4 Draw More Attention to the Subject - SCAI021

Hey there and welcome back. We've got a fantastic example. We're going to be combining a lot of what we've learned up until this point into one single image. We are on our example. We've got Lightroom Masking 04 and I really like this image. It's got a lot going for it. A couple things that I want to fix. Just this area up here on the top is like really bright and it's kind of distracting me a little bit. So I want to make that a little darker, kind of let it blend in with the background a little bit more. The highlights on my subject's skin are just a little bit too bright. The shadows in her hair, I'd like those shadows to be a little bit brighter. So bring back information and I want to work with these colors. I like this pink, but I want it to be a little bit more reddish. So it kind of gives that like red cyan color balance that I like quite a bit and then we're just going to draw some more attention to our subject with lighting. Okay, so let's move into our develop module. Now the first thing we're going to do is take care of this sky so we can just go to our masking tools and I'm going to try and just select the sky right here. Boom, did a nice job. It actually found the sky, so perfect. Now with this, what we're going to do is I'm just going to take our exposure down just a little bit. There we go, something like that. Let's take our highlights down as well, just a little bit and the whites down also. Okay, now this is looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and just with our color temperature right here, we're just going to make it a little bit more blue and then down here with the saturation, let's just lower the saturation. All right, that's looking a little bit better. It just kind of makes this area a little bit darker in general. There we go and if you want to, you can add to this because if I zoom in and I'm getting like really picky here, it didn't do this bottom right corner. So I could go add and then down here to like my brush tool and then we're going to bring the flow really low so I can get a nice build up effect and then let's go ahead and bring up our feathering. There we go and I can just kind of add to this by kind of like painting right over there and making sure that it just goes right to the edge with the brush tool. There we go. Now if you paint a little bit more than what you intend to, like if you're kind of like going off the edges a little bit here, it's okay. You can hold alt or option and that goes to your erase brush and with the erase brush, you can actually get different settings. So or you just click on erase right here, but alt or option will bring the erase brush as well. So with this, let me bring up our feathering just a little bit. The flow is nice and tight and alt or option. I can just erase this out of the areas where I don't want it to be visible. Okay, and I'm just using the trackpad on my laptop here. So you don't need any special tools for this. All right, there we go. That's looking pretty good and it's already blending a lot better to my image as a whole, right? There we go. I think that looks nice. So let's just double click. We'll just call this sky. The next thing we want to do is take these highlights of my subject and maybe just make them a little bit darker, right? I want to bring back some of this exposure. So we need to select basically a light range. So let's go to create a new mask and we have this luminance range right here, which allows me to select a range of light. Super cool. So let's click on this luminance range. Now with luminance range, there's a couple ways to do this. One is you just have this eyedropper tool where you can just click on a different range and it'll select that light range. Okay, boom, you can see it's just selecting different light ranges around my image. The other thing you can do is click and drag. So if I click and drag it kind of selects a patch of light and gives you a little bit more of an accurate area. So this is kind of what we want to do and you want to just make sure your overlay is only visible like where you actually want to affect it, right? Like if I just wanted to affect that light range, you can do this. Keep in mind, it's not taking into account color or your subject or anything. It's just light range. So if I want to see that light range, basically, it's a really nice way for me to be able to select just the area of light that I want to. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. You can see it's pink here letting us know that's affected. And then here all I have to do, I'm just going to take my exposure and just drag this down a little bit. Okay, so we're just dragging down those highlights, just making them a little bit darker. Let's take those highlights and just drag that down just a tiny bit as well. And let's see what happens if I take my whites. Yeah, that's starting to look really weird. Let's keep the whites where they are. Okay, so exposure and then you know what? I think just the exposure worked kind of the best there. There we go. Something like that. Now, this is looking a little bit better. The color in this area that we brought our exposure down, the color is looking a little bit too like yellow green and it's a little too saturated if I compare it to the rest of her skin, right? So what we're going to do is first we're going to just affect this color a little bit. We said it was a little too yellow and a little bit too green. So here in our color temperature, we can just take that and drag it to the left a little bit and take our tint and drag it out to the right a little bit, right? So it was too yellow, we drag it towards blue. Too green, we drag it towards magenta. Looking a little bit better. And it's a little bit too saturated. It's like too much color there. So we're going to take this where it says saturation and we're just going to drag this down just a little bit. So let's just make this invisible and visible again and you can see, yeah, cool. It's kind of like working and fixing that area. It's kind of bringing that selection back to what we want. It's doing a really nice job. Now, if I zoom out a little bit, okay, we can see because I selected a light range to start, it just selected that light range for my entire image, right? So what we want to do is I just want to basically remove the rest of my image from this. So you can do this in a lot of different ways. You could go to subtract and then like use your brush tool and paint around the entire image, which would just subtract to your entire image from this. You could hit subtract and then click on your background, like subtract and then go to select background. There we go. See how this does. Sometimes the background may or may not include the car. In this case, select background. Yeah, actually did exactly what I want. So if I make this visible and invisible, you can see it only affects my subject. So that works. You could also, let's just go ahead and delete that. If you are comfortable using intersection. So remember, adding just adds to your mask, subtracting subtracts away. Intersection allows two masks to be put together and only show the area where they actually intersect. So one really easy way to do this would be to go to double click, or sorry, click right here on your menu. There we go. You could go to intersect mask and then I could just do this with the brush. Fantastic. And now with my brush tool, all right, let's just bring our brush, make sure that our flow is nice and high. There we go. I can literally just paint in the area where I want it to be visible because I'm intersecting this mask. Okay, so I'm literally just saying, hey, only be visible in that area. So now I can have it be like that. And then on this whole mask, there we go. Let's just take our amount and bring that down. So always different ways to do things here in Lightroom. Classic, whatever you remember and whatever makes more sense to you, that's a good way to do it. Okay, so let's just call this Subject Highlights. Perfect, Subject Highlights. All right, so now we're looking a little bit better. Now I actually wanna bring it a little bit of light to my subject herself. So we're going to do this in a couple of steps. One thing that I wanna do is I wanna make the background a little bit darker, which is gonna help my subject pop. So let's go ahead and create a new mask. I'm gonna go down to where it says Radial Gradient. We're gonna click and drag out. Something like that looks pretty good. And let's bring our exposure down. Okay, now this is the opposite of what we want. I want kind of the vignette. So we're just gonna click on this Invert. There we go. Let's hit H for Hide and I would just wanna make this a little bit bigger there. There we go. So now our mask is looking really good. So basically you can see it's affecting our entire image. I really only want this to be visible in the background. So what we can do is basically I could do an Intersect and select the background. Okay, I could do a Subtract and then subtract out my subject or the car. Anyway, you can get to just the background. So let's try the Intersect with the background. So let's go ahead and dot, dot, dot, click here. We're gonna go to Intersect Mask and then I'm gonna go to Select Background. There we go, Select Background. So let's see what it looks like now. It found our subject but it's kind of counting this car as the background. So what we want to do is let's Subtract and we'll just try Subtract. We'll just go with some objects here. Okay, so let's try to Subtract some objects and then I can just kind of paint in over top of the objects that I want to Subtract out. There we go. Fantastic and paint in over those and you can see, yep, it's subtracted out of those. Looking pretty good. Let's try one more. Let's just Subtract some objects again. Let's make sure it gets all these. There we go and up there at the top. All right. So let's just make this visible and invisible there. We can see, yeah, it's looking pretty good. It selected, it Subtract out most of what we wanted it to. Making that visible and invisible. It's still getting this little bottom part of that. Not a big deal. We'll just go to Subtract and we'll just go to the Brush. There we go. Let's bring our Flow nice and high. All right, so it's Subtracting out with the Brush and then there we go. So we can see now this is actually pretty nice. We have a vignette on the background which is only showing up on the background. So actually like really nice. So we'll just call this Background Vignette. Perfect. Now, I actually want to create a light spot behind my subject's head. So we're going to go to Create a New Mask. I'm going to go to a Radial Gradient. We're going to click and drag out here and then I'm going to bring my Exposure up a little bit. There we go. But I only want this to be visible behind my subject's head. So what we're going to need to do, let's go to our mask. We're going to Subtract out my subject. So Subtract and then we'll go to Select Subject. Boom. There we go. And then let's just make that visible and invisible. Okay, and you can see it's affecting the car a little bit. So we'll go to Subtract, Select Objects. There we go. And then let's just paint over the car and hope that it finds the car really well. Boom. All right. Fantastic. And then we can Subtract out. Let's just use our brush here. There we go. Let's bring our feathering down and just grab that little area there. Fantastic. So, let's call Background Head Halo. There we go. Make sure I spell this right. Okay, so Background Head Halo. So let's just make that invisible and this invisible. You can see it's just a little cool like background trick that helps draw a little bit more attention to our subject. Fantastic. Now, of course, all this can be changed at any time. I want to draw a little bit more attention to my subject's face. Just kind of brighten her up a little bit. So let's go to Create a New Mask. We're going to go to Select Subject. There we go. And let's just bring her exposure up just a tiny bit. There we go. Bring the shadows overall up just a little bit. And I want to make her color temperature a little bit warmer. She was looking a little bit too magenta. We're going to push a tiny bit of green into our subject as well. Fantastic. So that's looking pretty good overall with my subject. Next, let's go ahead and create a new mask. I'm just going to go to a radial gradient here. And we're just going to make her face just a little bit brighter. There we go. Like if we had a reflector right there on our subject's face. Cool. That's looking good. I know it's spilling into the background a little bit, but I think it actually works. I don't mind it so much. Now, as I'm looking at the halo behind our subject, it looks a little bit too small. So let's go to this Background Halo, this radial gradient. I'm going to hit H for my hide. And then we can just make this a little bit bigger. There we go. H for to hide and show that. And then I have my background vignette. And I think this radial gradient, I just want a little bit more feathering. H for my hide there. Let's go ahead and bring that out just a little bit. So it's nice that I can just change these at any time. I'm not like, I'm not stuck with this stuff. And let's bring our amount just down just a little bit because I want a nice natural effect. All right, we're already looking really good. Now, I know we're kind of, we've done a lot already and we're kind of going in here and changing some of my mask. But let's go ahead and just see our before and after so far. So hit the slash key on your keyboard. There's a before and there's the after. So you can see like, yes, indeed, we are like looking more at our subject. As I do that, I see we've got some issues here with a mask. So I'm just going to turn some of these off and on to see like where is that mask actually showing up. And it looks like this Background Halo mask. Okay, it's still showing up on the car. So I just want to hit subtract and I'm just going to go with a brush. The object select tool is still not working exactly how I would like it, honestly. They are updating it and it's getting a little bit better. But when you go to select objects in Lightroom, it does an okay job, but it could be a little bit better in my opinion because I'm having to go back here. This is twice now and kind of like re-update it with the brush, which is okay. But, you know, just a little heads up if you're having trouble with the object selection tool in Lightroom, same here. So they're updating these tools at any time. So I'm sure very soon it'll be updated. Okay. Now the next thing I want to do is let's go ahead and target these color ranges. So let's go ahead and create a new mask. We're going to go to select color range and then I just want to click and drag here on this pink color range, which is going to select that here on the car. It's going to select my subject shirt and even parts of my subjects face. So with that color range selected, I just want to bring my temperature a little bit warmer. I want that like kind of like reddish, right? There we go. That's looking a lot lot better. Just make that visible and invisible. I like that overall like with the colors of the background. I think that's looking really good. Now, if I turn this off and on, there we go. You can see. Yes, it's looking really good on the car. It's looking good on her shirt. I might even take it a little bit towards green. There we go. Looking pretty good. It is affecting my subject skin just a little bit. So what we can do is go to subtract and then I'm going to go down to my brush and we're going to use a brush tool, but I'm going to bring my flow way down. There we go. And feathering up this way. I can kind of like fade it out of my subject skin, but maybe leave a little bit in there. There we go. So there's our before and after. Fantastic. You can see it's even picking up some of that background color, which is nice as well. It's a really nice looking effect. All right. I think this is already looking really great. Now, I'm just looking at the sky here. It looks a little bit weird. It looks a little fake. So maybe I'll just put the saturation up there a little bit. I'm going to bring my white level back to zero and bring my contrast up. Bring my... There we go. So it's not like so... All right. It's not like so, so dark like it was before, but I think it's looking a little bit more natural now. Let me bring our color down a little more. Green too. Just a nice little lesson that you can kind of change this stuff at any time. Okay. Now, subject is looking good. I want to bring a little bit more detail into her eyes. So let's go to create a new mask. We're going to go down to select people here. Let's go to our person. And then this time, let's see. I want to select her iris and pupil, but I also want to bring a little more attention and like light to her hair. So I'm going to go down to where it says hair as well. And in this case, I want to do these two separately. So we're just going to check this box right here at the bottom that says create two separate masks. That's perfect. So let's hit create mask. There we go. It made two. Let's just double click on this one. Call this hair. Double click on this one. Call this iris. Fantastic. So for the iris, let's go ahead and zoom in. Fantastic. Let's just bring our exposure up just a little bit. All right, nothing crazy. Just a little bit of a brighter exposure so I can see what we're doing. The hair, I want to bring my exposure up on this as well. I'm only going to really do the right side of this. So let's go ahead here. I'm going to subtract out the left side with a brush tool. So subtract, we're going to go down to brush. Okay, and then let's make our brush a little bit smaller, bring our flow up, bring our feathering down. All right, and kind of subtract out the hair here. So really, I just want to affect the right side of the hair. And if I hover over there, you can see what I'm actually affecting. There we go. All right, that looks good for now. So we brought the hair a little bit brighter, but now it still has some of the shadow color in it, which is cooler than the highlight color. You can see the highlight color looks like nice and warm, like yellow and red, but the shadows look a little bit like blue, right? But now that I made those shadows a little bit brighter, I want to change the color. So let's bring our temperature just a little bit warmer too. There we go. And that's just going to help it match the hair from the other side. And we're going to bring in a little bit of magenta as well. Not too much, but a little bit. So you can see before I did the color change and after. So when you're going to take something from shadow and bring it into highlight, keep in mind you want to take some of the colors from the highlights as well, because shadows and highlights are oftentimes made up of different colors. And different saturation levels. So just something to keep in mind in general for any editing that you're doing. All right, let's go ahead and I'm just going to push our mask to the side. There we go. And let's see how our image looks before and after. I'm going to just hit F for full screen there and then click on that slash key. Oh, that didn't work. There we go. Let's just hit that slash key here. Before and after. I think it's looking good. I think the like bright part on my subject's skin is a little bit too strong. So let's go back to our mask. There we go. Here's my mask for my subject's skin. Let's go ahead and expand out. You can use this little carrot or arrows to expand out. Let's go to this mask and then I just want to make the feathering. Sorry, not the feathering. I want to take the amount and bring that down just a little bit. All right, that's looking really, really good. So let's just see that before and after. I think we've got a really nice change here. It's definitely drawing a lot more attention to my subject. This is a nice fix that we did with the highlights here with the sky. It's definitely a lot more subtle. I'm definitely like looking at my subject quite a bit more. Now, I think I'm pretty close to done with the masks. Honestly, it looks pretty good. I would like to color grade this a little bit. So let's go ahead. We're going to move out of our masks and we're going to go down. It's so nice that now I can just like increase the texture of my whole image if I wanted to or the clarity or dehaze or saturation. So cool that I still have access to all this stuff. So let's go ahead here. Let's close everything down. We're just going to close everything down except for color grading. There we go. And again, I like to just work with my shadows and highlights for the color grading. So let's go ahead and bring like a bluish color in. My kind of way of working with color grading is I'll just take this like little guy in the middle. Let's just right-click and go to reset shadows. I just like to take this little slider in the middle and drag it towards a color, you know, and then I just grab this hue slider and kind of move it around to see like what kind of colors look good. I like this like kind of bluish teal color in the shadows and then I can go back and decide how much I wanted that, right? There we go. That's looking pretty cool. So now let's do the highlights. I'll just take this and kind of drag it out to any direction doesn't really matter and then I'm going to grab this little guy and kind of drag it around until it starts to like fit with my image. Okay, and then I'm going to take it and move it around because you don't always know like it actually like kind of looks green good with a little bit of green in there, which I'm like, why does it look good with green? That doesn't make any sense because I don't want greener subject skin, but it just kind of does look good right there. Not too much, but maybe it's just balancing a little bit too much magenta I had in my highlights. So maybe maybe that's why I like it again. I sometimes I don't always know what I want but like with this color grading. I find that I'm able to kind of like fine-tune everything. So let's go over here and we'll just kind of take a look at our there's the before the color grading and then here is the after the color grading. You can also just click on this little toggle to turn that off and back on. So the before the color grading and then after I think it looks a lot better with the after the color grading. It just kind of harmonizes everything and brings it back together again. It's really good. I'm super happy with this image. So let's hit the slash key. There's our before and the after basically draw a lot more attention to our subject not huge huge changes, but overall I think the image is definitely stronger and that was our goal. All right. There we go. Thank you so much for watching. We got one more great section for you working on a portrait going to bring some shadows back into the light. Thanks so much and I'll see you in the next section. Bye everyone.