From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Fixing light in a portrait with transition glasses

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Fixing light in a portrait with transition glasses

- [Chris] Hello friends, this is Chris Orwig and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we are in Lightroom Classic CC. We'll be working with this photograph that I captured of a legendary photographer Rick Smolan. And here I want to talk about how we can fix an issue which has to do with lightness or darkness in an image and how we can do that using one of our selective adjustment tools. But before I get to that, let me set up the problem and then talk about the solution. Okay, well here we have the RAW file, straight as it appears out of the camera. Now if I convert this image to black and white, what we see is with the glasses, it looks really dark here because these are transition glasses that have a bit of tint in them. That doesn't look very good, but, we can fix that so it has more of a natural look. If I convert this image to color and we see that again we can see here it doesn't look very good, but we can fix that, and how do we actually do that? So that's what we're going to do is look at how we can take this RAW file, process it in the Basic panel, and then fix that little issue. Okay, well first the processing. I'm going to go ahead and add some exposure and contrast, boost my shadows, and then I want to warm this up because I love his genuine and natural smile there and just want to bring some warmer tones into the photograph. Okay, well this is step one, just do some basic adjustments to the image. Step two is to really think about the problem. Whenever you have a problem in a specific area like this, you want to go to one of your selective adjustment tools. The one that which will work incredibly well for us is the Radial Filter, so if we go ahead and take this to temp, so we can just warm it up a touch, bring some exposure, shadows, contrast, maybe drop highlights down. We're kind of guessing here. We want to have our feather value pretty high as well, we'll just click and drag that out over this area. And all that we're looking to do here, let me exaggerate for a moment, is to brighten up that part of the image. Can you see how I'm doing that? Also the feather amount controls the intensity of the edge, so if we have it really intense like this, sometimes it's helpful to kind of figure out, well okay, where does this adjustment need to be exactly? Then add your feather to soften it, and then of course add the correct amount, which we want to brighten, right? We're really interested in removing that problem rather than exaggerating it. And I'm bringing my highlights down so that this center part isn't overly bright and I think we're going pretty good. Let me zoom out so we can see how this looks and then tap the H key to hide that overlay. And I think that looks pretty good. If we flip the switch here for this adjustment, you can see our before and after. Now with this adjustment, it looks like it's just a little bit too strong, so if we collapse those adjustments into the slider we can find just the right amount for that. All right that looks good. Next step, if we Control click or right-click on that, we can duplicate that and then just bring one over to the other side there, and then take a look, we have it. Before and after, not a lot of work, really clean, really pro looking, great results. So once we've done that, we could then create a black and white version of the image. Press Command + apostrophe on a Mac, Control + apostrophe on Windows. Then go through the black and white conversion process. One of the easiest ways to do that is to tap the V on your keyboard. Think V for victory, the most victorious way to convert to black and white, and then here we can modify, you know, some of our tones here if we want to change the look. Go into the Basic panel, black and white tend to like more clarity, they tend to like more contrast, and so we can sort of have some fun with some of those settings there as well. But, I want to highlight that really, this black and white conversion works because of all of that work that we did right there, right? Because those eyes are nice and bright and we aren't distracted by the darkness that happened as a result of those glasses. All right, well there you have it, a few quick tips about how we can use the Radial Filter in order to correct an issue like this. I hope you found that one to be helpful, and even more, I hope that you have a wonderful and productive rest of your day. I look forward to seeing you next time, bye for now.

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