Great tips! I think vignette got me. I'm guilty of just taking the easy all four corners method and calling it a day, especially if I'm working on several same shot scenes. The mask takes longer but the results do show.
Every week there is at least one very useful tip I pick up from your videos. This week two: 1 - the color balance trick with full saturation 2 - the Cmd/Cntrl key use with the Clone tool. Once again Thanks!!!!
Isn't Vignette supposed to be 4-corners that's why it's a Vignette? if you're only darkening a half of it, or some areas of the photo, that's similar to a Burn feature.
turning saturation to 'nuke' mode to adjust WB.... absolutely brilliant. Gives me such a great neutral starting point. Thank you. I've struggled so much with this.
Using the CMD key to tell LR where to look for the Generative Fill tool = Game Changer! I have always been dissatisfied with that tool, even after using the "Refresh" and that helpful tip has fixed that. Thank you!
The one thing that I found most useful was using the shortcut key "J". This is something that I will definitely be using from now on. Thank You Mark!!!
Just bought myself a Sony a6700, 3 lenses, an iMac and Lightroom subscription! Wanted to move past the limits of mobile phone photography. First few days with the new hardware and I'm loving it all......soon got overwhelmed with how much there is to it all (especially post editing). Looking online for tips and tutorials and stumbled across your channel. You explain and demonstrate things so very well and each video I watch teaches me things I didn't even know were available/possible! Thank you for your time! Videos like this are why I wanted to up my game and I enjoy the learning as much as taking the photos.
Been using Lightroom for a few years now and still picked up some useful things to implement! Always hovered over the arrow in the top right and top left of the histogram to check over/under exposure. Should have known there was a shortcut haha.
Great roundup of tips, thanks. I had almost given up with the content aware tool but your tip choosing an area via the control hopefully will give it new life!
I think the most important part of using a Radio Mask for "vignetting" (an effect I use on a limited basis) is the ability to offset the center and change the size with more control, secondarily to be able to subtract from the Radial Mask (so, I'll be looking for ways to incorporate the possibilities), which is more difficult to achieve with the Effects vignetting tool. Thank you for reminding me about Masking in Noise Reduction in the Detail Panel. I've been forgetting about that. An alternative approach is using Noise Reduction within a Mask. I bristle a bit when something is described as "Wrong" when maybe it is better to talk about (possibly better) "Alternative" ways of doing something, or new, improved ways. Before the various Masking tools became available in Lightroom Classic, the Vignette effect in Details or Lens Correction was the prime way of achieving that effect. The old ways of achieving an effect were not wrong at the time. I do agree that over sharpening is not the best approach to an image, maybe even a wrong approach.
Interesting approach for adjusting white balance. Simon d’Entremont posted a video a couple of days ago showing a similar approach. The only difference is that he pushed both Saturation and Vibrance to 100% before adjusting Temperature.
Hi Bruce. All vibrance really does is bring up the less saturated colors to get closer to the more saturated colors. I think the Simon method would work very good. Thanks!
Of COURSE! There were several things. I didn't really understand how to use the sharpening tool, and your explanation was outstanding. Then there was the improved vignettetting tool. I already use your idea of making my own with a radial filter (thank you), but by painting in or out an area, it would improve the vignette significantly. And, I realized that I can use more than one radial filter if I want different areas to have slightly different vignettes. Finally, I was unaware of the ability to clean up an area and use the Cntl-C to designate another area to fill in better. I'm definitely trying that. Your videos are the most educational, practical, and illuminating I watch.
Thank you Mark. I am an amateur and your videos are very helpful to me. I have improved and some of my photos have been noticed by others with more talent than me.
One trick I use to check for distractions I need to clean up is to intentionally defocus my eyes and see what grabs my attention. The small navigation preview in the top corner is also useful for checking for distractions and a balanced crop.
I know from my own experiences using a multitude of highly technical software, most people don't even know half of everything their software can do. Thanks for this, I learned some nice new tricks to improve my editing!
Great tips. Especially regarding vignetting and sharpening. however white balance will probably remain a mystery to me forever… 😊 and I always was a manic cleaner already before… with no pixel not being scrutinized… 😂
Great info and delivery again Mark, thank you. I've recently returned to photography and Lightroom and am very much struggling with colour casts so this was very helpful
Mark, I think using the radial gradient tool vs vignette is brilliant. How many times have I played with vignette tools and never get the effect i really wanted. That one tip will help me improve many photos. I just started following you about a month or so ago. You have a great depth of knowledge and wonderful teaching style.
Very helpful. All the more reason to try to get as close as you can in the camera then the tweaks are less time-consuming. I need to watch this a few more times.
I found Photoshop to be better and faster at cleaning. If there is a lot of dust / flies / etc (such as scanned film) I would give it a shot. Some tips from me: 1. Use HSL to (de)saturate certain colors. 2. Use Vibrance over Saturation
Yes, there was! There were actually three or four things that were either new or I had forgotten about. As always, great video and thanks for sharing your experience and knowledge.
Mark, your video edits are getting to be quite entertaining! I liked the white balance and vignette examples on you while you were talking about them. Well done.
Hi Mark ! I love your videos on tips on LRc -very usefull and straight to the point. Thank you so much And icing on the cake ( i hope it’s the right idiom) it helps me to keeping on practicing English listening Best regards
One area that affects the quality of processed image is colour accuracy and balance. This happens because of photographers' colour perceptions and editing machine's screen colour accuracy. I am colour blind to some colours which may put the colour balance off for other viewers. Often the edited photo to my taste looks completely different on colour and exposure on a second device which may be because of the colour accuracy of the screen that I use to edit.
Thanks for the video. The J shortcut is new to me but sooo helpful. Only thing which was weird. You got some kind of around 600hz resonance in your room which is triggered by your voice 🤣
Thank you as always Mark. The J shortcut was news to me (as are most Lightroom shortcuts!), and the extreme saturation trick for eyeballing white balance is a neat trick. 👏
I never use content aware fill in LR or Camera Raw because this tool produces inconsistent results most of the time. I prefer to export the finished edit into PS and use the remove tool to get rid of distractions. It's a vastly superior tool in my book.
On the last tip (11:58), not sure but I think you can also try to click on the "Refresh" button which pops under the 2 sliders of the tool, to force Lightroom to re-think it's proposition. there's a limited tries before it circles back to the first one. And if you utterly disagree with the AI treatment, then indeed your tip is the way to go to improve the final result. Also, when the cleaning is applied over an existing mask (like sky or subjet), you might have to go check them and update them (right click on any of them and look in the dropdown items) to be able to see the final result. Lightroom made me aware of this with the tiny dot under the mask tool icon turning red after a cleaning action. Again, not entirely sure about the whole thing, but that's what I understand of it. Thanks for this week's video, always helpfull :)
All the tips were quite useful - so much so that I’ve saved the video to my “Tutorials” folder for future reference whenever I need a refresher. Your clarity and concise presentations continue to be a joy to follow. Thanks Mark.
With underwater photography it was explained to me that you want to WB on a neutral color like sand and you try to get color picker to have the R,G,B values be as close to each other as possible.
About those sticks at the edge of the frame: my inner Boy Scout shouts at me “LEAVE NO TRACE,” but…it’s ok to snap a few twigs of deadwood out of the frame. There’s no generative fill quite like the view Mother Nature had in the first place.
Hello. Thank you very much for the tips. I didn't know about the sharpening mask. It didn't work on first try because in Windows it is the ALT key, not the CTRL key that activates the masking slider.
Thanks Mark. Very helpful. Used LR for quite a while now and wasn’t familiar with those tools. That’s a problem with jumping into one software and just looking for known or similar tools. Geoff
Great point about the vignette Mark! I use vignettes in almost all my photos, but very lightly. I never want it to look un-natural. I will try your method next time. Thanks for the tip and video!
The location in the thumbnail photo was one that really inspired me ... amazingly lovely, no, beatiful, view, and "shoot-able" in several places, and different seasons...p67 with Velvia.... Nice video, one that i'll put aside for future review!
WRT white balance, the color of an opaque object is tied directly to the color of the incident light upon it: the color wavelengths making up that incident light are either absorbed, or they are reflected back to our eyes/camera. The point being that photographers have the option of using the natural color of the incident light (e.g., golden sunset) or selectively "re-lighting" an area of a photograph with white balance as though the incident light was neutral. That's an artistic decision.
I guess I would say the least helpful item was cleaning but I've been doing that for a long time, even back when I had to go to Photoshop to do it because Lightroom had nothing that worked very well. But I found the others to be very helpful. I had used the J key in the past but somewhere along the line, I forgot about it. So now it's back in my workflow.
I also find that (and I'm guilty so much of this) is brightening the shadows too much. Overall contrast of a photo goes a long way in making it look better. Over brightening the shadows isn't always a good thing; sometimes, dark is meant to be dark.
Thanks for the ideas...I typically do global adjustments in LR and then export to PS for finishing.....I did not realize that LR had the AI tool....now just to figure out how to put a signature in the image with LR... :-)
My problem with the vignette slider is that it doesn't darken equally. It usually leaves the sky brighter and I want it darker, but I don't want to darken the land. I was surprised when you said you want them different, but that makes sense too.
How do I get the inner ring back to represent the feathering on the radio gradient? When I first started using it, I did something and it went away. And I don't know what I did and I can't get it back. I can adjust feathering with the slider, but I can't grab anything on the circle to just simply move it. Any idea how to turn it back on or what? I maybe did. To get rid of it?
Exactly-“you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Well, if you’re sitting behind your computer at home….thats time you’re not out shooting, time you lose in the journey of figuring out when (what times of day) and how to shoot stuff. 10 minutes in LR is a whole movement of the tripod. It’s a whole extra shot you could come home with. Choose wisely.
@@PhotofuelI learned photography with film in a darkroom and I can tell you that any photographer who was developing their own prints were spending plenty of time dodging and burning, reviewing, and repeating the process until the photo was ready for publication. If they weren’t doing it, they had a lab assistant who was. There’s no such thing as just “getting it right in camera”, even with film. You are getting it close. If you’re cool with your sooc shots that’s great, but don’t judge people for following a very common process. Especially when it’s far more necessary with digital. Watch a video of Ansel Adams making prints, or James Nachtwey, etc.
Hey, thank you for that nice viedeo, i have a question about that lens that you used for the first picture, you used something around 12mm? and F4? how is it possible that everything is sharp. is that a stacked picture? I know every lens has a sweet point but i thougt the dephts of sharpnes is not possible with F4. maybe its just because of the limited quality of the youtube viedeo but i was wondering ^^. Greetings from germany
If I’m not printing my photos does it matter if the blacks are under exposed or if the whites are over exposed? Like what if that’s the effect you are going for in your digital photo?
I know it is an example, but I would have NEVER balanced that boat photo to begin with. Probably modified but with a very light touch. The picture lacks character if you subtract the warm color of the sun. I would probably have done a true HDR conversion, even for print to accentuate the blown out sun even more left the color as in you original edit. The different green undertones married to the blue and warm colors really work here. Greatly done. It really just misses impact due to not being an HDR photo, though until that gains popularity... Issue is you just can't print true HDR. ^^
Hi Mark, great video as usual. One basic question/clarification... you're working on a Mac computer, so when you reference the "Command" key, I assume on a windows computer I would use the "Control" key?
Random question - you started to say ‘using’ and then you switched to saying ‘utilizing’. I see TONS of RU-vidrs using utilizing when ‘using’ would seem to be completely fine. Is there a reason you guys do that? Is it easier for some languages? Or for the captions or something?
I use the numbers (RGB) in the WB picker to try and find a neutral area. Closer to each other usually indicates neutral. This isn't always right either.
