Complete Image Workflow - From Location to Editing

[Music] [Music] this is what's a clear beach in the lava tonight that's quite a well-known location and what we're doing is we're shooting this big kind of cliff rock over here our machine very why fantastic foreground in here we've got this really beautifully wave sculpt of rocks which have got a lot of pools from the receding tide so I'm shooting wide about 15 millimeter or ten millimeter on it on a crop sensor and I'm using the receiving the pores here and the shape of the rocks as leading lines to pull pulled the eye all the way through the image now at the moment because of size still on you can see the sky is pretty bright so I'm using a two-stop graduated filter just to darken the sky down but even right now doing that the rocks are still very dark so I don't have a particularly balanced exposure what I think is going to work better is after the sun's gone down anywhere into the blue hour we're going to have a much more evenly lit scene and I can get a lot more detail on a lot less contrast out of these rocks in the bottom but it's nice knowing the lights lovely the sky's lovely there's so much color and light in the sky so I'm still trying to get some shots done with to stop Groudon and I've also slowing down the exposures with a six stop grad to give me a two or four second exposures just to blur the water a little bit to take the edge off to take a little bit the detail out of the water so this is what I'm seeing through the camera you can see that even though we're still 45 minutes before sunset the light is fantastic you can see here the color in the clouds over here the snow has just been turned pink and orange and it looks absolutely brilliant now because it's a little bit later now it's starting to even out a little bit so even though the rocks down here are still quite dark it's actually quite a nice balance now I'm using using a two-stop grad you can see it here there we go just to darkened down the the color of the sky just to make it so it's not too bright I still think that after the after the sun's gone down in the blue hour it's going to be a much more evenly lit scene and I can I can use a long exposure to just to blur the water over there but right now it looks fantastic now I'm using these these these are my leading lines here the curves on the edge of the pool and the pool starting to reflect the sky above so it really is nice now in terms of composition the things that I'm most I'm caring most about is just making sure that there's a nice gap there between the top of the ohm the rod and the top of the frame and just trying to make sure that you know I get as much of this pool as I can and keeping these lines coming in from the corners they're right over here where the shadows are so we've got these lines that just pull your eye right the way through the image so that's the aim that I'm that's that's the composition I've got and that's my aim but the light is so fantastic now I think I'm just going to try and do a few exposures about two or three seconds because it's an absolute stunning scene [Music] so now back home let's have a quick look at how I would go about editing an image like this now the first thing that you have to do is choose which image to edit from all the ones that you took so basically when I was shooting I actually thought that I would prefer the images taken in the blue hour and while I do prefer the composition on this I like this poor here what what I miss from the golden and what I prefer about this shot is the light I really like the light on this rock back here and I like some of the color in the sky which i think is a little bit more vivid here it's very blue there's a little tiny bit of color but it's lost a lot of the warmth and a lot of the light that really made this thing particularly special so what I do prefer the composition on this image I'm gonna go ahead and process the image this image although there are quite a few aspects of composition here and I'm not that happy with and then I'm gonna deal with it with a crop later on now cropping is always the last thing that I do to any shot I don't crop the image at the beginning because I'm gonna edit it first in Lightroom and then in Photoshop and if I crop it before when the image comes back from Photoshop the crop is going to be baked in so I won't be able to uncropped it if I decide later on that perhaps I want to have it as a square or as a panoramic or a fix something like that and change the crop so cropping is always the last thing and the other thing to always bear in mind when you're processing images is to actually have an idea of where you want to go with the image before you start processing if I just jump in and start sliding the sliding the sliders over here playing around with contrasting and these kind of things generally I never get anything that I particularly like so it's always good to have an idea at the beginning of what it is that makes the image what it is about the images that I like and what I want to enhance and bring out in the post-processing stage so in this particular image what I really like is the light on the back and the sky I want to enhance so it and bring out those as much as possible which is going to involve using some contrast work changing some of the difference the variables and the tones in the sky and the four and as I said later on some cropping so when I look at this image the things that I noticed that I need to do brightened up and down the sky a little bit now I have a two-stop graduated filter on there but it's still a little bit bright and I think I can darken that down and give it just a little bit more color and also the foreground is a little bit too bright Sun a little bit green so I'm going to work on that and change that a little bit later on in the process but the first thing I'm going to do is it's going to graduate it know the first thing that we're going to do is to ensure that the image is horizon is level so I just leaves a lemming tool along there and crop that and then now I'm going to use a graduated neutral density gradient graduated a gradient filter sorry I'm just going to drag that down to the horizon and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just pull down the highlights that's all in he's not going to change experience just pull down the highlights just a dark and down the bright a bit saying you can see already that's making the colors of the Pink's pop a little bit and making the making the scene just a little bit makes it pop a little bit more actually I think maybe I will just don't know about pulling down the exposure doesn't need much just a little bit like that because I'm gonna be doing some more work on on the image in terms of color and contrast later on so I don't think it really needs any more than that as a first step now I'm going to have a look at to the at the foreground now this seems to be to my eye a little bit of a green tinge in the rock what I'm going to do is try to change that I'm going to just make it a little bit blurry so I'm just going to change your color temperature there make that a little bit bluer and I'm gonna darken it down a little bit so I'm just going to take down the shadows there I have to be careful because in this bottom left corner I don't want to darken it down too much now the reason that I'm darkening it is I think the foreground before when it was brighter it held your eye too much and what I want it to do is to lead your eye the foreground is an important element of the scene but it's just part of the scene and when it was brighter it kind of grabs your attention too much so I want to reduce its impact in the image just by darkening it down ci moves across it much more easily so I'm just going to pull down the shadow to that what that's done is it's also lowered its reduce the contrast a little bit so a little bit later on you have to try to put some more contrast back into this because by docking it down the whole foreground looks a little bit flatter with my editing what I do is I layer the steps doing a little bit at a time so what it looks like now isn't how the final product is necessarily going to look and also what I'm going to do in the foreground is add some clarity till that 2025 like that now I never had clarity globally it tends to make noise and halo in areas like the sky away well you really don't want it but I think this rock needs quite a bit more texture because it's just just to really you know catch your eye a little bit more so I just put some I did put the clarity in I think one final step that I'm going to make is just to try to enhance this because this for me is the focal point of the image so what I want to do is get an elliptical tool and just drag that over here and just see if I can get a shape that it just fits over the rock now I'm not going to touch the highlights but what I'm gonna do is just drop down the shadows and what that's gonna do is just strengthen that a little bit it's taking a while surrender you can't really see much difference because I think my computer is taking a while to render it but if I go back and maybe the exposure a little bit no I can't pull the explosion out too much because that's also going to affect the the brightness of the sky behind and just to give it a bit more increase or warmth there just to give that rock a little bit more pop and then one final step that I'm going to use is with the brush on these pools here because what happened is I didn't have a polarizing filter so the reflecting the sky which was nice but whatever what is what's happened is they're quits made them quite bright and I'm losing a lot of the color of the algae that was at the bottom of this port and I think what I'd like to do is to just take there take the brightness off a little bit so what I'm going to do is just to get a brush I'll click the show Mascis I can see where I'm painting or the green mask just paint over the pools and ya know I'm gonna do - this is just pump the saturation a little bit so the saturation slider just pump that to about this so it just brings the Reds out a little bit more and just not the highlights down just a little bit and yeah it's very subtle but it's just taking the edge off just made it a little bit less strong maybe pull the highlights down just a little bit more and that's it so now I'm gonna move the image over to photoshop so right click Edit in and then edit in Photoshop and what I'm gonna be doing in Photoshop is basically adding a few adjustments on two layers and one of the reasons that I like to a shop and that I still use it in my processing is this ability to add allows is to be able to add adjustments on two layers and then mask part of it out or adjust the opacity of that so I'll just make it a little bit smaller so I can see it over the whole image and I think the first thing that I'm going to do is duplicate the layer and then open that up into Nik color effects Pro now car effects probe it's it's a plugin for Photoshop you can also get it for Lightroom the reason that I use it in in Photoshop is because I prefer to be able to make the adjustments onto a layer and then adjust the strength or a mood and later on if I put in Lightroom it will create a separate TIFF and all the adjustments that I've made a baked in things like that I like that I like the flexibility of using layers in Photoshop I know it's got a lots of different filters hundreds of filters they're easier just a handful that I use that I keep in my favorites but even if these I only use probably two or three of them regularly now the first one the one that's open on default because it was the last one I was using is the skylight filter which is really good if you're shooting a sunset a little bit of color in the sky a little bit of warmth you can see there just pushes out the pinks oranges and magentas that kind of thing it's only the eleven I might just push it up just a little bit and it gives it all because the balance of the image for me the color tones that I'm really working on pinks and blues because they're very complementary colors and that's really what I wanted the whole image is to feel that the Blues and the warmth and orange on the rocket the back is a little bit of splash of contrast but yeah that's quite nice it gives you can see it's also taking a little bit more of the green out of the rocks down here because the Greens slid along to the more magenta tone and just put a little bit more color in the reflections there and another filter that I'm gonna add is contrast now what this does is it adds contrast to the image but it doesn't touch the darkest shadows nor the brightest highlights it only works with the shadows in the mid-tones so you've got no danger of really making the images are really really high contrast you're not gonna block up your shadows you're not gonna burn out your highlights it's just going to take the mid-tones and push the contrast within that and you can see what that's done is it as I said before when I when I talked him down the rocks it starts to look a little bit flat particularly around this area here but by putting in that contrast it's just giving it a little bit more definition there a little bit more shape I've got that at 13 that's probably enough it's brightening it up a little bit again because that was originally the the original intention list to it it's dark in the foreground down but I know it's okay and that's all I'm going to do in um in color effects for us so I just click OK and now you can see the image you saved back in Photoshop on this adjustment layer here which I can turn off and turn on again so you can see exactly what I've done as you can see it's taken a little bit of the green out it's taken the and it's giving it a much warmer more pink glow now it doesn't really need a lot more the image I'm quite happy with it as it is but I'm just gonna push the the mid-tone contrast a little bit more just to show you an extra tool that you can use I'm gonna use this this action panel which is from an American photographer called Tony Kuiper and he developed a system of processing called luminosity masks and I'll I'll put a link on the screen and in the description below so you can go to sign you can you can buy this action panel what it does it selects parts of an image localized areas of an image based on their tonal value so you can select just the dark parts just the bright parts just the mid-tones the darkest darks and it gives you a really sophisticated and very flexible tool processing and adding contrast into an image so what I'm gonna do is these are all the different luminosity masks see I'm just going to select make a curves mask again it's just gonna affect the mid-tones it's not going to touch the darkest shadows not the brightest highlights and I just put an s-curve in there and what that's gonna do is make it pop just a little bit it's flattening the for grades yeah okay that's that's about right maybe make the darks a bit darker because that's that's giving me some of the darkness back in there in the foreground and I'm also going to maybe open up a curve just for the light values and just pull that down just see if you can see in the brightest part of the image just darken it down a little bit there and I think that's it in terms of the tonal values of the image that's probably everything that I need to do one thing that I don't like is playing in the contract playing around with the contrast this kind of made the blue here a little bit too bright a little bit luminous but I'll deal with that back in Lightroom so I'm just gonna flatten that and save it back into Lightroom so here we are back in Laramie you can see this is the the raw file that I've edited in originally in Lightroom and this is the tip that I edited in Photoshop now as I said what I want to do is just take a little bit of the edge off that blue this I'm just gonna get a gradient pull that over just that where it's a little bit too blue and when they're in the color temperature just move warm that up a little bit and that's just gonna take the edge off the blue make it not quite so fluorescent not quite not make your eyes pop so much yeah just that and now I'm gonna crop the image now for me a lot of what I see on the right here is completely unnecessary in the image it doesn't add anything to the immediate of light it's very messy it pulls your eye it distracts where the image should really be all about this rock here and also I kind of included a little bit of a rock there that was that was bad composition so what I'm gonna do is crop the right side of the image and just keep as much of this going as much of the foreground as I can but I'd really like to keep the same aspect ratio the same three by two so let's just pull it in and see now it's quite bright here on the top of this peak so I think if I leave that in it's going catch her ice I really need to crop all the way below that and just pull in from this edge of I'll just get rid of that rock there take away a little bit of the foreground just give it a little bit more sky make sure there's enough room for the image to breathe at the top and let's have a look that's probably it really that's yeah I think that's about right now I still are not completely happy with the with the composition here this for me is a little bit cluttered as I say that the image that I took in the blue eye has clean a composition but it doesn't have the light the reason being is that I had to step onto the low-level of rocks to do this shot but when I was doing this shot I was a little bit further back I couldn't step this far down because the waves kept coming over and it was a little bit slippy it was very cold the rocks were quite slick with ice and I really didn't want to be standing there with a with water lapping around my feet it's funny I think that's probably it if we if you want we can go back to looking at the original raw that's that with the original raw file and that's where we've taken it just giving a little bit more punch change colour tone slightly made it a lot bluer brought out the pinks and put in a lot more contrast in the mid-tones played around in these with these reflections that's really all the image needed and that's all I'm gonna do - in terms of processing and what I do now is I just saved you leave the image as it is in my Lightroom library I haven't in any sharpening to it apart from the adding the clarity which is a form of sharpening in the earlier stage and the sharpening that I would apply to it would depend entirely on the output of the images so if I were going to output it for print I would add a little bit of sharpening in in Lightroom and then output it is a full-size JPEG or a full-size TIFF if I'm gonna go if it's going to go to the web then it will go back into Photoshop and I would shop resize it and sharpen it at the same time in Photoshop and I just show you how I do that because I do that within actions so again we'll open it back in Photoshop this time we add a copy with the local adjustments could want to keep all of the things that I've just done and I'm gonna go back to this Tony kuiper action panel here and go to this section of the panel which is where I've got my shopping defaults and say this is an action what it does is it resizes the full image and sharpens the dirt the same you input the the output size that you want there were 2500 pixels along the longest edge which is what I generally use on my website and for web upload I just click OK it's gonna create a separate image with lots of different layers epic so I can apply sharpening to the various different parts of it but I don't really think I really need to do anything like that so I'm going to flatten it and that's it really that's the image that's 2500 pixels that's rotating onto my website and that's pretty much everything that I would do to an image it's taken me about 50 minutes some of them take me a little bit longer than that some of them take a little bit less and I hope that was interesting if there's anything that I missed out if there's any questions anything you want to ask me please just drop me a comment in the comment box below and I'll make sure to get back to you and once again thanks for watching and take care [Music]

Channel: Andy Mumford

Views: 51,527

Keywords: norway, lofoten, uttakleiv, processing, editing, image processing, on location, landscape photography tips, tutorials, workflow, landscape photography

Id: mNkx1KOP9gc

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018