7 BEGINNER Steps to EDIT BETTER Landscape PHOTOS in Lightroom

understanding exactly where to start an edit is something that really puzzled me when I when I first got in landscape photography I recall going on trips and taking pictures and returning home and loading those photos into lightroom remember going through the images and being fairly happy with the results I got but I remember looking at all the images and noticing that they were all lacking something and in order for me to make those photos look is the best that they could possibly look I knew that they would all have to be edited from start to finish and this is really where my confusion started was to trying to figure out exactly where does that editing process begin every photo is completely different and it felt like every process was going to be completely different every editing process was going to change every time I didn't know if there was a first edit I should be applying is there a third and a sixth edit did they even need to go in order or was I breaking rules was I not following rules I remember looking on the right side of Lightroom and all the sliders and all the buttons and graduated filters radio filters adjustment brushes and being completely overwhelmed and confused when it came to trying to figure out where do I start the process and that's the purpose of this week's video is seven simple steps that I apply to every single one of my images that I added in Lightroom and the best part about this workflow is not only is it super easy to remember these seven steps but it's highly repeatable this workflow can be applied to any photo and I literally use this the same exact step-by-step process on every one of my images that I added in Lightroom now if you've been using Lightroom for years and you're an expert this video probably won't be that interesting to you and I get that but if you are beginner a Lightroom I'm hoping you'll be able to pick up at least one or two nuggets of information out of this video that you can ultimately apply to your Lightroom workflow moving forward so to jump right into it this is a fully completed image this has been completely edited this is from I believe it's a dead horse point State Park in Moab Utah and this image right here is the completely unedited straight at a camera raw file so I'll toggle it back this is the final edited version and this is the raw file so the very first thing that I do this is not part of the seven steps because this is something that I do before I even begin to editing process and that is to remove chromatic aberrations and to enable lens profile Corrections and it's super simple to do we're just going to come down here to the lens correction section and we're going to select remove chromatic aberration and enable profile Corrections and once you have that completed now we can begin the seven steps of the editing process the very first thing that I always do is I go in and I crop my image and I adjust and straighten any type of horizon that it happens to be in that photo so I'm gonna come up here to the top I'm gonna grab the crop tool and I want to ask myself you know what's not adding any visual interest to this photo I remember when I first captured it I liked this bush on the left-hand side because I thought it added visual weight to the left-hand side of this image but now that I look at it this whole left side looks kind of bland and boring I don't think it really adds anything to the overall photograph except maybe an unwelcome distraction so ultimately I'm gonna crop in from the left side and I'm gonna crap up crop out that entire bush and I also notice that there was a tree that I missed on the right hand side of this photo when I was composing this shot so I want to bring the crop in and remove that as well I'm gonna bring you the overall crop down a touch because I really like this crack in the rock here how it leads up to the the tree right here and I think ultimately this horizon is pretty straight so I'm not gonna mess with it much right now but I might end up having to come back later and adjust it but for right now I think it looks pretty good so we're gonna leave it right there now once you have the image cropped you horizon straighten that's kind of like your your canvas your canvas is ready you can go ahead and apply the rest of your edges to the photo now the second step that I always apply as I go in and I update my overall exposure to the image and the white balance so I'm gonna come down here to exposure first I'm gonna bring it up this image is pretty easy to tell that it needs some positive exposure because it's definitely underexposed but something that I used to struggle with was trying to determine how much of a particular slider do you need to increase it or decrease it and if you ever run into that you can just hold down the shift-key and you can double click on any of these words here and Lightroom will automatically update it for you so I'll show you again I'm holding down the shift key double-click exposure and this is the value that Lightroom is same is needed in order to properly expose this image now Lightroom is not always right and of course Lightroom is not factoring in your artistic vision for your photograph it's just looking at it purely from a technical aspect but it's a pretty good leading indicator for you to tell you exactly where you need to put your exposure and from my experience a lot of times Lightroom over exposes images so I'm going to bring this down just a touch maybe two right there and I think that looks good now moving on to the white balance you can see these are the values that the damage was shot with 6450 on the temp and a positive 11 on the tint I'm gonna change this to auto just to see what Lightroom says is proper white balance and Lightroom is indicating 7500 on the temp and 0 on the tint so I'm gonna keep those values in mine and I'm gonna go back to the original and I'm gonna warm this up just a touch I'm not gonna take it to the 7500 that Lightroom was recommending because I felt that that was a bit too warm I'm gonna bring down the tent a little bit as well so once again we're kind of using Lightroom to help us out from a directional perspective just to let us know what lightroom thinks is the correct value to update exposure and white balance and then we're gonna go it go in there and then we make that our kind of fine-tune adjustments from that point I think that looks pretty good I'm gonna bring down maybe bring up the tent just a touch around the temp just a touch more I think that looks good right there now the third thing that I always do is I update my highlights in my shadows and nine times out of ten you're always gonna be bringing down your highlights and bringing up your shadows so I'm gonna come up here I'm going to hold down the shift key double click highlights double click shadows just to see what Lightroom is saying is the proper of values to update these sliders I'm going to bring the highlights down even more because I really want to try and bring out some of the detail in the sky there's not a whole lot of detail in the sky but want to try and bring out whatever is there and I'm also gonna bring up the shadows a little bit more than Lightroom is indicating as well I think that looks good right there now the fourth step is to adjust your white points and your black points and once again we're going to go in here hold down the shift key double click whites double click blacks and go from there and see if we want to make any additional changes in my experience Lightroom does a pretty good job updating the white and black points so I very rarely have to change these that much if any I think I'm gonna bring the black point back yeah actually I think it looks pretty good right there I think that's a good start now the fifth step is to apply to apply contrast and I always do this with the tone curve and I know the tone curve can be pretty intimidating especially for someone who's just starting out using Lightroom but Lightroom actually provides kind of like templates to use for the tone curve to add contrast and I'll show you what I mean right here I'm gonna come down to the tone curve and you'll see right here where it says point curve linear you can drop this down and you'll see medium contrast and strong contrast so if we select medium contrast Lightroom will automatically apply a tone curve that will apply medium contrast to this photo and if we change this to strong contrast light will automatically apply a a tone curve that will apply strong contrast to the photo so I think and I always always check both I always good try medium contrast and I'll always try strong contrasts about it I'm not updating it manually myself and I think strong contrast looks pretty good and I'm also gonna come up here and dial in a little bit of negative global contrast as well because I find sometimes if the contrast is making the shadow areas a bit too dark if I just bring down negative contrast a bit that might help kind of counteract that as well and I think that looks pretty good right there and it's using the tone curve in this manner is a great way to practice and get comfortable with the tone curve because once you use it enough you'll really get familiar with the with the S curve that you apply to add contrast to a photograph and once you do it enough then you'll eventually get to a point where you feel comfortable going in there and manually adding a custom tone curve to every single one of your images moving forward and I think that looks pretty good right there I don't think there's any any custom changes I really want to make to that tone curve so I think we're gonna leave it just where it is that right there and close this down now the sixth step is to update the present section I know that probably sounds pretty weird the present section because most people really never refer to this as the present section but for some reason lighten Lightroom has that title above this section right here but it's the area that has the clarity D haze saturation and vibrance so we're gonna go into this section see presence right there not sure why they call it that but I usually add anywhere from positive ten on the clarity that maybe negative ten on the clarity but I really never go too much out of that range we're gonna add a little bit of d haze to this photo because there is some haze in the background not quite that much I don't think though definitely want to add a little bit of vibrance to this and we'll also bring down the saturation just a touch as well I think that looks pretty good right there I generally generally like to add positive vibrance in conjunction with negative saturation I just kind of like the way though that kind of seesaw effect looks for the the overall color palette and I think I'm gonna bring the vibrance up just a little bit more as well I think that looks good right there and for the seventh step of this process is sharpening so I'm going to come down here to the detail section we're gonna pull up our sharp ax T now you definitely don't wanna go overboard here I'm usually somewhere in the upper 60s or at the very most the lower 70s and we're gonna hold on our option key and drag our masking slider over and remember black conceals white reveals and everything that is in white is going to receive the sharpening and anything that is in black is not going to receive the sharply because ultimately we don't want to sharpen our sky we don't want to sharpen our clouds and I think that that looks good right there now what she runs all seven steps I always like to run right back through it again because a lot of times when you have when you change one adjustment that might affect another so a lot of times like we adjusted the exposure in the beginning and then we updated our contrast later sometimes adding contrast will actually darkened down the overall photo so you just want to go back and make any kind of fine-tune adjustments at that point and I do want to bring up the overall exposure of this image again I do want to bring up the shadows just a touch I think that looks good right there just looking through here to see if there's anything else that we would possibly want to do any other additional changes that we want to make I think maybe at this point we could add a slight vignette that I usually like to apply to all of my photos just to darken down the corners a little bit draw the viewers eye to the center of the photograph and overall this looks a lot better and at this point once you've gone through your seven steps you you you've really got a good jump start on your overall edit and now if you want to from here you can go into like the HSL panel and change the individual color channels if you want you can add your gradient filters your radial filters your local adjustment brushes any kind of fine-tuning to the overall photographs that you want but these seven steps is just a great way to start the overall global edits to your entire photograph so this is where we ended up and this is where we started so this is the beginning this is straight out of camera this is a raw photo and this is where we ended up in just a matter of a couple minutes just using these seven steps so it was pretty simple to do let's go through another photo right here this is the the final image from a photo in the Western North Carolina mountains this past fall and this is the image straight out of camera so the first thing we want to do we want to remove chromatic aberration and apply our lens Corrections so we're going to come down here to lens correction remove chromatic aberration enable profile Corrections and once we have that done now we're gonna go ahead and start the seven step process the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go in and we're gonna crop the photograph and straighten the horizon it's gonna come up here to the crop tool and I know I want to remove this this railing right here I definitely wanna get rid of that so I'm gonna bring that into about right there I'm gonna bring this side in because there's a lot of negative space over here that I want to get rid of I'm gonna lift this up just a touch because I'm gonna get rid of this little branch sticking out right here so maybe right around there I think looks good and of course there is no horizon in this photograph but it looks straight because I'm using these trees as kind of an indicator and they're they're matching up well with the guidelines of this grid so I think the image is from a perspective or from a straightness standpoint I do believe that this image is straight it's hard sometimes when there is no horizon but I think it looks pretty good right there now the second thing we want to do is we want to update our white balance and our overall exposure of the photo so I'm going to come up here to exposure let's double click exposure that looks a little bright to me so we're gonna bring that exposure down just a touch and now we're going to update our overall white balance you can see where we're at right now where the actual image was taken 57 50 on the tint and positive 51 I'm sorry 57 50 on the temperature positive 51 on the tint let's change this down to auto to see what lightroom is recommending it was very warm to me the Lightroom is saying 74 50 and 30 so what kind of use that as a guideline I'm definitely not going to warm it up quite that much I'm thinking maybe right there looks good we'll bring down the tent just a touch not too much though I think that's a pretty good point right there I think that looks good do we want to make any other additional adjustments I don't think so now the third step we want to update our highlights in our shadows so I'm going to come in here we're going to hold down the shift key double click highlights double click shadows I'm gonna bring down the highlights a little bit more than what Lightroom is saying cuz I want to try and bring out some of the detail in the water and I also want to bring up the shadows a little bit because there are a lot of dark areas beneath this waterfall here that I want to try and bring out a little bit of detail in there I think that looks looks pretty good right there in the fourth step we want to update our white points and black points and once again holding down the shift key double click whites double click I think that looks pretty good I'm gonna bring the whites down just a touch because I don't want the water to be too too bright I'm gonna bring the blacks back a little bit as well so I don't want to crush my shadows think that looks nice right there in the fifth step we're gonna go into the tone curve and apply our group global contrast so I'm going to open up the tone curve click Lindt linear we're gonna try medium contrast okay strong contrast is definitely gonna be too much contrast so we're gonna go back to medium contrast I'm also gonna come up here to the global contrast slider and just dial in a little bit of negative contrast as well it's like the way that looks and the sixth step we're going to go into the present section I'm gonna add a little bit of clarity we're not going to touch the D haze because we don't need it for this photo add a little bit of vibrance because we want to bring out those fall colors dial in a little bit of negative saturation and I think that looks good there in the final step the seventh step we're gonna sharpen the overall photograph so I'm gonna come down here to detail bring this up to the upper 60 whole down the option key we don't have to mask this image quite as much because the majority of this photo we want to sharpen and I think that looks good we don't want to sharpen all of the water but a little bit is fine to add some detail to it some structure I like the way that looks now that we've gone through the seven step process we can go back through it just to make sure to see if there's any kind of adjustments we need to tweak and I think we just want to bring up the overall exposure just a bit maybe bring up the shadows just to touch more as well and I think that looks good I'm gonna come down here and add a slight vignette to the photo and I think that looks good let's go to where we started this is where we began and this is where we're at now I'll do it again so this is straight wrong let me try again this is a raw image straight out of camera and this is the image that we just edited here so once think I don't know how long that took but it felt like just a couple minutes so we really transfer this image in a relative short amount of time just going to those seven simple steps so I hope that was beneficial to you you hope you're able to get at least a little bit of information out of that so you could possibly apply to your images moving forward and as always if you have any questions definitely leave them in the comment section below I guarantee I will get back in touch with you and if you enjoy this week's video if you could hit that thumbs up button that definitely helps the channel out and as always I appreciate you watching this week's video and I'll see you next week bye

Channel: Mark Denney

Views: 128,781

Rating: 4.9685545 out of 5

Keywords: lightroom tutorial for beginners, how to edit landscape photos lightroom, beginner lightroom tips, beginner lightroom tutorial, lightroom for beginners, lightroom for beginners tutorial, lightroom editing tutorial, lightroom tutorials, editing in lightroom, landscape photography editing lightroom, edit landscape photos, landscape photography editing, landscape photography for beginners, beginner landscape photography, landscape photography, learn lightroom, mark denney

Id: _vSfm-GCdcc

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019