Creating Mood in Landscape Photography | LIGHTROOM tutorial for dramatic B&W photos

take some shots and I'll see you later [Music] okay well I've come out it's absolutely throwing down it must be so crazy to do this but I've come out I'm gonna try and get a shot I've got an umbrella probably not gonna walk that far away from the car but I want to sort of try and reflect the mood of today because it is throwing it down it's a typical British day it must be crazy and you must be crazy so I'm going to drive a bit further up this road see if I can find a spot and then I know there's a tree up here I think I can get that and then maybe just get the road in it as well which is gonna reflect the light a little bit what look a bit alike there is I think I'm gonna be able to get a shot I'm actually quite excited by it weirdly okay let's go after being outside and getting absolutely thoroughly wet through and not finding anything and just getting water everywhere on all my lenses which just didn't work I've decided to drive it further down the road and ever discovered the McDonald's equivalent of drive-through photography so I've stopped by the side of the road here I found a really good tree which have actually photographed before and I'm gonna jump out the car walk around see if I can find a composition I'll leave this recording on a tripod from the car in the dry hole II and then you can you can see me walk around see if I can find something now the mist or dense fog as it should be called changing all the time so I think I might be able to get something quite good [Music] you [Music] just doesn't get any better than this just look at this it's absolutely amazing I've come out here nobody else is out it's just quiet everyone's out either inside or just staying away from the rain but I'm out in the Peak District in the mist in the rain and it's fantastic and I think I'm gonna get an absolutely great shot with this scene here and these trees and the clump of trees below so gonna go back to my camera which is still surviving under the umbrella okay right well I've got a setup just step out a little bit you can see I have rigged up a little umbrella which is working pretty well I've got a great scene here so if you could just look behind me now the range just stop briefly but there's a little hot some trees and these foreground trees here and the mist just looks fantastic I've got so lucky miss just lifted a little bit and there's some masking tape in my car so I rigged this up and it was Street so I've got my d810 on my 24 to 70 lens oh crap okay it's windy this is not good yeah yeah so I've got my 74 24 to 70 lens oh my do 810 and have already taken a shot and they were gonna take another one now I've got it set at around about f/8 focusing on these trees in the foreground not bother if the background is out of focus because it just looks absolutely fantastic so I'm gonna go back to my camera which is still surviving under the umbrella they take some shots and I'll see you later [Music] [Music] so my new type of drive-by photography has definitely proved to be gratefull inside of a car is absolutely soaked but I wasn't gonna be beaten and I think I've got actually great image so I'm just going to open the window just for a second you hopefully can see in the background here I've got this tree over here and this is a tree that again I've taken lots of times before and I'm waiting for the reservoir in the background to open up to the weather and what I'm hoping to do is catch the rain coming down as I take this shot now everything is going to be handheld but I've got lots of things to rest myself on to make sure I keep it really steady I've got an iOS lens on my Fuji XT 2 as well which really helps to shoot down to probably a tenth of a second if I'm really careful and yes gonna be dramatic it's going to be dramatic I really hope the image is too sharp it's not outdoor photography I haven't got out as much as I should have done obviously it's absolutely peeing it down now I mean if you just look at that out there it's so heavy the rain now there's literally a river running down the road what a difference literally two minutes makes to this and I keep filming in the car by the way I am actually getting out and walking a little bit in the rain but just look at this now it's just incredible before you could hardly see this tree and now look at this [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so obviously this week's video is slightly different than have done before I didn't get to walk so much but I had a fantastic time I really enjoyed searching for those images and trying to portray and get an image that portrayed the mood of the day which was just torrential rain dark really foreboding skies and I think I got that with this with this image that I printed out here on some photo speed semi-gloss paper it just looks fantastic so what I wanted to do which was show you how I edited this this image and converted it into a black and white image I don't do a lot of black and white photography I used to I started out doing just black and white photography in in the film days and I have my own darkroom but not much has changed in in Lightroom that then try to try and create that mood and what I used to do dodging and burning certain areas in the darkroom so I wanted to go through my process of taking this image and showing you how I created that the final image that I showed you just before okay so let's have a look so this is the image that I took if I just hover over here then you can see that it was taken at 52 second iso 800 on the 18 millimeter side of the 10 to 24 millimeter lens now if i'm honest is slightly underexposed s if you look at the histogram at the top right here then I should have exposed it a little bit further to the right of this histogram so the first thing I'm going to do is convert it to black and white so to do that I'm going to go down to this tab here rather than just click the black and white here because this offers you just a little bit more control over your black and white images now in this image where there's not a lot of color it doesn't really matter too much but what I can do is I can say for the red tones the orange tones the yellow tones etc how much of that tone is translated into a particular you whether it be really dark or really light in the black and white image so if I wanted all the green tones to be really white and I can drag that to the right or really dark I can drag it to the left so it makes a big difference to the which here now you've got to be careful because if you drag it one way or the other and I'll show you on the blue tone I'm just going to set this to what it should be so if I go down to the blue tone here and then move this you can see that it's obably going to impact the sky but I said move it right to one side to the other then you can see this you start to get a noise in the image so you've got to be a little bit careful so blue I want to be set around about there and then slightly move the Aqua the green I want to be about that at that foreground I want to be quite dark the yellow so this is just again a changing the foreground a little bit but picking up some of the detail so I'm going to move that to about plus two and again if I just move this left and right you can see that it's slightly changing the image a little bit and not very much in this case before if you if you convert in autumn photos into black and white or something that's very colorful you've got a blue sky then you can do quite dramatic things obviously with this black and white mix here so once I've done that the next thing I'm going to do is go and crop the image so I just want to crop it down to about there I don't want that foreground in and that's much stronger and then I'm going to do sort of global adjustments to it before I do some more local adjustments so I'm going to leave the exposure for now and increase the contrast slightly on this image I'm going to reduce the highlights a little bit which I'll come back to in a minute and then slightly crease the shadows which brings up some of the detail down here I'm going to fairly significantly increase the whites again the sky's going to white now it was very dark and overcast I want to get that back but I'm going to do that by a local adjustment then I'm also going to increase the blacks quite significantly which bring us out so again some more detail in those blacks and makes them slightly more gray but that's what it was like on the day so you can see now my histogram is slightly more even across the whole range from blacks to white now there was no white in the image so there's never going to be detail in this in this part of the image here because it just wasn't white it was a very dark and overcast day so when we increase the clarity which can add to dramatic effect of images you've got to not overdo this because it increases the grain of the image as well which I'm going to come to later so you can start to see it's improving now I want to increase the whites a little bit further and then have a slight s-curve just to again lower those blacks down think that it's probably enough so once I've done that I'm going to put a graduated filter on the sky here and I'm going to slightly reduce the exposure of it I'm going to fairly significantly increase the contrast of that sky and I'm also going to increase the clarity is still further in the sky there to bring out again some of that detail and then I'm going to just slightly reduce the noise of the sky in this local adjustment so once I've done that I'm just going to move that down a little bit I'm going to add another graduated filter to the sky so just a little bit higher up here I'm going to add another one and this one all I'm going to do on this one is just reduce the exposure of this one you're going to try and get that dramatic effect of the day and that's about okay again I'm going to increase the contrast and you're going to increase the clarity so reduce that exposure just a little bit more and I'll probably go back to this one again just reduce that exposure a little bit more there we go so we're add one more adjustment for the bottom of the image here and all I'm going to do in this area is increase the contrast and reduce the highlights slightly very slightly just to bring out some of the detail into the mist here so the very final thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to add a filter just to reduce the darkness around the edges of the image increase the darkness around the edges of the image so I'm just going to invert this mask and slightly reduce the exposure so that is pretty much the final image I think I just could do one more thing maybe just increase the shadows a little bit more here just on this bottom filter just want to bring out a little bit more in the foreground here so that's it there is the final edited image hopefully that's helped and can encourage you to go and do some black-and-white photography as well I think it's really good for training moods of weather certainly in clouds it really does look fantastic so next week is something a little bit different I've got a challenge on with a fellow youtuber so hopefully you can tune in then thanks ever so much for watching if anybody wants to get on a workshop a one-to-one workshop with me then please try and sign up for that as soon as possible I'm getting booked up and it's been much more popular than I first expected it to be so if you want to get a day I'm booking all the way open to July next year now then please there's a link below click that and you can find out more details about my want to once I do that in the Peak District and the Lake District and thanks ever so much for watching if you're not subscribed then please subscribe below give it a thumbs up if you liked the video that's really helpful to me comment below as well because again that's really helpful and I look forward to seeing you next week bye [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 62,303

Keywords: landscape photography, photography, landscape, lightroom tutorial, lightroom, how to, photo editing, on location landscape photography, photography tips, landscape photography tips, landscape photography tips and techniques, black and white photos, b&w, black and white photography, editing black and white lightroom, b&w lightroom, nigel danson, nigel danson photography, b&w photos

Id: 3PzzXJFf5fo

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2017