Hello everybody, Reid Hoffman here with another of my video critiques.
If you'd like to submit images for one of these, please do.
You can find instructions on that at the beginning of the post for this, as well as at the end
of this video.
So let's get started.
Three people submitted, David, Douglas, and Norm.
So let's get started with David's.
First picture David has is what looks like a cloud inversion at Grand Canyon.
As always, when I first look at a picture, I say, where are the strengths?
What are the weaknesses?
And the strengths here, of course, are going to be the clouds and the canyons and the color
back there.
Got a nice kind of leading line in the bottom of the ridge here, a little bit of detail in
the tree and a touch of color and light.
The problems, I think, are more to do with things coming in from the edges, which is
not uncommon.
These bare kind of scraggly branches don't work as a framing device.
Generally, if you want a framing device, you'd like to have something dark and heavy out
of focus, if possible, that kind of sweeps in around, at least, from one of the sides.
So I want to get rid of those.
And then these little areas of brightness will also pull the eye away.
So first thing I'm going to do is crop.
So let's go ahead and take this into editing software.
My browser software, Photomechanic, as always, I'm going to launch controller command E into
Photoshop and open that up into what is going to be Adobe Camera Raw.
Now that's the same editing suite you'll have if you work in Lightroom, so you'll have
the same tools there.
So let's start with a crop.
Let's come up top here.
I'll get the crop tool, and then I'll start dragging a crop.
You notice that little red circle?
That is just an app I'm using to make it easier for people viewing this to see where my cursor
is on the screen.
Just as in framing pictures while shooting, I'm going to work the edges.
So I'm looking at what's going on.
I can see a little bit of that tree poking in there.
So let's pull in to get rid of that.
And let's see what happens down at the bottom.
Remember, I want to stay away from that poking up, that little bit of brightness coming in,
so I'm going to crop just above that, and about there is good.
Now I don't need all this dead blue sky.
I like the blue sky, but I don't need so much of it, so let's come down a little bit.
And I'll hit my return or my enter key and take my crop.
At this point, I probably want to work with tone and contrast.
So I think I'll try dropping the exposure a little, and I can push the contrast up some,
and that gives it a little more pop.
But remember, when you're adjusting contrast, you're going to lighten the lightest areas
as well as darkening the darkest areas.
If you really just want to darken the dark tones, then it's probably better to go down
and use that black slider, and I do that quite a bit just to what I like to say is lock down
those dark tones.
Also the color, I want to bring out a little more of the color in the mountains here.
So I can come down and I can push that vibrance up.
I tend to prefer vibrance over saturation because it's less drastic.
It'll give me a nice pop, and I'll go up to maybe around 20 normally, and I'll go ahead
and slide the clarity up.
Usually I'll go about 15 on that somewhere in that area, and I can hit the preview to
see before and after of what I've done with the active panel here.
Not everything I've done.
You notice when I do the preview, it doesn't undo the crop.
It just undoes what's going on in this panel.
Let's see what we can do with the color here.
So I've got a temperature and tint slider.
I'd probably push over to yellow and maybe push the magenta up, and I like what's happening
back in there to the stone, but notice how the sky is bleeding color.
That's because yellow is the opposite of blue.
I'm going to take the exposure down a little bit and then let's see what we can do to fix
that blue sky.
So I just want to work the blue sky.
That means I'm going to use a selective tool, and I'll just grab the adjustment brush, take
that and come over and let's see.
What do I want to do?
I want a little more blue, so I'll slide that blue slider over.
Nothing's happening because I haven't done anything with the brush yet.
Let's zero out the exposure slider, just to affect the color for now.
Then I come up here, that little black circle you see right outside my red cursor indicator
is where most of the effect is going to take place, and then it will fade off to the edges
of that black and white rectangle.
I can use the bracket keys on my keyboard to make that brush larger or smaller.
So I'll make it a bit bigger, and then I'm just going to start sweeping in, and you can
see how I'm getting more blue in the sky.
Now remember, I didn't do anything with the exposure.
All I did was push a little more blue in.
And so right now, this is active.
You see my red pin, so I could go further with it if I wanted, make a little blue, or
I might push a little magenta into it.
Just going for the look I want.
I could try pushing the exposure down.
I think that might be a little too drastic.
So maybe just push the blacks over a tad, and that will give a little more punch to
it.
Finally, since the focus of the picture is in the center here, what about darkening the
edges?
I could use a brush for that.
I could do another adjustment brush.
But also I have this thing called the radial filter.
I can select the radial filter, and I can draw a circle or an oval, and I can change the
shape of that.
I can spin it however I want.
And the way I have it set right now, let's look down here, and I'll zoom in.
I have it set so the effect is taking place outside of that circle.
And I've got the feather at 50.
I'm going to go ahead and push it up to 100, because I want that very soft effect happening.
But of course, the effect is going to be whatever is in this panel here, and right now it's
just set for blue, temperature sliding to blue, and a little bit of black.
So let's reset those, so nothing's happening out on the edges.
And really all I wanted is a slight burn, so maybe just push the exposure down, and
again, that's affecting only the edges.
Here's my preview before and after what's going on there.
I'm done with this now.
Let's go back to the original, so I'll go over to Photomechanic, and I'll make that
fit the screen.
And we can see here's the original, whoops, and those are the next pictures, let me cycle
the right way.
And here's what I've done with it.
So original to the finished image.
So not a lot to that, but again, playing to the strengths of the image.
Let's see what else we have here.
So I'm going to escape out of that.
Go back to Photomechanic and come to the next picture.
That's another of David's photos.
And I think what we've got here is we've got nice strong graphic elements of these curves
and the dark tones.
We've got some good yellow, some rich blue up here.
There's other detail here, but I'm going to focus just on the graphic qualities in the
center of the picture.
So let's go ahead and bring that into Adobe Camera Raw again.
I'm going to first thing, just like last time, I'll grab my crop tool, and I'll draw a crop
in there.
I'll add that to my picture.
And this is where I'm going to go with that.
And I'm going to start up where that blue and yellow come together.
I'm going to make that the upper corner of my picture.
And then I can play around down here and kind of decide how much.
I think I'll keep that nice sweep going over there.
Hit the return key.
OK, so if I want to do contrast now to punch that up a little bit.
Now, here's one of those times where punching up that contrast is bleeding out some of my
time, even lighter.
So maybe not so much with contrast, but more with the blacks.
I did that black slider before.
You can see how that darkens those dark tones, keeps the viewer's eye into the center here
where we've got the color and some other things going on.
And I might even want to enhance this a little more.
What could I do there?
Well, maybe play with that temperature slider.
Push the yellow over, and I might even try some magenta again to work these colors and
take the exposure down a bit more, and I could punch the contrast up a bit.
And now I'm going for a much more graphic kind of look with that.
Let's go look at the beginning one.
And here it is.
And here's where I ended up going with it.
But let's also look at what David did.
David sent me a second option on that where he turned it black and white and recovered
a lot of the tones down here.
And I think that's nice too.
In fact, I like that better than what I did.
I might go a little more contrast on it, get a little more punch to it, so making those
blacks a bit darker.
But I think that's a real nice way to affect that also.
Here's what I did.
Let's escape out of there.
Make that disappear.
Let's go back and see what else we've got.
Douglas sent me a couple of sunrise or sunsets.
This is actually maybe a moonrise or a moon set.
And again, where are the strengths, where are the weaknesses?
These little things poking up, again, distractions.
So let's go ahead and launch that into Adobe Camera Raw.
And I'll go ahead and get that crop tool first.
And I'm going to crop down there to try to minimize those, which means I'm going to crop
them out.
Once I've got the crop drawn, I can shift it around a little bit by grabbing and pushing
and pulling.
And I'm just going to take it down until I'm right at the edge here.
And then I'll probably come to this corner and pull down.
I'm going to play a little bit to the rule of thirds, where I'm going to off center my
subject, get it up into this quadrant a bit.
And I like that nice little touch of clouds there.
So I'll hit the return key.
And now I have the crop that I want.
Now let's see what we can do.
I think it needs more contrast.
We can try contrast.
We can push the blacks down a little bit on it.
We can bring the exposure down.
Give it a little bit of a moodier feel.
What about color?
Well, if we start shifting to yellow, we're going to warm things up, get a little more
of an orange look to it.
I have no problems with where it is there.
I might play with the tint a little bit.
Now if I go towards green, of course, it will clear it up, but we also get kind of an unreal
look to the water.
So maybe punch that up a little bit and take the exposure down some.
And I think that's about all we need to do to that.
Let's go back.
Let's take a look at that original.
Here we were.
So it was really, whoops, wrong one.
Let's go back here.
There we go.
So we started there.
It's just really a darkening and contrast adjustment plus a little bit of a crop to clean up the
bottom of the framing here.
All right.
We're going to escape out of that one.
Let's go see the other one that Doug gave us.
All right.
Now we've got a sunset with a little more going on.
I like having foreground elements.
This is a little far away.
I'd love to have seen a palm tree, maybe somewhere more in this area, but I don't know what was
there, whether we could have gotten back there.
So let's work with this.
And obviously it's the sunset.
It's the water down here, some dramatic clouds.
So let's bring it into our software.
And we'll go ahead and get that crop tool first thing.
And I'm going to crop out that palm tree, much as I would have liked to have it in the foreground,
just having a little bit of the branches poking in, I think is more of a distraction.
Might rotate that a touch.
A lot of times, even though I might use a virtual horizon indicator or a bubble level
with a tripod to make sure I'm getting a good horizontal line out there, oftentimes you'll
find afterwards that it may not look quite right.
So I'm not afraid to go in and crop and rotate to get the feel right.
Now you see the red here.
That's because up here I have the highlight alert turned on, which is give me an indicator
of overexposure.
If I didn't have that turned on, I wouldn't know that we've blown some highlights.
So let's leave that back on, because that'll help guide me in what I do.
I can either take the exposure slider or highlight.
Since it's a highlight alert, I'll usually try with the highlight slider first, but you'll
see in this case, it doesn't really knock that down entirely.
But the exposure slider will.
And Adobe does a nice job of recovering some detail and pulling those highlights down.
And I can even come back at this point and bring that highlight slider back up until
I have next to nothing showing, and there's an indicator.
So again, here's my preview before and after what I've done just in this active panel.
I'd like to bring out a little more color in here.
So the vibrance and clarity are already punched up a little bit.
So I might work the sliders.
And we've got a little bit of yellow up there, so might not push a tad more in.
And maybe the magenta as well, you can go back and forth, green's absolutely not going
to work.
So let's bring our exposure down a little more.
I mean, the picture is really all about the sunset and the tones and the colors in here.
Now we've gone pretty dark in these areas, so this is a time we might say, let's go get
the adjustment brush.
And I want to zero these out, start fresh.
So Command-Option-R on Mac, or Control-Alt-R on Windows, again, since I want to lighten
these up, I'm going to dial a plus exposure in, a bit of plus exposure, and probably some
plus shadow recovery into my panel here, and then come in and start sweeping around.
And you'll see I'm just getting a little bit of lightening in the dark areas.
I don't need it everywhere.
I just want it in the center of these dark areas here and up into the clouds, bring that
up a bit.
Now, I've made that change, there's my active pin, so I could always adjust it further at
that point.
And it's pretty easy to see.
You can go crazy with this, and it's not going to look very real.
In this case, I just want to get a little more punch out of it.
That's pretty good, so I can hit the return key on that, and come back to my basic panel,
and maybe push my black slider down a little bit.
And let's see where we started, right here, and here's where we finished up.
So I think that was a nice little touch done there.
All right, we will escape out of this, and come back to Photomechanic, and go to our
next picture.
So Norm sent me two pictures, and in this case, Norm sent me low res.
If you're going to submit images, please try to give me the full resolution that gives
me more information, more data to work with.
This is a pretty low res picture, but let's see what we can do here.
So let's zoom back out on screen there.
Actually, if I zoom to see all the pixels, it ends up being a little smaller, because
only 1,000 pixels wide can't even fill the window on my 13-inch laptop here.
Norm's got a nice peak action, he's got good light, good exposure.
Unfortunately, the rider is facing away from us.
If we've got people, and we can show faces, that's always going to be better.
The action is going away from us, and we also ended up in a position where we've got this
green tree protruding in there.
So in this case, if at all possible, I'd want to change my position, so I'm shooting
into the face of the rider, so we can see a little more what's going on from in front
of them, and see if I can find a position that cleaned up the background.
About the only thing I do editing this is I'd probably do a radial filter in the center,
just to darken these edges a little bit, to keep the attention in here where we want it.
On the next one, we've got a man looking out the window.
Let's go ahead and open this one up.
So once more, into Adobe Camera Raw, and I just again like to give it a little more
punch, so probably take that black slider down some, and really, if you've got a person
in the picture of the eye is going to the person, the rest becomes framing, and so let's
take everything else dark, and I'll just get an adjustment brush.
Under that command, option, or control, alt, R, resets that.
Let's push just a minus exposure in here.
Let's use the bracket key to make the brush bigger, and let's just swing around here and
just push some darkening into pretty much everything except his face.
There's a person in the picture, you're going to look to the person anyway, so let's make
sure that's where our eye is going.
I'm going to do a new brush, and let's back that exposure off, take the highlights down,
because I want to knock down some of that brightness in the hair there.
So I'm going to go to a smaller brush, I just really want to go into the top of his head,
the hair, and we can see that's looking too much, right?
But since it's active, I can always come back up here and say, let's just back it out a
little bit so it's looking realistic, and I'm going to go up here and say new brush one
more time, Command Option or Control Alt R, and open the exposure up a little bit, maybe
a quarter to a third of a stop, and I'm just going to go in and sweep on his face.
Let's back that out a little bit, and okay, let's look where we started.
So here's our full image when we started, and here's where we ended up.
Not a big change, but again, playing to the strengths, we're going to darken around the
edges, kind of lighten the face a little bit so the attention goes more naturally to the
face.
And that's it for this week, I hope more of you guys submit pictures, I will do another
critique in the next couple of weeks after I get some more images in.
Thanks everybody.
