* How to blend Vintage Tones in Lightroom:

- First: Edit Tone Curve

+ Bring up black across (maybe the edge of the box) to lift up any black tones
+ Bring down the shadow to bring that contrast back and then kind of filling out the S-Curve
+ Bring down the highlight to kind of mute the whites as well once (get Basic Curve down)
+ Sometimes, to go in and kind of tweak the little points a little bit until you’re happy with
how photo look like
- Second: Edit Detail: Sharpen the image: easy to concentrate
+ Straight away
+ Create a little ladder with the sharpening tool
- Third: Edit Color: Edit Basic
+ I want the photo look a little bit like the tiniest bit overexposed in away: Bring up Exposure
and Bring up Highlight
+ Also Bring Black down to add a tiny bit of contrast in to the image
+ Adjust the Vibrance and Saturation: Vibrance (normally up) to change cold color and
Saturation (Normally down) to change hot color
+ Bring up the Temperature to make the image a little bit warmer
+ Bring up the Tint to make the image a little more Pink
- Fourth: Edit HSL: To make the image look more Vintage
+ Want to saturate the green: 1, bring down the Saturate of yellow first and also green
+ Turn back to Basic, bring up the Temperature to make warmer if it’s necessary
- Fifth, Edit Split Toning
+ Highlight: want a little bit warmer: Bring up Hue; when you’re happy with Hue, play
around with Saturation depending on how much you want it to affect on image (really Vintage, really up
high)
+ Shadow: Change it in the similar way with Highlight if it’s necessary
* How to blend Soften and Smooth Skin in Lightroom:
- First: Masking the object, then select Face skin, or body skin, etc. Then use Sutract -> Select Brush to clear
the area near eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows and around the nose (to get detail and corners and edges) and around
lips. In Brush, Everything except the size should be the same and equal 100.
- Second: Decrease Texture as much as possible to get the level of softening that you want
If you want more softening effect, bring Sharpening down and reduce Clarity (but becareful with
Clarity because it can overboard quickly).
- Third: Use Spot healing tool: Use Content Aware Removal: Set Opacity to 100 and set size properly. Pick
into some blemishes on the face and LrC will fill in that area.
* How to blend Retro tone in LrC:
- The Retro tone photos should be taken with the old style: clothes, building, iterms, etc.
- Because ancient technology was not yet developed, old photos were taken in strong lighting conditions, and
had a certain amount of noise. So a Retro-photo always has a yellow tint, a little bit noise, darker (a little bit).
- The secret to achieve the filmic look on a digital photo lies within the Tone Curve tool more specifically the
lower left point which is responsible for the shadows and darker areas of a photo if you lift the output to 10
you'll achieve that famous fade that every film photo has don't go above 10 because you're going to ruin your
photo stay in that lower range of 0 to 10 as an output and then build out your edit from there.
- Before doing that, make your photo warmer by increase temp (6000K); increase a little bit Contrast but not
too prominent; increase Highlight and Shadow; decrease Whites and decrease Blacks; decrease a little bit
Clarity and Dehaze; decrease a little bit Vibrance and Saturation because you will add more Saturation by
HSL.
- Edit Tone Curve: click on the lower left point click on output type in 10 click on the upper right point click
on output and give it a 240 value now let's build the s curve one point here one point here to maintain now
let's decrease and get our desired contrast and this looks good now i'm going to add one last thing into the
tone curve and that is on the blue channel hold alt or option key if you're on a mac click a point at this
intersection on the grid and at this intersection on the grid then one last point in the middle and drag it down
remember if you drag it up you add blue as the grid shows but if you drag it down you add yellow to the
midtones area perfect.
-Edit Color Grading: start with shadows where we're going to increase it to around 50 then we're going to go
to midtones increase this also to 50 and lastly highlights decrease it by keep it under -50 in this case for me
minus 35 is good blending and balance we're not gonna touch so close out of color grading and let's start
adding the colors we want to the photo
- Edit Calibration: I'm going to shift the blue primary to more blue then aqua increase the saturation matching
almost the hue now for the green primary i'm going to go more towards yellow and increase its saturation and
the reds i'm not going to touch.
- Edit HSL/Color: I want to increase but not too much the saturation of the orange slider and the luminance
increase yellow saturation and luminance now since i have a forest in a photo i don't want to have a yellow
green hue i want to have a more green aqua hue and i'm going to heavily decrease the saturation and
luminance of the green values now to recover the sky shift aqua more towards blue increase its saturation and
its luminance now on the blue slider i'm going to shift it more towards aqua but not much increase the
saturation and decrease the luminance purple and magenta we don't have we don't touch.
- Go back to Color Grading: start coloring in the highlights i want a teal tone so i'm going to shift somewhere
around here and increase the value of the saturation slider don't go above 20 because as you can see you get
the extreme effect so i'm going to keep it under 20. okay 17 seems to be a very good value for me now let's go
to mid-tones here i want a yellow orange hue and i'm going to type in the exact saturation as the highlight and
for shadows i want a darker blue tone and i'm going to give it the exact same saturation value this looks
perfect
- But I think I'm going to tweak one more setting that is the contrast I'm going to increase it more towards 50.
- Edit Detail: hold alt and click on masking and drag it out everything that is white will be sharpened
everything that is black will not be sharpened so i want this much to be affected by the sharpening and i'm
going to increase the amount to around 60. noise reduction and color noise reduction i'm not going to touch.
- Edit Lens Correction: enable remove chromatic aberration.
- Edit Effect:
+ I want to add a slight vignette with an increased roundness and a very much increased feathering
good.
+ the last touch grain because we're going for that filmic look which film has grain increase it to
around 70 just to see the effect let's go to 50 percent now if you want to have fine grain in your photos
especially daytime photos increase the size to 35 and decrease the roughness to 35 this combination works
perfect now i'm going to decrease the amount because i don't want that much grain so i'm going to keep it
between 60 and 50 works very well for this photo and it's pleasing for me as well.
* Three way to use Color Grading in LrC:
- The Color Grading panel has three different circles in its default view:
+ One that represents the shadows or the dark portions or the blacks;
+ One that represents the mid-tones which is the grays;
+ And then another which represents the highlights or the white tones.
- You can control color or hue saturation which is the amount of color; or you can control brightness which is
how bright or how dark each of those portions of the image is.
- I just want to make the shadows or the black tones more yellow, they become more yellow. Now what you'll
notice is that black kind of always stays black, unless you do one of these and you grab the brightness which
is this slider and you drag it up what that does is it takes the blacks and lightens them or makes them more
gray. You can't add color to black, you can only add color to gray.
- Same thing for the whites, if I undo that and go to the highlights or the whites if I try to add color to it again:
yellow. You'll notice that the whitest or the brightest most portions always stay white and that's because you
can't add color where it's just white. So if you want to add color you have to darken it and make it more gray
so I would drag this slider which is the brightness and now you can see I can actually add color to those
portions of my image.
- And you'll notice at the very bottom there are two more controls: Blending and Balance.
+ Blending is the smoothness of this gradient. If I go all the way left to make it not smooth you'll
kind of notice that there's a blocky section in between where it kind of is a little bit gray and not perfectly
transitioned. But if I go all the way to the right now you'll notice that color starts to envelop the whole image.
If I really wanted to add color to the mid-tones I could come in here and now all of a sudden you know the
mid-tones are orange or red or whatever color I want.I leave them orange and if I go back to the left side of
the blending now you'll notice that that gradient is a bit harsher. When you slide blending to the left it makes
the transition sharper and when you slide it to the right it makes it smoother
+ The other control is balance and what you'll notice if I drag balance all the way to the left the
shadows take over but if I drag it all the way to the right the highlights and the mid tones take over so you can
see my highlights are set to red now pretty much all of my image is completely red.
+ Do not use Temp to adjust the color tone of the image. That's not the way to do that what you
would want to do is come down to this global color tint and say let's make everything just a tinge warmer or a
tinge cooler or a tinge more green and that will affect your overall image let me just reset this to show you
how exactly what this is doing. Now if I just wanted the whole image to be universally warmer I can come in
here and now just makes everything that one color one more thing to note is that if you come into each of
these individual color wheels and you expand this little triangle here to show you know kind of blue cyan teal
and also what your saturation and luminance are so you can really have that fine grain direct control over
each of those colors
- But why would you ever want to use color grading? We have all these other tools in lightroom including the
HSL panel which allows you to saturate and desaturate any color you want.
Well that's because Color grading affects a specific tonal range or a brightness range whereas the HSL affects
color that is already in your image.
Another thing is that color grading is applied after HSL. So even if I come in here having added some yellow
to this photo and I try to saturate or desaturate the yellows, you'll notice it doesn't do anything and that's
because Color grading is something you always want to apply after you've done all your other corrections
after your image is good and the tones and the colors are generally the way you want them. You would come
into Color grading just to add that little bit of stylization to your photos.
- Strategy number one for editing your photos: I like to call it “The Color Theme” approach
+ That's where you have a reference photo or a movie or a TV series that you want to replicate the
look of.
- Strategy number two for Color grading is: A Split Tone
+ Now color grading used to be called split toning. The idea with Split Toning is that you're picking
two colors on either end of the color wheel that complement each other. Some color combinations aren't
going to be best for all types of photos and you might want to change the intensity.
- The third and final method is what I like to call: “The Color Grading Enhance method”.
+ That's where you take the colors that are already in your photo and either boost them or
complement them with an opposite color.
- Color grading is a great way to find an aesthetic style that is uniquely yours or edit a photo to look more
filmic or more cinematic or match whatever theme that you're going for.
* How to use HSL in LrC:
- The colors that you choose to feature in your images are a huge part of the story that you're trying to tell,
and getting control of those colors and how you include them or exclude them is a really important skill.
- You might have found that depending on the lighting or the color in the scene your favorite preset doesn't
work for some images and does work for others, and you're going to need to make custom tweaks yourself.
- “Why is this looks so cinematic?” When people give this compliment they've identified an intentional mood
and look in the image where color contrast and composition all come together to provide a feeling for the
scene that's captured in the same way that we get when we watch a film on screen.
- And when we shoot like this or edit like this we're moving away from straight reportage and we're stylizing
and pushing things more towards creative storytelling.
- But i want to get more specific than that because i think one of the things we associate with the look of
cinema or when we give that compliment this looks so cinematic i think what we're identifyingH is a limited
color space or a reduced color palette.
- Cinema isn't concerned with accuracy. Cinema is creative storytelling so that means that sets are dressed
people are clothed in particular colors, things a little particular way, and things are graded a particular way in
post.
- Because the filmmakers are toning the image to elicit a particular response to you, and to get you to feel a
particular mood in the scene.
- This way is less about color accuracy and more about setting a mood to the image so understanding that
creating a cinematic look is all about being deliberate about which colors to include and which colors to
exclude from your final image.
- Let's take a look at two of the most basic ways that you can limit your color space and create that mood and
feel to your shot:
+ The first is using an analogous color scheme and analogous colors are just groups of colors that sit
next to each other on the color wheel and serve to give an almost monochromatic or single color feel to the
image.
+ Another popular way to limit color space is using complementary color schemes which are colors
that sit on the opposite ends of the color wheel from each other.
+ For the shot to greater or lesser degrees we can use the same principles to create mood and tell
better stories with our own images now let me say personally i don't like a heavy touch in my images and i
use these principles very lightly but just to show you how far you can push things let me show you three
photographers work who i think do a great job of pushing things quite far but creating a beautiful cinematic
mood to their shots.
- Let me show you why i don't use split toning and i prefer this method
The reason I don't prefer Split Toning to HSL because it applies a wash to the entire image
Because I think it's so important to still keep the colors separated from each other rather than have something
that applies as kind of a wash or a global filter. It gives you that finesse to be able to use individual colors
pulling them into your space and pulling them out and gives you a ton more control.
* A picture has good composition which has front-ground, object + mid-ground, and background
* Editting Process:
RAW -> Exposure and White Balance -> Color Correciton -> Color Grading -> Detail -> Final.
- Step 1: Exposure and White Balance:
+ Notice the skin tone when you adjust Exposure. Too much Exposure makes the image looks more
pale, and more light is make the image looks tiring.
+ To adjust Exposure and White Balance, use Temp, Tint, and Exposure.
- Step 2: Basic Adjustment (Use Tone):
+ Use the Hightlight, Shadows, Whites, Blacks
+ This step denpents oon your purpose: you want a image that has high-key of brightness or low-key-
moody photo.
- Step 3: If you have PRESET, it’s point of time that you should use them to check.
+ Even you don’t have plan to use them, it’ll give you the idea.
- Step 4: Masking and Lighting:
+ The reason is we want to determine all lighting and all tone before go to next step: All color will
blend exactly where we want it to.
- Step 5: Texture, Clarity and Dehaze (Use Prescene):
- Step 6: Vibrance and Saturation (Use Prescene):
- Step 7: HSL/Color:
- Step 8: Tone Curve:
- Step 9: Color Grading:
- Step 10: Sharpen your photo:
- Step 11: Lens Correction: Becarefull
- Step 12: Creative Masking: for Front-ground
- Step 13: Anothor Edit
* Master the Art of Night Cinematic Photo Editing:
- The characteristic of Cinematic style in night photos is used to use hot color attach with cold color and
green-is used to use likes a mid-tone color.
- What hot color or cold color will be use are depend on the photo’s light. For example: the photo contain
traffic light and advertise-light, so may be I can use red and blue.
- The cinematic photo always has really as soft, clarity and dehaze as possible.
- Night Cinematic photos in Euro and in Asia have the diffirences. Also in Morden background and Mid-
century background do too. Green makes the photo more “Hong Kong” style.
- You don’t need to Color Correction in Night Cinematic photos.
* How to edit Moody Brown effect:
- It’s a combination between Moody style and the Light Brown color.
- The moody style presents of A cold misty day or Mysterious day in the mountain with may be some rain or
some fog or something like that which presents the blues or the cold tone.
- Moody brown tone tin Moody style and adding some brownish tint in the shadow zone and highlight.
- It’s available for the scenes that rarely occur: Sunset in rainyday, Rainny day and suddenly it light and
everything turn to orange or brown tint, or be use with normal photos.
- The image should be more darker, focus on object