DON'T make this common LIGHTROOM editing MISTAKE

a big thanks to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video morning everybody fantastic to see you all again so before i show you the last morning of the shoot that i did um last week i wanted to go through uh some of the edits that i did on the photos i've also got some prints of some photos here that i'm going to show you in a little bit um but there's one thing that when i started photography that i used to do all the time and i've stopped doing it now and i think it's massively improved the edits on my photos but i still see it on photos when i'm judging competitions or on beginners photos that i think is such an easy thing to fix when you're editing and that is all about the luminosity of the photo so not just the luminosity of the whole photo but how bright certain areas of the photo are as well and i'm going to go through an example with you but the basic principle is that um you know there's there's got to be reality in what you're shooting you know you can edit and have a little bit of artistic license obviously but you want to create something that seems like it's possible so if there's a big sun um then and there's a shadow behind the rock then brightening the shadow up too much won't look right because the shadow is meant to be there so i think this is a good example to show you as well because these heather photos it's easy to get carried away in lightroom and do the wrong thing so i'll show you let's get into this this image now so this photo is a good example of where you can become unstuck so we've got a scene like this i've done a very brief edit in fact i've applied one of my presets to it but i'm not done much else apart from that so if you look at before after that was before that's what i've done and now there's a tendency to think okay well the foreground needs brightening up but if you look at the before this is always a good thing to do you know that the camera has captured something that probably is a very accurate representation of those luminosity levels your eye does special things so does your phone actually as well but your camera is pretty good at it so you know this area is dark you know there's not a lot of light getting down here this is bright the sky is pretty dark it was very very stormy day and then there's not a lot of light getting to this area here but it's brighter than this bit down there probably about the same luminosity as maybe the sky over here um this this bit um the temptation is that the thing you want to do is you just want to get a graduated filter here and i'll just drag it over and automatically you can see i've got it brightening up and you just want to brighten it up and you think okay well probably that's a bit bright but you want to brighten it up to about there add some contrast and increase the shadows a little bit and then you think and then you think okay that looks much better but i don't think that does look right you know it's not right if you look at the before after it wasn't like that um this is this is too bright and this is probably not the best example of a photo you have i've i've done it much worse than this in the past but you've got to be a little bit careful the better way of doing it so if we take that graduated filter that we just added there rather than just adding whites and contrasting exposure let's just get rid of that in fact we'll get rid of the whole graduated filter and just use the dodge and burn here and we're just going to just increase the exposure a little bit and then we can use that dodge and burn tool and we can say okay well i think maybe just this bit up here is going to be a bit brighter maybe the flowers are catching some of the light because they're higher up so we'll brighten these up a little bit and this rock um and then this bit just a little bit but not as much as this bit and then you can also think about just adding some warmth maybe to that area just adding a little bit more white even a little bit more clarity and if you use the dodge and burn tool and start to do that then that adds a much more realistic effect to it you've got to think about how light is impacting the land or for that um point the the sky as well and it's easy to get a little bit carried away with this so this is another example here so this is a scene where um i've edited as i i think it should be we've got these amazing rays here and there's a temptation again to just put a graduated filter on this bit at the bottom like i've done and i've increased the exposure but you could push that even more and you could go to about here but again it doesn't look good you don't want to brighten that up too much in fact you could go to about there because if you look at the original shot there was there was no light compared to the light that was coming on the mountains to the background there was no light or there was a lot less light hitting that area than there was at the mountains in the background now the reason i want to say this is i'm just going to move these out of the way and i'm going to show you the photo that was one of my favorite from last week yeah i really really like it and um yeah i just want to talk a bit more about the photo and then we'll talk about the luminosity so there was a bit of light coming out here but it was fairly flat light and there was this amazing rock formation here that i wanted to get i also wanted to get the um the purple heather in this distant um hill here this is um called higator and i really like this patch of heather and this rock and then the path running through now when i was editing this photo there was a such a temptation to brighten this up this area here and i'll show you on on in lightroom in a second it wasn't bright it was overcast there was no light hitting it so the luminosity of this i didn't want to increase too much and i think it creates a bit more of a moody shot as well so i purposely didn't increase that it is a focus stack this just to let you know um so i i exposed for the foreground and the top half um and then i just was really careful about the um luminosity levels on it similarly with um with this shot here so this is um this is a landscape version of that i'll just move my calendar out of the way i should say by the way i am actually still taking pre-orders for this i thought i was gonna have to stop them last week but um because i've delayed the printing of it just by a little bit um for various reasons um but i just wanna i just wanna make sure i get it right that means that you can actually pre-order it and i don't know when i'm gonna stop that but i will stop it in a day or two so if you still want to get free delivery on it worldwide then you can and um yeah i'm so pleased with this landscape version it looks fantastic there's also a portrait version as well if you want to be able to write on your calendar right sorry that's an aside so this shot is actually one of my favorites to be honest i like the composition of that more than this but i like the lighting in this now even though it looks like the lights coming out it isn't actually hitting these um these heathers i have actually done that myself a little bit but i've had to be so careful about how i do it and also when i brightened it i only brightened the the heather i didn't brighten the um the green grass or the rocks too much either because i wanted to make it look like there was a little bit of light coming onto this heather the reality was there was very there was just a tiny amount but very not as much as it looks like here and then the back of this rock here uh as some people said it looks like the sorting hat and harry potter sorting hat certainly does in that one i made sure that i didn't brighten that up too much either but yeah this this isn't my favorite composition but it's probably my favorite shot um oh god if i got the perfect light on this it would have been amazing we were so close to it so close but it just didn't quite come out did come on the on the background hills here okay so let's just have a quick look in lightroom and then we'll go to day day five in the morning and i'll show you what i got on that final day okay so let's let's have a look at the these edits again so this edit here this is the raw image um that i've edited the reason i've got a tiff image as well is that i focus stacked it so when i focus that stacked it i export it as a tiff back into lightroom so this is a raw image and you can see that i have just been really careful about what what i do with this you know i've just increased the contrast in fact i've not really increased the brightness very much i've darkened the bottom of it and then the brightness on the heathers i've done through just using luminosity on the purple so you can see that can you see how i can change the brightness level of the heather there now you can go over the board on this so i don't go overboard i just stick it at about there and then i just did some brush work around here and yeah that was about it really i didn't do a lot else it didn't it didn't need a huge amount what i didn't do which is very tempting and actually a good test for this is if you just use a crop tool look at the histogram if i crop down to here you can see that on the histogram tool i have no whites now you if you were editing just this so say i was editing this then you would probably brighten it up because it would look better if you brined it to about there but i'm not just editing that i'm editing the whole scene and the whole thing together as a whole means that that bottom bit can't be as bright as the top bit so if i left it at that brightness and then uncropped it and then went back up to the top you'd see that the the sky now is very bright and it's actually too bright so you know the exa the correct brightness for the sky is about there which means that the actual foreground can't be much brighter if i go and do um go and do this and increase the brightness of it it starts to look a bit odd and you don't want to do that it doesn't create the atmosphere it doesn't create something that's super special so just be careful about that again on this one here you'll see that i actually was even more careful i i actually selected you'll see just the purple heather with the color range mask so i just selected purple and then i could control just the purple heather or anything that was purple in the scene so in this case it was this rock down here and then on that i changed the brightness and the whites on that so just to add a little bit of punch just to give them a little bit of brightness but by just doing that alone and not the rest it looks like light is just feeding onto the tops of them and not into the shadows which i don't want to increase the brightness of so i hope that helps i hope that you know that's something that's useful let's go back to last week my final morning and do i get a shot with some sunlight okay so last morning and there's a little bit of fog tiny bit of fog in the air i don't think there's gonna be any sun but this is exciting because it's a little bit different i think i'll be able to get something quite interesting i know the area i've been back here so many times so i've got an idea where i'm going to go and hopefully i can get something just a little bit different than the days before the weather's changed so much of the last four days anyway let's get going [Music] so i'm back in the location that was in before and i've got this amazing scene in front of me here which is this mist and there's just a the headline over over there of higator i've got the rocks just in the foreground here some beautiful heather it's a much softer scene than i was after but it's really beautiful and i'm really pleased for the last shot that i'm probably going to take of this series and um yeah you can't feel any breath of wind it really is quiet and calm there's just a chirp of the bird the occasional squawk of a pheasant it really doesn't get better than this [Music] okay so i just want to quickly show you and the difference that going lower um makes in the scene you can see i've got my camera quite low here and i talk about this quite a lot but if you just i just turn you around here and you could come to the scene and conceivably shoot it about maybe here like this but if you go low i just want to show you the difference it makes see you can bring that rock more into prominence like that whereas that rock's a little bit hidden there and that and that is the difference between literally sort of 60 70 centimeters um movement vertically so you know think about that because it does make a difference to the shot oh that pheasant's really noisy now right what else can we see oh there's definitely no sun sunrises over there we haven't got anything at the moment [Music] [Music] so just as you think you're good to go home the mist arrives on four so i thought i'd jump into this sort of vertical shot here and just talk through what i think is quite complex composition um so we've if we start the top here we've got these grasses here and then this rock and then then there's this heather just sort of balancing this left-hand side there's these nice line of rocks down the left and got this quite strong dominant rock on the right and then the heather in the background before i could just see a peak in the background um i say a peak a tour which is like a bit of rock and then it just sort of opens up you can see to the tour down there and yeah it looks pretty good and there's also this other feature here which i think is quite interesting although it may not work because of that as well so that feature just i've made sure uh separated on its own into the mist in the background and because we've got this missed that looks a little bit more dominant and it looks pretty amazing [Music] [Music] the fog just keeps rolling in and out so i've come back to this old place that i've photographed quite a few times of the last four days and um there's just a bunting there just flying which is just so beautiful but i've struggled with it because i struggle with these rocks in this rock but i think i've just sort of unlocked something so i i've been shooting higher up the hill a little bit um and so i came down the hill a little bit and you can see there's a path that i found by going down and further back i really like the front of these rocks i like that sticking prominent but this rock's always puzzled me but now because i've come down i've opened up the front of this rock and because i've opened up the front of that rock i think it mirrors this rock better and also because i've come down i've brought this rock closer to this rock in the composition so all those things added together i think it's just made quite a pleasing composition i got a shot with the fog i'm really pleased definitely going to get a cup of tea now so i hope you enjoyed that final day as you can see i didn't get the light that i was hoping for however that miss created something a little bit different it created a very different image of the heather i actually really like this shot here i think this has worked really well i like the fact that i've got this sort of curved path that goes through here and i just found that right at the end um you know the mist just come in here it's just creating a little bit of um just mystery on on um higator here and then you can just see the valley down here as well this is a good example of where i've not darkened the sky too much you know there's a temptation you could easily darken that sky and bring out more of the cloud detail but i wanted to create this very sort of ethereal mysterious look i think this works well with this rock above the horizon and then this rock here on its own i really like this i think it's turned out really well it's not an image that i expected um to get and i didn't expect any miss but yeah i i think i got some good shots now i just wanted to um say something else as well i um i haven't updated my portfolio for a long time on my website and i'm starting to do it over the next week and this image is gonna go on there um i'm probably gonna put the other one on as well so i'm probably gonna put this image on as well um i'm not 100 sure about that but this one definitely will be on and let me know if you if you want me to put all three of them on then then i can do that you know let me know in the comments below um but yeah i'm gonna be putting this image on and um it's going to be limited edition an a two size a three size name one size as well it it'll look so incredible printed really really huge on this photospeed nst bright white paper and yeah you'll be able to see that on my website and speaking about a website this video is sponsored by squarespace thanks ever so much for squarespace for helping me out with my youtube channel over the last few years if you want a website or you're looking to set up a shop like how how i use um squarespace or you're just looking to showcase your images then make sure you head over to squarespace and check them out if you're ready to purchase a website then you can get 10 off by going to forward slash nigel or using offer code nigel so that's it go and check out my portfolio on my website and see the new images that i've put on there for a short period i'm going to be offering 30 off any images on my portfolio okay thanks ever so much for watching and until next sunday bye you

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 57,251

Rating: 4.9753251 out of 5

Keywords: Lightroom, photo editing, landscape photography, photography, editing tips, lightroom tips, lightroom tips and tricks, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: RS--LstcbrE

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021