6 Experiment Without Risk - SCAI021

Hey there and welcome back. In this section, we're going over color toning in Lightroom, which it's fantastic about. The color toning features are really, really good. We're also going to show you how to use virtual copies, which are a way of making multiple different images in Lightroom. Let's say you want your original, maybe you want a color tone version, and then maybe a different color tone version. We're going to show you how to do all that in Lightroom and then how to export it so you have all of your different versions perfectly organized on your computer. We had a great section for you. Let's jump into Lightroom. So here we are in Lightroom. Now we're going to go to our lake fashion here. These images are super, super cool and really great for color toning. So let's go ahead and start with this image here. Let's just double click on it. Here we go. Let's go to our develop module right up here at the top. And we're going to go on the right hand side, just make sure everything else is closed. We just want to open up color grading. Fantastic. Now with color grading, we have a few different options. We have this first option, which is our three-way color grading, which will show the mid-tones, the shadows, and the highlights. There we go. You can also edit them individually if you want just the shadows, just the mid-tones, or just the highlights. And then you have this global, which basically will allow you to choose the color that you would apply to the entire image. There we go. Let's go ahead. I'm going to hold alt or option and reset that. I generally find this three-way to be pretty helpful because I can do them all at the same time. All right. So let's go through all of the features and options here. So we're going to start off with our mid-tones. Basically, you're going to start with this center point and click this out in the direction that you'd like. Now, keep in mind, all of this is non-destructive, so you can make any changes at any time and then undo them. So basically, I recommend just kind of like moving this around and it's color work. This is very subjective and it's kind of artistic, right? So kind of just move it around until it's something that you like. And I kind of like this teal color. That looks really good. Now, if you go right over here, you can actually adjust a little bit more fine-tune the hue where you'd like to put things. That's looking pretty good. And then right here, you can adjust the luminosity of your mid-tones. So you can make your mid-tones lighter or darker. A little bit lighter looks good. And then, of course, you can just make that visible and invisible. Perfect. Now let's move into our shadows. We're just going to kind of, again, I'm just literally clicking on this mid-slider and moving it around until I see something that I like. These deep blue shadows are looking really, really nice there. Fantastic. I can click here and work. There we go. Like fine-tune those. And then I can adjust the light levels of my shadows. Ooh, that's looking really, really good. Beautiful color tone. Okay. Next, I want to go to my highlights. So we're going to pull this and add a little bit of warmth into my highlights. And then let's go ahead and fine-tune that color and then decide how light or how dark I want my highlights. There we go. I think that's really nice. Now, with any type of color toning, you might want to do a few different variations. So let's go back to our library module. Hit G for our grid view. And here you can see we've color toned this image. Now, the cool thing here that we can do is I can apply this same color tone to multiple images in this series. So let's hold shift and click on a few of them. I can go to sync settings. I'm just going to go to check none for now. And then we're going to go to our color grading. So let's just turn on color grading and hit synchronize. And you can see they're all color graded to be basically the exact same look and feel, which is really, really nice. Okay. So that's I'm going to hit undo. That's the basics of our color grading in Lightroom. It's very, very powerful. Now, I like to use color grading with another tool called a virtual copy. Basically, it creates a copy inside a Lightroom that you can work on alongside of the original. You can color tone that, you can edit it however you want, and then you can export those individually. So let's show you how to do that as well. So here we are back in Lightroom. Now, I have this photo that we just did our color toning. We're going to get back to this in just a second. For now, let's go to this other photo in this series. And we're going to right click on it. We're going to go down to where it says create virtual copy. So there we go. Create a virtual copy. And as you can see, we have our original photo and then we have a virtual copy. And then you see right up here at the top, it says one of two and two of two. Now, these are stacked together, the original and the virtual copy. If I click right up here where it says one of two, it's going to bring them back together. And here you can see the stacked icon. If I click on it again, it's going to expand those out again. Now, right now they look pretty much the same, but this is the original reference photo. This is the virtual copy that I can do whatever I want with it. So let's say this image here is I really like the color toning that we did to this. Let's say maybe I want the color toning of this to apply to the virtual copy. I can treat it just like a regular image. So I'm going to click on this one, control or command and click on the virtual copy. And then we're going to go to sync settings on the bottom right. Make sure just color grading is checked and click on synchronize. So now we have our original image and the virtual copy. Let's go ahead and show you how you can filter between those. Right up here at the very top, we have our attribute. We've used this before. I'm just going to get rid of my right sidebar. And then up the very, very top, we have our original photos, virtual copies and videos. So if I click on this virtual copies icon right here, boop here, I'm going to see only the virtual copies that are actually in my images. Okay. I can turn that off and we can continue to work again. Now let's create a couple more virtual copies. Let's say I'm going to click on this one, click on this one and click on this one. We're going to right click. And I'm going to go down to create virtual copies one more time. And now we're starting to have a few different virtual copies in my images. I'm going to hit the minus key on my keyboard to bring it a little bit smaller. Let's create a virtual copy for this one as well. So right click and we'll say, create a virtual copy. Fantastic. So as you can see, it's starting to get just a little bit confusing as we have multiple different versions of each of our images in Lightroom. Keep in mind, this isn't actually creating copies on your computer. This is just inside of Lightroom. So I really like virtual copies, but we need to understand and kind of figure out a couple ways to manage these virtual copies. Okay. So we'll show you how to do it with our virtual copies. As we've seen, we have one of two and then two of two. If I click here, it's going to go ahead and collapse those as a stack. Okay. I can click here. It's going to collapse them as a stack. I can click there and it'll do the same thing until we have all of those. Okay. So each of these has two images in a stack. So right now we know that you can actually click on each of those icons and expand or contract your stack. You can also do the same thing within the menu. So we're just going to go, I'm going to go to the help menu right up here and I'm going to type in stack. There we go. And you can see here, you could like choose all of your menus. It's going to show you exactly where it is. So you can see it's in photo, stacking, collapse all stacks. But I can just type in stack in the help menu and I have all of my stacking options right here too. Sometimes that helps because I don't always remember exactly where it is. So if I wanted to go to expand all stacks, I can do that. And now I've expanded all of my stacks. So I have image plus virtual copy, image plus virtual copy, image plus virtual copy. Now this is okay. It's nice that I can expand all my stacks and collapse them all together. It's nice that Lightroom does that, but it's still a little bit confusing for me to see exactly what I'm doing. Of course, I can click right up here at the very top and just see my virtual copies. That's actually quite nice. But something that I also like to do personally is color of my virtual copies, just so I can see exactly what I'm doing. So I went ahead and showed just my virtual copies. I'm going to hit control or command A to select them all. And then I'm going to go down here to my color ratings and I'm just going to give them the color green. There we go. So that way, if I see all of my images, I see that the green ones, those are the ones in fact, that are my virtual copies. Okay. So let's go ahead and just see the green ones. Perfect. And now let's say all of my virtual copies, I want to be color toned exactly like this one. So I'm going to click on this one, hold shift and then click on the rest of them. Okay. Let's bring our sidebar back. I'm going to click on sync settings and color grading. So it's going to sync all those settings. So now let's bring that back over there. Now, just my virtual copies are color toned. So let's go ahead and turn off that green filter. So I have my original plus a virtual copy. That's now been color toned. The other original, the other virtual copy, the other original, the other virtual copy. Okay. So our virtual copies are all color toned. Now let's say I want another version of color toning for all these. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to click on all the original controller command, click on all these original ones. I'm going to right click and I'm going to say, create virtual copy. So we're going to do this again. You don't have to do this again. I just want to show you how many times you can use this tool. So let's create virtual copies again. Now I'm going to hit the minus key. So it gets a little bit smaller, but you can see, we have our original plus the new virtual copy, plus the other one that we made was green. We can also see now is all of the virtual copies that I just made are still selected. And that's really great because they're all selected. What I'm going to do is now go the very bottom here and I'm going to make those all blue. Fantastic. So I have my originals, my blues are one version of a virtual copy and my greens are another version of the virtual copy. So let's go to this blue here. There we go. We're just going to go to our develop module. And you know what? This time I want to just do like a pretty different color tone on it. Cool. I like that. Looks good. I'm going relatively fast with the color toning on it, but I like that. So that was a blue one. So let's go ahead and filter just by the blues. There we go. And now I'm going to click here, control or command A to select all those, click on sync settings, just color grading and synchronize those. And now they're all going to be synced with that exact same color tone. Now let's go ahead and turn that filter off and expand out. Okay. So now what do we have? Let's hit plus a couple of times. We have an original image, one version of a color tone, and then another version of a color tone. Another original image, a version of a color tone, another version of color tone all the way down to here. Except remember, this is the original image that we had, that we actually based this virtual copy off of. So let's go back to this original image and I'll just undo. So let's go back because remember you can undo all this stuff. Let's hit develop. I'll just go back into my history, back to import, and then we're done. Go back to our library module. So we have original, color tone one, color tone two, original, color tone one, color tone two. Okay. Now, of course you could do this with your entire library. I just want to do this with these photos. Okay. So what are we going to do now? Let's just show you how to export these out in a way that actually makes sense. I hope by now you can start to play around and understand color toning, but I do want to show you how to export all this stuff. Okay. So this is all in our lake fashion. So let's create a new folder inside here. I'm just going to call this export. There we go. Okay. Oh, I had something selected. There we go. Let's deselect. All right. So inside of my export, we're going to create one called original. There we go. Inside of there, I'm going to call this color tone 01. And inside of here, we're going to call this color tone 02. Fantastic. Okay. So now we have an export folder, color tone 01, color tone 02, and original. So let's go ahead. I'm going to hold control or command and click on all the originals. There we go. It should be five. Let's go to file down to export. There we go. Choose folder later. Sounds good. There we go. Rename two. I prefer, let's do a custom setting here. Let's do, let's start from the beginning. Okay. So we'll do file name. There we go. And then underscore, and then I'll do custom text. And the custom text I can enter in the next one. Fantastic. So let's hit done. And then the color tone custom text, we'll just call this original. So this will be the file name underscore original. Fantastic. Cause that's what I selected. Let's go export. There we go. And we're going to go sample images, 2024 Lake fashion export original. So we already made these folders in Lightroom. We just did it. And now I'm going to export those there. So let's hit open there. Fantastic. There we go. Let's deselect. And now if I wanted to just go to attribute and just choose my blue ones. There we go. I can hit control or command A to select all of those. File down here to export. There we go. And then now we're going to call this color tone. Oh, one export. And then that's going to go in my color tone. Oh, one folder hit open. Now let's just take a look at our green ones file export. There we go. And we'll just call it color tone. Oh, two and hit export and make sure we put it in the right folder color tone. Oh, two and hit open there. Fantastic. And then sometimes what we need to do here in Lightroom classic, we'll just right click on the master folder here. There we go. Go down to where it says synchronize folder. And it's going to say, hey, we found 15 new photos. Hit synchronize. Fantastic. And here they are. And now these are actually on my computer. So if I go to my export, we have color tone oh one. Here we can see these are actually JPEGs on my computer now. Color tone oh two. They keep their green color and our originals. So using different colors when we create our virtual copies is a really nice way to stay organized. Because if I go back to my capture folders, I can still see in my capture folders. That's a virtual copy. Don't forget if you type it, if you go to help menu and type in stack, you can go down to where it says something like collapse all stacks. Boop. And then you have a much cleaner view of what you have. You still have your virtual copies here. Okay. Now let's go ahead and just take a look. We're just going to go here, right click, show in finder. There we have our export. Our original. There we go. All of the original files. And you can see it says underscore original. Color tone oh one. These are color toned. There we go. Looks really nice. Color tone oh one and color tone oh two. So not only are we organized in Lightroom Classic, we're also organized on our computer. And just a side note, you can see it really doesn't take that long to create a few different color variations for color toning. So if let's say you're going to be sending some images to your client and you wanted to send like, oh, here's a version with black and white. Here's a version with this color tone. Here's a version with that color tone. To them, they're going to receive this and be like, wow, this is amazing. You sent me multiple different versions of all of these images. I love it. And for you, it's like it didn't take that long. Like you're going to be able to create a lot of value for them in a relatively short period of time for you using this workflow. And yeah, it's just going to help you look better and deliver more value to them. So all good all around. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy this. I really like the combination of using virtual copies with color tone. Thanks again. I'll see you in the next section. Bye, everyone.