Editing with Lightroom

- [Instructor] Lightroom CC on your computer, Lightroom CC on a mobile device, and Lightroom for the Web all share the same basic interface for editing photos. The phone looks a bit different though because of the small screen size but all of the tools can be found there. Lightroom on the Web is missing a few of the edit functions but it includes the ones that we use the most. I'm going to start with Lightroom CC on the desktop. You could follow along with this using an iPad because the interface between the desktop and an iPad is very close to the same. I've added an image to my Favorites album here, of the desert. Let's edit this to see how these functions work. I'm going to double-click on the desert image and then in the upper right-hand corner, we have an edit icon, or the E key on your keyboard will take you there and this opens our Edit panels. I usually start in Edit by choosing a profile. By default, all raw images are assigned the generic default profile called Adobe Color and we can see that here. I'll click on Adobe Color and as I hover over these profiles you'll see that the image changes and this happens before we've even moved any sliders. This is a landscape image so I'm going to choose the Adobe Landscape profile. I love how this profile pops the colors and opens the shadows before I've even started to adjust the sliders. The next thing that I do is I hit the Auto button. I know it sounds kind of crazy but the Auto Edit function is powered by artificial intelligence and it's quite smart at what it does. The Auto button adjusts Light settings as well as Vibrance and Saturation. If we open the Color panel here and scroll down, we'll see that it added a little bit of Vibrance. Let's come back up here and look at the Light sliders. Usually the Auto button makes my images a little too flat so it gets me close. I think from here, we'll open up the shadows. I want to see more of that foreground and that really flattened it out so I'll double-click on the Contrast slider and that'll reset it back to the middle. If you're on an iPad, you can just double-tap on it. And then, I don't like when the whites go to a minus number. So I'm going to take this a little bit over to a plus number and then take the blacks down a little bit to add some more contrast. That's looking pretty good but, I feel like it's a little too cold and I'd like to warm it up. I can collapse the Light panel here if I click up by the name Light. We can take a look at the options here in Color. A lot of times, I'll try the Auto function for White Balance as well. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. This is better. It still feels like it's too cool so I'm going to take the tint up a little bit to warm it and I'll take the temp up, get it a little bit warmer. That's looking pretty good. Maybe we'll add just a little bit of saturation. I like it when my images are nice and colorful. Finally, I didn't get the horizon line quite level on this image. There's a quick and easy way to do that in Lightroom CC. If we come down here to Geometry and then where it says Upright Off, I'll click on that and I'll pick Level and then presto, that image looks great now. Remember that everything you do to edit a photo in Lightroom is completely non-destructive. You can't hurt anything, so don't be afraid to play. There's some additional editing tools for Crop, in the upper right-hand corner here. And then Healing Brush and then the next three are Selective Edits for Brush, Linear Gradient and Radial Gradient. The Selective Edit tools are the one editing feature that's a bit different on the iPad. They're actually kind of hidden there. So let's take a look and I'll show you where to find them. I'm going to exit out of the editor here by just clicking on this icon in the lower left. That'll take us back to the grid view and then I'll open the library view and we'll see that the edits have synced. Then we'll switch over to the iPad and see what the Selective Edits look like there. So here we are on the iPad, looking at the collection of Favorite images or the album. I'll tap on the desert image. We can see the edits when I open the Light panel, we'll see all of the sliders and how they were moved on Lightroom CC and then they show up here on the iPad. And let's find those Selective Edits that are kind of hidden here. In the iPad we have the Crop tool and then the Adjustment Brush and under there is a Selective Edit icon. Tapping on that brings up this plus in the upper left-hand corner. Hidden under the plus, is where you find those Selective Edits. The brush, the Radial Gradient and the Linear Gradient. If you were to apply one of those Selective Edits, you would want to say Done to apply them. I'm just going to tap Cancel to get out of there. Now let's take a look at how you can edit on a computer without the Lightroom app by going to Lightroom on the Web. It looks essentially the same. I have the Favorites album selected here. So I'll double-click on the desert landscape over here and that'll take us into a single view and then in the upper left-hand corner, you'll see a button to edit this photo. Sometimes this take a little bit of time to load. It's very close to the same interface that you have in Lightroom CC, the application. We see all of the Light sliders have been moved and if we come down, we can see the Vibrance and so on. Editing in a browser with Lightroom for Web feels very familiar to editing in Lightroom CC although it might be a little bit slower. You'll find most of the same panels and tools but not all of them. Currently the Selective Editing tools, the Spot-Healing Brush, Radial and Linear filters are not found. Also missing are Tone Curve, Details panel, Optics and Geometry. The Edit tools you use most frequently though, you'll find here. So let's finish this tour of Lightroom CC editing by taking a look at Lightroom CC on an iPhone. Here we're looking at the same set of images on an iPhone. I'm going to tap on the Favorites album so that we can see that edit from the desert image pop in. Lightroom CC on a phone is the most unique because all of the edit controls and edit tools are represented together as individual icons at the bottom or right of the screen, depending on the orientation and there's a lot of icons here, you might miss when you first take a look at this. I have my finger on this and I'm dragging it across so that we can see all of them. The Auto button is this one that's a pick with some stars on it. If you edit in a horizontal format, the icon names go away, so it's helpful to learn what each of these icons represent. I made this chart for you that you could download and print out and keep close by as a reference to what each of these icons are. I know it took me awhile to get familiar with each of them. I hope you find this helpful. Now let's switch back to the phone and do some editing there. Actually want to back out of this and edit a different image. Let's go all the way back out, tapping on that arrow in the upper left-hand corner. And let's pull up this still life image that I captured a little while ago. I'll tap on it to pull it up and then we'll see all of these icons down here. The first thing that I want to do is look at some different profiles so I'll tap on the profile icon and as we choose different profiles, you'll see that the image changes a little bit. If we go to the Adobe Portrait, that's set up to give a little less saturation for warm tones if you're photographing people. I'm going to actually pick the Landscape one for this and then tap on the check to close out of that then I'll tap on the Auto button and then if we open the Light sliders, we'll see that these have all moved. I'm pretty happy with the way those look, except that I want to blow out that background so that it's completely white. So I'll take the White slider and just move it up even further. And sometimes when you do that, you start losing the detail in the highlights and those can be recovered by taking the Highlights slider down to the left and this works because we captured this as a raw image using the iPhone. I might come down here with the Black sliders and add a little bit more contrast to that. I'm pretty happy with the way this looks. Let's tap on it to hide the sliders and then zoom in and see how incredibly this beautiful this image is, that was captured on a phone. Even that pine cone back there is a little soft focus. I actually really like the way this image turned out. After spending time with each of the Lightroom CC apps, you're likely to find a favorite for editing. My personal favorite is the iPad. I love to sit in my recliner, listening to music, or on the couch in front of the TV while I edit. For me, it's like meditation. I use this workflow for images to be shared on social media or in web galleries. Any photo that will ultimately print and hang on a wall gets a final edit on my computer with a color-calibrated monitor. The beauty of the Lightroom ecosystem is that it offers options and flexibility. You can capture with your phone, edit on an iPad, and finish on your computer. Work is always synced everywhere, so it can be put down and picked back up at a later time, from any other location or device.