How to Create the Orton Effect in Lightroom Classic, No Photoshop Needed

[Music] hey there everybody i hope you're doing well in these crazy crazy times and uh enjoying the holiday season as best as you can but in today's video i really just wanted to take a few quick minutes hopefully quick minutes i say that a lot and then these tutorials kind of get into a deeper dive than what i have planned in my mind but anyways i wanted to take some time to show you how i create the orton effect within lightroom without using photoshop at all anybody that knows me knows that i can be pretty stubborn and if i'm told i can't do something or something shouldn't be done a certain way i'm quite prone to go out and try to prove them otherwise and one of those things a couple years ago probably two three years ago now uh is specifically around the orton effect so quick kind of not history lesson necessarily but if you're not familiar with the orton effect i was created by a photographer i believe it was michael orton back in the 1980s on film and it was combining two different frames of an image essentially or slides of an image to be able to blend in a very soft ethereal kind of glowy appearance along with still having the detail of the image as well that you would want so obviously over the years it's been emulated by other photographers and with technology advances for the most part it's done within photoshop there's multiple ways of doing it nick page has a really good tutorial on how to do it within photoshop i personally if i do go into photoshop to do it i do it through the tk actions panel but there's a lot of different ways it seems it's certainly not even consistent from person to person in terms of the exact settings they use and as with anything in the subjective side of the actual post-processing standpoint it's really personal preference but anyways i want to just walk through that real quickly show you on a few different images how i apply it and what it can do for the image in terms of the overall look and feel for me especially i like using it on woodland images quite a bit it gives it a little bit more of a softer look i'm not going necessarily for ethereal but maybe a painterly look i don't use it as much as i used to again as i mentioned in my high key video that i recently released my personal preference and style has changed a little bit i've got some other approaches i take to give that soft kind of painterly effect especially to my woodland woodland images but anyways let's just jump over to lightroom here and i'll shut up and show you exactly what i'm talking about so looking in here specifically this is one of my images from ireland taken last year and this is not the final image this is the image as i processed it without the orton effect applied so when i talk about doing this in lightroom and using range masking you could technically do this a couple different ways you could do it with a large radial you could do it with large brush and cover the entire image but really what i'm doing is using the graduated filter effect to essentially create a an entire layer mask or not a layer mask i will do that in a moment but essentially create a layer on top of the entire image and the easiest way to do that is to come out to the outside of the image it doesn't matter where if it's just outside the actual image on your background and if you hold down the shift key on your keyboard that's going to keep it perfectly straight and perpendicular but if you hold shift and drag away from the image it's essentially going to apply that graduated filter across the entire image universally without exception and actually let me turn on show selected mask overlay so as i create this you can see exactly what i'm talking about so i've just come out here to the right edge of the image just outside the image itself i'm holding down the shift key click and drag away from the image and now just like that you just need a very narrow graduated filter here it doesn't really matter as long as it's not going into the image itself in terms of the gradation but now i've simply created an entire quote-unquote new layer not obviously exactly like photoshop but trying to use it in relative terms it's kind of like adding a layer within photoshop so i've got that on here let me hit the o key to turn off that that red mask overlay so i've still got this out here and then in my adjustment panel or my effect panel i've actually created a preset for orton effect so if i click on this we'll kind of run through exactly what i've done here before we look at the image so i've added a little bit of contrast i've boosted the highlights a little bit and then the main thing i've done is greatly reduced the clarity you know i might tweak this from image to image and i'll show you a little trick on that in a moment as well that i've covered in one of my previous tutorials in terms of how you can adjust the opacity of a local adjustment like this but these are the settings i've found that at least from a starting point get me the type of effect that i'm really looking for in terms of giving it a little bit more glow in the highlights and giving a little bit of a painterly effect so now if we look at the image itself this has the orton effect now applied to it and it's applied universally across every single pixel within the image because i haven't done anything to tweak and modify it so that it's only pulling into the highlights if i turn this on and off in terms of my graduated filters you can see there's my before version of it without the wharton effect and as i turn it back on you can see hopefully off and on it softens things down a little bit as well as giving a little bit of subtle glow to the highlights within the image and if you look at this back part over here in kind of this upper left corner you can really see the difference there in terms of what's going on with the highlights in the image and how it just kind of softens everything up a little bit now i'm not done it's easy to apply it but now i've got to tweak it and the main thing i do here is i come into my range masking and again if you're not familiar with range masking i do have a separate video that does a deep dive on the range masking in terms of your color and luminance options and how to apply them in some different scenarios you can apply them this is yet another scenario so i always apply a luminance range mask and then what i want to do here is i'm not looking to make my shadows soft and glowy because it's not really what the effect is about and if you're trying to enhance highlights obviously those don't carry over into the shadows so what i'm going to do here is i've got my luminance range mask selected and i want to exclude the darker areas of the image from having this orton effect applied so what i'm going to do is hold down the alt option key first and then click on the left slider for this range slider as i drag this to the right i'm telling lightroom i want to exclude the darker areas in the image and with this alter option key being pressed on my keyboard it is excluding the darker areas so my white areas with this visual overlay that i've got are being included and having this effect applied while the darker areas are being excluded kind of a common term here is white reveals black conceal so essentially i'm creating now a layer mask instead of just a universal layer across the entire image so i usually bring this up to 50 or so and then i'll usually pull the smoothness slider over to the left a little bit usually right around 40 or so just to get a little bit more definition between the lights and the darks in the image and now i've excluded those darker parts of the image from having this orton effect applied and if i turn the luminance masking off and on let me turn it off it's very subtle so i don't know that it's going to show up in the screen capture and especially once it gets up on youtube but if you watch the darker areas of the image there is a little bit of a subtle difference in terms of the detail that's retained by me applying this luminance mask to this mask that i created with the graduated filter on the image so that's number one in terms of how i would apply this now the other thing i do is again in that local adjustments opacity video that i put out several months ago i showed how you can come up into your effect panel and use this little white triangle to collapse all of those sliders down and by doing that it allows you to do a couple different things if i had multiple graduated filters on this image and i just used the toggle to turn it on and off it's going to turn all of them on and off so it makes it more difficult to really gauge what is this one graduated filter doing to the image so i get by that by collapsing this panel down using that little arrow now i've got an overall amount value for this orton effect that i just applied so by default it's at 57 so if i click into this field and i just change it to one i'm going to essentially turn off this single graduated filter while any other graduated filter i've got applied to the image is not going to be affected whatsoever so i'm just going to hit one and if you watch the image as i do this you'll see that the orton effect i just applied is essentially removed so i'm hitting one now and you can see that now the image is back to how it looked essentially when we started before i even applied the effect at all so the main reason here i'm showing this is it's a way to turn this single graduated filter on and off since there's not really a native way within lightroom to do that and then secondly if i put this back to the original 57 value i put it back to essentially where i started but now i can take this amount slider and if i want to reduce the overall effect or i want to increase it i can simply slide this back and forth until i get to a point that i'm happy and what that's doing is changing all of the sliders within here proportionally to each other without me having to go in and adjust every single one and again i don't want to go into this too deeply here i've got the separate video on it but just know that this is a really easy way to adjust an overall effect you've applied without having to go in and touch every single slider so in this case i'm going to take it back down to about that 57 that i had it at a starting point again sometimes i do need to tweak this i might come back in and expand it and boost the exposure boost the highlights up a little bit more but for the most part the settings i've got here are the ones that work best in terms of applying the orton effect in lightroom so i've shown that let me exit out of this image and we'll jump to another one that's not a woodland scene and we can see where we're at with that okay so this is a shot that i took of cliffs of cary on the western shore or western coastline of ireland and what i want to do here is add some glow to the sky the sun was really intense breaking through these clouds i actually had dark storm clouds up above me that was about to get dumped on actually and then i want to add a little bit of softness into the foreground grass here as well i'm going to do that again by applying the orton effect so i'm going to come up here open my graduated filter i want to apply a new one i'm going to come in and i'm going to select my orton effect preset and just like i did before i've got some other graduated filters applied here i'm just going to add another one hold down the shift key i'm going to drag away from the image just a little bit to create that overlay or that layer with a graduated filter off the image and now if i hover on it you're going to see again just like before that effect is being applied universally across the entire frame right now and just like before i only want to apply it to my highlight so i'm going to come down here again i'm going to go to my luminance range mask selection i'm going to hold down the alt option key once again grab that left range mask slider or range slider i'm going to pull that back to about the midpoint and then i'm going to use my smoothness slider to further refine it a little bit and i think we're good there now we've pretty much just gotten it into the sky if we look at in terms of again white revealing the effect and black concealing the effect i've got that range mask applied here to do exactly that so now if we look at this before and after i don't want to turn off the graduated filter toggle down here because again this is an example of i've got multiple graduated filters applied so if i turn off this toggle it's going to turn off every single one of those and in this case fairly dramatically change the appearance of my image so it's harder to gauge what is this one graduated filter doing so i'm going to turn all these back on i'm going to come up and hit the white down arrow here and collapse that panel down click into my number field hit one and if i just use my keyboard shortcut to undo the effect or the change to that value i can jump back between having just the orton effect turned on turned off turned on turned off so again i can really gauge exactly what i've done here in terms of affecting the overall image now with this one i said i wanted to soften up this foreground a little bit too but with my luminance mask that i applied i'm actually excluding that foreground so if i come down and hold down the alt or option key and click and hold on this slider you can see that that foreground is pretty much in black which means the effect is not really going to be applied here so if i did want to do the same thing to adjust this little piece of the image down here this i could do with a local adjustment brush since it's a relatively small area or i could come in i could create another graduated filter and just apply it to this little piece of land down here so let's jump over to the third and final image where i can show you once again another example of how i would do this on an image so jumping over to this one this is a shot that i captured in yosemite valley back in february of this year and once again we're just going to come and create a graduated filter i do have another one applied here but it's just a small one on the bottom of the image to darken that down a little bit but again i've already got my orton effect preset applied so i'm just going to hold down shift pull away from the image and same thing we can come up collapse this if i change that to one i'm turning it off if i undo that change i'm turning it back on so i can jump back and forth it's obviously much more glowy especially if you watch towards the upper part of the frame around the sun star and it's probably a little overdone but again i haven't done any range masking on this yet so let me come back in i'm going to come in i'm going to change this to a luminance range mask on this graduated filter same song and dance hold down the alt option key start pulling this over to the right to exclude as much of the image as you want and then we'll pull the smoothness slider to the left a little bit to make it a little bit more defined this basically means there's less overlap between your darker and lighter areas the image and now if i let go i can come back up here again key one into that field to turn it off use my keyboard shortcut control z i believe it's command z on mac just to undo that effect or that changed the value so i'm going to one to turn it off undoing that back to 57 undoing that to go back to one and you can see the exact difference that this makes on this particular image and again you're seeing it's much more glowy and soft in the brightest parts or the highlights of the image which is exactly the effect you're going for if you're trying to add the orton effect now is this exactly the same impact to an image as orton effects that you might apply within photoshop no but as i said at the beginning of the video it really seems like a lot of photographers do the orton effect in photoshop very differently so from me in terms of comparing what i'm getting here to the different methods i've seen of doing in photoshop i find it's very very similar it saves me the step of jumping over to photoshop again i'm stubborn i want to prove i can do it in lightroom and i think i'm doing that here but also i'm stubborn in that i just want to use lightroom i don't want to have to jump back and forth and go between two different programs and then bring the tiff back into lightroom and continue editing on it from there and again to walk through these settings i've got the contrast slider at 22 the highlights at 22 and then dropping the clarity down to -57 that's getting you the soft glowy look so i'm raising those highlights a little bit but really adding the softness in with the negative clarity the biggest key here is using the luminance range masking so that you're not just applying it universally across the entire image now if you want to obviously don't mess with that but for me i don't want that softness and that boost to the highlights within the darkest parts of the image so i'm always going to be applying that luminance range masking onto that graduated filter essentially i'm creating a layer mask within lightroom without ever having to go over to photoshop to do it so that's really all there is to it it's not complicated for me it just took some experimenting as i'm always doing within lightroom anyways so at the end of the day i hope you found this helpful if you did please give the video a thumbs up it really does help me grow this channel subscribe if you haven't turn on the notification bell so you know when i've got new videos releasing otherwise i truly do hope you're all staying safe and healthy and happy in this very challenging year especially as we go into the holidays i know me personally i'm not able to visit my family this year for the first time in my life so we're all having to adapt but the most important thing is that we're staying safe so until next time thanks for watching take care and be well

Channel: Michael Rung Photography

Views: 1,648

Keywords: Photography, Astrophotography, Landscape, Timelapse, tutorials, post processing, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, Adobe Lightroom

Id: opVgk-m7UKg

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020