Photo Adventure Transcript

Download the photo here.

Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Macro Photography --- and today we are going to turn this butterfly photo, from my butterfly garden video, into this photo using Lightroom. So let's get started.

We start out in the basic panel and up at the temp slider I tend to lean toward making my photos on the cool side vs the warm. Sometimes it's easier to use the keyboard plus and minus instead of the slider so if you just click on the word temp, it will set that slider as your default so you can use the plus and minus keys like I'm doing here. I'm going to leave this at 4000.

Next I'm going to increase the exposure to plus 80. I'm going to decrease the highlights to minus 100. I'm going to increase the shadows to plus 40. I'm going to increase the whites and if you use the alt key while dragging, you will see the areas that will be blown out as you drag. I'm going to leave it at plus 26. Next I'm going to decrease the blacks to minus 31. I'm going to increase the clarity to plus 12. Also increase the vibrance to plus 30.

Moving down to the tone curve panel, I'm going to set the point curve to medium contrast. Moving down to the HSL saturation, I want to bring out the yellow in these circles on the butterfly so I will increase yellow to plus 40. Moving down to the detail panel, I'm going to increase the luminance to 70. I'm going to check both checkboxes in the lens correction panel. Moving down to the effects panel, I'm going to give it a minus 14 for some vignetting.

Now that we are done with the basic processing, I'm going to move up to the graduated filter and decrease the exposure on the right side. I'll decrease to -2 exposure and click and drag the corner. Then I'm going to reduce some of the shadows by decreasing to minus 40. I'm going to duplicate and also put it on the bottom corner. I'll turn it on and off so you can see the change. This will bring more attention to the butterfly.

Next I want to brighten up these yellow circles on the butterfly so I'm going to use the radial filter and draw a circle around them. I'm going to increase my exposure to plus 45 and increase the saturation to plus 100. I'm going to turn down my feathering to 20. And I'll turn it on and off so you can see the difference. Next I'm going to duplicate these filters to the other circles. And I'll turn them on and off so you can see the difference. Next I want to bring out the eye more so I'm going to duplicate and drag over to the eye. Reshaping it to the eye. Then I'm going to increase the clarity to plus 45. I'll switch it on and off so you can see the difference.

Next comes the fun part. I want to highlight some areas on the butterfly by using the adjustment brush. I'm going to increase the exposure to plus.86. And notice my flow is set to 47. Then I'm just going to paint the highlighted areas to bring them out more. Now i'll switch it on and off so you can see the difference. Now I want to do the same for the darker areas. I'll create a new brush, decrease it to minus .95 and start painting. I'll also darken the shadow underneath the butterfly. And I'll turn it on and off so you can see the difference. Ok that's looking pretty good. Now let's take a look at the before and after. And there you have it, here is the final result. If you liked this video please give me a thumbs up to help out this channel. You can also download the photo if you liked it. Thanks for watching!