Original subtitles

Morning.

Good morning.

Whoa.

Yeah.

I just decided that you shouldn't be the

only one with an amazing view.

That's awesome.

Oh man, you should see the view here.

Oh, I've seen that view.

It's so gorgeous.

Yeah.

Gorgeous.

Wow.

Okay.

Okay.

So, let me just switch this view here.

How do I get it into?

I don't have Erica to help me out

with the technical today.

Speaker view.

There we go.

Participants.

Here we go.

59.

Okay.

And climbing.

First thing I need to make sure is

that I have the right view.

We get everybody in here because we've got

the upgraded zoom account.

So, we should be able to go past

100.

Yeah.

So, that'll be the first test this morning.

We're at 63.

So, climbing.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, then other thing I want to just

make sure I can share the screen.

Okay.

Okay.

So, Zoe, right now I've got, I can

see you, but I can't see me.

I think you've got to do speaker view.

On zoom.

Yeah.

And then click on mine.

There's Jody.

I see Jody now.

But I can't.

Hold on.

Lanny, your view.

Toggle your view.

View.

It's the top right of your screen.

Yeah.

So, right now I've got a strip and

I've got a whole bunch of people's webcams.

Above that, there's two little icons.

Yeah.

One's gallery view.

One's speaker view.

Yeah.

If you toggle the gallery view, you should

get speaker view.

Now I'm just going into some weird mode.

There.

Now you're all up at the top of

my screen.

Okay, there.

So, yeah, now I can only see Jody.

I want to see my camera.

Now I can see mine.

Okay, there we go.

Sorry, what's that?

Just pin your video.

You can use the three dot icons and

just pin your video so it will always

show you on your side.

There's an option called pin your video.

Pin your video?

Yeah.

Where is that?

The upper right-hand comma, there are three

dots on top of the video.

Just click on that.

Pin video.

Yeah, so it will always keep you in

focus.

Ah, thank you.

Awesome.

That's great.

Thanks for that tip.

It's a lot.

So, okay, now what I need to do

is start recording.

It's recording.

It is?

Oh, right, Erica set it up so it

automatically does that.

And can you see my screen now?

You can and your cursor.

Okay, so if I just do that.

We're at 124, by the way, so it's

gone.

It's good.

We're over 100.

Yep.

Cool.

All right, now I'm going to go figure

out how to mute everybody's mics.

Somehow Erica does that in.

So you go to participants, I believe, and

then it should say, when it pops up,

it says, it should tell you that you

can mute everybody.

So then you'll have to unmute yourself again,

Zoe.

I can't.

Yep, yep.

Okay.

And we also have Jodi here this morning,

and we probably have Rass as well.

So if things get overwhelming with questions or

exhausting with length, you guys can hand each

other off.

Great.

But Zoe, for now, I'll just kind of

have you in the managing questions role.

Got it.

Yep.

And I don't know when and where we'll

break for questions, kind of whenever it makes

sense.

Okay.

But just unmute whenever it makes sense to

do so and jump in with questions and

stuff.

Okay.

Do you have slides for that?

No, I don't.

Okay.

Okay.

Good to know.

Whenever it feels right.

Okay.

I'll break in.

Yep.

Unmute all one more time.

Yeah, 141.

Okay, cool.

That's that.

That's that.

So you should see the keynote now, correct?

Yep.

Correct.

Okay.

Is it still participants?

Are we still climbing?

142.

I'm going to give another minute or so,

and then we're going to get started.

Great.

Coffee.

Coffee.

Cheers to that.

So I've changed locations because I'm going to

have to get, I'm going to have to

darken the room for the editing cave so

I can see the screen and see what's

going on.

And, okay.

And there's going to be a bunch of

jumping back and forth between keynotes and Photoshop

and webcam, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay.

Are we ready to rock?

Everybody?

How are we doing there, Zoe?

Do we have...

We got 146.

And just looking at the questions really quickly.

Seems like we're good.

We're coming through loud and clear?

Yep.

Okay.

Here we go, guys.

Let's do this.

Wrap in.

We've got a big one.

It's post-production day.

And we decided as a group that we're

going to do the full meal deal, the

full Editopia experience.

So I'm going to introduce you to Editopia

the way I like to introduce you to

Editopia.

Welcome to Editopia, where the blacks are black

and the whites are white.

A high-definition world of lushly saturated colors,

infinite dynamic range, tonal peaks and valleys as

far as the eye can see, and pixels

as sharp as a samurai sword.

Welcome to Editopia.

Okay, guys.

So here we go.

I'm going to give you guys...

I'm going to start with kind of the

overview of what's in store for us today.

I'm going to start by kind of giving

a quick crash course on our workflow, post

-wedding workflow, so you can kind of understand

where this post-production piece fits into the

overall workflow puzzle, okay?

And then we're going to look at a

whole bunch of before and afters, okay, to

kind of set the stage for what we're

trying to achieve with the editing.

Then we'll actually...

I'm going to do some live editing demos

for you, explaining the whole process and all

the little steps.

And I'm going to try to...

I'm going to basically try to show you

guys all the little tips and tricks that

I use when I'm doing the editing.

And also try to sort of set the

stage by explaining our overall kind of philosophy

in general when it comes to post-production.

And then we'll finish with some more before

and after examples at the end, once you've

had the context of, you know, you can

kind of picture what we've done in order

to get there.

And at the end, as well as throughout

in a few places, we'll do all the

Q&As, okay?

And we're going to break for some bathroom

breaks as well.

So let me know if I just start

going and I forget that we're going to

have to take a couple of breathers throughout,

okay?

Zoe, are we good?

We are good.

We're at 159.

Okay.

So I want to start with before and

afters.

And so for this, you can kind of,

if you haven't, you can minimize me into

the corner or whatever, because I want you

guys to be able to see full screen.

What we're going to do is...

Actually, before I do before and afters...

No, let's not do before and afters yet.

Let's start with the workflow, okay?

So Eric and I spend an entire day

in our full workshops, basically breaking down our

entire workflow, our entire client experience, everything that

happens before the wedding and everything that happens

after the wedding, okay?

It's a lot of stuff.

There's a lot of thought and strategy that

goes into the whole thing.

Today, all we're looking at is the one

little post-production piece of that.

And we've already talked about how much Eric

and I shoot.

We shoot a lot.

We'll have 20,000, 25,000 frames after

a wedding between the two of us, right?

And so now the whole post-wedding workflow

starts.

Erica's our culler.

So Erica culls.

And the reason we've divvied up our roles

this way is because she's way better at

that than me.

I can't commit.

I can't push delete.

I can't decide.

Erica's ruthless.

She goes on gut.

So she does our culling.

She'll usually do two or three rounds of

that.

And after those two or three rounds, she

ends up usually getting it down to...

It usually works out to around 5%

to 7%.

So, you know, if we shot 20,000

frames, we usually end up delivering, you know,

maybe like 1,500-ish, okay?

And so let's just say there's 1,000,

okay?

1,000 images that Erica's sort of chosen

as deliverables for the clients, okay?

So all 1,000 of those images we

send over to the Image Salon, okay?

So the Image Salon has been helping us

with post-production for like three and a

half, almost four years now.

And what we do is we use their

basic plus level of editing, which is basic

white balance and exposure correction as well as

local dodging and burning, okay?

I think it's 45 cents Canadian per image.

Before that, Erica would do all of that

herself in Lightroom.

So she would edit it all herself.

And so now, basically, the Image Salon has

replaced that piece of our workflow.

And if you're going to outsource editing, just

know that you have to be prepared to

put in the work.

So we, especially the first year, we spent

a lot of time going back and forth

with feedback.

The nice thing at the Image Salon is

you do get a consistent editor.

So every wedding, every job, you've got the

same person, right?

And so we could give feedback so that

she could continue to get closer and closer

to our look and what we're going for.

And you also have to realize that you're

not going to get it all the way

there with every image, every time, right?

I'd say that now, after a few years

of working with the same editor and giving

feedback after every wedding, we've gotten to the

place where it's, in terms of deliverables for

our clients, we're getting it back, and it's

80% to 95% of the way

there in most cases.

So at that point, then, Erica goes through

the entire catalog and looks at all the

Image Salon's edits.

And one by one, she goes through, she

does cropping, she does some dodging and burning.

If there's an image where she's made a

lot of changes, like she went in a

different direction from what our editor did, then

she'll export that.

She'll basically export her edit beside the Image

Salon's edit and send those back.

So after every wedding, they get a few

examples of where we've done something different so

she can realize, oh, they want more of

this, less of that.

I need to do this more that way

next time.

So it basically completes that learning loop for

our editor there.

Okay.

While Erica's going through doing the crops, they

will crop for you if you want.

We ask them not to.

We'd rather do our cropping ourselves because that's

kind of like the composition part of it.

So Erica did the crops.

As she's going through and making the little

tweaks, she's flagging the images that she feels

are our favorites.

So basically anything that we feel has portfolio

potential or the slideshow potential for the client

or the blog post, anything we're super proud

of, basically she's trying to pick all the

quintessential images, the best images from the wedding.

And she's flagging those as she goes through,

and then she puts those into a subfolder.

So underneath that wedding, we'll have a subfolder.

And she labels it pool or Lanny's pool.

Okay.

And so basically that's my selection pool when

it's time for me to do the artisan

edits is I go into that folder of

the best shots from the wedding.

We've got the image salons edits already.

And I basically go through those and start

editing those full on.

So we've kind of got a bit of

a two-tier editing system.

We've got the image salon plus Erica in

Lightroom getting everything deliverable to the way that

up to our standards, up to our look

for the clients.

And then, you know, so, you know, if

we shoot the 20,000, then there's 5

% to 10% of that gets delivered

and edited that way.

And then 5% to 10% of

that.

Okay.

So it's like the 5% to 10

% of the 5% to 10%

are the ones that get that higher level.

So sort of the artisan edit level.

Okay.

And so that's where I come in.

And that's what I'm going to show you

guys today is how we edit our artisan

edits.

And then Erica will take so then I'll

do my thing, which I'm going to show

you guys.

And then Erica will take my edits, import

them back into the Lightroom catalog, and replace

the image salons.

Okay.

So plus at that point if there was

like sometimes Erica will include three or four

similar versions of a frame for me and

kind of leave it up to me which

one I want to edit, which one I

think is going to have more potential.

And in that case, then the other versions,

we don't give those to the clients, unless

they're different enough that they're going to want

them.

We just give the one that we give

the full edit to.

And then Erica basically takes all those artisan

edits, and she puts them into a slideshow

for the client.

She usually just uses iMovie or Soundslides, I

think it's called.

Just like one to two songs in length.

And that's essentially the first thing that our

clients see after their, well other than some

sneak peeks is then they get their slideshow

with all the artisan edits set to music.

And then of course they get the full

gallery.

Now the full gallery, I guess you guys

have seen an example of one.

What we used to do, I think it's

different now that we're using pick time, but

what we used to do is we would

front load the gallery.

With all the artisan edits.

So they see all the artisan edits first,

and then they would see all the rest

of the edits chronological basically.

That achieved a couple things.

It's part of our whole strategy of encouraging

them to fall in love with the same

photos that we've fallen in love with.

So we're essentially training them by the order

of delivery and the order that they see

things in.

The first thing they see is what they

tend to get most emotionally attached to.

And so we want that to be the

artisan edits for the most part.

And also then they're not seeing those two

edits, two kind of tiers of editing side

by side necessarily.

Although honestly for most of our clients, they

really can't notice any difference.

Really the difference between our deliverable level and

the artisan level is mostly just our OCD

photographer mind coming in.

But now of course with pick time, I

don't think we are front loading the gallery

anymore.

Now it's just all chronological.

But pick time allows us to in the

gallery make some of them appear bigger than

others.

So obviously we'd be choosing the artisan edits

for that in those galleries.

So actually that might be a good point

here Zoe to just check in if there's

any questions around that overall workflow process that

we follow.

Yep, the questions are coming in.

So that's good.

The first question is what do you use

for slide shows?

Is that something that's built into pick time?

iMovie.

iMovie.

Yeah, iMovie or Soundslides I think it's called.

And then you upload them to pick time?

No, no.

This is a slideshow.

This is like a movie, a slideshow.

Right.

Then we send that to the clients.

It's embedded in our website.

It's probably hosted through Vimeo or something like

that.

But it's a secret private link they get

and it's embedded into our website.

And with the Boca Panoramas, what point in

the workflow and who works on those?

I would do those.

I would basically, Erica would put that as

a subfolder within the selection pool.

It would be Berneiser's and then I'd go

and give that an attempt and see if

it works.

And then if it works and it looks

cool, I might like really work on it.

Otherwise, I would just abandon it.

Who's drawing on my screen?

Oh, were you?

I wasn't, no.

From the moment that you import, how long

does it take to deliver to the client?

Oh, yeah.

So our delivery time is what we promise

is 12 weeks.

And that's built into the whole free workshop

that we did where we showed you how

we basically do the client Skype with our

clients before they hire us.

That's the point at which they learn that.

And you can go and see how we

explain that, why good things come to those

who wait 12 weeks.

Sometimes it's sooner, but if we're backlogged, it's

close to 12 weeks.

So when they get the slideshow, I mean,

is the slideshow just a simple edit and

then the actual gallery?

How does that work?

The slideshow, I didn't explain this clearly enough.

The slideshow is just a slideshow.

So it's a slideshow of basically all the

artisan edits that I do, which usually ends

up being somewhere between 50 to 100 per

way.

So let's say 100.

Those 100 artisan edits set to music in

iMovie.

And we send them a link so they

can watch that on their TV.

That's what the slideshow is.

And then after they've watched the slideshow, they

get the full.

Yeah, we usually let that sizzle for like

24 to 48 hours, kind of two to

three days.

Because again, we want them to watch it

over and over, fall in love with those

images.

And I mean, we say this because it's

so many amazing images from your wedding.

It's taking this long to upload, but your

gallery will be ready soon.

Of course, with JPEG Mini, it doesn't take

that long.

But that also buys us a little bit

of time to blog their wedding.

So we try to blog their wedding in

that 48-hour period.

So then they've got something to share.

We don't always use licensed music for the

slideshows.

And that kind of gives us the excuse,

you know, we couldn't find a licensed song

that fits the energy of your wedding.

So we had to use this song.

So please don't share it anywhere publicly.

It's totally legal for private, personal use.

And that's sort of the excuse.

Because we'd rather them share our blog post

than the slideshow.

Because the blog post is then curated down

even more.

If I do 100 edits on a wedding,

we'll usually curate that down to like 50

% to 60% of those are the

ones that actually make the final cut for

the blog post, which we, you know, show

to the world.

But yes, then they receive their full gallery

24 to 48 hours later.

Like the one that we shared with you

guys.

So, I mean, there's a lot of questions

about the technicalities behind the slideshow.

And I'm wondering if that can be answered

with sharing.

It's just a slideshow, guys.

It's just iMovie.

Take the 100 photos.

Pop them into iMovie.

Pick a song.

Auto-time or whatever.

Time it yourself or set it to three

seconds.

Export.

That's all it is.

It's just a slideshow.

Are you picking music that's specific to the

couple?

Or how are you picking music?

Yeah.

Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned the slideshow.

Because in our workshops, we have a full

day to explain our whole workflow.

I can really only talk about the editing

here today.

Otherwise, we're going to be here all day.

The slideshow is a whole thing, right?

We use iMovie.

Create it.

Yeah.

We pick a song.

That's it.

Okay.

A question regarding that's more technical.

What's your process with Lightroom in terms of

folders, collections?

Does each gallery get it?

Each wedding gets its own folder.

Well, each wedding gets its own Lightroom catalog.

Okay?

And then also on our hard drives, we

use these little working drives here.

It's a solid state drive.

They're expensive.

It's like two terabytes there.

But it's our working drive.

So our current weddings, like the last two

or three weddings that we're working on, are

here with me on there.

And so the wedding basically has the main

folder.

And then within that, there's – well, I

can't break the whole thing down.

But Erica has a downloading process with the

subfolders and a process for what she checks

to make sure she's got them, and then

everything's getting backed up.

But then there's a raw folder, which essentially

the select ones that will go off to

the Image Salon, and then the pool, right?

And then I'll explain to you kind of

how I save them as I go through

and do the arts in a subfolder labeled

PSD Photoshop documents.

Great.

I think that's it for questions for now.

Okay, cool.

I was going to pop in there for

a quick sec.

If you don't mind just, like, addressing, telling

everyone to turn off their videos.

There's a few that are distracting, and I'm

not sure if they're hearing it.

So maybe just address it.

Okay.

Can everybody turn off your videos?

It will help with bandwidth.

Okay.

I don't think I can do that.

Correct?

No, I don't think you can.

You can only mute them.

Okay.

So let's – yeah.

Sorry that has to be such a crash

course, guys.

Like, literally that's four hours in our workshop

explaining the whole downloading, backing up, all the

processes, and the whole strategy behind the delivery

and the softwares that we use.

So what I have to focus on here

with you guys today is the artist and

edit piece of that whole puzzle.

And before I get into the before and

afters, I want to just talk about our

overall philosophy in general around editing.

It's been the same since the beginning, since

we got started.

Even though our editing style and look has

changed, the overall philosophy and overall goal has

remained the same.

We've always viewed the post-production, you know,

our post-production software, whatever software you're using,

Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One, doesn't matter.

Okay?

All of them are tools of photography, just

like our cameras, our lenses, our flashes, our

softwares are all tools that help us do

the job that we're striving to do.

So we've sort of embraced that from the

beginning.

And the thing about editing is it helps

you become a better photographer.

Obviously, it helps you appear to be a

better photographer, but it actually makes you become

a better photographer behind the camera in the

field.

Cropping your photos in post helps you learn

how to make better compositions next time in

the field.

And learning what kind of potential you can

pull out of your files helps guide you

on your shoots in terms of what you

do with your camera.

You know, you get to the point where

you can sort of look at the file

and envision the potential.

Right?

And know whether or not you're going to

be able to get it to where you

want.

Okay?

So and the goal is for us is

the same as photography.

Okay?

So the creative process obviously starts with the

camera on the shoot at the wedding, but

then it continues into the post-production.

Okay?

It's an extension of the same goals.

So we've talked about why we light the

way we light.

Right?

Why we compose the way we compose.

Why we focus on the moments that we

focus on.

We're always going for maximum impact.

Right?

Maximum visual impact.

Maximum emotional impact.

Okay?

That's why we shoot the way that we

shoot.

Light the way we light.

That's why we edit the way we edit.

It's the same goal.

We're going for maximum impact.

Maximum visual emotional impact.

Okay?

And the best analogy I've heard to describe

post-production is, was actually my friend Ben

Christman.

He described it like when you go to

the Grand Canyon and you park your car

in the parking lot and you get out

of your car and you can see the

Grand Canyon over there.

Okay?

And as you start to walk towards the

edge, the view keeps getting better and better

and better.

And then when you walk right to the

edge, so you're standing on the edge of

the Grand Canyon, that is the best it's

going to look.

Okay?

It's the ultimate view.

It looks as good as it possibly can.

If you take one step too far though,

you kill it.

Right?

You fall off the edge.

You kill the view totally.

And so with editing, that's essentially what we're

all striving to do is take it to

the edge with each file.

To make it look as good as we

can possibly make it.

Okay?

And we all have different edges.

And even my edge changes with time.

Right?

As we grow and mature as photographers, our

taste changes, that edge changes.

And we all have different edges.

Okay?

But you can't find the edge until you

fall off it.

You have to go too far and then

pull it back.

So that's kind of the idea with the

editing is to take it right to the

edge, fall off, and then pull it back.

Okay?

And, you know, we, our goal's always been

timeless and classic versus trendy.

Okay?

So we want it, just like when we're

shooting, we want it to be about them

and their story.

We want it to be about the story

and the photo, not about the photographer and

the photographer's vision.

Right?

That's the goal.

So with the editing, it's the same thing.

We want it to be about the photo,

about the image, about them, about the story,

not about our editing, not about our post

-production.

Okay?

So that's kind of helps us find that

balance.

Before and afters.

Okay.

Any questions before we dive into the before

and afters?

Let us see.

Nothing about what you just spoke about, but

hold on just a second.

Anybody got questions?

Bring them on.

Okay.

Well, I can start going through some before

and afters here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do it.

So what I've done is I've gone back

a few years and then chosen examples that

for the most part are showing you kind

of the kind of potential that we're able

to pull out of the files and kind

of what we're going for.

So in some cases, they're pretty extreme examples.

Other times, much more subtle.

And then right up until the most recent

wedding that we just shot.

So you can kind of see kind of

where we are now with the editing.

And so let's start here.

And what I've done is it's basically the

befores are the straight out of camera.

Okay?

So we shoot raw.

So the files are obviously intentionally super neutral

and flat.

Right?

That's what we want.

So and then side by side with the

final arts and edit.

Okay?

So this is kind of to see the

overall, what we can do, what we're striving

to do, and then we'll break it down.

And basically I'll show you the process.

Okay.

Now, if there's ever one that you want,

put my camera up here.

If there's ever one that you want me

to go back like this.

There we go.

Back again to see it side by side

again, just, just let me know.

And to do, to do so I'm not

sure how we'll do that, but Zoe, if

it seems like there's one that people really

want to see again, just chime in and

let me know.

Okay.

And just, just to note to everyone, just

let us know if you want to see

those again and on the side, if they

can see each, each slide has a number,

so they can tell us which number that'd

be great too.

That's right.

Okay.

So here we go.

Straight out of camera groups and the final

edit.

So I also tried to go back and

find some, some old classic examples once that

you've probably seen before.

And also we've talked a lot about the,

the, the power of getting close, right.

And cropping is not the same as getting

close, but it does help it feel closer.

Okay.

So what I've done intentionally is I've left

the straight out of camera versions like this

uncropped.

Okay.

So that you can see the power of

a crop.

Okay.

And I've tried to also choose some examples

of ones that we deconstructed for you guys,

as well as the ones that you requested.

There was a few requests there.

This is how we know, if we're not

sure if it was Erica's shot or my

shot, if it's this crooked, it's definitely Erica's

shot.

Right.

So backlight on a dark background.

Right.

And then in the post-production accentuating that

warming it up, dropping the blacks.

This is another good example of how Erica's

close here, but she could be a lot

closer.

There's a lot of information that's not adding

right.

All of this, all of this.

So we can crop that shit out.

And in terms of, of color or black

and white, I'll just talk about that now.

Sometimes it's obvious, right here.

We want to go color here.

We want to go black and white.

Generally speaking, if the light is shit, we

go black and white.

Okay.

If colors are distracting, like this color here

is actually kind of distracting.

We go black and white.

The color isn't adding anything to the image.

We go black and white.

If it's all about the moment, the emotion,

the light and shadow, we go black and

white.

Okay.

So we almost always go black and white.

No, I'm just kidding.

Sometimes it's obvious.

We want to go color, right?

We've got all the primaries, yellow, blue, red.

So it's an obvious choice.

Crappy hotel room, shitty white balance, black and

white.

Okay.

Not always.

Now we've also talked a lot about how

our eyes are drawn to the brightest spot,

right?

Brightest spot, sharpest spot, highest contrast.

And so in this case, this big bright

shoulder is obviously pulling our eye away from

where we want it to go.

So mainly what we're going to do here

is we're just going to shift that through

dodging and burning.

So you encourage the viewer's eye to go

where we want it to faster.

The other thing that you start to realize

in editing is you start to see the

information in the pixels.

You start to see the potential, like looking

at this raw file.

I can see the cool tones, the blue

pixels behind her here relative to the warm

pixels on her skin.

So we can pull that out in the

post color or

black and white.

Got to go color here.

Tyler work and says he wants to start

a website called crap, crap, your crap.com.

Often a crop can make all the difference.

So here we've got a white balance nightmare

and we need to shift the eyes up

into the smile through dodging and burning.

So this is backlighting.

You can see where I am doing the

one arm pushup back there, trying to get

the light down behind the bride here.

And then we can take that arm out.

Another trick I'm going to show you guys.

If you look at the dance floor here

and the back of her dress, that's all

clipped, meaning it's blown out.

It's white as white.

You can't get it back, but some tricks.

So I'm going to show you how you

can do that.

Colors are distracting, right?

The greens, the reds, all these things that

are pulling the eye away from the light

and the shadow in the moment.

So we're going to go black and white

for sure.

Okay.

Now I just put this one in for

fun.

This is just for fun guys.

We rarely ever use the liquify tool.

And when we do, it's, it's almost never

to change the shape of people's bodies.

But sometimes you want to help mom out

a bit.

It's so awkward doing this without getting to

see people's reactions or hear people's reactions.

Okay, here, here we've got a big bright

blown out cement thing here, right?

And big bright highlights here, pulling the eyes

away.

But I mean, it's great how they're coming

down through here in the light and they're

on a dark background.

So we're going to drop the shadows behind

them.

So they pop even more.

We're going to warm it up and we're

going to burn down this corner in this

corner.

All right.

This ceremony in Maui, I'm going to show

you guys a trick.

If you look at the, this before and

after pay attention to right here, right behind

their hands.

Okay.

That's not an easy job, but I'm going

to show you how you can move oceans

for your clients.

Okay.

So, and it's all in the files here,

right?

It's pulling that out, learning how to pull

it out.

You know, we don't always, you know, here

we've obviously got a flash on the wall

behind them and we didn't quite get the

right spot in the right spot.

Okay.

But in over until it's over tricks and

things that we can do.

Black and white for sure.

One of the things I'm going to show

you guys is how to correct for perspective

and straighten things out, straighten lines.

Okay.

We talked about the border patrols watching for

those clean and simple edges.

Okay.

Always in camera, dragging the eye corner to

corner, corner, corner in post too.

We're looking for those clean, simple edges.

How are we doing there, Zoe?

Sorry.

I'm pretty good.

We've got a couple of questions.

I mean, obviously some of these questions, I

think you're going to get to when you

start dissecting anything about how just know that

that's what we're going to spend the next

three hours doing showing you how.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if there's anything apart from that.

Yeah.

So far it is, it is mostly that

just one question about delivery.

When you, when you send a black and

white, do you also send a color?

No.

So they get whatever we decide we know

best.

So we'll choose whatever's going to make that

photo look best.

And they, our clients understand that before they

even hire us, it's kind of part of

what they're hiring us for.

So it's very rare that they ever do

ask.

But so they just get the one, the

one version.

But if they did ask, you know, if

we delivered it as a black and white

and they wanted to see it as a

color say sure.

And then I'd send them a really crappy

color version.

And then they'd be like, Oh yeah, you're

right.

It's better as a black, white.

Of course.

And you know, in terms of client management,

have you had situations where you've delivered a

color and they've converted it to black and

white themselves?

How do you handle that?

Oh no, not really.

I mean, yeah, once in a while we'll

see something, you know, with, with a God

awful filters, but not to add to it

and we don't really worry about it.

Um, yeah.

And if you could just go back to

63 and 64.

Yeah.

And it's just a, just take a moment.

This is actually not our flash.

That was the, uh, I think that was

the videographer had a light there.

I can't remember.

Maybe it was our flash.

Yeah, it was our flash.

Yeah.

Cool.

That's it for now.

Okay, cool.

Okay.

There, I think there was a request to

see this one.

So I just wanted you guys to see

it straight out of camera.

Okay.

Like, and you know, it's a trippy, trippy

reflection shot.

That's hard to understand and explain, but there

it is.

That's what I saw natural light, just the

black and white conversion there.

The thing with black and white is, um,

often you can push things a lot farther,

especially when you, when you get into contrast

and clarity because you don't have to worry

about the color information so much.

So sometimes I'll choose black and white because

it allows me to, to pull out texture

more like in this case with the tattoo

and the water drops on his back, check

out those dirty, uh, dirty sensor dust all

over the place.

Right.

Cause it's shot at a high aperture.

I mean, and this just lined up amazing

for us back lit short lit.

This is kind of, uh, this is kind

of like what we were doing on our

back porch, um, the other day backlight flashing

behind, uh, another example of, you know, pukey

bathroom light, but I noticed these blue, these

cool pixels compared to the warm tones in

the bathroom.

So I ended up going in that direction

with the edit and trying to pull that

out and accentuate it.

And I have to like pull on an

invisibility cloak here.

Another example of, uh, you know, just accentuating

the difference in color temperature in the wall

behind relative to the warmer tones on their

skin.

These are taking a while to load for

you guys.

Uh, I'm going to move this thing so

you can see the upper right corner, see

the distractions up there.

So we're going to crop, burn, clone to

get rid of that.

Just a, just an iPhone reflection, but then,

um, getting kind of funky with the crop.

So cropping it right down to here to

make it a little more mysterious and getting

rid of the videographer.

This is that tricky, one of those tricky

transitions where they're going from like inside a

dark church out into broad daylight out on

the church steps.

So these guys are out, you know, they're

like a full stop brighter than grandma.

And this is where we want our eyes

to go, right?

So mainly what we're going to be doing

is burning down this part and getting the

eyes into grandma faster.

Okay.

So that straighten it, left the exit sign

in that case.

Cause it kind of, it's kind of completing

the, it's kind of balancing it out.

So here we got a, we've got a

bit.

Yeah, go ahead.

Sorry.

Um, uh, image number 90 didn't load for

everyone.

Could you take a moment on that again?

This one.

Yeah.

Is it loading for everybody?

It's up here on my screen.

There's a bit of a lag for some

people.

So, uh, yeah, it's loading and great.

Okay.

Long enough to give a couple extra seconds.

Yeah.

Perfect.

So here we want to burn this knee

down.

Right.

And bring out the nice warm tones in

the wall behind her there.

Videographer videographer.

So we're going to do basically a lot

of dodging and burning to get the eyes

in here to Huntington much faster and onto

her dad.

Is this pace?

Okay.

Are they loading on your end?

I think, let me just make sure it

seems to be better.

Yeah, it's better.

Thank you.

So here's Erica coming in behind.

I'm crouched up there somewhere behind a dad

kind of, you know, near the groom.

There's a videographer.

Okay.

So do some fancy cloning to get rid

of her.

Okay.

Um, here's my shoulder and my hand.

This is not my hair.

She's actually got these frilly things on the

back of her dress, these little feathers.

And I'm just basically holding a flash on

the wall to make a bright spot.

And it's got a really warm gel on

it.

And then in the edit, um, I really

tried to push the difference between the warm

tones compared to the cool tones in the

graffiti.

Um, we looked at this one and talked

about the importance of finding a dark background

to rim light them on so that they

pop.

And so we did the best we could,

but then in the edit, we're going to

clean that up a little bit, a little

bit more.

Okay.

This is a white balance nightmare here.

So we just went black and white, got

rid of this tourist.

Okay.

This is, um, Chinese door games and something

like this.

I'm definitely going to go black and white

and really push the clarity and try to

pull out the detail and all that here.

Sometimes all it needs is a crop.

There was a request for this one shadow

to camera because there were, um, it was

a little bit difficult to understand where the,

the warm tones were coming relative to the

cool tone.

So remember we used the blue gel and

then for whatever reason, there were also these,

you know, there was a mix of blue

Bocca and orange Bocca.

So the orange ones are from the ceiling

lights.

Okay.

So then we just, we just accentuated that

in the, in the post, made the blues

more blue and the orange is more orange.

Okay.

Examples.

Here's, uh, one of the most challenging edits.

Well, one of the most challenging shoots and

edits, uh, we're on this junk boat in

the Harbor of Hong Kong.

Um, they'd hired two boats to go out

for like a half an hour and make

some portraits.

So, um, I'm on the, I'm on one

boat.

Erica's on the other boat obviously with the

couple here trying to coordinate two captains to

line the boats up and, you know, triggering

off camera flash and the waves.

And it was just an absolute nightmare.

You can see where Eric is here.

And so then the edit was just Epic

because I actually, we didn't get a frame

where we had the full sailboat, the full

sails.

So I ended up, um, I ended up

using another frame to complete that as well

as having to try to remove Erica from

it.

So it was probably a good, a good

two hour edit there.

Just a little pop-up makeup mirror under

the lens or the flash behind.

Okay.

So Brad's coming down with dad.

You can see Erica's coming in behind.

You guys got the cell phone out there.

Okay.

So one of the things I'm going to

show you guys are some of the tricks

that I use to, um, to clone little

things like that out.

Okay.

So a few from this, uh, wedding in

India, I'm not sure what he's spraying.

I think it's for mosquitoes.

You can

see the pop-up mirror right there.

Right.

And then we'll pull up the invisibility cloak

in the edit where this girl here, if

we want, this is one of our favorite

places to go for the first kiss.

If we're, if we're able to go there

and we're allowed to go there, um, it's

almost always a better perspective.

You know, the light's not working for us

here, but it's having that background, all their

smiling, laughing guests, it's usually much better than

whatever is behind them.

So usually one of us will go back

there if we have the option to do

that.

This is a videographer here, Jen Beth, North

Carolina, just holding the camera up over the,

over the shower stall.

It's an outdoor shower.

We looked at this one in shadows.

So there it is.

She had a camera and then just flipped

it.

Okay.

Um, these edges ended up going, uh, bring

them way down to make it all about

just the mimosa and these lines.

There's that dirty sensor, super dirty.

Okay.

We looked at this one.

So again, Erica's gone back here for the

kiss.

Obviously this is like a beach wedding for

a photographer, um, wedding photographers.

So no problems going back there.

And so you can see where I am.

So I'm shooting the other, the other direction,

but I'm giving priority to Erica to get

this, this shot.

And then here's the edit.

So it took me and my curly hair

out black and white.

Sometimes we'll play around with a big drastic

crop.

Um, you can see me back here.

So I'm holding the light on a stick,

right?

This is a champagne spray.

Uh, I have no idea how Erica managed

to get focused, but she did cause they're

literally sprinting through here and I'm just crouched

behind them holding a flash.

Sometimes if we're not sure color of black

and white, we'll do, you know, we'll do

a couple of different versions.

One is color, one is black and white.

If you look closely here, you can see

Erica right here, ninja holding the flash, holding

the B10 right there.

I didn't even see her when I did

the edit.

So I actually didn't, didn't remove her.

She's still, she's still there.

All right.

One of the things I'm going to show

you, look, uh, look at these fingertips here.

Didn't quite get them right.

One of the reasons we'll shoot 16 millimeters

is because it, it allows us to not

be cutting out extremities and fingers.

And so, but I'm going to show you

how to do a finger transplant if you

want.

Okay.

Jamaica, just a couple more weddings guys.

And then we'll dive in.

How are we doing Zoe?

Lots of questions, but, uh, do you want

to take a moment here?

Do you want to just, is there any

questions that, um, uh, that are not about

how, how we do it?

Um, yeah, I mean, some are, and some

are, some are not like, for instance, cropping,

uh, you know, are you worried about images

being, um, too low res for large, large

prints or albums?

Okay.

Yeah.

I'll wait.

Yeah.

Cause I'm talking about cropping.

So we'll do that then.

Great.

We'll just cover it.

We'll cover it after.

This was a, this was a happy accident.

Actually.

One of the things with mirrorless is sometimes

we accidentally end up shooting at a slow

shutter speed and in the silent shutter, not

realizing it.

Um, and that's the only reason I, I

got this with the movement.

I was like at one 10th of a

second by mistake there.

Hey Lenny, can I pop in for a

quick sec?

Absolutely.

Um, there's just a bit of a leg

for some folks.

So maybe if you slow down just a

tiny bit in between the photos, uh, some

folks are, are getting stuck on a photo.

Okay.

Also, um, obviously not all of these, but

I did share an album in the workshops

group with, um, a bunch of before and

after examples as well.

So if you haven't had a chance to

go look at those there too, obviously, we're

looking at a whole bunch more here.

This is a first look, obviously.

So Brad's coming down.

Um, this is Dwayne's getting ready for the

first look.

And here's Erica, right?

So it took her out.

It's going to try to give a little

extra time on each image.

So you guys can, so it has time

to load pure

luck right there.

The eyes in focus.

So yeah, with, with cropping, um, you obviously

do lose resolution.

Um, but I mean, these files are 6

,000 pixels across as it is.

So even cropping to that extent, this is

still going to have no problems printing it,

you know, eight by 10.

Um, so no, it never really factors in

a resolution for print.

If it, if it looks crappy, then, you

know, it's, you've cropped too far.

Here's Erica dancing with Dwayne, Jamaica.

These white dance floors are a nightmare with

the, with the off camera flash.

Okay.

Here we are in Bali where Kelly and

Leif's vow renewal, this is actually at a

workshop.

Um, they, um, uh, so Kelly, Kelly was,

um, at the workshop and Leif came to

Bali with her and they did a five

year vow renewal.

And so actually it was pretty cool because

as part of the workshop, we got to

document the vow renewal and the, their only

guests or attendees were essentially the other 12

photographers.

So basically watching, uh, Eric and I, um,

document it.

So, and here we are making portraits.

We deconstructed this one in the workshop group.

Um, there's Erica.

So she's up there doing stuff in close

and then I'm farther away playing around with

my mirror.

Okay.

This is in, uh, Grand Cayman Island.

Almost done.

I think, um, Erica showed you this one

in the shadows.

Here's another one that we deconstructed in the

workshop group.

So you may have already seen this one.

That's just an iPhone reflection.

This is just natural light.

There's a window behind her.

That's lighting up this.

We looked

at this one when we talked about off

camera flash.

Obviously two flashes inside one right here, pointed

that way and one over here pointed this

way.

It's throwing, throwing the shadow over there too.

Okay.

So here's this one straight out of the

camera.

You can see where Erica is right back

there and she's holding two lights, one behind

each, each bride.

Same thing here.

Okay.

Jason and Lindsay's wedding.

So here comes the bride.

Erica's coming in behind, right?

Here's my spot up at the front, going

down this, this shot.

So from that, from that perspective there, right

up at the front, I've got clear view

of the front row, right?

White balance nightmare.

Definitely black and white.

Okay.

We'll look, looked at that one.

And you know, we tried our best to

keep the light spill off of the grass

and to try to get rim light all

the way around as good as we could

get it there.

And then finish the job in post and

took this tree out.

This is an iPhone reflection actually, but you

can see it's super dark.

But then when we pulled it up in

the posts, we saw this cool pixel information

down here.

And one more last one.

Another challenging edit.

Here I am killing Erica's shot, but now

I'm gone.

Okay.

Zoe, Jody, how are people doing?

Well, the first thing is that we need

to, um, shout out to Ali, uh, and

ask him to turn off his video because,

um, apparently he's, you know, taking us to

fun and strange places.

Uh, so there's that.

Um, so far the questions that I'm seeing,

I feel like most of them are going

to be covered as you go through.

Um, okay.

So I hope that that was, that was

helpful as a big picture to sort of

see the potential, see the extent of what

we're able to do, what we're trying to

do.

Um, and then, and then now what I'm

going to do next is now I'm going

to break down that whole process for you

guys.

I'm going to show you how I do

these artists and edits.

So if there's any like questions of, you

know, apart from how, um, um, maybe more

philosophical or kind of why type questions, otherwise

we'll dive in.

Yeah, I think, I think, uh, I think

most of it's going to be covered as

we go.

Um, and again, a shout out to Ali

because he's apparently now in the washroom.

So.

Ali.

Okay.

Thanks guys.

All right.

And, um, okay, cool.

So here we go.

What, were there any, um, if, if, if

anybody needs to, wants to see another one,

uh, again, just let me know the number

and we can go look at it again.

Otherwise, let's talk about hardware.

Okay.

So.

All right.

So this is what I ended on.

This is my editing station here.

Okay.

So it's just, uh, a MacBook pro 15

.4 inch MacBook pro.

Okay.

Um, I used to have a big 27

inch cinema display, uh, when we had a

little bit of a studio space here in

town, but since we, uh, started, once we

started traveling so often, uh, basically all the

editing always happens in airports and hotel rooms

and coffee shops.

And so that's basically, um, a reality now.

So this is what I edit on and,

uh, and I use this thing here.

Okay.

It's a Logitech performance MX.

Okay.

I used to use the, just the standard

Apple, um, magic mouse.

And I found that I was starting to

get like the carpal tunnel, the claw from,

it's just not that comfortable.

This is much more ergonomically friendly, super comfortable,

no problems there.

Um, I have never committed to the learning

curve to use a, like a tablet, you

know, one of those little, um, Wacom things.

Um, everybody, all my friends who use them

swear by them.

And I'm sure that I would love it

too, but I'm often behind in my editing.

So I just go and do what I

know this muscle memory is so dialed in

for me.

I just stick with this.

Um, at some point I will commit to

learning a tablet.

Um, I've also never color calibrated a screen.

Um, we've only ever used Apple displays and

have never really had any issues with photos,

not looking the way we want them to

on our displays.

So take that for what it is.

And, um, oh yeah, I usually put my,

um, my brightness at full brightness, uh, unless

I'm in a really, really dark, uh, room.

I'll sometimes darken it down a little bit.

Some photographers swear by editing at like 50

% brightness, 75% brightness.

I think as long as you're, you're consistent

and the way, the way I edit is

just visually so that the photos look the

way I want them to look on our

website or on our, on our social media

platforms.

I don't do anything differently with my editing,

um, so that it prints a certain way.

Um, I remember some, some print labs that

we used to use, everything would come back

a little bit dark.

I know some photographers will intentionally kind of

overexpose their edits a bit.

So prints come out the way they want.

I'd rather just find a print lab that

can get it right and edit my photos

to look the way I want them to

actually look on our website.

So, um, so that's that you.

Oh yeah.

And then again, the external monitors, the external

hard drives, um, is what, is what I

use.

So basically I'm always editing on the hard

drive.

So when I, when I'm heading down to

the coffee shop to go edit for the

day, I basically just grab my laptop, my

mouse, my hard drive, power cord, go and

I plug in and I do my thing.

Okay.

Okay.

Software.

Um, what you're going to see with my

artisan edit process is that I'm using Adobe

camera raw and Photoshop.

We also use Lightroom and of course everything

gets, gets imported into a Lightroom catalog for,

for every wedding.

And the stuff, the work that gets done

at the image salon and the work that

Erica does is in Lightroom.

The work that I do for my artisan

edits, keep in mind that this is like

50 to 100 photos per wedding.

Okay.

So this artisan edit process is, it's not

a workflow for an entire wedding.

Okay.

You'll see this is like deep into the

rabbit hole of time consuming editing.

I full disclosure guys, I am not going

to make you a faster editor.

Okay.

You're not going to get any faster today.

I think I can make you a more

powerful editor.

Okay.

So I'm going to give you some, some,

some tools basically to have up your sleeve

for those, those money shots.

Okay.

Those ones that you are really proud of

those ones that you want to pull the

full potential out of for your portfolio or

for their slideshow, maybe for your blog post,

or maybe, you know, some submission, something that

some old file that you knew there was

more potential in there.

Okay.

So it's, it's sort of like a, it's

a custom editing process, one photo at a

time type thing.

But in terms of what software you're using

Lightroom, Photoshop, Adobe camera rod, it doesn't really

matter.

You can essentially achieve the same things in

all of them.

Just a different way of getting there.

And in some cases, more work in some

cases.

So with, with Lightroom, what I'm going to

show you, what I'm doing in Adobe camera

rod and Photoshop, you can theoretically do it

all in Lightroom as well.

You're just not going to have as much

control.

Okay.

And it's going to be more of a

difficult process to get there in some cases,

not always, sometimes it's super simple.

You could do it all in Lightroom.

When I break down this process for you

guys, if you, because I know a lot

of us do everything in Lightroom and that's

totally cool.

If you never want to open Photoshop ever,

and you want to just do everything in

Lightroom, when I'm explaining my process, every time

I do, every time I say the word

layer or layer mask, just think adjustment brush.

Okay.

Essentially it's the, it's the same thing.

I'm just doing it in a way that

gives me more control.

Okay.

But you're still going to be able to

take, learn from watching the process in Photoshop.

Even if you don't want to ever open

Photoshop, you'll be able to replicate a lot

of it.

A lot of it, most of it is

going to be totally transferable over into your

Lightroom, Lightroom workflow.

Okay.

And most of what I'll show you can

be done in Lightroom.

Of course, there's some things that you can't

do in Lightroom.

You have to go into Photoshop and I'll

explain the point at which that, that point

where you have to deviate from Lightroom into

Photoshop for you.

Okay.

Really the power of this artisan editing process,

I'm going to show you is, is basically

taking local adjustments to a bit of an

extreme.

Okay.

So we talked a lot about lighting and

shaping the light with grids so that we

can light independent areas of the photo independently

from other areas.

Right?

Well essentially what we're doing with local adjustments

is we're not, we're able to, instead of

just treating the whole image globally, we're able

to fine tune local areas of the file

to pull out the potential in each local

area, independent of the other areas.

Of course, with a local, a local edit,

sorry, a global edit, we can only push

the sliders so far before we start to

kill, kill it.

Right?

Like we can only make the sky look

so great before our people start to look

like Oompa Loompas or something.

Right?

They start to look, they start to look

fluorescent.

So you can only push things so far.

Local adjustments gives us the power to push

things further, right?

Independently.

And so what I'm going to show you

is kind of taking that to a bit

of an extreme or a real extreme.

Okay.

All right.

Get your, get your pad of paper, get

your pen out here.

I'm going to show you guys the order

of operations.

When I sit down to edit a photo,

this is the order that I, that I

tackle it and keep in mind the way

that I edit these because I'm just working

on 50 to a hundred photos per wedding

is one at a time.

I do one image at a time.

This is a batch processing.

Okay.

So I start by cropping.

Okay.

Because there's no, there's no point in editing

pixels that aren't going to be included in

the final composition.

Right?

So it's kind of like you go back

into the field and if I could have

composed it differently, obviously I can't move my

feet, but if I wanted to tilt, angle,

straighten, crop in a little bit, this is

the point at which I would do that

with a few exceptions that I'm going to

show you.

There are some exceptions where I will actually

crop much later in the process.

Then I come up with a plan.

Okay.

So rather than just start editing, I come

up with an overall plan of you know,

am I going to color?

Am I going black and white?

What are the, what are the problem areas

that I need to take care of?

And what are the local areas that I'm

going to have to treat independently within this,

within this file?

Okay.

So I make up a plan.

Then what I do is actually at that

point, and this is kind of new as

of last year, at that point is when

I'll start looking at my presets.

I've got five presets to choose from.

And often one of them is going to

get me pretty darn close to where I

want to go.

And so that's the point at which I

would apply the preset and start tweaking from

there, which I'll show you guys.

Okay.

But then for the most part, I'm working

with smart layers or smart object layers.

I'm sure some of you have never heard

of that.

I'm sure some of you are familiar with

it and already use it.

But for those of you who've never used

a smart object layer, I'm going to show

you the power of that.

Okay.

That's the, that's most of the heavy editing.

The heavy lifting that I do is in

smart object layers.

Okay.

Then I work with plain old adjustment layers.

Okay.

In Photoshop, AKA adjustment brushes in Lightroom.

Okay.

Then smart filters, which is kind of a

brand new thing for the latest version of

Photoshop.

It's super cool.

So I'll show that to you.

Then at that point I'll do the overall

image cleanup.

So that's where I'll take care of distractions,

blemishes, dust, scratches, those sorts of things.

Okay.

Clean up the, clean up the overall file.

And then I give it the final punch.

Okay.

Some final pop to make it jump off

the screen.

And then always as the last final step

on, on export size and sharpen.

Okay.

So I don't want to be, I don't

want to be applying sharpening before I've done

all of this editing process.

Okay.

So maybe take a screenshot there.

If you haven't gotten all written down, cause

I'm going to jump over to this next

three, two, one.

Okay.

Then once I've got the photo open now,

this is the order of operations that I

start.

This is the order that I adjust the

sliders in.

Okay.

Keeping in mind that usually the first thing

I'll do is apply one of our presets

and then start tweaking these sliders, right.

And blending things.

But if I'm just starting from scratch, if

I'm not going to start from one of

the presets, this is the order that I

go in.

Okay.

So exposure and white balance first exposure, because

that's sort of the overall exposure as if

I were to go back into the field

and choose to over or underexpose from there.

Okay.

And then fixing the white balance, those two

things, that's called neutralizing your flow.

If you use presets, you always want to

do those two things first before you apply

the preset.

It's called neutralizing it.

So get the exposure where you want it,

where the exposure should have been and try

to get the white balance in the right

spot because your preset isn't going to adjust

those for you.

Right.

So you need to have it neutralized first.

Then I'll choose one of our mystical potions

presets.

And we'll talk about that and figure out

which one is closest ish.

Okay.

Then I work on the tone curve.

Okay.

So that's basically the curve that you've got

in Lightroom or ACR.

I'll show that to you.

Then these two here, gotta be really careful

with them, but they can be pretty powerful.

I'll basically see how much of those I

can get away with.

Okay.

We'll talk about those separately.

Dehaze comes in handy sometimes when you're trying

to pull out drama in sky, but you

have to be careful with it.

Clarity you have to be careful with it

as well.

Clarity is kind of like a, a, a

contrast boost to the mid tones.

And the effect is it pulls out like

texture, but you can really overdo it, especially

on skin.

Okay.

I see a lot of photographers overdoing the

clarity.

So I'll see how much of that I

can get away with.

Then I'll work on, then I'll basically adjust

the blacks and the shadows.

So I go down to that bottom part

of the tonal curve and work on the

black point in the shadows.

Then I hop up to the opposite side

of the tone curve and work on the

whites and the highlights.

Okay.

Then I'll go into the, the color palette.

So these presets each have a color palette

and you can go into that color palette

and you can change it.

So that's where I'll start to adjust with

that and play around with those settings.

And then once I've got all of that

stuff, I'll fine tune that white balance at

the end there.

These final steps here, these ones I've got

in the different colors, saturation and contrast.

The reason for that is even though we're

pushing a lot of saturation and contrast into

our files, I almost never use those sliders.

Okay.

That's a really crappy way to add saturation

or contrast, the contrast slider itself in Lightroom

or ACR, nothing compared to other ways that

we can boost that contrast with curves and

black points or white points, which I'll show

you guys.

Okay.

Same with saturation.

Saturation, I almost always leave it at between

zero and five.

Vibrance is the one that I'll use.

You know, I'll pull that one up to

20 or 30 or 40 sometimes in some

locations because vibrance adds saturation to the pixels

that are under saturated.

So whereas saturation boosts the saturation of all

the pixels uniformly, even the ones that are

already oversaturated, vibrance favors the pixels that are

under saturated.

So you can push that a lot farther

to bring up the colors.

Okay.

Okay.

So this might be a good spot.

Yeah.

We're over an hour to take a bathroom

break.

Okay.

Stand up, stretch, move around.

Let's take a couple of minutes.

And Jodi and Zoe, if there's any burning

questions or things at this point, you can

let me know.

No, not yet.

There was some questions about presets and it

seems that not a lot of people were

aware of the developed presets that you have.

So we've just shared that.

But yeah.

So, yeah.

So how long do you want to do?

Five minutes?

No, no.

Let's take two or three minutes.

I will show you guys our presets and

how we use them.

I'm just learning myself how to use them,

you know, cause we just got our hands

on them last year.

So it's a new thing for us.

That's super helpful.

Sped up my process a lot.

Of course.

Okay, great.

See you all in two to three minutes.

Yeah.

Two minutes.

Take a breather.

I need to.

So Zoe, right now I'm sharing this keynote.

If I go here, what are you seeing

now?

Are you still seeing the keynote?

Yep.

Okay.

So I have to go share a different

thing now then.

There's a, you get to choose screens or

windows when you're sharing.

Yeah.

Or you have to move that, minimize that

and.

Where has it gone?

Zoom.

Okay.

So you've minimized.

It's what we can is very.

Now I can see my, now I can

see my options here.

So if I go to share.

Stop share.

Okay.

And then share screen.

Okay.

It doesn't give me the option to share

any of the minimized screens now.

So I have to go on minimize them.

If you un-minimize your Photoshop screen, then

you should be able to share that one.

The problem is when I un-minimize them,

I can't see the zoom.

Here we go.

All right.

Okay.

So one more minute.

Okay.

Yep.

I'm not seeing your shared screen though.

I'm not going to reveal it yet.

No, no.

Okay.

As long as yeah.

Just want to make sure it works.

Okay.

Shall we.

Do it.

Okay.

What I'm going to show you guys next

is.

Something that I wasn't going to show you.

I wasn't going to share it here, but.

This is something that I've done.

For our.

A full workshop.

Our alumni.

And the reason I.

I did it.

And the reason I'm going to give you

guys access to this.

Is because I want you to be able

to sit back.

And observe the process.

And not worry about scrambling to write down

each and every tip.

And where was that?

Which drop down was that?

And how do you do that shortcut again?

I want you to have something.

I basically, I made the notes for you.

So you can refer back to this.

After.

And then.

Open your own files.

And at your own pace, step-by-step.

Go through this process and learn this.

This process.

Okay.

So can you see this?

Can you see this?

Yes.

Okay, cool.

So this is everything that I'm going to

show you.

Is written out here.

Step-by-step.

Where it is in the drop downs.

How to create the shortcuts.

What I'm thinking, how I'm using it in

what situations, basically everything.

That I'm going to show.

Is here.

So I'm going to answer a whole bunch

of questions right now.

And just say, yes, it's in this document.

Okay.

So when you ask, is that in the

document?

Yes.

If I show it to you today, if

I explain it today, it's also written out

here, described in this whole overall exhaustive step

-by-step-by-step thing.

Okay.

There's a lot of, thank you.

People are stoked.

They're in.

They're in for this.

We're amazing.

I'm going to stop share.

Okay.

Guys, the only thing.

So, so I'm going to put that in.

We're going to figure out how to get

that into your, your student portal for you

guys.

You'll have access to that.

I just have to ask that.

It's for your eyes only.

Okay.

That's for you guys.

So now I got to share, share, share

screen.

What if I just share my whole desktop?

Let me try that.

Okay.

So what are you seeing now?

We're seeing your post-production.

Yeah.

See my disastrous desktop.

Now we see your desktop.

Now do you see, see bridge?

I always see bridge.

Okay, cool.

So I got a folder here.

Here we go.

Okay.

So you should be able to see bridge

and you got my webcam there as well.

Correct.

Yeah.

Great.

Everyone to please mute yourselves and turn your

video off, please.

Why don't I.

174 People in here.

I'm going to mute all again.

That'd be great.

Okay.

Okay.

Everyone's muted.

Okay.

So this is, this is bridge bridge.

Comes with Photoshop essentially works hand in hand.

And because I'm doing my editing on these

artists and edits in with ACR and Photoshop.

That I use bridge.

Okay.

So I'm old school with, with bridge.

Everything else in our workflow is, is likely.

Okay.

And now, so at this point, what I'm

going to do is, is we're going to

open a photo together and we'll edit it

kind of step-by-step start to finish.

Okay.

And we're going to do that on a

few different examples.

I want to show some colors, some black

and whites.

Ones where we've got lots of skin problems

that we want to work with.

So a bunch of different examples, but we're

going to start with, with one that's a

mix of environmental, right?

We've got sky and beach and we have

skin.

Okay.

So it's a good balance of both the

things that we often have to deal with

in our, in our photos.

And at this point in the process, you

could be just in your light room catalog.

Okay.

I happen to be in bridge here.

You could be in light room and you

can start to tweak all your sliders.

Just the way that I'm going to be

doing it in ACR.

So in bridge, all I have to do

is double click on it.

And when I do that, it opens it

up in ACR for me.

Move this down here.

Okay.

So ACR is the same as light room.

Okay.

Underneath the hood.

They're identical.

They're running the same engine.

The only difference is the interface where the

sliders are, what they're called.

Okay.

But they do the same.

The sliders do the same thing.

There's nothing you can do in light room

that you can't do in ACR and vice

versa.

So with the, with the sliders over here,

just quickly.

So we're on the same page as to,

as to, as to what they do.

Exposure is the overall brightness, right?

Blacks is working.

Blacks here is working this point right there.

Okay.

So that's, that's when I talk about dropping

the blacks, that's what, that's what that's doing.

Okay.

And shadows is just a little bit higher

up on the tonal range.

Okay.

So that's in the, in the deep parts.

One of the things that I often do

is I'll often drop blacks while lifting shadows.

So that allows me to bring up lost

detail in those deep shadows while dropping the

blacks down.

Okay.

On the opposite end of the tonal range

up here, that's your whites and your highlights.

So the whites is the extreme bright points.

And then the highlights are just down from

there.

And I'll often do the opposite with whites.

I'll often push the white point up and

bring the highlights back.

Kind of like that.

And by dropping blacks and lifting whites, that's

one way to add contrast into your image

images that looks much better than just boosting

that contrast slider.

Okay.

The contrast slider is like the overall kind

of contrast.

And it really just destroys your images.

So if you're, if you want to add

contrast, there's better ways to do that with

curves, black points, and white points or in

Photoshop itself.

Okay.

So that's all of those.

And then this texture one is new.

It's just come out, I think this year.

That's similar to clarity, but it's not so

harsh.

You can use that to kind of bring

out texture and fabric and stuff.

Clarity is that mid-tone contrast boost.

You see what it does to the skin.

It's just awful.

So if you're going to use clarity, just

be careful or just using it in local

areas.

And the dehaze, look what that does to

the sky.

Right.

It kills their skin, but it does some

cool things to the sky.

Okay.

So that's another one that you just want

to work in local areas or be very

cautious with it.

Okay.

And you'll see when I show you the

presets, some of our presets have pretty aggressive,

use the dehaze slider pretty aggressively, but they've

had other things done to counteract it.

Okay.

Vibrance and saturation.

Again, same thing.

Saturation just kills some of the pixels, right?

Whereas vibrance, you can really push that up.

See how it brings out her shirt and

the sky without totally killing the skin.

Okay.

And then the white balance sliders up here.

Cooler, more warm, more green, more magenta.

And when I'm adjusting my sliders, I'm making

big drastic adjustments.

So I don't really ever kind of, you

know, click on it and gradually drive, drag

it left or right.

I usually do big clicks like that so

I can see the effects.

I'm looking at the photo.

I can see the effect of that slider.

So I go too far and then I

can kind of find the sweet spot.

That's a much faster way to like, see

what that slider is doing and get it

into the right spot.

Okay.

And I basically, if I'm, if I'm not

starting from a preset, I follow that order

of operations in terms of, you know, Starting

with exposure and then you get the exposure

in the right spot.

And then I come down to the blacks,

drop the blacks, the shadows, and you kind

of have to, each slider has a relationship

with the other ones.

So as you go through that order of

operations, you might have to come back after

you drop the blacks, you might have to

come up and fix the exposure sort of

thing.

Okay.

And I'm just basically all I'm doing when

I'm adjusting sliders is eyeballing the image or

eyeballing the local area of the image that

I'm working on to get it where I

need it.

I'm never looking at the histogram or anything

like that.

It's just a visual visual taste type thing.

And then all these other little places on

light room, you've got them all in your,

on the right side of your stack, right?

This part, I almost always stay out of

there unless I've applied one of the presets

because the presets do all kinds of crazy

things on these tone curves.

And you can see, you can see all

these developed tone curves that I've got.

Right.

And then what they do is actually on

these individual channels, there's tweaks that it does

to try to get things.

Basically the presets, let's talk about the presets.

Here are the presets.

Here we go.

So it's the mystical potions pack from, from

develop.

So develop is Ken and Jeff.

Ken kind of runs the business side of

it.

And Jeff is the, he's the, the technical

wizard behind it all.

I have no idea how they're able to

do what they do, but it's all built

on a platform that they created, which balances

it so that no matter what preset you're

applying or what camera you've used, it has

the exact same effect on the image.

So a Sony, a Canon, a Nikon, a

Fuji, doesn't matter what model of what camera,

if you apply that preset, it's going to

have the exact same effect on that file

as if it had been shot with another

camera, which is really cool.

But that's all underneath the hood type stuff.

We'd never used presets until they approached us

to try to create some presets.

I didn't believe that they would be able

to replicate what we do.

But Jeff and I sat down, we spent

three full days with a whole bunch of

before and afters.

And he basically tried to figure out how

to create presets that replicated what we do.

Of course, we do a lot of local

adjustments, right?

And so, of course, there's no way that

you can create a preset that replicates that

in every image.

But what he was able to do was

basically in a one click thing, get it

almost there.

And in some cases get it too far

there.

So we tried to get it all the

way there with the one click.

So as a result, some of the presets

on some photos, it totally overshoots the landing,

right?

So that's an important thing to know is

to use them and use them right, is

to use that as a starting point and

then tweak and adjust from there.

And I'm going to show you guys how

you can blend different presets too, because one

of our presets, the Amarone was designed for

big environmental images where you want to pull

out, make the sky look awesome, right?

So any photos with lots of water and

sky and rocks and forest, it works great.

But if there's lots of skin tones, sometimes

it doesn't work so well.

So we've got, we've got the double IPA

preset, which was made for skin tones, right?

But it doesn't pull as much potential out

of the sky.

So I'm going to show you guys how

you can blend those and get the best

of both worlds.

So there's, there's our presets.

We've got that.

We've got the Amarone, the double IPA, the

espresso, Jaeger bomb and, and the margarita.

Now, again, before you apply any presets to

get a feel for it, you always want

to neutralize it first.

So in this case, I would brighten them

up just so that you can see the

effect of the presets.

So now I got Chad and Beth properly

exposed, right?

The sky's overexposed, but that's where I'd want

it for skin tones.

Okay.

And then color temperature wise, it's actually pretty

good.

So I'm going to leave the color temperature

alone.

So now I can, now I can, now

these presets live in Lightroom and ACR.

They work in both places the same.

Okay.

So this, this Amarone one, you see it's

killing their skin.

It's not great on the skin in this

image, but it's doing a good job on

the sky.

Double IPA does a much better job on,

on their skin.

Okay.

It's not quite right here, but I can

tweak it and get it, get it into

range.

Espresso is basically our go-to black and

white.

And of all our presets, this is the

one that I can almost use just one

click.

And then all I have to do is

dodge a bird from there.

Okay.

It's a, it's a real punchy high contrast

black and white.

The Anger Bomb is even punchier and higher

contrast.

And it was, it was designed more for

off-camera flash dance floor, black and whites.

That's where it works best for us.

And Margarita is totally over the top as

well for us.

I know some photographers use it and love

it and lots of photos, but for us,

it's more of an off-camera flash dance

floor where we're trying to pull out all

the colors and the DJ lights and the

lasers as far as we can without totally

killing the skin.

Okay.

And then it comes with these, these sharpening

tools as well.

All right.

So in this case, if I, let's apply

the Amarone as a starting point.

All right.

And if we go back to our, actually,

let's go back to straight out of camera.

Camera defaults.

Here we go.

Straight out of camera.

If we go back to, let's, let's do

this photo together following that order of operations.

So we start with the crop.

Okay.

So in this case, what I might do

is I might straighten it.

So, Oh, I've already, okay.

That is my crop there.

Let's clear the crop.

Here we go.

That's straight out of camera on crop.

So what I'm probably going to do is

come up to the crop and we always

crop two to three ratio.

We stick to the actual aspect ratio of

our cameras, mainly just to, just to eliminate

infinite possibilities, right?

Of every other aspect ratio we can do.

So we always make it work two by

three.

And if I'm going to crop, I'll probably

straighten it in line with the horizon there.

Okay.

So straighten it a bit.

I'm going to bring it in here a

little bit just to balance it out.

Okay.

So do the crop first.

I'm going to show you guys a few

situations where I won't crop first.

If for example, in cropping, I had to,

let's say I wanted to straighten it this

much and I, I would lose his fingers.

You see how in a crop here, I'm

constrained within the limits of the photo.

In Photoshop, there's ways, there's some tricks that

allow you to crop outside the lines.

So in that case, if I lost his

fingers, I would wait and crop later in

Photoshop.

Okay.

So let's just.

Yes.

There we go.

Okay.

So there's the crop.

And then I come up with, after the

crop, then I come up with a plan,

right?

So color or black and white, that's one

of the first decisions I have to make.

And let me just neutralize this.

I'm just going to bring it up so

they're more in the right exposure.

If I'm trying to decide color, black and

white, often it's obvious, but if it's not,

I'll just come down here and I'll quickly

just look at the espresso, get a feel

for the black and white potential.

And then maybe I'll look at the color

presets and right away.

I see that the Amarone brings is bringing

out some cool sky behind them.

So I'm going to do this one as

a color.

Okay.

The other thing I'm doing at the planning

stage is identifying the local areas of the

image that I'm going to have to treat

independently.

So in this case, I see the sky

as a local area, the beach, and then

my couple, possibly even their skin and their

clothes.

Okay.

As as different local areas and the order

in which I deal with those, I'll usually

go from the largest area and then work

down towards the smaller.

I don't know what that was.

Your gallery active.

If you want to use it while editing

your album.

Stephanie up more.

Should I go unmute people?

Can you unmute it?

Okay.

Is everyone muted now?

Cause I have to, okay, here we go.

Participants.

There we go.

Okay.

Yep.

You can still see my screen.

Okay, cool.

So the other in an environmental shot like

this, like an outdoor shot, what I'll often

do is I'll start with the, the area

or the layer farthest away from my camera

and then work towards the camera.

So in this case I'd probably start with

the sky and then move to the beach

and then move to the couple.

Okay.

So let's start with the sky.

So what I'm going to do is I'm

going to come down here and I'm going

to run the Amarone preset.

Okay.

So, and then if I'm just looking at

the sky, okay, so I'm turning my eyes

off of carrying anything about what's happening on

the skin.

I'm going to turn this down, right?

The exposure.

So I'm looking at the sky.

Okay.

That's where I want the sky.

And that's basically where I want it.

I'm just going to run the Amarone.

So that's just Amarone and then getting the

exposure where I want it.

Okay.

Nothing else.

Obviously the sky looks great.

A couple looks, it looks horrible here, right?

Their skin is brutal.

So, but I'm going to treat that area

independently.

So what I'm going to do next.

So at this point you could have done

everything I've done right now in Lightroom, just

run the Amarone preset.

We'll put all the sliders where it puts

them.

And then you could, of course then use

adjustment brushes and tweak from there.

But what I'm going to do is I'm

going to go into Photoshop and in Lightroom,

you can do this by just right clicking

on the image and go open, not open

in Photoshop, open as smart object in Photoshop.

Okay.

That's what I'm going to do right here.

Right now.

I'm going to come down here to open

image and I'm not just going to click

it because then it will just open it

as a normal photo in Photoshop.

I'm going to shift click.

So see what happens when I push shift.

Now it says open object, open image, shift

click, open object.

Okay.

I'm going to do that now.

So now if had you done it in

Lightroom, same thing, you'd be looking at that

photo with just adjust the way you did

it in Lightroom right here in Photoshop.

I'm just going to put this into a

better view.

Okay.

So I can move this around my webcam

up here.

Let me

just get this working for me here.

It's doing weird stuff because of the screen

share here.

Okay.

So here we've got the photo in Photoshop

and this is basically how I keep my

workspace ish in Photoshop.

Okay.

Over here.

These are all my, these are all my

tools.

Right.

And then over here I have a setup.

So I've got my layer stack.

So this is my stack of layers, which

I'm going to give you guys a quick

kind of crash course on in a second.

Okay.

And I like to keep the photo here

on the, on the canvas so I can

move it around like this.

All right.

So over here, if you see this little,

this little icon, that indicates that this layer

is a smart object layer.

And you're about to see the power of

that in a second.

This is new for you.

What I'm going to do now is I'm

going to come up here to layer smart

objects, and I'm going to go new smart

object via copy.

Okay.

And see, I've got, I've created a shortcut

there for this.

Cause I do it all the time.

Okay.

Command K.

Okay.

And so when I push command K, this

is what happens.

It duplicates this.

Okay.

But it's not just command J, which is

duplicate a normal layer.

It's you have to do it this way.

Smart object, new smart object via copy.

Okay.

And in the document it's, this is all

written out there.

It's explained.

I show you guys how to create this

shortcut for yourself.

Okay.

And then this is what happens.

So I'll just undo that.

I'll do my command K pop.

There it is.

Yeah.

I've got this new smart object by a

copy.

Okay.

It's on top of the other one.

It's just sitting right there.

The next thing I do is I go

layer smart objects, edit contents.

And you see, I've created a shortcut for

that as well.

Command comma.

The reason I did command K and command

comma is because those two keys are really

close together on the keyboard.

And I do these things all the time.

So it's super fast.

Command K command comma.

Okay.

Come over here and I'm going to go

command comma now.

Edit contents.

All right.

So this is what happens.

It brings me back into ACR.

There's the photo, just the way I left

it.

And there's all the sliders right where I

left them.

So if you had started in Lightroom and

then gone right, click open as smart object

in Photoshop, and then did what I just

did command K command comma, it will bring

you into ACR like this.

So if you're going to follow this process,

and if you want to be able to

edit with this much power, you will have

to learn this ACR interface to be able

to do it.

It won't bring you back into Lightroom.

You won't be able to go back into

Lightroom until you export it at the end

and import it back into Lightroom.

Okay.

So here I am.

And now what I can do is I

can go and I can tweak any of

these sliders, any which way I could do

anything I want here.

Okay.

And so now moving from the sky onto

let's just, we're just going to do this

one quick and simple.

We're going to do background.

We're going to do subjects.

We've already done the background.

So now we're going to look at Chad

and Beth and we're going to get all

the sliders in the right spot for them

ignoring the sky.

And right away, I know that my double

IPA, which is kind of our go-to

one for skin tones is going to be

close.

Okay.

So just ran the double IPA.

Now I'm looking at Chad and Beth, brightening

them up and they're a little bit green.

So I'm going to go a little bit

that way.

I'm going to warm them up a bit.

So I'm just eyeballing it on their skin.

Okay.

So it's just basically all I did was

the double IPA preset and then tweak the

white balance and the exposure a little bit.

Okay.

So I'm happy with the way they're looking

there.

Okay.

The sky doesn't look as great as it

did before, but they're much better.

So now I'm going to come down here

and click.

Okay.

All right.

So here's what happens.

So now I've got this new, these new

settings applied on this new smart object layer

up here.

Okay.

So I can click on the little eye

to turn it off.

Okay.

So there we're off.

There we're on.

So the way that layers work is when

you've got a layer on the top without

a mask, you can't see any of the

layers beneath it.

So when this layer is on, I can't

see the layer beneath it when it's off

cam.

Right?

So the masks come in handy in order

for us to turn parts of that layer

on and parts of that layer off.

So I basically got three, three ways that

I build layer masks.

Okay.

And you'll be familiar with these methods from,

or two of them, at least from Lightroom.

So let's turn this one on and let's

apply a mask to add a mask.

You just come down here and click the

little mask thing.

When I do that, it adds this white

little icon here.

And that indicates that I've just applied a

white layer mask.

A white layer mask means that that layer

is entirely on or entirely opaque to the

layers beneath it.

It's a white layer mask.

I can't see any of the layers beneath

it.

Okay.

It's a hundred percent on.

Undo that.

And if I come down here and option

click, I get a black layer mask, right?

And a black layer mask means that that

layer is entirely off or it's entirely transparent

to the layers beneath it.

Right?

So if I turn this one on and

off now, there's no difference because it's entirely

off.

It's all black.

So the power comes in having shades of

gray, right?

So we've got to create shades of gray

to blend it, to blend it in and

out.

So if you ever want to see the

layer mask itself, just come up here onto

the mask and option click on it.

Okay.

Now that shows me the mask.

It's all black here, right?

Option click, go back to the image view,

option click.

I can see the mask.

Okay.

So in order to build the mask, I've

got three methods.

The quickest or the most straightforward and easiest

way, and the one most of us are

familiar with is brush.

Just going to use a brush.

So I'm going to go B for brush,

use my brush.

And if I come up here to the

brush, you'll see that I've got various controls

to affect that brush.

Okay.

So in here, where's my webcam?

And where is it here?

I've got the size and the hardness.

So the size, the way I control the

size is just with the shortcut keys.

So when I'm editing, I basically keep my

two fingers hovering over these square bracket keys.

Okay.

Those are the shortcut keys for brush size.

So you can see what happens here as

I click the large bracket, square bracket, or

small opening bracket, whatever.

You guys know what I mean.

Okay.

So those two keys control the size of

my brush.

So I never have to go up here

and adjust this slider.

Okay.

As I'm painting, I'll just be going like

this, depending on how big or small I

need the brush.

And then the other slider, the hardness, I

keep that down around five to 10%

top.

So I'm always using a nice soft brush.

Okay.

Even if I'm doing super precise, super like

pixel perfect brush work, I still use a

soft brush.

I just use a very small one.

I zoom in on the image and use

a very small brush, but I keep it

soft because I still want that nice natural

feather edge to it.

Okay.

Because as you go down to a finer

tip, it's a, it's much more precise.

And you, so I never have to adjust

the hardness that way.

Okay.

So that's those two sliders.

And then over here we've got opacity flow

and this, this says smoothing.

Smoothing is, is a brand new thing.

I don't even know what it does.

It just didn't work.

Okay.

There's Erica.

So it's smoothing.

Don't worry about it.

I don't even know what it does.

When I accidentally change it, the brush is

just super slow.

So don't worry about smoothing.

I just keep that at 100%.

Okay.

But flow and opacity are important.

Okay.

I'm going to show you the difference between

opacity and flow.

I'm going to put shift 100.

Okay.

Flow is at a hundred percent.

Opacity is at 10%.

You see that?

Okay.

I'm going to come down here and I'm

going to paint with a white brush.

This shows that I'm painting white on black.

Okay.

If I hit the X key flips it

to a black brush, X key flips it

to a white brush.

Okay.

Or I can just toggle it back and

forth here.

So I'm going to be painting with a

white brush, 10% opacity, 100% flow.

I'm going to click and drag my brush.

Now you see I'm painting 10% gray.

And I haven't let go of my mouse

key yet.

Okay.

And as I paint over top of it,

it never gets any darker than 10%

gray.

Until I let go and click again, then

it adds another 10% gray.

Right?

Okay.

So let's look at the difference if I

go opposite.

So now I'm actually going to go, I'm

going to go a hundred percent opacity.

And I'm going to go 10% flow.

Okay.

Now watch the difference here.

I'm going to click and drag.

Okay.

There's my 10% gray, but look what

happens as I paint over top of it.

Right.

And continue to paint more.

It burns it in more and more and

more.

Okay.

So that is a much better way, a

much faster, more natural way to build your

layers or sorry, your, your layer masks.

Then the opposite.

So I keep opacity at a hundred percent.

And I put the flow down around five

or 10% so I can paint it

in nice and gradually like this.

Okay.

And so basically what I do is I

keep my left hand hovering over those shortcut

keys for brush size.

And then my right hand is over here

on the mouse clicking as I go.

So let's just clear that layer mask.

So let's start now.

You can start from a white layer mask

or a black layer mask.

In this case, I think what I'm going

to do is I'm going to start from,

I'm going to start from a black layer

mask.

Okay.

So there's my sky layer underneath.

I'm going to go B for brush.

I'm going to go a hundred percent opacity,

10% flow.

And I'm going to paint.

So I'm clicking.

Here's my, I can't see.

Zoom box is hiding all of my things.

Can you close the curtains?

Maybe is that going to help you?

No, it's not my it's the reason I

can't see it is because the zoom box

is hiding my sliders.

Okay.

There we go.

Oh, that's why my opacity got turned down

to 10%.

Okay.

Opacity is at a hundred percent flows at

10%.

I'm going to click repeatedly here.

Click, click, click, click, click on the skin.

And as I get closer to the edges,

I go down to a finer tip brush.

Okay.

So my left hand is hovering over and

that the, the reason with opacity on a

hundred percent and flow down at 10%, as

I paint it in, if I click and

hold and paint like this, it's kind of

like spray paint, right.

Or kind of like a pressure sensitive tablet

sort of thing.

And so that way I can paint much

faster and get much more natural feather selections

or masses.

Okay.

I have a question.

Does it matter that you're have smoothing at

a hundred percent at the moment?

I'm always at a hundred percent for smoothing.

If I change smoothing to like sometimes I

accidentally push the wrong key and it changes

the smoothing to 10%.

It has something to do with how fast

the mouse tracks.

It's just really annoying.

So I just keep it at a hundred

percent.

Right.

It does matter if it gets changed, it's

just affects the way that the mouse tracks.

So you can come over here at any

time, remember, and option click on the mask

and see the mask you're creating.

Right.

Which is the first of many examples of

how and why this is much more powerful

and gives you much more freedom and control

than if you're doing the same thing with

adjustment brushes over in Lightroom.

Okay.

So let's see how that works.

I'm going to come down here.

So there's the mask that I just created.

Let's toggle that on and off so you

can see.

Okay.

Not bad.

Right.

So at this point you can do, I

can do anything I want to either of

these layers.

Okay.

So on the sky, for example, I could

go back here.

I could do the command comma, which is

edit contents.

I could go back here and I could

say, you know what?

I want to cool off the sky a

bit, drop the blacks a bit more, push

the de-haze a little farther, bring the

vibrance up a little bit more, drop the

exposure down a bit more.

Okay.

Click okay.

And now then that applies those changes to

the sky layer.

Okay.

Which is down below the skin layer, which

has this mask applied.

Okay.

I could do the same thing for skin.

You could come in here to skin and

I could say, you know what?

I want to warm them up a bit

more, brighten them up a little bit more

and lift the shadows a bit more.

Okay.

And then I can see right away that

my brushwork isn't great.

So I can come in with the brush.

Fix that up.

It gets pretty tricky down here.

Right.

If I try to, unless I get really

precise, it's going to look brutal down there.

See that?

And so what I'm trying to do essentially

is leave no trace, right?

We want to leave no trace, no evidence

of our brushwork, of our editing.

And you can see I've left a big

trace here.

That looks brutal.

So it gets difficult with a brush.

It can be quite limiting to try to

get a good, natural looking transition from the

sky to them.

Right.

So that's not bad though.

So brush is one of three options for

us.

The second option, let's get rid of that,

is to use, so I'll add a mask,

G for gradient.

Okay.

So just like in Lightroom, I've got all

my different gradient options here.

Circular, linear.

I usually just use the linear one.

So let's try the circular one.

Right.

You could do this.

There we go.

Okay.

That's not bad either, but I can see

the halo, right?

I'm losing a lot of that good sky

information right in here behind me because of

the halo.

I can click on here and see the

mask that it just did for me.

Okay.

Or I could use that.

I could use the linear gradient.

Let's say I wanted to go from the

sky into the beach.

I would go, so this is white on

black.

So on to off.

So I could do a transition like that.

Okay.

Basically draws a nice gradient like that on

the mask.

Right.

Obviously that's not what I do in this

case, but I could start with that and

then go B for brush and start painting

on up here.

See what I'm doing here.

So we can combine these two methods.

We can use our gradient and our brush

tools together.

So let's toggle that on and off and

see how that works.

Not bad, but not great, especially around his

shoulder here, right?

Is my smoothing at 100%?

I can't see it.

Yes, it is.

Oh, you can see it.

Okay, cool.

I just wanted to make sure that my

mouse was tracking.

Your flow is at 20%.

Yeah.

So I change the flow on the fly

as I go.

Sometimes if I definitely want to paint in

something fully and quickly, and I don't have

to be super precise, I'll just put it

at 100.

But if I want to feather it in

nice and gently, I'll drop it down to

10% flow and just bring it in

gently.

So that's the gradient and that's the brush.

And those two tools together allow us to

create these masks.

Sometimes, though, that can be very time-consuming

or difficult to get a nice, precise mask,

for example, like around his shoulder here and

around the edges of her hair here, right?

So I'm going to show you another little

trick that I use in some situations.

Let's get rid of that.

And for this to work, you have to

start from a white layer mask.

So with the mask selected, you can't be

here.

You have to have the mask itself selected

there.

You come up to – where is it?

Image.

Sorry.

Select Color Range.

This is in the document, guys.

Select Color Range.

And what that does is it gives you

this little eyedropper tool.

And so what you can do then –

and this shows a preview of the mask,

what the mask is going to look like.

So now I can use this eyedropper tool

and click on the pixels that I want

included or excluded from this selection.

So I'm clicking on the sky, but you

see, actually, in this case, I want the

opposite.

I want the sky to be excluded and

the skin to be included.

So I can just invert that.

There we go.

And if I choose this eyedropper with the

little plus symbol, that allows me to add

more pixels.

So the fuzziness slider controls the degree to

which – basically, when you click on the

pixels, you're telling it, I want any pixels

that are like this pixel to be included

in the mask.

And then the fuzziness slider tells it how

close they have to be in terms of

tonal value and color matching.

So this allows me to eyeball the mask

that it's creating.

And if I want to add more pixels

to that selection, plus, I can look at

here and I can say, okay, I need

to get these pixels included.

So I come up here and click.

Plus.

There we go.

There we go.

We're adding them all in.

And then we're adjusting the fuzziness.

Okay, so that's pretty good-ish.

Click okay.

All right.

So I'll just click here so you can

see the mask that it just created for

me.

That would have taken me a long time

to get that sort of precision brushwork done

around the hair, right?

But that's just a starting point.

Then I go B for brush and come

finish the job.

You're using up all of your RAM from

videoing and everything.

So it's going to be.

Yeah.

All right.

And then I can flip over to a

black brush.

Yeah, it's super slow.

But at least it's not depleting my battery,

which that happened in the past.

Let's see that.

So if I zoom in here and have

a look at her hair, you see how

it's too, in his hair, you see how

it's too perfect?

It looks cut out and fake.

So at that point, what I would do

is I'd come here to the mask.

So as long as I'm on the mask,

I can go and I can blur that

selection.

I can go filter, blur, Gaussian blur.

Click here so I can see.

Okay.

So I'm just blurring the edges of this

selection.

So it's not so precise.

It goes from that to that.

A little bit more.

There we go.

Click okay.

Okay.

So now it's much less cut out looking.

And I can always bring my brush in

here, 10% flow, and just throttle it

back a little bit here.

Intentionally paint outside the lines.

Flip it to white brush.

Intentionally kind of bleeding it outside the lines

a little bit so it doesn't look so

perfect.

Okay.

Let's see that.

And then it looks pretty bad down here

along the coastline.

So this, the brush, a

bit.

There we go.

Okay.

So not bad.

And then now I've got my sky.

I've got my couple.

And from there I can choose to tweak

things, right?

So, for example, maybe I want to brighten

up Chad's face a little bit.

So I can duplicate any of these ones

that I want as a starting point.

So in this case, I'll choose the top

one, which is Chad and Beth's lair.

Command K, which duplicates it, and then command

comma, edit contents.

I could come in here and I could

say, you know what?

I want to brighten this up for Chad's

face.

Okay.

And then I'll flip that to a black

layer mask.

And I can come in here with a

white brush, 10% flow.

Essentially what I'm doing is dodging.

So all of the dodging and burning that

I do, it's never using the dodging and

burning tools.

Okay.

It's using any combination of sliders within Lightroom

or ACR to brighten it up or burn

it down.

Or I'm using curves in Photoshop, which I'll

show you next.

Okay.

So there, we're just brightening up Chad's face

a little bit.

And then let's say on Chad's shirt, right?

Let's say I wanted to put the sliders

in a different place on Chad's shirt.

Come down to this layer, which is the

Chad and Beth's skin layer.

Duplicate it.

Come in here.

I'm looking at his shirt.

Maybe I want to drop it down, bring

up the magenta in there, bring up the

texture a little bit.

Okay.

Click okay.

And then I would bring that layer up

onto the top.

Okay.

So you can drag your layers into position.

Okay.

So I'm going to go from a black

layer mask.

I'm going to paint white brush, 20%

flow.

So I'm basically essentially burning down his shirt.

But in doing so, I'm also bringing up

some clarity.

I'm shifting the color temperature a little bit.

Okay.

So obviously, there's a bunch more things I

would do this image.

But at this point, what I'm going to

do is I'm just going to save this.

We'll come back to it because I want

to just go through that process and review

it for you guys on another image.

So let's put a little – let's put

it in here.

Chad, Beth, working.

All right.

So now I can close that down.

And we will go look at this one

now.

Okay.

So here's the final edit on that one.

And here's the straight out of camera.

Okay.

So let's take this one.

Zoe?

I'm just wondering if now is a good

time to maybe ask some questions.

Yes.

Or do you want to – I want

to basically just review what we've done so

far quickly.

And then let's look at the questions, okay?

So in this example, we crop first, right?

In this case, I don't want to crop

because I don't want to lose the summit

and I don't want to lose me down

here.

Then I come up with a plan.

Should we go color or black and white?

Let's eyeball it.

Espresso, black and white.

Amarone color.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, color is going to be cool.

Okay, we're going to go color for this

one.

Now I need to identify the layers that

I'm going to treat independently.

In an environmental shot like this, I would

start with the sky, then move to the

mountains, then move to the reflection, and then

move to me and my red jacket down

here.

So if I'm starting on the sky, I

would pick a preset, probably Amarone for the

sky.

Or let's do this one without presets.

Let's do this one just the way I

would do it from scratch, just looking at

the sky.

I'm going to start with exposure and get

the exposure where I want it.

Keep in mind I'm not carrying anything that's

happening down here.

I'm just looking at the sky.

I'm going to drop the blacks a lot.

As I do that, I'm going to have

to lift exposure a bit.

Dehaze, I know that's going to help me

in the sky, right about there.

And then blacks come down.

Shadows I'll probably bring up.

It doesn't really affect the sky too much,

so it doesn't really matter here.

But I know I'm going to have to

blend the sky into the rest of the

scene, so I might as well keep the

shadows up a little bit.

Blacks down, whites up, almost always.

So there we go.

Whites up, and I can bring the exposure

back down a bit.

And highlights down.

So white point up and then bring back

a little bit of the lost details in

the highlights.

There we go.

Temperature-wise, I like it's nice and blue.

I don't want to warm up the sky.

I'm definitely going to want to warm up

the mountains, though.

So I'm going to leave the sky nice

and cool.

I'm going to actually shift this a little

bit magenta.

That tends to help bring out nice, deep,

rich blue tones.

The other thing I could do is I

could run the two-man color palette, which

comes with the preset.

So all the presets use the two-man

color palette.

Oh, yeah.

That's the money there.

But now it's a bit too much here,

so I've got to just open up a

bit.

I could also add a little bit of

a vignette.

So I'm just looking at the sky.

The color palette brings the vibrance up to

15 and the saturation to 5.

I'm going to put that back at zero.

It's a little bit too intense here right

now.

It's a little bit too blue.

Okay.

So the sky looks great.

Everything else looks like shit.

So now I'm going to come down here,

and you could have done all this in

Lightroom.

If you're in Lightroom now, you're going to

go right-click, open as smart object in

Photoshop.

If you're in ACR like this, you just

come down here and shift-click so that

it opens it as a smart object layer

in Photoshop for you.

Let's get this like this for you.

Okay.

So here's my little indicator that says that

this is a smart object layer.

So now I'm going to go Command-K,

which duplicates this smart object layer, and then

Command-comma, edit contents, which brings me back

into ACR, all my sliders right where I

left them.

Had you started in Lightroom, at this point

now you'd be here in ACR just like

me.

Okay.

So now if I want to move into

the mountains next, okay, I can adjust any

of these sliders, or I could just reset

it right back to straight out of camera

and adjust from there.

Okay.

So let's do that in this case.

If I'm just looking at the mountains, this

is where I'm going to look.

I'm going to focus on this area here

and ignore the sky.

So it's too bright.

I'm going to darken it down.

Can I get a white balance off the

snow there?

No, it's too bright.

Nope, that doesn't work.

So I'm going to eyeball it on the

temperature.

I want to warm it up.

There we go.

Nice, warm light on those rocks.

And drop the exposure down a bit more.

Okay.

And then I'm going to drop the blocks,

not too much, right about there.

Just eyeballing it right here, guys.

Okay.

I'm going to shift this a little bit

in magenta.

And lights up, highlights down.

Texture up.

Because the rock bands is bringing out those

rock bands.

And clarity, too.

Yes.

Clarity.

It kills the sky, but it really helps

bring out the detail in these rock bands.

The exposure a bit.

I'm going to lift the shadows up.

That helps.

Okay.

And I'm going to warm it up a

bit more.

And what I do, guys, when I'm working

on subsequent layers now, is I'll intentionally go

a little bit too far.

And I'll show you why in a second.

Because I know that when I go back,

I can blend it in and feather it

in as much or little as I want.

So if I go too far intentionally, that

allows me to have more than enough room

to go, but I don't have to go

that far.

I can throttle it back.

Okay.

So I'm liking the way the mountains look.

The sky doesn't look as good as it

did, but the mountains are great.

So at this point now, I'll lift the

vibrance up a bit, and I'll try the

two-man palette.

No, I'm going to leave it alone.

Okay.

I'm going to click okay.

All right.

Here we go.

So there's the mountain layer.

There's the sky layer.

Okay.

So I've got the mountain layer on top

of it here.

So what I'm going to do, first of

all, let's zoom in a bit for you.

There we go.

Okay.

What I'm going to do is I'm going

to put a layer mask.

Okay, white layer mask.

I could actually let's start from the sky.

So black layer mask.

I could go B for brush, right, and

I could come in here with my brush,

and I could paint it like this.

But you see how time-consuming and painstaking

it would be to make this nice, natural

-looking?

There's a leg in the brush because of

the streaming here, so it doesn't come in

as fast as it would normally.

But let's look at that.

So you guys can see.

Okay.

Not bad, but you can see my brush

work, right?

So then I could go in here, and

I could take the black brush, and I

could try to throttle it back.

But that's going to take me a while

to do it that way.

Or I could do G for gradient, and

I just use a linear gradient and go

like this.

That's not bad.

There's the gradient that I just drew.

Or in a situation like this, because the

sky and the mountains, all the pixels are

so drastically different, it's easy for me to

use that little trick to get at least

a head start on a nice mask selection

through here.

So what I do on a white mask,

again, is go Select, Color Range.

Here's my eyedropper.

I'm going to click on the sky.

There we go.

And a little plus.

Add these pixels up there.

Control the fuzziness slider.

Finish.

Okay.

Click okay.

So let's look at that mask.

Right on.

B for brush.

I'm just going to finish the job.

White brush down here, and

black brush up here.

Okay, let's zoom right in there and see

what this looks like.

You see how it looks too perfect?

All right.

So I'm going to go Filter, Blur, Gaussian

Blur.

All right.

And I'm just going to blur the mask.

So from that to that.

Just enough so that it's not so cut

out looking.

Okay.

Look here.

We're going from that to that.

So we've got a nice selection.

And at this point now, remember I said

I intentionally go too far?

One of the reasons is because I've got

this opacity slider here.

So if I decide, you know what, that's

too drastic, I can always throttle that back.

So this is entirely off.

That's entirely on.

And if I want to just find the

sweet spot, I can dial that in like

that.

Okay.

And then at this point, of course, if

I feel like, you know what, the sky

is not quite right, I can go to

any of these layers.

So I'm going to the sky one now.

And I'm just going to make this.

I'm going to just try the Amarone preset

on it actually.

Try that instead.

That's actually pretty good.

Okay.

So it was just too intense.

There.

That's better on the sky.

Okay.

And then the mountains, same thing.

I could come into the mountain layer at

this point.

And I could say, you know what, I

want more texture, more clarity on those mountains.

I want to warm them up a little

bit more.

Or I want to drop the highlights and

the exposure a little bit more.

Okay.

Click okay.

Okay.

I actually don't like that.

I'm going to undo it.

But just this is the start of seeing

the potential here as we start to get

more and more local areas.

In Lightroom with adjustment brushes, it would be

very difficult, especially once you get four or

five or six or seven or 12 different

local areas to go back and tweak the

settings on all those adjustment brushes with the

same amount of control that you can have

here.

Right?

I can go back and tweak any of

the settings on any of the layers.

And I can go and I can tweak

any of the masks.

Right?

With brushes and gradients.

Okay.

So I'll just do one more quick one.

I'll duplicate the mountain layer.

Command K.

Command comma.

And now let's just do a quick and

dirty layer for this reflection area.

So I'm just going to brighten it up.

Okay.

Drop those shadows a bit.

Okay.

So I'm looking down here.

Blacks.

Shadows.

Exposure up.

Okay.

And I get a little bit of a

net on there.

All right.

Let's say we like that.

Now, when I duplicated it, it brings the

layer mask with it.

Right?

So it's applying the same layer mask to

that.

And that looks brutal.

So we can't use that.

So we've got to get rid of that

layer mask.

Okay.

And what I'm going to do is I'm

going to use the gradient, linear gradient.

And we're going to go off to on.

Like that.

There we go.

So that's the mask that we just created.

Okay.

Like that.

And then, of course, I could bring in

my brush.

And I could say, no, I don't want

to brighten that up too much.

Or this.

Right?

And we can really finesse this mask.

Right?

And then I can go and I can

change the temperature.

And I can do another layer for my

red jacket, for example.

And go from there.

Okay.

Okay.

So this would be a good point to

check in with questions.

Okay.

So first off, just to kind of address

a lot of the questions.

People are, you know, asking about the differences

between Photoshop and Lightroom.

You know, it seems that there's some consensus

that most of this can be done.

But with or without certain things affecting it.

You use Photoshop.

Have you used Lightroom to do these kinds

of edits?

To the extent that I'm showing you here.

We've only done two layers here.

This image that we're looking at right now

on the screen.

I probably do ten.

Probably ten different layers.

So the rock band, the highlights, the shadows

in the trees.

The reflection itself.

The sky in the reflection and the mountains

in the reflection.

The rocks in the foreground.

My jacket.

My skin sort of thing.

So essentially what I'm doing at this point.

If we go back to our order of

operations.

It's the crop and then the plan and

then the smart object layers.

With the smart object layers.

Essentially what I'm trying to do is get

the whole file.

The whole overall image globally within range.

Okay.

So everything is kind of looking the way

I want.

And the reason I'm doing it with smart

object layers.

Is because I have full latitude.

I'm working with a full 16-bit uncompressed

file.

Right.

So every time I go into ACR with

those sliders.

I've got full latitude.

Full color gamut.

Right.

Full control.

Before I do.

Before I'm actually working on any of the

pixels in Photoshop.

Okay.

In Lightroom.

Yes.

Every single thing that I'm showing you right

now.

Can be done in Lightroom with adjustment brushes.

And if you've only got two or three

or four or five local areas to deal

with.

And you don't have to be super precise.

You know, masks and brushwork.

Then you can absolutely do it.

Much faster in Lightroom.

But once you start to get more than

a few local areas.

And, or you're starting to get into precise

brushwork that you need to do.

It becomes much more challenging and cumbersome to

be able to replicate this in Lightroom.

Yes, it can be done.

But good luck.

Trying to figure out which brush was where

and how can I now change the brushwork

and how can I go in and change

the settings on that brush?

And, and you'll see when we get into

some examples where we're taking it into the

subsequent steps.

Where this just gives you so much more

control and flexibility.

Another question that, that some people were confused

about is at what step in, in this

or what stage is image salon edits involved?

You opened up a raw file.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if we go back to our overall

workflow, every, all the deliverables go to the

image salon.

And then the image salon sends us back

basically the sidecar, the XMP files, and then

those get imported into the Lightroom catalog.

When Erica goes through the Lightroom catalog, looking

at the image salon edits, doing her tweaks

and her crops, she's flagging the favorites and

putting them into that subfolder for me.

So I have the image salons edit right

there in front of me.

So I can piggyback on that edit or

I can start over.

Sometimes I just, I start with, with her

edit.

The image salons edit, I can use their

brushwork and I can do this process going

from there or I'll just go in a

different direction.

I'll start from scratch.

Okay.

So just to clarify what you did today

was completely blank, slight, no image salon edits.

If you had opened that in those in

camera, they would show, correct?

Would they not show there?

Yes.

If I, if I open the, if I

open the image in camera raw with the

image salons edit, all the sliders will be

just, and the brushwork would be on the

file just like in Lightroom.

One question is, you know, they're wanting to

know, you do these for the artisan edits,

but what about the rest of the images?

The rest of the, yeah.

So if we just go back, I'll just,

I'll just refresh the workflow explanation.

Again, the rest of the images get the

image salon edit.

So the image salon edits it basic plus

level, which is overall exposure, color correction, white

balance, local dodging and burning to our guidance

and specifications.

Then Erica crops, dodges and burns and tweaks

from there to get everything up to our

deliverable standard for our clients.

That's what that's, that's everything else.

What I'm showing you here is then above

and beyond that for a handful of images

per wedding, 50 to a hundred, depending on

the, depending on the wedding.

And to further that, is there a difference,

you know, in the client's eyes to those

images versus these artisan edits?

No, in my eyes, yes.

In, you know, a discerning photographer's eyes who's

looking at yes.

Most of our clients know, and we sent

you a full gallery so you can, you

can see what it looks like there.

That's a mix of the two tiers of

editing for us.

You can see it right there.

Okay.

It's a question.

Would it be safe to say you choose

the breakdown of the image from farthest to

closest by identifying the brightest spot in each

section to include in the first.

Kind of.

Kind of.

Usually I'll pick the largest area and get

that looking where I want it to be.

And then I'll go into the smaller areas.

But no, I don't follow any kind of

rules or formulas in that respect.

And sometimes an environmental shot will start farthest

from the camera.

Just to keep it, keep it.

Keep track of it in my head and

then work towards through the landscape, towards me,

towards the subject.

But in terms of the sliders, I'm just

eyeballing it to look.

What I feel visually looks the most impactful.

Finding that sweet spot.

So.

Yeah.

I just want to remind everybody, some of

the questions that are coming in are for,

you know, clarification on some things.

And some of, some of this, I'm just

want to.

They will be in, in the rewatch, watching

it with the PDF side-by-side will

be much more helpful than asking you to

go over technique.

Yeah.

In terms of like, if it's something that

I already showed.

Keep in mind that I've written, I've described

it as best I can in the document

for you to go and practice it and

learn it yourself at your own speed with

your own raw files.

Okay.

And I've been reminding people that your presets

are available and develop.

Is, is, are you planning on going through

what are in your presets or is this

kind of just.

I don't know.

I kind of already did when I showed

you each of the presets.

There's five.

There's I'll just do it right now.

Again, for you.

There's five of them.

We've got.

The double IPA is kind of our go

-to for, for skin tones.

The Amarone is our go-to for big

environmental images with lots of earth and sky

and water type things.

And then we've got.

So those, those are the three main ones.

And then, and then we've got.

The espresso is our go-to for black

and white.

And then the margarita and the Jaeger bomb.

We created those ones for our dance floors.

So the color and black and white for

our dance floor with off-camera lighting, obviously.

Okay.

So they're like really punch you kind of

over the top ish, but they work for

us and our lighting on, on the dance

floor.

So that's, but you, you, with any preset,

you just, you have to understand that they're

not going to make every image look the

way you want.

They don't for us, right.

You have to kind of eyeball it and

then tweak it from there.

So, but usually we'll start with one of

those and then blend them using the process

I'm showing you here and dodge and burn

locally.

Okay.

I think that's it for now.

And just a reminder that we may, we're

going to have more question opportunities.

So if something doesn't get covered.

So let's I'd like to show a black

and white as well.

So let's, let's do this.

Camera defaults.

Here we go.

Okay.

Straight over the camera.

Yeah.

All right.

So this one, let's brighten it up.

So we've got it properly exposed.

There we go.

Okay.

So this would be the neutralizing of it,

get it neutralized.

And then we could test some of the

presets.

So Amarone get a feel for the color

potential.

And then right away, I'm like, no, we

got to go black and white on this

one.

Okay.

It's way more punchy and dramatic and high

contrast.

So I'm just going to run the Espresso

preset on that one.

Okay.

This is an example of a photo where

all I need are like a couple layers

at best.

You could totally just do this one, you

know, in Lightroom because I would run the

Espresso like this.

And then I would basically use our dodging

brush, which comes with the preset pack and

I would dodge this area up and then

I use the burn brush and I just

burn this area down and then it would

be all within range.

Okay.

But let's just do this one with the

process that we've been learning here.

Okay.

So I'm going to open the image like

that.

Okay.

And then I'm going to essentially do one

smart object layer to burn it down and

one smart object where to dodge it up.

So let's burn it down.

I'm looking at this highlight area here.

There we go.

So that's going to be my burn layer.

Another way of thinking about the smart objects

layers at this point is it's kind of

like, especially when you're doing multiple local areas,

it's kind of like manual HDR. Okay.

So HDR usually looks like shit.

You're looking to run an algorithm to get

everything within the right dynamic range.

Essentially that's what we're doing, but we're doing

it, hand crafting it right.

Manually dodging and burning and painting it in

to get everything within the right range.

And then we finish it after.

Okay.

That's all the, all the final steps.

So here we go.

We're going to go take a brush and

we're going to burn down these areas.

Yeah.

The webcam, the microphone, the zoom, everything's definitely

slowing down the brush work here.

Okay.

So burning down some areas there.

Okay.

And then I'll come back and we'll dodge.

So I'm looking at this area down here,

put that up on top, black layer mask.

And now I'm going to use that layer

to dodge up these areas.

So basically just getting everything within range.

Okay.

And then once I, once I'm happy with

the whole photo that everything is looking like

as much potential as I can get out

of those sliders, that's the point at which

I've moved to the next step in my

order of operations.

Right?

So we cropped, we came up with a

plan.

We use smart object layers.

Okay.

Or maybe you just use adjustment brushes in

Lightroom.

Okay.

Then I do adjustment layers.

Okay.

Same thing in Lightroom.

You could just do more, you know, more

adjustment brushes.

Okay.

So in Photoshop I've used adjustment layers.

So, and at this point, I would flatten

it and save it.

Okay.

Or actually before I flatten it, save it

with all those layers intact.

I'll show you guys some examples towards the

end where I've saved some files with all

the layers intact, where I've done like 15

different local layers.

You want to save it at that point,

save as you go.

First of all, because Photoshop quits unexpectedly, but

if that way, if you ever want to

go back and tweak any of those layers,

especially if you've painstakingly created some layer masks

that have been time consuming is you can

go back then and tweak things from there.

Once you flatten it, you can't go back.

But at some point you'll want to go

and delete those massive Photoshop documents because you

know, if you've got 10 different layers saved

as smart object layers, that's like hundreds of

hundreds of megabytes of information.

So eventually you'll have to commit and get

rid of those.

So I'd save it here and then I'd

flatten it.

And then I just use adjustment layers in

Photoshop.

Okay.

And essentially all I'm doing at this point

is dodging and burning.

Okay.

And the way that I dodge and burn

in Photoshop, Photoshop itself is, is an insane

piece of software that the stuff you can

do in Photoshop is crazy.

And I use like, I use like 1

% of what Photoshop can do.

Okay.

And that's what I'm going to show you

guys today is kind of the 1%

that I, that I use, but you know,

Photoshop it's, you know, sitting here, I feel

like I'm sitting in the cockpit of a

fighter jet, not knowing how to fly.

This software can do incredible things.

Okay.

But what I do is if I want

to dodge and burn from here now at

this point is I just use a curves

adjustment.

You can use levels, same thing, but I

use, I use curves.

And so if I want to burn again,

rather than using the burning tool curves is

what I'll use.

So if I want to burn, I'll just

drop down like that, grab the curve in

the middle and, or I'll grab the bottom

black point here like that.

Okay.

And again, I always kind of intentionally go

farther than I would need.

Right.

And then black layer mask here B for

brush.

I would use that to burn areas that

need to be burned down here.

I just kind of eyeballing it.

It's bad.

I'm probably going to take care of that.

Once I get into the image cleanup section,

get rid of those distractions.

Okay.

So there's the brush work we just did.

And then for dodging, I do the opposite.

So dodging, I basically drag the midpoint up

and or the white point up like that.

She's going to bring the black point down

a bit to keep the shadows deep.

There we go.

Okay.

And so then I'll paint that white brush

on a black mask and I can use

that to dodge some areas up.

I just kind of eyeballing it.

All right.

So then if we go back to the

order of operations, next is after adjustment layers

is image cleanup.

No smart filters.

Okay.

Smart filters.

I want to show you guys what this

is and I'll pick a better image.

Let's do this one.

Let's open this one up.

Okay.

So here we go.

Let's reset this to camera by default.

Okay.

So just what we'll do as a quick

refresher to bring us up to where we

are is I'll go through quick and dirty.

Just those first few steps up to the

smart filter section.

Okay.

So right away I see two different areas,

right?

I've got the stained glass.

I've got the couple.

Okay.

So I'm going to look at the couple

first and I'm going to drop them down.

Right?

So they're exposed to the highlights there.

I'm going to warm them up.

There we go.

That's better.

Drop the blacks.

Shadows up or down.

Not really sure.

I'm just going to leave it in the

middle.

Lights up a bit.

Highlights down a bit.

Exposure back up.

Just looking at the couple.

A little bit of clarity.

Yes, that helps.

Some vibrance.

Okay.

Good enough.

So I'm going to open that one as

a smart object layer.

There we go.

All right.

So now I'm going to go and I'm

going to create it.

I'm going to blend it into another area

here for the stained glass.

Light room.

Just a quick adjustment brush to apply all

these changes for the stained glass.

What I'm going to do is I'm going

to brighten it up.

Cool it off.

Punch the vibrance.

More clarity.

Yeah.

And sometimes when you end up adding this

much clarity and brightening it up this much,

if you start to get noise, that's when

I'll come in here and just look at

actual pixels.

And if noise is an issue, it just

come into the noise controls.

I usually leave sharpening at the default.

I don't add any sharpening.

But what I almost always do is crank

the masking.

Okay.

I'll just zoom out here so you can

see what this does.

I usually crank this way up there.

The reason for that, what that does, you

have to option click on it.

And then that shows you what it's doing

is essentially applying a mask so that the

sharpening, whatever you put this at, it only

sharpens the areas that are white.

So if I crank it up there, it's

only going to sharpen the pixels that are

on the edges.

It basically finds the edges for you.

If I keep it down here, it sharpens

all the pixels.

Even like the ones up in the sky.

So you can't push sharpening as far that

way.

So I usually crank that up.

And then the luminance is the one that

I'll use to smooth out noise.

And I just eyeball it.

You want to go as far as you

can before you start to lose sharpness and

detail.

Alright.

So there's my stained glass layer.

And this would just be a quick gradient.

Let's get a mask on there.

G for gradient.

Go on to off.

We'll just hide it in there.

Okay.

There we go.

And you know what?

Just quickly looking at this stained glass.

I'm going to do another one where I

drop the exposure.

The highlights for the halo.

It's overexposed.

So I'm going to flip it to a

black layer mask.

B for brush.

And I'm just going to bring back some

of that detail in there.

And if I go back down to my

couple here, I realize that I want them

to be warmer.

There we go.

And what I'd also do is I'd do

another layer for this blown out highlight on

the dress.

I'm going to drop that down.

And I intentionally go too far.

And then I just paint it in 10

% flow.

Just gently here.

Because I want the eyes to go up

here first, not down there.

Okay.

So that helps on the dress.

That helps on the halo.

So you can go as far as you

want at this point, right?

Maybe what I'd do actually is stained glass.

I'm going to duplicate the stained glass layer

and brighten it up even more.

Keep the shadows low.

The blacks low.

And I'm going to do that for this

part of the stained glass because it's a

little darker.

So B for brush.

There we go.

Okay.

So now I've got everything within range.

Okay.

At this point then I could use some

adjustment layers.

I could use some curves.

But what I'm going to do is I'm

going to go into smart filters and show

you guys what that is.

So a smart filter, it's brand new in

the latest version of Photoshop.

So I just discovered it and started to

use it.

What it does is so now that I've

flattened this, this is now a Photoshop document.

Okay.

So everything I've done up to this point

has been completely lossless, uncompressed, full dammit, full

latitude from my original raw 16-bit file.

Right.

Now at this point I'm actually working on

pixels now.

I've got it flattened.

It's now a Photoshop document in Photoshop.

What I can do is I can duplicate

this layer.

That's just command J duplicates it.

Okay.

Pops it on top.

But this isn't a smart object layer anymore.

Right.

There's no little smart object indicator there.

Okay.

So on this new layer what I can

do, it's up here in filter.

This is brand new.

Go filter, camera raw filter.

And so I've memorized that shortcut because I

do it all the time.

Camera raw filter.

What that does is it brings you into

ACR with your photo looking just the way

you've got it all optimized.

Right.

All your smart objects.

It's flattened now.

It looks just like that.

But opens it up here with all the

sliders in the middle now.

Okay.

Everything's in the middle.

So you now, you don't have the same

latitude.

Right.

You don't have the full color gamut anymore.

This isn't a full 16-bit raw file

anymore.

But you still have access to all these

sliders.

And they impact the file differently now because

it is a flattened Photoshop document.

But you can do things now to the

photo that you couldn't do in Photoshop.

For example, adding texture or clarity or dehaze

or shifting color temperatures, shifting HSL sliders in

here, right, on different channels.

Like all that stuff could be done in

Photoshop.

But you'd have to be a Photoshop wizard.

But we all already know all these sliders.

Right.

We're all familiar with these.

These are the exact same sliders that we

have in Lightroom.

So we can do things at this point

to push things even further.

Okay.

For example, let's say you were doing something

where maybe you decided you wanted even more

than 100% clarity on something.

Right.

Or you couldn't go far enough with the

slider can only go so far.

This allows you then to go that much

farther again because now the sliders are dead

center.

Okay.

So, for example, what I could do at

this point, and this is what I'll sometimes

do when I'm trying to shift color temperatures

and bring as much color potential out of

the file as possible, even more than I

can get in Lightroom or in the raw

file, is I'll do something like this with

a raw filter.

So let's look at the stained glass.

And let's say, well, we've got blues, we've

got purples, we've got greens, we've got reds.

I can pull all that potential out by

shifting the color temperature.

Okay.

Which is very different than just cranking the

saturation.

Okay.

So what I'm going to do is let's

look at the blues first.

And let's just go all the way over

here with the blues.

Okay.

Click OK.

All right.

So then what I can do is I

can put a white layer mask on that

and I can do that color range trick.

Select color range.

Which gives me the little eyedropper.

And then I can come in here and

click on the blue pixels.

Invert that.

So it's, yeah, there we go.

Okay.

So now it's including the blue pixels only.

And I can turn it up to about

there.

Okay.

Let's zoom out.

Over here.

E for brush.

Because I don't want to be turning them

more blue.

Okay.

So now just the blue pixels up in

stained glass.

And what I would do is I would

filter blur, Gaussian blur, blur that mask a

little bit.

Like about that much.

A little more.

A little more.

There we go.

Okay.

There we go.

Click OK.

So let's eyeball that.

Okay.

And I'm going to take my brush and

just throttle it back in the areas where

it's too much.

It's too blue.

Okay.

So let's eyeball that.

All right.

That's good.

But I intentionally went too far.

So I'll throttle it back.

Find the sweet spot for that.

Okay.

Then I could do it again.

So I could duplicate the layer.

Do the shortcut for the smart filter.

And let's pull out the purples.

I'm going to crank the magenta.

Click OK.

Put a white layer mask.

And go select color range.

And then I'm going to pick these magenta

tones in here.

Turn it off on the couple.

And then filter.

Whoops.

There we go.

On the layer mask, filter, blur, Gaussian blur,

just to blur it.

Okay.

And then that's way too much.

Throttle it back.

So then I could do the same thing

for the greens.

Right?

And the oranges.

And so that's one method for really pulling

out the color potential without just cranking saturation

or vibrance.

It's actually shifting the color temperature, the differential

in color temperature between the various pixels.

So there's all kinds of things that you

could do with those smart filters.

Right?

I could look in here on the couple

and say, you know what?

I want to bring out the texture and

the clarity on her veil and her dress.

Okay.

And a lot of this stuff you could

just keep going with your smart object layers

in the beginning steps.

Right?

You could do a layer for her veil,

a layer for her dress, a layer for

her skin, a layer for each color up

in the stained glass.

But at some point it's much easier to

just flatten it and then do it like

this.

So if I'm looking at her veil there,

I could say, you know what?

I want to bring the clarity up like

that and the texture up a little bit.

Okay.

Click okay.

And then I'll just paint that in on

her veil and her dress.

Eyeball it.

You can throttle it back.

Okay.

So you can just keep tasting, keep adding

salt, keep, you know, you can take this

as far as you want sort of thing.

So that's the smart filter stage of the

process.

What I'm going to move into next, I'll

break for questions here in a sec, is

the next step in the order of operations,

which is image cleanup.

Okay.

This is the point at which now I'm

going to deal with distractions and stuff like

that.

Okay.

So at this point, the entire image is

now within range.

All the colors, the dynamic range, everything is

kind of where I want it.

The last remaining steps are the image cleanup

and the final pop, the punchy pop, the

final steps.

So how are we doing for questions, guys?

We have a couple.

First one is for smart objects, do you

always flatten the image after every color temperature

change?

No, I don't.

Usually what I do when I'm working with

the smart object layers in the first steps

is I keep them all intact as I'm

going, because as soon as I flatten it,

it's no longer a smart object and can

no longer work with that full gamut.

Right.

So I keep that stack until I'm satisfied

that I no longer need to use the

full original, and then I will flatten it

at that point.

But then as I go from there with

additional adjustment layers like curves or smart filters,

where I go back in and tweak something

for a certain area using those sliders, is

I usually tend to flatten it as I

go, just because it keeps it simple and

straight in my head.

You don't have to flatten them, though.

As long as you want to have access

to them, you want to keep them intact.

Actually, I do want to show you one

other thing.

Let me go back to this.

I'm going to open this and get this

back.

And then fire questions at me, Zoe, when

I get this back.

If there's anything.

I'm just going to get this back to

where we had it real quick.

Any more questions?

Yeah.

At which point do you not destruct the

image without losing the whole 16-bit?

So in terms of quality, you're adding so

much more information and breaking down the quality.

There's no compromise in quality until I flatten

it.

So at that point, then you're now working

with a Photoshop document, right?

But until that point, it's just like in

Lightroom.

It's a full, lossless thing.

So for a lot of photographers, they'll do

the vast majority of their work in Lightroom.

And then once in a while, for some

images, they'll do some things in Photoshop that

they can't do in Lightroom, like some sort

of a cloning job that's too complex for

Lightroom.

So at that point is when you flatten

it and go and finish it in Photoshop,

which is the same for me.

Right.

Is there a stop-tasting-the-soup moment

for you, distinct moment?

Or when do you put your mouse down?

When it feels right.

It's a feeling thing.

It's a visual thing.

It's once I'm happy with it, once I'm

satisfied with it, once I'm no longer distracted

by things that aren't.

Once I feel like, and that's an experience

thing that just comes with mileage.

You get to the point where you feel

like, yeah, now this looks like I've achieved

the potential.

You start to learn to see when there's

still more potential within a file to pull

out of it or not.

But for me, it's just a visual when

it feels right.

Sometimes that's three minutes into the job.

Sometimes that's three hours into the job.

I would say on my artisan edits, I

average 30 to 60 minutes per edit.

Do you have a point in this process

that you delete the Photoshop files after you've

done this part?

Usually after we've delivered the wedding.

I'll keep it.

Sometimes I'll edit away for 45 minutes.

I've got multiple layers.

You start to get to the point where

you just lost it.

You're too close to it.

You can't see things.

That's the point at which I'll go walk

away and come back with fresh eyes.

Or I'll call Erica in and Erica will

come look and be like, whoa, no, you

totally killed that.

That's too far.

Until I'm happy that both Erica and I

feel like, yeah, this is what we want

to look like.

I keep access to those layers so that

I can go and tweak.

But then once we're happy, yes, this looks

the way we want it to look, then

we get rid of those.

What I want to show you guys right

now at this point is I just kind

of got back to where we were with

this one.

We've got the sky layer and the mountain

layer.

And then I do another one for the

reflection.

Get all your layers right.

On the topic of when to flatten and

when to commit.

If I've, you know, imagine if I painstakingly

painted this mask, if I'd spent like 15

minutes creating a mask that took a lot

of time.

If there's anything else that I'm going to

want to do to that local area, I'll

do that before I flatten it to not

have to rebuild that layer mask again.

So, for example, I'm going to show you

guys this in a second.

But what I'll often do to the images

is apply a big global contrast boost like

this, a big S curve.

And it's over the top.

It's too much.

And it never works on the whole image.

But let's say I just wanted it on

the sky.

If I turn it on and off, the

sky is already too intense anyways.

But just imagine that I want to apply

that only to the sky.

I've already created this layer mask down here.

So I can click on the layer mask,

option click on the layer mask, and drag

it up onto there.

And in that case, it's the reverse of

what I want.

So I could just command I, which is

invert, and that inverts it.

So now there's my mask.

So I've applied that big contrast boost and

kept it only on the sky.

So just keep that in mind.

Once you've created a layer mask, if it's

taking you a long time to do that,

consider if there's anything else you want to

do before you flatten it.

How are we doing for questions, Zoe?

Just one more.

Do you ever use frequency separation for close

portraits?

Let's talk about that once we get into

skin stuff.

Because that's a skin smoothing type thing.

Quick answer is no, but we'll explore that

in detail in a second.

Let's move into image cleanup now.

This is the point at which we deal

with scratches, blemishes if it's skin, dust, distracting

elements.

We're going to use this one as an

example because clearly we had a big distracting

element behind there that maybe most people care

less about, and they could probably care less

about.

But I obsessed over it, and I decided

to move that rock.

So that's not something you can pull off

in Lightroom, guys.

This is an example of something where you're

going to need the power of something much

more powerful than Lightroom to do.

But we'll start with just straightforward problems that

we want to deal with.

But let's open this image.

I'm just going to do a quick –

let's get this straight out of camera.

There it is.

I'm just going to run a quick and

dirty preset on this.

Let's do the Amarone.

Okay, good enough.

Let's warm up a bit.

Okay, here we go.

I'm just going to open this, and I'm

just going to open it as a normal

Photoshop document.

We're not going to do the whole smart

object thing because I just want to talk

about how we can deal with distractions.

There we go.

And now I do have too much light

coming in here to see it.

That's better.

Okay, so let's zoom in here so we

can look at what's going on here.

If I've got something distracting, let's say this

rock.

Let's pretend this rock was a big distracting

thing for us.

It's not, obviously, but just so we can

look at the different tools or methods that

we can eliminate distractions in Photoshop or Lightroom.

A lot of these simple removals can be

done in Lightroom.

The easiest way to deal with a distraction

is to crop it out or to burn

it down.

We can burn it down.

If that doesn't work, then we have to

look at how do we remove it or

replace it.

One of the easiest tools to use is

this one.

It's called the Spot Healing Brush.

That gives you a little brush like this,

and Lightroom's got something like this too in

ACR.

If you've got scratches or dust marks on

your sensor or blemishes, it gives you a

little clicker like this.

Let's pretend it's this rock here.

We can come down like this, draw around

it, and it's gone.

Let's see if it works on this rock.

Not great there.

Always do it on a new layer.

There we go.

Turn it on and off, and you can

see it.

Maybe that's not the best tool for that

job there.

The other area that that Healing Brush works

well is if you've got signposts, small exit

signs, or if you've got a power line

or something.

Let's say that this was a power line.

You just come down here, click, drag, and

follow the power line.

There we go.

It does a pretty good job.

With power lines or signposts, learn this trick.

You can go to one end of the

power line, click, and then go to the

other end and shift-click.

It extrapolates a straight line for you.

Instead of having to follow a whole power

line, you can do that to save a

lot of time there.

If that doesn't work, the Healing Brush doesn't

work, another option is this one, which is

your patch tool.

Let's try that rock again with the patch

tool.

On a new layer, the way the patch

tool works is it gives you a little

clicker.

You can draw around your distracting element.

Then you can click and drag to an

area, a similar area to sample from.

Let's try that.

That's pretty good.

That did a pretty good job there.

I'm going to show you when we get

into skin where that patch tool can help

you deal with blemishes and glare on the

skin.

You've got the patch tool, the clone tool,

or the healing tool.

Then you've got S for the healing stamp

tool.

That's another option.

How are we doing, Zoe?

I just got a message that my internet

is unstable.

Am I still coming through?

You're fine on my end.

All right, cool.

There you go.

You're coming through clear, Lenny.

Right on.

Thanks, guys.

Here's the healing.

No, what is this?

Clone stamp.

The way clone stamp works is on my

new layer, you option click an area.

Let's option click here.

Then you basically paint it in, and it

samples from where you option clicked.

That does a pretty good job.

That's another option.

Delete that.

Failing that, if that doesn't work, because sometimes

that won't work, let's find an area where

let's go maybe this girl here.

Any of those methods are going to be

pretty difficult.

Let's try.

Someone's mic is on.

Let's see how this works.

Not bad up in the water, but you

see here it didn't do a very good

job.

Failing that, you can try your content fill

aware.

When I use content fill aware, I usually

select this polygonal lasso tool.

Then come down here and basically click, click,

click, click, click around the distraction.

Now, this is going to be really hard.

It's not going to do a good job

around the head for sure.

I have to fix that after.

Then shift F5 is the shortcut for content

aware.

You need to have this one selected, content

aware.

Then click OK.

It's going to run an algorithm to try

to sample it for you.

I could do the same thing up here.

Pretty good.

If none of those options work, there are

cases where, for example, if we wanted to

remove this rock from behind them, none of

those options are going to work for that.

That's a super complex cloning job.

Let's get rid of that.

Let's see how we would remove this.

The way I figured out all of this

stuff, the way I've learned editing in Photoshop

is just coming up against problems.

Then YouTube searching and figuring out different tools

and methods.

It was just problem solving that I figured

out this way to do this job.

The way I do it, and there's probably

a much easier, faster way to do it.

Any of the selection tools, like trying to

select an area with the magnetized selection tools,

I can't figure out how to get them

to work and be natural and look natural

and believable.

I found a different method.

What I do is duplicate the layer.

I've got a new layer on top of

the original.

Then what I do is I put a

black layer mask on there.

Option, black layer mask.

Now what I'm going to do is I'm

going to paint with a white brush.

B for brush, 100%.

This is just a rough, coarse brushwork in

an area that I can use to replace

this area.

I'm going to sample from up here.

I'm going to take my white brush.

I'm just going to click and paint there.

I'll show you.

There it is.

That doesn't have to be super precise.

Then what I'm going to do now is

I'm going to move the top layer to

line up that part of the ocean on

top of the rock.

What I'm going to do is on this

upper layer now is I'm going to go

command T, which is edit, transform.

Edit, transform.

That allows me to click and move that

layer, which is on top.

Remember, I already created this layer mask so

that I can eyeball where that part of

the ocean is.

Command T, and I click, and I just

drag.

Now it's dragging that whole layer.

The layer mask is showing me where it

is.

I'm going to plop that into there-ish.

I'm just eyeballing it.

If you want to be super OCD here,

at this point you can click and rotate

to get the waves to line up.

Or I can skew it in any direction.

I could enlarge it or shrink it.

I can do various things to try to

get that area to line up for me.

Then just hit return.

Now it's in position.

The new layer is in position.

I can't use this mask.

Now I need to change that mask into

a super precise mask.

I'm going to delete the mask.

Now you can see what's happened there.

The entire layer has been moved into position

because I don't have a layer mask anymore.

I'm going to put a black layer mask.

Now I'm going to paint with a white

brush.

Right in here.

Super precise.

100%.

Still soft, though.

100%.

Did I change my...

Has my smoothing changed?

I can't see it.

Still 100?

Okay.

It must just be the leg.

100% opacity, 100% flow, and 100

% smoothing.

I'm eyeballing it now.

Does this make sense what's happening here?

Yeah, we can see it.

Yeah.

It's super leggy.

But really, this is the only way I

could imagine to create a layer mask that's

going to work here and look natural.

Basically, I just have to take the time

to get the point.

That's going to take me 20 minutes to

paint that.

So that's how you can remove distractions from

complicated areas like that.

That's the same technique that I use, like,

let's say...

Let's see.

Here we go.

Let me just open this.

Let's say that this dress was clipped, like,

all the way up like this.

Let's do it like this.

Here we go.

Let's say that we overexposed it, and part

of this dress was totally blown out.

So what I'm going to do is I'm

just going to open this in Photoshop, and

let's just make sure that it is indeed

clipped up there.

I'll show you how you can get it

back.

Is it clipped?

It's not even clipped.

I'm going to clip it entirely so that

you guys can see.

What we'll do is we'll go like this,

open it, and then I'm just going to

intentionally blow out part of it to the

point that it's totally clipped.

So I'm just pretending that it was like

this so that you guys can see the

process and how you can recover clipped highlights

in a situation like that.

Okay, so that is totally clipped.

The whites are unrecoverable, right?

Totally clipped up there.

So I'll use basically the same method I

just showed you to recover those kind of

highlights.

So what I do is I duplicate the

layer, put a black layer mask on it,

100% brush, and then I paint in

an area that's not clipped that I'm going

to use to replace the clipped area.

Okay, so I just paint it up there.

And then Command-T, Edit Transform, slide this

into position, rotate it so that the fabric

lines up.

Maybe I want to increase the size a

bit.

Okay, eyeball it.

There we go.

Hit Return.

And then you've got to get it back

to a black layer mask, B for brush,

and then just feather it in at 10%.

So that's an option for if you've got

blown out areas, you can try to recover

it.

So any questions about cloning, content-aware, removing

distractions, other than skin stuff?

Because next we're going to do a photo

with lots of skin problems and deal with

that then.

Any questions about cloning at this point?

Yep.

So one question is regarding the beach photo.

Yes.

To paint out the rock, would you then

do that for every shot that you give

them of that perspective?

No, we only give them one shot of

that perspective.

So let's look at that photo.

That's all they need.

They don't need 12 other photos from this

perspective.

They're getting a couple hundred photos from their

ceremony.

They don't need 12 from up here.

They don't need four from up here.

If there was something very different from up

here that was important and that they would

appreciate having, then yeah, we'd give it to

them.

But if it's worth delivering, I'm going to

take the time to make it look as

good as I can make it look.

But no, of course not.

That wouldn't be something I would do on

more than one photo.

Okay.

Regarding the rock, in terms of the way

that you edited that out, would you not

just cut it out and brush meticulously?

What do they mean by cut it out?

I'm not sure what they mean by that.

Nicholas, can you maybe expand on that?

I would do it just the way I

did it, which is the way I showed

it to you, because I don't know of

any better way to do it precisely enough.

There are Photoshop masters, though, who can do

precise selections with all those tools and probably

have a much more efficient way to do

it.

But for a job like that, the only

way I know how to do it is

to super precise brushwork.

Next question.

How do you deal with blown highlights in

party photos?

Well, the same way.

I mean, the blown highlights in here, that's

blown down there.

It depends if it's a problem, right?

If it's a problem that's unrecoverable, undeliverable, we

won't deliver it.

But if it's close enough and we want

to work it and it's important that we

deliver it, then I just deal with it

with all the methods I've shown you so

far.

So we cover the detail as much as

possible with the local smart object layers and

or dodging and burning.

And then if it's still not there, it's

still blown out, then I would do just

like I showed you with the dress.

Is there an area that I can drag

into position to kind of try to fake

it and bring it back or not?

So it depends.

In an example like this, let me show

you guys a couple tricks here.

So here's the edit.

Here's the raw file.

Let's open the raw file.

And let's do crop.

Crop it.

We will fix the color temperature because it's

way off.

There we go.

And then let's neutralize it.

And let's just run Margarita.

Margarita is close except for the skin.

So there we go.

That's not great.

But quick and dirty, I just want to

show you guys something.

So let's open this one just as is.

Here's a big distracting highlight.

There's a big distracting highlight.

I don't know that I would remove them.

But a couple tricks.

One is duplicate your layer.

If you've got something like that, like a

big flary thing, this is one of the

times that I will use the liquify tool.

I'll go filter, liquify.

And then I come in here and use

the pinch tool, which is this one.

Or sorry, yeah, the pinch tool, this one

here.

And you can come in here with that

pinch tool and you can click and do

that sort of thing.

Click okay.

And see what we did there?

And if that's too much, we can throttle

that back.

Another thing you can use liquify for blown

out highlights is a glitz.

What I'm going to do, I'm just going

to turn something into a blown out highlight

for you guys.

Look at his shoe.

There we go.

See his shoe there?

Let's pretend that that is rim light.

So that's rim light.

And you know with rim light, sometimes you

get areas that are blown out, like underneath

the chin, sometimes underneath the nose.

You're trying to get the rim light to

wrap all the way around.

And there's areas that are just that rim

light is too fat and blown out.

You can use the liquify tool.

Filter, liquify.

Use that same pinch tool.

So imagine if this were rim light and

we decided that this was the part underneath

the chin that was too fat and we

wanted to just thin it out.

That's where you can use that pinch tool

as well.

Does that make sense?

You can go around your rim light and

those sections that are too big, you can

pinch them down like that.

Or the areas that are too thin, you

can use the opposite one, which is the

whatever that is tool.

So that's something that you can do to

go around and try to get your rim

light more matching the way you want it

to.

I don't know how we got off on

that tangent.

Highlights on the dance floor.

One other question.

Do you generally clone after you do all

of the color layer adjustments?

Yes, back to that order of operation.

It's crop, plan, smart object layers, adjustment layers,

smart filters, then image cleanup.

So I wait until I've got everything working

the way I want, everything is in range,

I've dealt with everything as best I can

with dodging and burning and local adjustments, then

I would do the image cleanup.

Lenny, everybody is begging for a three-minute

pee break.

Okay.

Good timing.

Let's take a pee break.

We're going to get into skin stuff next,

okay?

How are you feeling?

Everything all right?

I'm good, yeah.

Yeah, I'm good.

He's going strong.

Just to write down a list of things

that I still want to show you guys.

So perspective correction.

Finger transplant.

The invisibility cloak.

Invisibility cloak is like I just showed you

with the moving the ocean to clone out

the rock.

It would be an invisibility cloak where you

need to remove yourself or your shooting partner

because you're in the reflection or something.

It's just going to be a combination of

all those methods.

Burning when and where possible.

If it's a small, easy job, it would

be just a clone stamp or a healing

brush tool.

Or if it's a more complicated job and

you felt that it was worth taking the

time to do so, you do content filler

wear or moving an area within the frame

to basically painful the top of it.

Gotcha.

Is there anything different with mirrors?

No, same thing.

Once you're on your computer looking at it,

it's just pixels now.

So whether or not those pixels were reflected

in a mirror or not, it's the same

process of cloning those pixels in or out

or burning those pixels down sort of thing.

Gotcha.

I have one more question.

How do you clone a person out like

yourself if you're overlapping another person in the

audience?

There's an image where the couple is kissing

and you are in the frame.

There's a family person in the background.

How did you do that?

That's exactly how I showed you guys with

the rock behind the couple.

In a situation like that, you'd have to

drag an area from that frame into position

and then paint it in.

But actually, I think the one that they're

referring to there was this.

Oh boy.

This one, right?

I think that's the one.

Yeah, that's the one.

There's no area of the frame that I

can drag into position to replace that.

So in this case, I've actually used another

frame.

The frame that we shot two seconds before

or two seconds after I came in front

of Erica's shot here.

And so then basically painted that on top

of this area.

That's a super complex, difficult, challenging thing that

we rarely ever do.

But in this case, by far, this was

the best shot from Erica's perspective and I

totally killed it.

So that's what we did.

Awesome.

Thanks, Lanny.

Okay.

How are we doing?

Are we back from bathroom breaks?

Looks like everyone's very happy you answered that

question.

But yeah, I think one more minute, Lanny.

One more minute.

I'm just going to get this one ready

for us here.

So we'll do the skin stuff.

And then I'm going to show you how

to correct for perspective.

I'm going to show you how to do

a finger transplant.

And I'm going to show you how to

crop outside the lines.

Then we'll get into the final pop.

The final pop steps that I do in

all our artisan edits.

And that'll be it.

Good.

Okay.

Here we go, guys.

Here's an image.

Obviously, I've only picked this one because it's

all kinds of issues with the skin that

we want to deal with, right?

We do our best, given the light, when

we're shooting.

But in this case, we've got blemishes, we've

got glare, we've got lots of challenges that

come up when there's lots of skin.

So I'm just going to show you a

couple tricks.

One is in the initial stages, during adjustment

brushes or smart object layers, is I would

do a layer for skin smoothing.

Someone asked if I ever use frequency separation.

I have, but I do it like once

every two years.

So every time I do it, I have

to go and Google YouTube tutorial on how

to use frequency separation.

It's the most powerful, best way to do

skin smoothing without losing the actual textures and

pores from the skin.

But I forget how to do it every

time it's time to go and do it

again because I do it so rarely.

So what I'll show you is what I

do for it.

So one trick is I'll do a layer.

And let's say, you know, there's part of

the skin through here.

I want to smooth it out sort of

thing is I'll do a layer for the

skin.

And these are the things I'll do is

I'll turn clarity down and texture down.

So if I'm looking in this area there.

And then in the sharpening sliders, I will

turn luminance up quite a ways.

So all those things are kind of smoothing,

smoothing pixels and getting rid of detail and

clarity.

Of course, I don't want to be doing

that to her eyes and her lips, but

in through here, it kind of helps.

So then I'll just use my brush and

paint that into the areas that I want

to smooth out.

So a black layer mask, or you could

just do this with a simple skin smoothing

adjustment brush.

Coming here gently 10 or 20 percent flow.

Just paint that into those areas.

So that would be the first step is

I would do that.

OK, I've got piano practice happening upstairs.

Give me a sec.

OK, so

then now we've got glare, we've got blemishes.

So once I get to the image distraction

part, I would basically use that healing brush

for the blemishes.

So I come up to here and I

just basically you can do this in Lightroom

to write or ACR.

So I take the time and I go

around and I do I do that and

I toggle it on and off.

And what I'll often do is throttle it

back.

In a lot of cases to leave some,

you know, I don't we don't want to

be you want to look like a porcelain

doll, right?

So I usually kind of throttle it back

to keep it natural looking.

So I do that.

And then for glare, glare here, glare up,

glare there.

I find that the patch tool works pretty

well for that.

So here's the patch tool.

So let's say that this glare, we wanted

to throttle that back.

This is distracting for us.

I would just draw around like that with

the patch tool and then drag up to

an area that looks similarish.

That looks okay.

And just let it do its thing.

Not bad.

And then throttle it back.

So I could do that down here.

I could do that up here.

This is going to be tricky.

Let's see.

Oops, I should have done that a different

way.

Probably better to do it a little at

a time.

And then I can either just throttle it

back on the sweet spot or put a

black layer mask and then paint it in

10% flow.

Just feather it in and throttle it back.

OK, so that's how I usually deal with

blemishes and glare.

Another thing that I'll do on skin is

use a smart filter.

And this is something, I don't know how

you replicate this in Lightroom or ACR.

I've only figured out how to do this

from Photoshop.

From Photoshop as a flattened Photoshop document, I

use a smart filter.

So what I'll do is duplicate the layer

and do the shortcut for smart filter.

Which takes me into ACR with all the

sliders in the middle.

So keep in mind this isn't the full

Roth file anymore.

And so the sliders behave very differently.

So what I'll do is I'll drop shadows

all the way down.

And then I'll underexpose by about a stop.

And then use highlights to bring it back

up to the right exposure.

This is in a photo with lots of

skin.

So I'm going to click OK.

And I'll toggle it on and off so

you can see the effect.

So I don't like it everywhere.

I don't like it on her eyes.

But I like it on her skin.

So what I'm going to do is just

paint.

Actually, what I do is put a white

layer mask.

And then take a black brush and just

turn it off on the areas where I

want to keep the detail.

So I'm just eyeballing it.

Painting on the eyebrows.

Back here.

Bring that back.

Let's take a look.

So there's the mask.

Just paint it.

So you see the effect there?

I just discovered that through trial and error

and playing around.

But it really smooths out the skin and

kind of like softens the transition from highlights

to shadows across the skin.

So I've started to play around with that

when I'm dealing with a lot of skin

in images.

All right.

Any questions about skin smoothing, blemishes, and that

sort of stuff?

Just one.

You wanting to know whether you used the

noise slider in Camera Raw.

Yeah.

So when I'm doing a layer just for

the skin, like I'm trying to smooth the

skin, is I turn down the texture, down

the clarity, and I up the luminance, which

is one of the noise in the noise

slider.

Yeah.

I'm just not sure if you're going to

cover this, but you had mentioned in one

of the prior sessions that you would show

how to lessen the effects of harsh flesh

on the skin.

Is that something that you're still going to

cover?

That's what we just did.

That's what you just did.

Yeah.

This happens to be natural light.

This is window light.

But, I mean, you know, if we look

back at the original of this, this is

about as challenging as it gets with skin.

You've got all the problems, right?

Scratches and blemishes and glare.

And so whether it's natural light or flash,

it's the same thing.

I use the tools, the techniques that I

just showed you.

Do you edit all of the bridal images

with Researched Skin that you deliver?

So, again, we do artisan edits.

The process I'm showing you here now on

50 to 100 images per wedding.

The ones that we're going to show off

to the world.

Portfolio, blog, you know.

And so this extent of like skin cleanup

would only happen on very few images.

Otherwise, we just do like, you know, much

more quick and dirty.

We do the, you know, we do our

presets and or the image salons edit.

And then a little bit of, you know,

blemish removal as needed, you know, as we

go through.

And Erica would just do that in Lightroom

sort of thing.

Are you going to cover eyes in this?

I don't do anything with eyes, really.

Other than, you know, in a photo like

this.

There's some blue in her eyes.

Would you?

Yeah, so it's the same.

So with all the images, it's just tasting

it and eyeballing the eyeballs.

So, yeah.

So at the initial smart object layer phase,

an image like this, I probably do one

for her face overall and her features.

One to smooth the skin and then possibly

one for lips, one for eyes.

So you're right.

For the eyes in this case, like let's

open this as a smart object.

So then if I notice the color temperature

is not right in her eyes, I would

just fix that and maybe try the eyedropper

tool.

Okay, there we go.

And then just paint it in.

So really like all the little, you know,

all the little challenges and things that we

come up with various different images, it just

boils back to the same thing, right?

Just local adjustments, tweaking them and blending them

with masks.

Great.

You know, I might also then say, you

know what?

I really want to make those eyes pop.

So maybe even just with a smart filter,

I come in here and the clarity and

the lights.

Eyeballing it.

That doesn't do anything for any parts of

the image, but if I isolate it just

onto her pupils here, and then just paint

into the lights a little bit there.

So there's the mask.

Okay.

That just brings up some punch in the

eyes.

So it all depends on the photo, right?

How big are the eyes?

Most of our photos, the eyes are only

a few pixels, but in something like this,

yeah, I'd be treating those eyes as their

own local area.

Okay.

I want to show you guys how to

correct for perspective.

Do that with, I'm going to open two

of these.

There's a few different ways.

One is if we go here and you

can actually do this way, you can actually

do it right in Lightroom or ACR.

You've got the little adjustments for perspective.

And often if we're shooting our couples from

low, perspective is not helping us out, right?

Because their lower bodies are closer to the

camera.

And so if it's a post portrait, we'll

often have them kind of lean over to

counteract that.

And I've got no issues with this one

as is, but if this were the case,

what you'd do is you'd use that perspective

controls.

And in Photoshop it's up here under filter

lens correction, go over here to custom.

And then these are the same sliders that

you have in Lightroom where you can go

this way or you can go this way.

So obviously if we go that way, that

can help us counteract it when perspective is

working against us.

And, or you can also go this way

or that way.

Okay.

So that's one way that you can do

it.

If you want even more power than that,

you can do it this way.

Okay, here we go.

Let's say we wanted these horizontal lines and

vertical lines to be parallel.

I wouldn't want them to be that way

in this image, but let's just say we

did because sometimes you're shooting and you're going

for symmetry, but it's a little off kilter,

right?

And so the lines that would be parallel,

they're not quite parallel.

Okay.

What you can do is you can do

the method we just looked at or on

a new layer, you can go control T,

which is remember edit transform.

Okay, here we go.

So now I can slide and move this

layer around, right?

The other thing I can do is I

can grab a corner.

And if you command click on the corner,

it allows you to skew it like this.

Okay.

So, and if I bring up my grid

lines, commands, what is it?

Command apostrophe.

I bring up my grid lines while I'm

doing that, I can have those almost parallel

lines become parallel.

Make sense?

So that's how you can use perspective control

to help you get parallel lines lining up.

A finger transplant.

A finger transplant.

So basically what I'm doing there, let's find

an example.

Okay, let's

go back to this one.

And let's go straight out of camera here.

Remember I said that sometimes I'll crop at

the end instead of at the start.

The reason for that is because if I

crop here, I'm constrained, right?

And so let's say if in cropping, because

I'm constrained, it meant that, oh, I'm going

to lose this little girl's fingertips.

In that case, I would wait and crop

after.

I'll show you why.

Let's go like this.

Okay.

I'm just going to open this here in

Photoshop.

Let's say I shot this like this.

It's like, oh, it's not quite composed properly.

It's so close.

I want to straighten it.

But if I was in Lightroom or ACR,

if I tried to straighten it like this,

oh, darn, then I lose that little girl's

fingertips.

So in that case, I wouldn't crop first.

I'd do all my editing, and then in

Photoshop, I would crop then.

Because in Photoshop, you can crop outside the

lines if you know how to do it.

So let's crop in like this.

And I can crop like this.

So now I've straightened it without losing the

little girl's fingertips.

Okay?

But you see how I've gone outside the

lines here?

And when you do that, if you click

Content Aware, it will Content Fill Aware these

missing pixels for you sometimes.

Let's see if it works.

It does its thing, runs its algorithms, tries

to figure out how to.

There we go.

Okay?

And if that doesn't work then, if when

you do that, for some reason there's too

much confusing information along the edges and it

can't do it for you, just unclick that.

Okay?

And then do it yourself.

So then in a new layer here, I

would just Content Fill Aware these sections myself.

Like this.

Okay?

Shift F5 is the shortcut for Content Aware.

And then do that there.

Do that up there too.

Now, if the finger, you know, if you

missed the finger and then you cropped outside

the lines and, of course, it couldn't figure

out how to rebuild the finger for you,

that's just, again, using the technique I've already

showed you where you essentially could say I

was missing.

I'm just going to get rid of a

finger here.

We'll pretend that it's missing.

So if I was missing this finger and

this finger, because I missed it, right?

So flatten it like that.

In that case, the finger transplant is just

basically moving the ocean again, except now you're

moving a finger.

So you duplicate it.

You do a black layer mask.

You take a brush.

You find a finger somewhere on the frame

that's similar to that.

And then Command T.

You can see it.

Command T.

Now I can move that finger.

I can rotate the finger.

Where are you, finger?

I can't see it.

Oh, there it is.

There it is.

There we go.

Right?

And I'd line it up, rotate it, shrink

it, enlarge it, get it into position so

that it fits, and then just paint it

in.

It's lagging and not showing.

There it is.

There we go.

Okay, I'd probably shrink it because it's a

pinky.

It's too big.

But it's too laggy for me here.

Oops.

Oops.

There we go.

And then paint it in, like that kind

of thing.

So it's the same technique, right?

It's finding an area to sample and move

it into place.

Okay.

How are we doing for questions?

So when did you go to med school?

Because you're clearly a surgeon.

I forgot.

We need to talk about the final pop,

okay?

Let me find a good example for this.

So after image cleanup, the next, if we

go back to that order of operations, the

next one is final pop.

Okay, so let's go to an example.

Oh, where was the one that we did

together?

I have a question about the finger for

you.

What if the details are very visible?

Like that shot, it was not visible.

Details are very visible.

Oh, like if it's in focus, same thing.

You just have to try to find an

area that is going to work, right?

So if you're blending, you know, if the

finger is in focus, you have to find

another finger that's in focus.

You know, if the finger's out of focus,

you have to find, you know, it's different

on every single image, but you have to

find an area, whatever you're trying to replace,

whether it's a finger or a part of

a dress or something, you're trying to find

another area that's close enough-ish that you

can use it to paint it in.

Let's just use this one.

Okay, let's just use this.

Okay, so final pop.

I've got basically five steps that I'll do,

at least a combination of those five steps

at the end of every single artisan edit

that we do.

So let's get this up here.

All right.

So those are, so this one, if we

just look at this one, everything I've done

up to this stage would have been the

smart object layers, probably one for the sky,

one for the beach, one for Chad and

Beth, one for their skin.

And then I would have done some curves

to dodge and burn from there.

And then maybe I did a smart filter,

bring out some texture in the clothes, et

cetera.

Maybe I did one where I whitened the

white balance a bit for the teeth.

Okay.

And then at some point I flattened it

and I dealt with the distractions.

I can't remember if on the final edit,

I took out this dog walker.

I probably did.

And then I do the final final pop.

Okay.

So those final steps got five of them.

They're all in the document for you guys.

The first one is my shortcut key for

it is F4.

And it's that over the top giant S

curve, global contrast boost.

Okay.

And it's intentionally over the top and I

just basically toggle it on and off and

find the sweet spot.

Okay.

And, or if I only like it in

some areas, what I would do is just

bring a brush on the mask and I

would turn it down.

See, I don't like what it's doing on

the skin.

So I'm just going to paint it out

on the skin.

Okay.

So it's applying it everywhere except the skin.

So a big giant S curve.

Okay.

So that's step one.

Then step two is I do a combination

of two, two steps.

The first one is I've got a shortcut

key for it.

And what it is, is it's image adjustments,

shadows, and highlights.

Okay.

And this is where the document outlines where

all my default settings are for that.

But what it does enough that transit to

be, can see what it's doing here.

And as a final step, is it pulls

back a little bit of loss detail and

highlights and shadows.

Okay.

So it's just helping me with the overall

dynamic range of it.

So I'll do that in combination with a

curve layer.

This is what it looks like.

So basically it's just, it brings the blacks

down a bit and the whites up a

bit and overall just up slightly.

I'll toggle that one on and off so

you can see the effect.

Okay.

It adds a punch.

It's like a 3d, like it pops off

the image and those two steps together, the

shadows and highlights and the curve.

If I group those together so you can

see the effect.

It goes from that to that.

And in some cases it's too much.

In which case I just turn it down.

Okay.

Sometimes I keep it all the way up.

Sometimes I turn it right down and it's

just too much.

Okay.

So just eyeballing it.

So then if it was an area with

lots of skin, what I would do is

that this is when I would do that

skin trick that I showed you guys where

I come over here and I drop shadows

all the way down.

Under expose it above the stop and then

use highlights to bring it back up.

And I might apply that to see it

doesn't work so great on an image like

this, but if there's lots of skin, it

might help on the skin.

Okay.

In this case it doesn't.

So delete it.

Okay.

And then the final, final step is sharpening.

Okay.

Most of the sharpening I do on export

when we size it for whatever, but at

this point, before I save it as a

master file, I do apply some sharpening and

what it is, it's outlined in the document.

It's, it's an unsharp mask and you have

to zoom right in here to a hundred

percent to see the effect.

I don't know if that translates resolution wise,

but it's a very subtle sharpening and it's

a final, final step.

And then what I do at that point

then is I save it.

And Eric has got our normal naming scheme

that we follow for all our weddings.

And so I just leave it as she

named it.

The only thing I do is I just

add dash final.

Okay.

And that goes into the Photoshop sub folder

or the Photoshop document sub folder.

So all the artists and edits live in

there.

Okay.

And I'll save it like that.

The other thing we do is then what

I do is because, you know, this maybe

took me 20, 30, 40 minutes that I

sunk into this one image.

And then if I save it on here,

right.

On the first on here.

Oh my God, that is, there we go.

So I save it on the, on the

drive and the sub folder.

If anything happens to this, I lose it.

It gets damaged.

Of course.

I've got all the files, all the raw

files from that wedding backed up on multiple

drives and multiple locations.

But if anything happens to this, I lose

all that work.

I still got the raw file, but I've

lost all that work.

So what I do is I, I also

see that I back it up onto Dropbox.

So we keep a folder on our Dropbox

called portfolio.

And so basically all the arts and all

the artists and edits that I've ever done

from every wedding live there on Dropbox.

So it backs that up.

Plus it makes it really easy for us

to find our best photos.

Anytime, anywhere in the world, right.

If we are submitting for something or whatever,

we want to find our, all the images

that we've done artists and edits on live

on that Dropbox folder.

Okay.

And then that's sort of basically the, the

master file.

Right.

They all live in there.

Erica then of course takes those and imports

them back into the Lightroom catalog and uses

those to replace the image salons.

Okay.

And if there happened to be two or

three other like very similar photos, she just

gets rid of those ones, right.

We only deliver one version.

Okay.

And then when we, when we export for

whatever, whether it's printing or a portfolio or

a blog or social media, that's when we

usually apply our sharpening at that point.

And we're careful to always size it to

the exact pixel dimension of whatever, where it's

being used for.

So if it's for Facebook, we always size

it to 2048 pixels.

If you want it to look as good

as possible on Facebook, put it to exactly

2048 pixels and run it through JPEG mini

to get the size down.

You want the size underneath 900 K if

it's underneath 900 K Facebook, won't compress it

as bad as it usually does.

Okay.

And we run everything through JPEG mini, even

our, even our full res JPEGs that we

deliver to the client, go through JPEG mini

because it just takes, there's no degradation in

image quality whatsoever.

And it brings the file sizes way down,

which is great and super great for your

website because that really helps with your loan

times.

Instagram is 1080.

Exactly.

And then for your, for your website, your

blog, all that, you just want to know

what your resolution is on your site.

Like on our site, our site is responsive

up to 5k displays.

So they're huge images, but we're careful to

size them to that exact dimension.

Where are we?

How are we doing for questions there, Joey?

We have some coming in.

Okay.

Let's let's do that.

And I'm going to get some photos loading

for you guys here in the background.

So hit me with the questions.

Okay.

So, they're a little all over the place,

but I'm going to ask them anyways.

Business question.

You know, you're talking about these artisan edits

costs costing you an hour in time.

That's like 50 to a hundred hours of

extra work.

You know, how do you, how do you,

how much do you add to your price

for that kind of that level?

Well, our price is our price.

We have one price.

We have two prices.

We have one price.

Every couple gets us and our process.

For our price.

So there's no adding or subtracting or how

much without the arts and edits.

It's just.

You get what you get with us.

And the price is reflective of that.

In terms of.

You know, how much time you invest in

your post-production?

How much do you charge for your weddings?

That's all a personal decision, right?

It's up to us.

It's up to you to decide how much

time you sink into your editing for your

couples.

And, you know, and then you reflect that

in the, in the pricing.

So it's, it's a personal decision, right?

Okay.

And one person asked a question.

Obviously on, on that, we charge a lot

more for our clients than we would be

able to, if we didn't have the same

standards.

Right.

For what we deliver.

Right.

So it'd be an adjustment.

Exactly.

Yeah.

When you're, would you recommend that someone who's

doing a flash version of an image also

shoot a non-flash version at the same

time and to use to overlap for sort

of that dynamic range as you're to be

able to merge two images.

Like, I guess we're talking about shooting a

portrait on a tripod.

Yeah.

Or maybe imagine any other situation where you

could have them line up unless you're on

a tripod.

So possibly, possibly, yeah, possibly in some sort

of a, you know, a careful portrait that

you're working on and you got a tripod,

you know, but certainly not in documentary work

or anything else.

Yeah.

Do you happen to have any shots where

you've removed yourself from a mirror image that

you could show as an example?

Yeah, I think there was a few examples

there in the before and afters that we

started with.

Right.

Do you want, do you want me to

bring them up again so you can see

them?

Yeah.

I mean, do you have one that you

could show live or is it.

Oh, like actually, actually show me removing it.

No, cause that would take another 90 minutes

probably.

Like let's, let's bring up an example.

Let's bring up an example.

Just give an eye, a high level sort

of explanation of what you would have done.

There we go.

Right.

That'd probably take me 20 minutes.

So me to take the time to show

you, to sit and watch me do brushwork

for 20 minutes is going to bore you

to death.

In fact, it would have to probably take

40 minutes with the, with the mouse leg

that we've got right here because of the

broadcasting.

But, but yeah, I mean, basically I would

just use a combination of the tools that

I, that I explained and show it for

you guys.

So in this case I would have started

by, you know, dragging some of this information

down here and diddle for here.

Like the fingers, I probably would have brought

the clone healing stamp onto the fingers there.

And then for here I would have been

dragging these pixels down and painting them on

top.

Really, it would have been really quite easy

up to about here.

So everything in this area would have been

quite easily.

This area in here around the ear and

around the shoulder, that would have been the

delicate careful work, zooming into a hundred percent

and really painting it in.

But basically using the techniques I showed you

where I duplicate the layer, drag those pixels

into position and then paint them in and

then flatten it.

And then do it again and keep going

until I'm, until I'm gone.

Lots of questions about the full JPEGs versus

JPEG mini.

What do you, what do you send to

your album company and have you had any

issues with printing?

We used to have issues with printing before

we were with graphy.

Our images would always come out, prints albums

would always come out a little bit dark,

darker than they would on our displays.

Whatever graph he's doing at their studio, they

get it right.

They, they make it look the way it's

supposed to look.

So we just send them, we send them

JPEGs.

I think Erica runs them through JPEG mini

first, actually.

And we haven't noticed any, any issues.

No issues from clients who were printing from

that.

No, no, we've never had any clients say

my prints don't look good.

Okay.

Okay.

We're getting flooded with questions right now.

So give me a second.

Is it possible to see you deconstructed?

Like you just did an image where you

boosted blues on the, on specifically on other

walls or on the Boca?

Well, let's see what I got.

Well, we did that in the sky, right?

We brought up the blues in the sky

there.

In this case, this would have been like,

let's just do a quick, got a number

of images open.

So this might be slow.

Okay.

Let's run a little IPA on that.

It's a starting point.

And then let's try to get the color

temperature, right?

On Milo.

I'm actually going to probably white balance off

his shaving cream there.

That'd be pretty close.

Okay.

So in this case, What I would have

done here is this is a smart object

and I'm just going to do this quick

and dirty.

It's not going to be perfect.

You, there we go.

And then I would have done another smart

object layer where if I decided, you know

what I want to accentuate the differential between

the warm tones on his skin and the

cool tones in the bathroom is okay.

So I'm going to shift the color temperature.

The bruise.

And then this is the part I'm not

going to take the time to show you,

but it's a matter of creating that layer

mask, right?

So I could brush it.

But what I probably would have done in

this case is started from a white layer

mask and done select color range.

And then clicked on that.

Click on these tones up here as a

starting point.

Okay.

And I'd finished the job with a brush.

Black brush in here.

And the brush work is four times as

slow as it normally is because of that.

The leg here.

Right there.

And then I would have started to work

on that here.

We're causing blur.

And then I would have been working on

this part, working on that part, blending it

and getting it right, tweaking it to blue,

turn it down.

Skin.

He skins to green would have fixed that.

And it go from there.

But in terms of like images where we

push the blues images where we push the

reds images where we've basically I'm doing all

of that through the process that I've just

shown you.

Okay.

Identifying that area and then putting the sliders

where I can to do what I need

to do and then using a layer mask

to blend it, whether it's with a brush

or a gradient or, or the select color

range tool.

Awesome.

Thank you.

There were just some, some, some questions on

that.

So I'm going to show you now guys

are a few examples of where I've saved

the image in which examples of where I've

really kind of taken it to an extreme

view.

So you guys should be able to see

this one, right?

So here's, here's a photo.

And over here I've got, I saved it

with all my layers intact.

So before I flattened it and finished it.

So what I'm going to do is turn

them all off.

And actually what I'll do is I'll make

sure that the bottom layer is straight out

of camera so you can see that.

Okay.

There's straight out of camera.

So I'm going to put that one on

the bottom so you guys can, I can

walk you through the process here.

Let's get this one up there.

Okay.

So there's the straight out of camera, right?

That's what it looked like when I opened

it up in Lightroom or ACR.

And then what I did, here's my first

layer.

Okay.

So that's obviously based on the sky.

I'm trying to make the sky look as

great as I can.

Okay.

All right.

Sky looks good.

Then I'm going down to the reflection.

Okay.

So then I did a layer for the

sky in the reflection and I'll click on

the mask here so you can see it.

Just a straight gradient.

Okay.

So there's the sky and the reflection.

Then I duplicated that one or actually no,

then I did one, a different one for

the skyline.

Okay.

So there's just another gradient tool there to

get the skyline.

Then I duplicated that one again and did

a much more precise layer mask.

There we go.

You see that one.

Okay.

So I would have been using that select

color range to get this layer mask created

for me.

Okay.

So there it is.

And then I moved up and started to

work on Milo and Courtney.

So this one here, that layer mask would

have taken a long time to paint.

Okay.

So that would have actually been going in

and painting it painstakingly.

Okay.

But then once I've got that, I can

work around that layer mask as much as

I want.

Right.

As long as I've taken the time to

make it natural and precise.

And then what are we doing there?

That's the sparkle.

Okay.

So that's bringing out the sparkle in his

MJ socks there.

Turn up the clarity, pushing the whites, making

those nice and poppy.

Then now we're moving down into the reflection

of Milo and Courtney down here.

That's not just a mirror mask.

That's another mask that I had to take

the time to paint.

And then now we're fine tuning the color

temperature down on his suits.

Okay.

Now we're moving up into the skin there.

Okay.

There we go.

That would have been, you know, I would

have been copying the layer mask that I

built earlier, dragging it up into position and

then using my brush to, to paint it

from there.

Another one there.

Now we're down here into the skin and

the reflection.

Yes.

What are we doing there now?

We're the sidewalk.

Okay.

So we're burning down the sidewalk and the

highlights.

There's the mask.

Now that's getting those highlights, right?

It's the mask there.

What's that?

Oh, that's the, the socks in the reflection.

Okay.

And so then some curves and then it

would have been flattened, straightened and finished in

Photoshop.

Okay.

So there's an example of, you know, it

would have been pretty hard to get that

original file to here in Lightroom with just

layer masks.

I'll show you one more example.

Close that one down.

Let's go to this one.

So here's all the layers and let's turn

them all off.

We'll make sure that's straight out of camera.

There we go.

Straight out of camera.

Okay.

So here's a straight out of camera.

Now, actually the first layer that I would

have done here was this one, the one

that's up on top.

I'll turn it on.

And that's obviously for the background.

Okay.

So that's making that blue graffiti paint as

vibrant as possible.

So let's click on the mask there.

Okay.

So that mask would have taken a while

to create.

Okay.

So first we got that mask to stay

off of their pants and their skin and

just be on the background.

And then I did this one.

Okay.

I'll show you the mask on that one.

Okay.

So that's careful to stay off the shoes,

but it's basically making the sidewalk look as

good as we can.

So there's the sidewalk.

And the graffiti.

Those are the only two layer masks that

I had to take the time to create

all the rest of them.

I could just be super fast with my

brush because these two are up on top.

As long as I have those layer masks

on top, all the other layers that I

can do underneath, I can just paint it

in very roughly like this one, for example.

Oh, that would have been the first one.

And then this one.

And then here we go.

There's the shoes.

Okay.

So you see how I can just paint

like this outside the lines because it lives

down beneath this one.

Right.

So that controls the sidewalk and keeps the

sidewalk where I need it.

Okay.

So that's blacks or sorry, that's the shoes.

And now we're moving up.

Sort of been moving up into the cuff

links.

Okay.

Moving up there.

There's the socks, right?

There's the sock layer.

Okay.

Just fine tuning it.

And then now that's moving into Courtney's dress

behind.

Okay.

And then eventually getting up onto the hands

and the skin.

Skin.

And then Courtney's legs.

Okay.

And then that last one there, the cuff

links.

Okay.

So then at that point, it would have

been flattened, straightened, close that down and finished

here.

So here's a few more.

Probably these would have been smart filter layers.

Yeah.

So just pull it, bring it out the

full potential in the file.

Okay.

And straightening it there.

Okay.

And another thing to help just bring this

all full circle here before we dive into

Q and a is look at a few

more before and afters that I have.

Now that you've seen the whole process like

this one.

We started this one together.

We didn't take it all the way, but

there's the final edit.

So from that to that.

Okay.

This one, I've probably done one or two

layers for back in there.

And then one layer for the frosted glass

and straightened for perspective to have those vertical

lines parallel.

Okay.

And played off the warm tones in this

room compared to the cooler tones in the

frosted glass.

Okay.

In this case, I probably would have had

a local, a local area for the rocks,

her dress, the skin, these shoes and no

shoes.

Yeah.

And here's another one that we started together.

Okay.

There would have been a layer for the

sky, the mountains, the lake reflection, the mountains

in the reflection, and then for my jacket

there.

Okay.

And then image cleanup on some of the

distractions around here.

Okay.

And you saw this one, right?

Went from that to that.

And then we straightened it and finished it.

And I'll just show you that one.

This is actually an example of straight out

of camera, image salons, edit, and then the

final artisan edit.

Okay.

In some cases, the image salons edit slash

Erica's edit together, slash just running our preset

and a little bit of dodging and burning.

In some cases, those are very close and

similar and almost, you know, imperceptible.

Sometimes it's actually, I get the image salon

edit back.

And I actually prefer that one to my

artisan edit.

But in many cases, there is a difference,

right?

Especially to, to our discerning eyes.

Okay.

Any.

Hey, Lenny with that one, can you go

back again and just give us a, a

little bit longer on each one to decipher

the differences.

So you've shown.

Cause I closed it.

It takes a while.

No, no.

Then what, where you were.

Oh, sorry.

I thought you meant the layers.

Yeah, no, no, just with one with the

socks, you went really quickly from the.

So if you could just take a second,

so we can see.

So explain this one again is this is

straight out of camera.

Okay.

Yeah.

The image salon edit.

Right.

Great.

Thank you.

Okay.

Here's just an example of a, a fertilizer.

Let's see.

The size of all the frames that are

stitched together there.

Okay.

So again, I just want to reiterate a

few things.

This process.

And in post-production in general is what

I just showed you like this powerful.

Process.

These techniques, this is not a workflow for

an entire wedding.

Right.

And depending on who you are as a

photographer, you know, it might be, these might

be some tools that you pull out once

in a while on a couple images per

year, or maybe a couple images per wedding,

or maybe an entire blog post, you know,

or maybe just, you want to go back

and there's a few images that you knew

there was more potential and you want it

to like really bring it up, bring it

up and show it off on your portfolio.

Right.

This is that sort of, this is for

pulling maximum potential out of your files.

And it's a, it's a, it's a time

consuming process.

So you have to pick and choose when

and where it makes sense for you, for

your clients, for your business.

So again, for us, we, I do this

process on about 50 to 100 photos per

wedding.

And basically everything that goes into client slideshow,

it's this process.

Anything that goes in our clients, what's it

called album, right.

Anything that goes on our blog posts, our

portfolio, that's kind of the full artisan edit,

which could be anywhere from a few minutes

to, you know, in some extreme cases, a

couple hours sort of thing.

And that just fits into kind of who,

who we are, who I am, where our

standards are, what we're looking to deliver.

And it's different for everybody.

And in terms of flavor and taste and

style with editing, it's just like everything else,

right?

We have different, different tastes.

But regardless of what my taste was in

terms of the overall finished look, I would

follow the same process, but my eyes would

just be, you know, set to make the

photos look differently because it's, it's what feels,

it's what feels best to my eyes.

Right.

So how are we doing?

This would be the time for any questions.

So now would be the time before we

wrap it up.

If there's any kind of burning questions around

editing post-production, now's your chance.

No, there's no questions at all, which is

a total lie.

Okay.

So I'll start with a couple.

So have you ever had customers unhappy with

your artisan edit choices?

No.

Like, like which, which photos we decided to

edit fully.

Yeah.

And then which ones you showed, I mean,

obviously you would know.

No.

But they knew, right.

Yeah.

No, I mean, you guys have seen an

example gallery, right?

So, I mean, that's the best way to

sort of answer the questions around how does

this fit in?

How did these two tiers of editing fit

into a client gallery?

Just look at the client gallery that we

sent you as an example, right?

We've never had clients say, why did you

edit this one?

You know, more than this one.

And also keep in mind that if you

haven't watched the sample client, Skype session, go

watch that.

You'll see the way we explain our editing

process to our clients before they even hire

us is the exact same way.

I just explained it to you.

We break it down.

We, we tell them when and where we're

putting the time in.

You know, obviously we don't spend an hour

per image.

Or they won't see their photos until the

year 2030.

Right.

So they get it.

They understand that.

Yeah, we, what we do for our clients

is artisan edit is like a level above

and beyond what most, any other photographer is

going to be doing.

So, you know, we bring it up to,

you know, a high, high standard as it

is.

And then this is the above and beyond

that we do for our clients.

So our clients are never disappointed that we've

gone above and beyond for them on a

few images.

In the image salon edits today.

Take care of skin tones, or is that

something that you usually end up having to

deal with?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, they've got, I can't remember how

it works, but they've got three levels, basic,

basic plus, and some other level.

We do the basic plus and yeah.

So they do, they do local adjustments.

They do dodging and burning for you.

Right.

So, and they will do some like blemish

removal type stuff to a certain extent, I

think, but that would be a matter.

That would be a question for them.

But again, the important thing is to give

them feedback after every, after every order so

that they can continue to learn from you

in terms of what your taste is, what

you're, what you're going for, how much dodging

and burning to your life, you know, how

much punch and contrast do you like, how

much color do you like color or black

and white too?

You can usually specify number or like percentage

wise, but we tell them to like, not

put any formulas around it.

If the, if it, if a whole section

is going to look better as black and

white, do them all as black and white

for us.

We would rather do that than to do

half color, half black and white.

It's usually pretty obvious whether or not it's

going to look better as a color of

black and white.

Let's just do whatever looks best.

So do you pick the images that end

up in albums or how does that work

for your clients?

That's a whole lot of, I mean, we

could do a whole workshop on album design,

that sort of thing, but basically Erica designs

it a first draft and then they can

make changes from there, but she makes it

less overwhelming for them by getting them started.

Just, I'm just wanting to remind people to

keep, keep the questions to specifically to editing.

There are, there are things like, you know,

your, you know, what, what, what do you

tell your clients who ask for the raw

files, but I'm assuming that you've covered that.

No.

It's a simple no.

Yeah.

It's not an option.

We tell them no.

Yeah.

And they, and they know that they, our

clients would know that before they've even hired

us.

So we never get those questions after they've

hired us.

If that question is going to come up,

it might come up during that client Skype.

By the end of that, having heard our

process, The answer to that question would be

pretty, pretty apparent to them if it's not.

And they still ask it at that point.

It's just a big red flag for us.

At which point we just double down on

why we do what we do, what they're

hiring us for.

And then they either get it or they

choose somebody else and we're fine with that.

But yeah, no, it's, it's a simple no.

And if for our clients, it makes sense.

They understand that this is a big part

of the artistry and craftsmanship that they're hiring

us for.

Is there any extra steps that you take

for print specific printing specifically?

Any kind of sharpening or color?

Nothing.

No difference.

Other than at that last and final step,

just like always resize and sharpen to the

exact pixel dimensions.

So if we're making a, an eight by

12 print, We size it exactly to whatever

eight by 12.

At 300 DPI would be so that we're

going to get maximum resolution in the print.

And then we would sharpen it to whatever

looks best at that resolution.

So, you know, we apply more sharpening to

something for Facebook than we would for a

print because it's a different size.

How do you, how do you manage noise

with the higher ISOs?

So I go into, I go into this

here.

Okay.

Which is what it's called in Lightroom, but

it's the sharpening and detail one.

And then I zoom into actual pixels to

see, and then control it with this part.

Okay.

So that's, and I just eyeball it.

So I'm looking at the noise here and

I'm taking it up to the point at

which it starts to smooth the noise out.

But before I start to lose sharpening.

And again, I always crank up the masking,

leave the sharpening at the default, but generally

speaking, I just leave it down here for

a hundred ISO.

If it's up around 1600 ISO, It'd probably

be up around here.

And if it's 3,200 ISO, it'd probably

be up around here.

6400 ISO, maybe up around 40, but just

eyeballing it.

Awesome.

Any other questions that are.

Hey Erica, you want to come down for

the wrap up?

So can you explain the process when you've

been saved your Photoshop image, then what do

you do?

Do you export?

So it stays in, it stays in the,

the PSD sub folder as a full res

Photoshop document.

That's the master file.

And it's backed up on Dropbox.

And then Erica takes those full res Photoshop

documents and imports them into the Lightroom catalog,

right?

Yes.

Well, I don't know.

What did you just say?

My edits, how you import them into the

Lightroom catalog.

What's that?

Like makeup all over my face.

Cause I didn't wash my face last night.

So yeah, it's just a process for taking

my arts and edits and incorporating them into

the client.

Yeah.

Just import.

Cool.

That's what she does.

And then I export them with all the

other.

Images that image salon is edited.

And of course I've gone through and given

you my final touches as well.

So.

And then.

Yeah.

And then you just, you talked about the

order of the gallery.

Right.

But with pick time, I

mean, I don't know if you've seen it,

but when you're looking

at them side by side, you're not looking

at them side by side.

Unless you're.

Like a trained photographer.

I mean, if you're a trained photographer or

someone with like obsessive compulsive.

Tendencies like Lanny then.

Then you don't really notice the difference that

much.

So.

And now I need to abandon me here.

All by myself.

Any more questions.

Hello, Erica's.

Okay.

Question.

How long do you keep your images for

a wedding?

Assuming indefinitely.

Definitely.

Yeah.

I mean, in our contract, we say that

we keep it up for up to a

year.

But of course I've got hard drives full

of images, but if those hard, if those

hard drives were to fail, they're still in

the big time gallery.

But also we haven't guaranteed.

That we keep them.

For a year.

Beyond a year or so.

Someone's asking for some clarification on the artisan

edits.

They did.

They remain separate.

Once you deliver the gallery or.

Yeah.

So if you go look at that full

gallery, I sent you guys.

Of Chad and Beth's wedding.

You can see like the first.

Part of the galleries, all artists.

And then everything else chronologically.

Okay.

So those artisan edits are not included chronologically

then.

Usually not.

Sometimes some of them sneak in there, but.

It's really up to you.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, just go look at that

gallery.

You'll be able to see how we.

Space them out.

All right.

Thank you.

No worries.

Okay.

How did we do there?

Oh, it's actually shorter than the first session.

Four hours.

Well, no, we're over four hours.

But well, thanks for sitting through that.

Burn with me on that guys.

I know for some, some photographers.

It's their favorite part of.

The whole process and for other photographers, it's

the worst part.

Worst part.

It was the worst.

Yeah.

And for me, for me, it's like, it's

like a.

It's like.

It's the word.

It's like, it's a dichotomy of paradox of.

Yeah.

Like.

I actually love the process of sitting down

and losing my mercy, myself in the creation

process.

And like hours will go by.

No idea where the time's gone.

I love creating that magic, but at the

same time sitting in front of a laptop

computer goes So it's like this weird.

Sort of thing.

And it's a pretty stressful.

Part of our process when it's editing time.

Sucks.

When Lanny's editing a wedding, it sucks.

Like sometimes I've actually sent him away.

I'm like, you need to go away for

four days.

And just come back when the editing is

done.

Cause it's so immersive.

Kind of stressful.

And you can't really hunt.

Like he gets really hung up on the

details of the images, which is great.

I mean, well, to a certain extent But

it stresses him out and then you know

Two weeks later.

I'll be like do you remember that image

you were so stressed out about?

It'll be like do you remember what that

image was and he's like no I can't

even remember what the image was that I

was all stressed out about but you know

in the moment It feels so important.

I didn't just I feel it's our our

We owe it to you guys to be

completely honest about this process like this is

our process It's the only process that we

can teach but basically our whole business plan

Which I'm not bitter about at all is

designed around the way that lining edits That

are literally that's that determines how many weddings

we shoot that determines Our pricing it determines

everything because for years we push or I

push like this is ridiculous like Like it

just was so ridiculous how much time he

was putting into into each image and we

push him and then I realized he Was

one of two things either.

He's super stubborn in which he is Or

he just can't work any other way, and

I think it's a combination of those two

things so then our whole business plan is

Is wrapped around the way letting edits?

and so Yeah, so you have to choose

whether or not this is fits with your

lifestyle You pick and choose how you know?

Anything anything you learn from any you know?

On any topic really it's anything you pick

and choose how you're gonna apply it to

What you do who you are your business

your art your photography right like it's like

anything It's no different, but it's got lots

of pros and cons like obviously it's the

only process that we can teach I'm telling

you from an honest perspective that It's not

the best way.

I think it's certainly not easy on us

in a couple as a couple online He's

editing this way, so I just want to

sort of ask as well or say that

you know.

I mean, that's also a decision about How

you?

aesthetically Determine what you're doing as well I

mean if you don't put that much effort

into it and your prices are all connected

to that to His evidence man was a

big factor in your aesthetic it is yeah,

yeah, it's definitely a big factor it's not

as Big a factor as As Lenny thinks

it is right so that and this comes

down to I'm sorry Speaking for you, and

I mean Lenny's perfectionism, which is sort of

his What would you call it your?

my gifts to the world But your gift,

but also the other end of that spectrum

you're the obsessiveness Yeah It's his thorn is

the obsessiveness right and so It does how

it does have to do yes, we can

attribute some of our aesthetic to it But

not all of our aesthetic to it.

This is it.

This will be an argument, but I mean

I have you know I'll be like you're

spending too much time He's like well This

is our brand and I'm like yeah But

the the 10% you're taking the 90

% of the time that you're taking you

do that last 1% Isn't about brand

at all.

It's about your perfectionism and nobody sees that

so it's striking that balance of where you're

Perfectionism is where your standard is and then

where your standard is with how you're going

to divvy up your free time, so How

much Yeah, certainly like it is certainly determined

how many weddings we take on and that

determines how much we charge It's his blessing

and his curse yes, oh, yeah And I

mean, I've got plenty of blessings and curses

to like I'm not trying to throw any

under the bus here I just feel like

Especially at this section like it's important to

be honest with you guys about it's not

Oh, I learned the process and then I'm

able to spit these images out like it's

Obsession I think I guess a obvious overview

of how how intense it can really get

Yes Great we want is extremely appreciative.

Oh good.

Awesome.

So we'll see you guys all tomorrow night,

actually Yes Yeah, because

we can't finish on that we can't Not

for some people some people are like Right,

yeah, I agree.

We're ready to party.

We're ready to finish on some final fuzzies.

All right Have a good day.

Thanks everybody Thank you everybody