How to create and EDIT BETTER landscape PHOTOS | Lightroom Tutorial

I'm really excited about this episode I've been planning this episode and I'm planning to do this episode now for for a number of months actually because I really want to talk about Lightroom but more importantly how to visualize images and create images Lightroom being one of those tools [Music] okay so before I go through how I edited this image in Lightroom and I'm going to show you some tips and tricks in Lightroom as well then I want to talk about visualization although you're probably thinking that's just a load of crap really but it isn't it is really really important to be able to visualize the image that you're intending to get before you press the shutter button because otherwise ends up just being a snap you you you you end up just taking a record of the location Lightroom is just a tool to be able to take that digital negative and then convey the mood that you had and the the feelings that you had when you took that image so whether that's a cold feeling or whether that's just a feeling that it was miserable on the day and doll I mean if you go back to this video that I produced then the final image that I had the image that I took out with my car window was one of just the dullest day that I've ever had it was a rainiest day that I've ever done at any photography on and I knew when I took that image how I wanted the final result to appear and baby Duke by doing that then he made me think a little bit more about the composition about the subject that I wanted in that composition about the light and and what type of light I wanted to wait for I didn't want sunlight to suddenly come on on on this image I didn't want to wait too long so so that visualization really helps because it's part of that entire creative process from pressing the butter on the shutter to get in the printout at the other end so really important to really really think about it you're just going to remember that Lightroom doesn't make that great image from any any file as well Lightroom is just one of the tools on the way you've got to have a good composition you've got to have a good subject you've got to have good light on that subject and the timing of that image has got to be right so so what's really interesting and is the the images that I showed in my last video they were taking on two mornings and the first morning met a guy called James green on the top of lauric fell and if you haven't seen his work then check out his Instagram he's a fantastic photographer and it was really interesting to see his portrayal of that morning compared to mine so that you know we were in the same place at the same time and we were pretty much in the same location in that place and we took that you know fairly similar images really but the result of those two images after we process them in Lightroom were quite different so you can see that James is is you know very different tones to mine it's kind of think of a little bit of a warmer feel than mine and it's just a very different type of image and all those things create a different look and a different feel to that image now that's exactly what James want to portray you know he just lots of images in this style on his Instagram feed and they're just absolutely fantastic in fact I love his image I think I prefer it when I look back at it to my image but my image he represents the feeling and the mood and what I was trying to get from that morning and what I'm trying to say here is that two photographers will produce different things in Lightroom so there's no right answer to what you do in Lightroom there's lots of different ways of doing things so the other morning on the Monday morning where it was really cold I I was really pleased with my images I've got some incredible feedback on the one that I'm going to show you how I edited in in Lightroom which I didn't show in last week's video if you don't know Matthew then in the UK here he won the 10th landscape photographer of the year which is an amazing achievement and his images are just stunning he does a lot of wildlife photography but he also does amazing landscapes and he happened to be the harem that morning on the Monday as well which I didn't know at the time don't know how we didn't bump into each other but I noticed on Twitter it was about a few days after a post of one of my images that he posted an image from the same location and his image was it's quite different to mine really and we actually spoke about it on Twitter and we we didn't reasonably similar things in Lightroom but the ultimate output was quite different now his compositions slightly different to mine but it's not I don't think it's the composition of this image which gives it a different feel it's how we process them differently now again I don't think there's a better image you know the the both images I think are really really good I do think though that they convey a slightly different mood and a slightly different feeling I think Matthews is you know a slightly warmer image you know but but you still do get that feeling that that obviously it was it was a cold morning it's a very calm image I think whereas I think my image and what I was trying to portray in my image was just the cold of the morning I had freezing cold hands when I took this image and that was the overriding feeling I had I and you know it was really still and misty and the mists was just hanging and that's what I wanted to portray what I wanted to show is that two photographers can go with similar camera equipment to the similar location at the similar time and the ultimate output can be very different and so you know what Matthew might say in Lightroom might be different to what I say so there's no right or wrong answer to what you do in Lightroom now there are some fundamentals and there's some fundamental rules which I'm going to go through but ultimately you've got to generate your own style so really think about that and really think about what what style you want and what mood you want to convey with that image and then that makes it a lot easier when you go into Lightroom to then produce that end result okay so let's get on to Lightroom and let's have a look at this image and see how I created it through Lightroom okay so here we've got the image and the first thing you'll probably notice is that it's really dark so if we look at the histogram up here you can see that I only exposed it basically which isn't very good I usually bracket my exposures unfortunately I didn't in this case and it's not a good idea to under expose images I like to expose as close to the right hand sides as I can without clipping the highlights the reason behind that is it's good to expose to the right now there's many articles talking about this but basically you get more tones in the right-hand side of the image so in the highlights there's a lot more tonal detail than there is in the shadow area I'm gonna change this to white the background here now this is a bit of a personal preference but it does make a difference to how your edits in the image III usually have it set as white the background and then it mimics how it's going to be seen either online on social media which is using a white background on my website which is a white background or when I print it and get it framed which is usually a white background I've obviously made sure I've calibrated my monitor but I also ensure that I've set it to the correct brightness as well so on my iMac I always make sure that I've got five bars of brightness at the bottom here and that makes a big difference you've got to think about it as an iterative process as well you're probably not going to get it right on the first path or the second path maybe the third path but it's very much like an iterative process so the first thing I will do is crop it and I may crop it again later but I like to crop my image before I do anything else so I think I'm going to crop it to be vertical composition because I just think I don't like these trees on the right hand side so there we go I've got I've got an initial crop and I'll probably do more cropping later the next thing is to set the white balance but in this case it's difficult to set the white balance because there's there's not a lot of color in the image at the moment I'm going to bring that color into the image so I might come back to this later and then I'm going to just do some basic first pass stuff so I'm probably just going to increase the exposure slightly I'm going to reduce the highlights slightly and I'm going I'll probably come back to this I'm going to significantly increase the shadows about there I am going to increase the whites and that's why I decreased the highlights because as I increase the whites I can bring back detail by decreasing the highlights so I'm going to set that around about 45 that'll do and I'm going to reduce the highlights a little bit more to bring some detail into that sky so already I got some color in it now I've got a little bit of a representation of that those sort of apricot colors that I saw on the day we ever described it sky is apricot before and there we go and then I would carry on going down here I'm going to come back to the curves I'm going to come back to my HSL colors as well I'm not going to split tone this image I am going to come back to the sharpening but I'm here I'm gonna move chromatic aberration and I'm going to enable profile correction so that's it that's my first pass so that's fairly fairly basic really the next thing that I would do is I'd usually do color correction but in this case I'm going to bring out the color by using some gradient filters so I'm gonna probably put three gradient fills on this so I'm going to click the gradient tool here and the first one I want to do is for the upper part of the image so I am going to just create a gradient just about here just make sure these are all set to zero and a top tip here is that if you just double click on the name then it if I just change that double click on it it sets it back to zero so that's really useful to know what try and do here is use two contrasting colors that either side of the color wheel to create a sort of cold but yet calm feeling image so it's a really good idea to think about the color wheel when you're when you're taking shots but also when you're editing those shots as well because small tweaks in color and just bring in a green slightly to a different hue or a blue to a different hue or an orange or a yellow it can make a really big difference to the feel of an image so get a color wheel have a look at it look at the opposite sides of that color wheel and see what colors complement them each of their a lot more so what I am trying to do I've got orange and teal I'm trying to get those two colors to sort of complement each other really well in this image but the whole idea is that I'm trying to create a different feel for the bottom of the image and the top of the image because the bottom of the image is that it's a cold misty grass and the top of the image is where the sun's coming through okay so I'm going to change I want to just change the green down a little bit again I might come back to these in my second iteration and move them a little bit I am going to decrease the exposure a little bit of the sky but I'm going to change that in a little bit and I probably going to increase it with another filter I'm going to reduce the contrast because I don't really want to really contrast the image here the whole idea is to get soar a pastel image I'm going to again reduce the highlights even further I'm going to significantly increase the shadows again I'm going to increase the Y it's quite significantly and I'm going to slightly increase the blacks that's looking quite good I also want to add some clarity into this now clarity is something you've got to be a little bit careful with you can make something look completely different with clarity now using an image like this I wouldn't add a lot of clarity but what I want to do is the cloud just in the background in this area here I just want to pick out some of that detail a little bit more now I could do a local adjustment there but I think just doing it here is going to work quite well so I'm going to increase the clarity then a clarity what clarity does is it does contrast in the mid tones of the of the image so it doesn't really change a lot to do with highlights or really dark areas it looks at the mid-tones of the image so I want to add just I want to add another graduated filter I quite often do this as well when I'm looking at skies all that I'll add more than one now this is something I'm going to alter in multiple ways I'm going to slightly increase the exposure a little bit there I'm going to reduce a contrast significantly reduce the highlights again the sky's getting closer now to what it want to look like I'm gonna increase the whites by the increase of blacks and that's probably okay for now I'm going to do some more color correction in a minute so this if I just hover over it this is just for this this bop botton image now what I'm going to do here is this is where I'm going to now change the color of this bottom area so I'm going to significantly change the temperature of the bottom so I'm going to change it to probably minus 22 now you can see already that that create a very different feel to the image I've now got this very cold area at the bottom and this warm a sort of very light orange color at the top now I need to get these colors correct but I'm getting there now again I think I'm just going to make it a little slightly more green as well I don't want it to be that sort of purple color I want it to be more of a green color slightly increase the exposure slightly increase the contrast I want to reduce the highlights and I think I need to increase the shadows even more in this area bringing out somewhere at some detailing this bit here I'm going to significantly increase the whites yeah decrease the highlights and increase the whites even more and I am going to reduce the blacks here I now want to increase the clarity of this now again you got to be a little bit careful I want to feel quite sharp quite crispy you know like the morning was it was a crispy morning so I'm going to increase the clarity here around about 45 okay the next thing I'm going to do is look at the tone curve I will then go to the color correction so what I wanted what I'm trying to do now with the tone curve is create a little bit more definition in the graduation of those tones in the image at the moment it's too dark so I want to lift up pretty much all the tones apart from the very very black so I might add a number of points on here so I'm going to increase there I'm going to add another point then mr. bout with us so what I've done is I've increase the brightness of those areas of the image so that the highlights and the mid-tones quite significantly but but I want the blacks to remain fairly fairly dark so that this adds a little bit of contrast if you can see as I just move that and that has some contrast I'm going to add another one now and just darken it down so what I've done there is I've created I've just switch this on and off by using this little button here you can see that I've created some contrast in the image now by doing that what I've done is I've probably blown out that a little bit now you can click this button here and you can see that those tones are all very similar in this sky so what I want to do is I just want to reduce highlights just even further I probably slightly reuse the whites as well okay that's looking better so the next thing to do we start having a look at the colors so this orange is just not quite right so I'm going to go to the HSL slide here and what this allows you to do is allows you to change the colors that are orange yellow green aqua etc in your image so you can change individual areas of the image with the same color value it's very different to the thing at the bottom which is the camera calibration which is also allows you to change colors but this changes the color of every pixel in the image what I want to do is just change the individual colors so I could pick the sky color here by using this pick at all but I know that I just want to change this orange here and I want to reduce that down to make it more I want to get away from that the very the very obvious orange color because that's not what I thought it was like in the morning so I'm going to go down to about minus 24 that's about right now what I'm going to do here is I'm going to add a little bit vibrance because I just want to just slightly increase the saturation of just the middle tonal values of the images so I'm going to slightly increase the vibrance now if I go back down to this and the reduces down to about 24 it's starting to look like I want it to look now now this makes a significant difference to the sky I just want to slightly change that the Blues in the image at the bottom so I'm gonna just slightly increase that there is this starting to look really cold and frosty around this area here which is exactly how I imagined it good okay not far off with that so I think the next thing to do is is sharpening so the best thing to do with sharpen is if you zoom in on the image here I can see you know some branches and I can see whether there's any noise I want to get rid of so I'm gonna go and sharpen the image now this is a good little tip for you if you click option and then move the button you can see the impact it has on you on your image now I always leave the radius at 1 otherwise you start to get all sorts of artifacts but detail is a good one and masking talked to keep your finger on option and then change it and you can start to see as I change this if I move it up here I can start to see it's going to affect everything all the little tiny details in the image which I don't want I just really wanted to affect the branches and a little bit the foreground so that is about right about 44 I'd say which is quite high and then but now I've got quite a lot of noise in this area so again what I'm going to do is and guess option again and then I'm going to increase the mask in and what you'll see is all the dark areas or areas that are not going to be as impacted by this I'm going to increase this to about 48 and then that means that all this area here is not going to get sharpened ok well it's getting there now I think it's starting to represent exactly how I felt and the the image that I sort of pre visualized in my head when I took this image so I'm really really pleased but I'm going to do is I'm going to go make a cup of tea because I think it's a good idea to sort of step away from your computer go and take a break and then come back and have a look at the image sometimes it's a good idea just away a day and have a look at the image again okay I've got my cup of tea so now I've come back to it I know it's not quite right in this in the centre of the image so what I'm going to do and you know I have actually done the sharpening I usually don't do the sharpen until the last thing I do but but I think that really matters what I'm going to do is I'm just going to create create a new adjustment brush I'm gonna reduce the size of it a little bit here and I'm just gonna paint that over this area here I think I need to slightly increase the exposure of this area yeah that's looking a lot better don't want to overdo it though I'm going to reduce the contrast of it because I want it to be sort of more sort of mysterious and a significantly reduce the highlights just to create a little bit more definition in those highlights now I want to add some more clarity in this area just to bring out some more definition and that's starting to work well so I think that's pretty much the image I had in my head when I took the photo so when you go out you're trying to visualize this image how do you do that well I think it's important to have a appreciation for the things around you that isn't just the subject so don't think that's an amazing tree you do need to think about the light and how the light might change the mood of that that image and think about whether it's worth waiting for it to go cloudy or waiting for some sunlight to hit the light is it better if you come back when it's misty you know late later in the morning or or or wait until the mists clears I think that's going to ultimately impact on your mood you guys think about the textures you know the textures of the grass are they going to add to the image are they going to help you portray that story of that image is it not worth having any foreground in it because just that you know detract away from what you are trying to portray so so it's good idea to have a more general understanding of you of your environment when you're taking that that image I think that really helps now there's there's different ways that you can do this I do think that the modern way of doing it is is using your phone you know you can it certainly helps to crop a little bit so certainly for composition to be able to crop and see what it looks like when you've cropped because often you can look at a landscape and it could be a big sort of panoramic view that you've got from these eyes these eyes you know what do I did that from your eyes and it's a much more expansive view than you get when you put on a lens and go to a particular focal length on that lens so being able to visualize that either through the viewfinder on your camera but I think that doesn't work so well using your iPhone does work quite well and you can zoom in and out a little bit just to try and sort of crop it a little bit but the other thing that that's worth trying as well and I occasionally do this night I do think it really helps from a composition point of view it's just try and just cut out a bit of card like this and and look through it and I think you'll find that that can really help with your composition it can really help get away from distractions because sometimes you can look at a tree think that trees amazing your brains really clever is focuses in on that tree and try and sort of get gets rid of all the things around that tree and you think this is gonna be amazing an image you get it back you look at it in Lightroom you think oh there's a branch there or that branch is really distracting and you've sort of because you've been you've had all these sort of external distractions but your eyes been focused on this tree he's then quite difficult to visualize what the composition of that image is going to be like so just taking a card out can make a really big difference so here is the final image I am so pleased with it I think it just really captures the mood of that morning really really does I really it's one of my favorite prints that I've done this year I think so this is going to go up on my website and become a limited edition prints so you know if you're interested in please go and have a look at it it really helps if you purchase my prints or got my workshops it's how I make my living so I really do appreciate all the prints that have been bought today it's blow me away really really hope that this can be hanging up on somebody's wall sometime shortly it will make a great Christmas present okay thanks ever so much for watching I really really really appreciate all the people have watched over the last few months I'm getting they're getting close to 10k subscribers so thanks so much for that I'll leave you with another image that I took on the morning that I didn't show in last week's video which again is really really great image I was really really pleased and remember go out get you or let me grab it get your card and start visualizing that end image start thinking about the things around you the textures the things around you how things interact together and how you want that end image to be and you may be surprised you may find that you create some stunning photos okay until next week see you next time [Music] it doesn't get any better than this [Music] Wow [Music] it's a different [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 155,447

Keywords: photography, landscape, how to edit photos, landscape photography, lightroom, lightroom tutorial, photography tutorial, lightroom editing, landscape photography tutorial, landscape photography tips, landscape photography tips and techniques, photo composition, composition, adobe lightroom, edit in lightroom, nigel danson, nigel danson photographer

Id: HCNnlFwKQKc

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2017