How to Add an ETHEREAL Glow for CALMING Landscape Photos

many thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this week's video there aren't many editing techniques that I use on each and every one of my landscape photos outside of the usual suspects of course things like correcting exposure or contrast or maybe adjusting colors but softening my photos to create a somewhat less digital look is one of the most often used techniques for me now this isn't anything new this has become a real common practice for a number of years now amongst landscape photographers and you might have heard this technique referred to or described as creating a dreamy or ethereal look or the painterly look or applying an Orton effect and there's multiple different ways you can create this effect in both Lightroom and Photoshop now I get it the entire thing seems very counterintuitive as everyone appears to be clamoring for for higher and higher resolution cameras so why on earth would anybody want to soften or reduce the fine size detail in any of their photographs and I think it's a real it's a personal preference some like in others don't and I certainly wouldn't want to speak for anyone else but I personally like this look I prefer this look is it is it reduces kind of that that's somewhat cold and lifeless look that an overly sharp digital photo can have sometimes and it replaces it with a more subdued or or painterly effect that feels like it has more life associated with it kind of like how filmed us now if you want to apply the actual Orton effect to your landscape photos you have to do that inside a Photoshop which I'll get to in just a second but there are multiple different ways you can create this ethereal look inside of Lightroom now the very first thing that I like to do is just reduce the overall size of the image just that way I have more work space around the actual photograph to work so I'm going to come up here and just select one to 16 right through here and that's just going to shrink the overall image and then I like to come up here to the adjustment brush and I'm gonna come down to flow I want to make sure that's set at 100 and I want to make sure that Auto mask is deselected I'm going to hit the shortcut key oh just so I can see exactly what I'm painting and I'm just gonna take a couple quick brush strokes oops let me hit shortcut key oh again and I just want to cover the entire image in this effect and I think that looks good there and then I'm gonna come back and hit fit and I'm gonna actually I'm gonna leave the mask overlay on for right now but once I have the entire image covered in the mask I can now determine exactly where I want to apply this effect and where I don't want to apply it and I found that it's most impactful when you don't apply this effect to the entire image because sometimes with you soften or create this kind of ethereal look across the entire image it's a little bit hard to notice because there's no contrasting areas it's it's all the same type of effect and I found that if you get a little bit selective with where you want to put this effect that it has a little bit more impact and I found that areas that have a a high density of detail so things like detail and leaves or detail and branches or detail and trees so like woodland areas are a great place to kind of soften the or create this ethereal look so what I want to do for this image is I want to remove the the effect that we're going to apply from kind of the staircase through here and to the immediate foreground so I'm gonna come over here to a race and I'm gonna leave my feather around 90 and I'm gonna bring my flow up to 100 I'm gonna increase the size of this brush and I'm just gonna start to erase I want to erase the area in the immediate foreground and I went to erase along the actual staircase and it doesn't have to be perfect I'm gonna get right through here I'm going to reduce the size of the brush now because we're getting closer to the actual top of the staircase maybe a little bit more kind of all through here and along this edge align right through there and I think that looks good and just so the transition zone right through here like along the edge isn't so abrupt I want to kind of feather that a little bit so I'm gonna come down to feather I'm gonna bring it down to maybe around 40 oops I didn't mean feather coming flow let me go back to bring the feather to where we were I'm going to bring the flow down to around 40 and then just kind of take a couple passes along that edge just to kind of soften that transition zone just a little bit let me increase the size of my brush just a little bit more maybe take just one more pass through there and maybe one more pass all along right through there and I think that looks good make sure I got all that area there and then I'm gonna hit this shortcut key oh just to turn our mask overlay off now once you happen to have the areas determine like where you want to put the effect and where you don't you can go ahead and start to create this it's kind of a theory allure painterly look and there's multiple different ways to do this and one of my favorite ways to do it is by introducing a little bit of negative D haze because using negative D haze actually introduces the illusion of haze and whenever we see haze or fog that's associated with kind of that ethereal or that soft look so I'm gonna come up here and I'm gonna introduce a little bit of negative D haze and I'm also gonna introduce a little bit of negative clarity because that's a great way to soften the the details and the overall image maybe not quite that much we can also use texture as well if we use negative texture that's going to actually soften the these smallest levels of detail in the photograph or the small to mid-size levels of detail small to mid-size levels of detail and the clarity is gonna actually reduce the the larger size detail in the photograph so I'm going to reduce both of those a touch and then we can actually bump up the exposure just a little bit just to kind of create that glowing effect we can also warm the temperature up a little bit as well and then we can just toggle the overall effect on and off so this is where we started and this is where we're at now so this is before and after and that already made a big difference and sometimes it's easiest to see whoops if we actually zoom in to maybe a specific areas like this woodland area right through here and toggle the effect on and off so this is before and after before and after and of course if you notice that maybe you went a little bit overboard and you want to actually reduce something you can just come up here and make any of those changes very simply just by reducing them right here maybe we want to bring that temperature back a little bit or maybe we want to just dial the exposure down just a touch but it's real simple to make those adjustments there and then here's another image right here where there's a we want to apply maybe this effect to like the this background area where there's a lot of woods and it kind of looks like there's a little bit of sunlight peeking through the canopy up here so maybe we want to exaggerate that a little bit so I'm gonna come up here to the actual graduated filter we're gonna just drop this down across the top right through here hit the shortcut key oh just so we can see exactly what we're working with and I think that looks good right there and a lot of times I like to to brighten an area in the background of the photograph because the the human eye is will naturally gravitate towards the brightest areas of your scene and if that happens to be in your background that's a great way to draw the viewers eye throughout your entire photograph all the way into the background of your scene so what I'm gonna do is we already have our graduated filter set right there I'm going to introduce some negative D haze introduce a little bit more in this scenario I think let's soften it down a little bit a little bit of negative texture as well let's bump up the exposure quite a bit on this one and let's warm it up a little bit and let's toggle the entire effect on and off so this is before and after before and after and that made a world of difference just to really kind of give that illusion that there's sunlight peeking through the canopy of those trees and just really exaggerating that and also made that the brightest area of the scenes and that's kind of like a double win there I think I introduced maybe a little bit of too much negative D haze there but somewhere right around there looks good and of course if there's any other area that you want to make an adjustment to so let's say that maybe we want to soften down the detail in this area right through here just bring our a radial filter around there hit the shortcut key oh just so you can see exactly what we're doing I think that looks good then we can just reduce the clarity there if you reduce the texture just a little bit maybe not add a little any D haze in that scenario you can also reduce the contrast a little bit that's another great way to soften this particular area of your photograph as well but those are all different techniques to actually just soften certain areas of your image of course you can definitely just reduce clarity across the overall photograph but I found it to be a great technique just to get a little bit more highly selective with where you apply this kind of ethereal or painter look now if you want to apply the actual organ effect I had mentioned earlier that has to be done inside a Photoshop so what you want to do here's an image of a Half Dome in Yosemite which is the last few moments of light it's kind of kissing the top right here and illuminating a small little patch of snow here which I really liked and if you want to apply the oort effect it's actually very simple and there's a ton of different ways to do this I don't know if the way I do it is the best way but it is a very very simple way and I'm really happy with the results that it it creates so what I do is I want to duplicate the background layer here and the shortcut key is just by hitting command J and that's just going to make it an exact copy we can name this important just to stay a little bit more organized and then what I want to do is select that layer and I'm going to come up here to filter blur and I'm going to come across to Gaussian blur and it's going to pop up this dialog box asking you to select a radius in pixels now there's a couple schools of thought here what I always do is base it off of the amount of megapixels that were by the amount of megapixels in the camera that were used to create the photograph so for this shot it was taken on my sony a7r Mark 2 which is a 42 megapixel camera so I'm gonna set the megapixel radius or the pixel radius here so somewhere right around 42 so I mean it doesn't have to be exactly I always just trying to kind of keep it in the ballpark so somewhere right there it looks good and that's the first step in the second step I do is that come up to the image section adjustments brightness contrast and this is gonna be where we're gonna actually add that glow a little bit so we're gonna increase the brightness and we're gonna pump a lot of contrast in here because that's going to the contrast who in conjunction with the Gaussian blur kind of creates that that real painterly effect it kind of bleeds the highlights into the shadows and the shadows and the highlights and kind of softens things down a bit so I always take the brightness up to ride around in the 50s around 50 60 and then I take the contrast up all the way right around 70 or 80 and then I hit okay and that's it and then I usually reduce the opacity to somewhere around 10 or fifteen percent I'm going to leave it at fifteen percent just so it's a little bit easier to see at home and when you look at it right now you might not think we really did anything but if I toggle the effect on and off this is off and on off and on you can really see the difference and if i zoom in to this area up here let's zoom in a lot actually and I'll toggle the effect on and off again so this is on and off on and off and you can really see how that just kind of softened down a lot of the the fine size detail in the overall photograph and it really kind of added to that just solved a theory look now if you don't want to apply this look to you know the entire area of your photograph it's real simple to get selective just like we did in Lightroom I'm just going to come down here to the layer mask section and select that it's going to put a label a white layer mask on that layer and I'm just going to come up to brush and I want to make sure that black is highlighted right here and I'm just going to paint this effect away and you can see on the layer mask you can see that we're starting to paint this area away and anything that is in white is going to reveal the adjustment and anything in black is going to conceal the adjustment so I'm just gonna paint all through here and there's a lot of different ways you can do this you can get highly refined by utilizing luminosity masks or something like this that might be a little bit easier you could just do it by hand and if we toggle the entire effect on and off now you'll notice that it's only impacting Half Dome in the background and of course the sky now this toggle this on and off so you can see and the Orton effect is probably my favorite way to kind of softening and create this more kind of glowing dreamy look here's another example right here this is the same image we did in Lightroom I'll go a little bit quicker this time I'm going to duplicate the layer by hitting command J let's name it Orton I'm going to come up here to the top and hit filter whoops gonna make sure the layer is selected and then filter blur Gaussian blur 43 pixels is already selected we'll hit okay I'm going to come up here to image adjustments brightness contrast take the brightness to around 50 take the contrast to around 70 hit okay reduce the opacity here to 15% and toggle it on and off so this is off and on off and on and you can really see the difference right through there and if you found that the the effect is too strong you can definitely reduce the opacity or you can also change this blend mode from normal to soft light that will also reduce the overall effect and if we want to remove it from the remove the Orton effect from the actual staircase once again we'll just create a quick layer mask make sure that black is highlighted here and that the paint brush is highlighted we can just take a couple brush strokes right through here and just kind of paint away the entire effect right through there and we could spend a lot of time on this but I'm just doing it real quick just for demonstration purposes and then we can toggle the entire effect on and off just like that you can just you can really see the difference up through here let me zoom into that area so it's really easy to see come up here to that background toggle it on and off on and off it's off and on so it makes it it makes a real big difference and just it's a great way to just kind of soften that image a little bit and like I mentioned earlier just kind of get away from that cold lifeless overly sharp digital photo and I think that using these types of techniques in different capacities is just a great way to do that now before I do wrap up this week's video I do want to say just a big thanks once again to the sponsor of this week's video which is Squarespace where I use for all of my website needs Squarespace provides a dynamic and attractive online platform to create your website you can display your photography using Squarespace is professional portfolio designs and customize the layout and look and feel of your gallery in order to make it your own with Squarespace is traffic overview feature you can easily track trends in page visits and views to better optimize your content you can even grow and engage with your customers with Squarespace email campaign tools which enables you to create engaging emails that match your website with your products blog posts and logo just so that your messaging remains consistent so if you're looking to a new website or possibly upgrade your current website go to Squarespace com4 slash mark denny to get a free trial and 10% off your first purchase so I hope you're able to pick up some helpful information that you can apply to your landscape photography your post-processing moving forward I think this is just a great way to just kind of take your editing to another level now if you have any questions about anything please leave those in the comment section below and I guarantee I will get back in touch with you and if you did enjoy this week's video if you could give it that thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you're not subscribed already and as always I really do appreciate you watching this week's video and I will see you all next week bye

Channel: Mark Denney

Views: 44,959

Keywords: how to apply the orton effect, orton effect landscape photography, landscape photography, landscape, photography, mark denney, landscape photography tips, orton effect tutorial, orton glow, orton effect, orton effect lightroom, orton effect photoshop, how to edit dreamy photos, how to create dreamy effect in lightroom, how to create dreamy photos, how to take ethereal photos, how do you make a picture glow, painterly effect lightroom, painterly edit tutorial, dreamy photography

Id: RDO5LVBhxyQ

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020