? Third one's great, too. I mean, the fact that it even puts the rain in there, it's got the depth of field. It's just quite amazing. All right, let's crop this image. If you want to get more intimate with your subject, you'll want to crop in on it. In this case, I'm going to leave it about here. I don't know, maybe you had to add some text or something to the image. And then I'm going to remove a few more spots. So anything that is not adding to the image but is distracting, I'm going to get rid of that. So here I have my three spots, we can choose Remove. And again, because these are three different spots that aren't touching each other, Lightroom is going to, under the hood, create three different spots so that it's creating them at the highest quality, which is fabulous. And we could cycle through each of the variations for each one of these, but I'm going to leave them right here. I think they all look great. Actually, that looks a little weird over there. Let's turn on the "O" key. Let's grab that and actually go through. And there we go. That's better. I'll tap "O" again. Yeah, I like that one with the tail. How about that one? That one's good, too. Okay. Now, unlike the coyote image, where I wanted the coyote to fit into the background, I actually want to give this little fox a little bit more texture to separate them out from the background. So let's zoom in. Well, actually, we don't have to zoom in. We can just go grab our masking tool, and we can use Select Subject or Select Objects. I think Select Objects is nice because you kind of give it, like, a little hint. Like, this is where the object is by dragging the marquee around it, and then it just kind of shrink wraps it to it. So in this case, now let's go ahead and zoom in, go to Effects, and we'll just add a little bit of Texture and a little bit of Clarity. That's looking much, much better. We could even go in here, we could go in, let's add a little brush, just a teeny, tiny brush, right around his eyes. I'll just click right here and then just draw right in that area. That wasn't a very steady hand there. And then let's go to Color, and let's just add a little bit of color in here. I'll just add a little bit of brown right in there. Look how cute he is. Okay, now back to Mask 1. This mask, if we remember, is going to be of the fox. I want the opposite. So I'm going to use the three dots, and I'm going to choose to duplicate and invert the mask. So now I have Mask 1 inverted, which is the background. And again, I could make that cooler if I wanted to separate the fox. I think there's enough separation between the depth of field or the, you know, the shallow depth of field where the fox is in focus in the background. I think I just want to warm that up and just make it a little bit cheerier. And then we can add one more radial gradient. This time I will drag it out just to show you. By default, if I was going to darken down the radial gradient, it's actually going to darken down the foreground, you know, not the background, so I would need to come here and invert it. And then we just basically, we have, like, this little spot of light that we can move around anywhere. And, of course, we can resize it and rotate it and everything is needed. Okay, moving on to the next image, I want to return to my Edit stack and go to Lens Blur. And let's apply the Lens Blur. So the Lens Blur is going to try to estimate the subject and then estimate a depth map so that it can blur it. And we can leave it set on the subject. In this case, it does a fantastic job, or if there's somewhere that you want to target, you can pick up this little target tool right here and then click, like, in the foreground, and now that would be in focus. Or we can click in the background, and then the background would be in focus. Or we can just move this little slider here, the little rectangle in the focus range, and we can see that the focus is changing. We can also visualize depth, and now everything becomes color-coded. So what's near is in this yellow area that's going to be in focus, and then we've got what's in the middle, which is pink, and then the far area here. So as I move this over, I think I said it was going to be in focus. It shouldn't be in focus. That's just the color coding from near to far. As you move the focus range rectangle here, then you get a different display, and what is white is going to be in focus. So I can reposition this, I can also elongate it, so I can stretch it out, because I want just the buildings to not be in focus. So we can do that. And then we can turn off Visualize Depth. And then there we go. We can go ahead and change the Blur Amount, making it more or less blurred. The thing that this image doesn't have, though, and that I really want to show you is specular highlights and what happens to them when you apply Lens Blur. So I'll apply it to this image, and then I'm going to show you, by zooming in, how it can create this bouquet, or some people say, bokeh. I'm going to boost this up, and everywhere there's a specular highlight, now we're getting this great little blur. So it's much more than just a depth blur, right, or a depth of field blur. It's actually creating a blur in a certain shape. So we've got just-- The first one's just the circle, and then we've got, I think they call it the bubble. Is that right? Yep, the bubble. And then we've got the five-blade. We've got the ring light, and then also we've got the cat eye. So whichever one you like, I think it creates a very beautiful bouquet. I'm in a Visualized Depth, and let's scoot this over here. I'm going to scoot this all the way to the end. Just want to go not so far that I'm actually getting the iceberg. All right, let's turn that off. But I do think that it's actually a little bit. It's just that gray, it's-- The fade range isn't quite enough on this image. I think it stops a little bit too abruptly. So we can go in, in the refinement area, and pick either our Focus or our Blur tool. So I'm going to pick our Blur tool. I'm going to get a little smaller of a brush there, and I'm just going to paint right along here. And then we can change the amount of blur. So if I want it more blurry, I can change it to the right. Or if I want it less blurry, I can move it to the left. It's really amazing. Now, one thing I will point out that you probably want to do, I'm going to zoom in and we can see that the original image had a lot of grain in it, and this does not because it's been blurred. So what could we do? We could go to our Detail panel and we could start at-- Nope, sorry, our Effects panel, and we could start adding in some grain. So here we can add in our grain. We can change the size and the roughness, but that's adding it to the whole image. So let me just reset that, and instead, and just to do this quite quickly, I'm going to go to Masking and grab my Linear Gradient. And then I'm just going to drag up a linear gradient here. And then under my Effects, now we can add in our amount of Grain. So we would just need to visually make those two look like they're matching up. Okay, but I have a lot more to cover and so I'm not going to spend a lot of time here. I want to show one other image with the Lens Blur. So I'm just going to zoom out here. Let's go to our-- There we go. Meant to zoom out. Let's go to our Effects and go to Lens Blur. So, here this has already been applied, but you can see when it's applied, it's blurring the little frog because this is a very confusing image because what's most blurred is in the foreground. So if we visualize the depth, we can see, like, Huh, that doesn't quite look like what we want. So with any image, you can just move the focal range really small. So, like, hardly anything's in focus. And then, you can grab the blur brush. And I could get a big brush with no feather even bigger than that. And let's just paint over the whole image. Okay. Now it's still not all dark because my blur amount is set to 100. So let's move that up to 200, and now it's all going to be blurred. So when I take off Visualize Depth, we see, yeah, we've got a very, very blurry image. But if I increase my feather and I switch to my focus brush now, we can paint in focus anywhere that we want in this image. It's really cool. And then if you want one area that's, like, totally in focus like that, but one that's less in focus, you can just click on the "+" icon. And then you can paint, like, maybe right across here. And then you can change the amount for that area as well. So we could make that a little bit less focused. So be sure to experiment around with that. Okay. We need to move on quickly. So here I've got a portrait, and I want to retouch this. So I'm going to use masking and I'm going to create a whole number of masks. When you have an image that has a person in it or multiple people, you will get the little person option. So I'm going to click on that. And I don't want the entire person. I want the face, body, eyebrows, eyes, iris, lips, teeth, hair, and clothes. I want to create nine separate masks for all of these different elements. I'm going to go ahead and hit Create, but then I'm going to create a few other masks as well. So I'll return to the Person 1. And I want a mask that has the facial skin, and the body skin, and the eyebrows because my eyebrows are very thin, and I'll be able to notice if I make a change without selecting the eyebrows. But this time I only want one mask. So I'm going to create that. And then let's create another mask. Let's create a mask, how about for the background? We could create a background mask and we could create one more mask. And you'll notice I haven't done anything to any of these masks, right? I'm just creating them. And let's create. I'll just do that same Command+Double-click in order to make that. Terrific. Okay, so I've got all my masks. What would I do at this point? I don't ever want to do that again. So I would use the More icon. Sorry, not the More icon. I would click on the Presets icon right here. And I would create a new preset, and I would call this Masking people. And I would turn off everything except for the Masking. And all those masks, and I would save this and it would save it here as Masking people. And then I would favorite it and it would add it to my new favorites area. And that way, if I go to another image and I need all those masks, I don't have to recreate them. I can just click on my preset. All right, but I haven't made a change to the presets. So let's return to our Edit stack and-- Oh, no, to the Masking, and let's start at the bottom. So with the Facial Skin, what can we, or should we do with this? I'm going to go to Effects, and we should probably zoom in a bit. And I'm just going to move that Texture slider little bit to the left there. That's great. And then Body Skin, well, that's the neck, so I'll zoom out. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to move the Texture down, but I'm also going to move the light, the Exposure down just a little bit so that the emphasis is on the face and not the neck. Eyebrows again, we could add some texture to that. We could go to the Eye Sclera. Oh, let me zoom in. And we could go to Light and add a little bit of light, not too much. Iris and Pupil, we can add again a little Exposure, maybe come down to Effects, and add a little bit of Dehaze. Lips, I'm not going to do anything to that. How about teeth? Teeth, let's go to Color and just take down the Saturation. Well, we can't really see them, so let's move that. Again, not too much. It's going to start looking weird. And then the Hair, I'm going to go back to Effects and we can add some more Texture to that. For Clothes, let's go ahead and increase the Exposure. But I don't need that. I don't like this light that's happening on the shoulders. So let's go ahead and subtract with a brush. So just because you start with an AI mask doesn't mean you have to end with an AI mask. You can add as many different components as you want. Then Mask 1. Why did I create this mask? Because I typically have very blotchy skin. So I would go in here and I would go to Point Color and select the Eyedropper, and I'm just going to zoom in here and then I'm going to click on one of these red blotches on my face and I'm going to visualize the range. And if that's not showing, you can just use this arrow right here, visualize the range. And I want to affect the reds, not really all of these kind of lighter, you know, yellows. So I'm just going to scoot this over and then I'm going to do a Hue Shift and I'm going to move the Hue over to the right. And if we uncheck Visualize Range, we can see the difference there. So they were red before. I'm just scooting it over a little bit to the right. We could also change Saturation, we can change Luminance here. And then if we zoom out, we can see a quick little before and after. So there's all the red. It's not only in my face, but also my ears and everything. So there's before and there's after. Two more masks. This was-- For the background, let's just increase the Exposure there. And the next mask, let's decrease the Exposure for the vignette. So the great thing is, of course anything we do here can be saved as a preset. But if I want to apply these settings to another file, I can also use the More icon and choose to copy the edit settings. So I'm going to choose None and then Masking. So I'll select all those masks and then I can select multiple images and then I can choose to either paste the edit settings or paste to the entire selection. So I'm going to paste to the entire selection. If there are already masks in those other files, I'm going to choose to replace them. But you could also choose to merge them and it's going to apply all of those masks with all of those settings to multiple images that you have selected. Excellent. Well, unfortunately, I am out of time. I hope that this was interesting and informative. My name is Julieanne Kost. Thank you for watching and I hope you enjoy the rest of Adobe MAX.
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