Landscape Photography | A complete guide to High Key Processing

hi everyone i'm alistair ben and you're watching expressive photography in this week's video i'm going to cover a topic that's been requested by one of the members on the membership channel and it is high key processing now this is a really interesting thing and what i want to do is i want to look at what makes a good candidate for a high key treatment what hiki means how they feel the emotional resonance that we have with high key images and then i'm going to look at one image that you would just not think is a good candidate for a high key and i'm going to use a little technique that we can use in lightroom to turn it high key so hopefully you're going to find this useful some of these techniques i discuss and in quite some detail in my luminosity and contrast ebook i cover high key in there and some of the concepts about it as well so if you want to dig into this a little bit deeper please check out luminosity and contrast available in the link below now here we are in lightroom and we have three images sorry four images which um are going to be the candidates for today now one thing that the first two have in common if i just bring those up together the first thing that these two have in common is they were taken in flat light misty conditions they're both taken from yellow mountain in eastern china the one on the left very foggy just you know big mist banks coming through and obscuring these cliffs with these trees on them and i'm gonna turn that into a square or a four by five composition i think the one on the right was shot as a square taken during a blizzard we've got lots of atmosphere and lots of kind of diffused light again very flat very overcast so these two make very obvious candidates they're already atmospheric and airy to a certain extent now the third one is a desert scene it's quite bright but you know and therefore when we look at the histogram we'll see that it's already quite well exposed so there's not a lot of contrast now contrast is key in high key photographs because you have to decide the tonal fingerprint i guess of the photograph and this one it should be quite easy to make but i'll show you different ways that we can adjust our blacks and our shadows to to change the feel even in a high key photograph the final one is a forest scene taken on the island of tenerife and the canary islands out in the atlantic ocean there again it was a foggy day uh it's a scene that kind of really caught my eye i like the ivy kind of creeping up around about the the um i think these are uh laurel trees i really like the way the the ivy was interacting with them but it wasn't enough of a shot to kind of make me feel very excited about processing and color but i'm going to show you a way that we can make this into a high key photograph so let's start with uh one of the the straightforward ones this one is really it's begging to be high key now you can see the histogram there the the lowest um the darkest pixels in the frame are in the shadows you can see when you hover over the histogram there that it highlights that and if you hover over the shadows slider you will see that also that section of the histogram uh brightens up so most of this photograph is in the mid tones and into the highlights so if i brighten this image so that the majority of the tones are in the highlights and the whites then what you can see now is all of those white misty tones or bright misty tones have been raised and we have a much brighter image and the the trees uh if we compare that to where we started off um you can see we've managed to the what is the consequence of that this is the big question we have to keep asking ourselves is what was the consequence of me brightening up those brighter of those tones and what it's done is it's made it feel differently the one on the left feels kind of sunburned a little bit kind of melancholy and dull yeah because the the all the mist is a mid-tone and that's what cameras want to do they want to expose brighter things as mid-tones so if you just shoot at aperture priority with a zero exposure compensation you will get flat gray uh highlights basically so all i'm doing is here is i'm re-introducing the brightness to that fog and very quickly uh the image feels more lively yeah now i'm gonna do something else with this one i'm actually gonna flip it horizontally because what i don't want to do is add tension to this scene um for now you know this this is my preference now the way it was before everything's off on the left hand side and we've got just a ton of negative space on the right hand side i shot this in 16 by nine in camera so if i crop this initially into a four by five and i don't like this little knobbing up there at the top so i'm just going to pull that down so that's my initial crop everything's still distributed slightly to the left it makes you want to look out left all the geometry is taking you out all the weight is taking you out to that left-hand side now for most of us images like this are going to feel just a little dis-harmonious they're not going to feel comfortable in themselves so i'm just going to flip this one horizontally and all of a sudden this image just feels to me anyway you make up your own mind it feels different it feels more open it feels like the negative space is where it's supposed to be and honestly i have no problem with doing this at all you know i'm i'm not interested in saying this is an accurate representation of this place this is art for me and i can do whatever i want so here we are we have this nice bright airy photograph i can continue to add brightness with my highlight slider and i can even open up my blacks and you can see that as everything that i'm doing is just making less contrast but what i can do is i can use my white slider now just to get that up and what i want to do is you just have to avoid clipping above the histogram here we have a couple of little squares with an with a triangle in them if you hit the j key it will turn on this and this is now showing you clipping yeah and you will get that warning on the frame when the pixels are starting to clip it is red for clipped highlights and it is i don't yeah there we go we can clip our blacks as well it's blue for clip blacks in this example we're not going to be getting any clipped blacks so here we have now a very bright very airy very atmospheric photograph we can do other things we can we can take off some dehaze which makes it even more diffused everything we're doing is creating more atmosphere now if we look back on videos we've been doing recently we have luminosity contrast atmosphere geometry and color now this is a color photograph but it's extremely monochromatic you wouldn't be able to tell we can change the the tone of it by using our temperature slider you can see it's not a black and white photograph we can introduce tone and that again will have some degree of impact i would say with high key images that the cooler you make them the less high key they feel and i would urge you probably to more towards the more neutral or slightly to the warmer side of neutral otherwise the image starts to take on a slightly melancholy feel a slightly somber feel which is kind of in conflict emotional conflict with the atmospheric elements that we're trying to portray here so this one's really quite straightforward now and i kind of like it like that and i think um that is a very nice high key photograph in my opinion the second one is is somewhat different there's a lot more contrast in this and we can tell that because the darkest pixels in the frame are dropping now into the blacks and the brighter pixels are pushing up more towards the whites we have a more strung out histogram which means more contrast the more compacted histograms are the less contrast they provide but again we want to do the same thing i'm going to add brightness so i'm going to add exposure and all this is doing is taking the image towards where you would ideally expose it in the field sometimes we have a conflict between exposure and how much iso we want to do this was a very gloomy situation and i shot this at 1 over 25 of a second at iso 320 um i could have pushed the iso up another you know to 650 or something like that and it would have been brighter but you know i was more interested in capturing the atmosphere of this and as long as you're not getting clipping in your shadows or your highlights you're really not got too much to worry about now as soon as i've brightened this image you can see the the darker tones in these pine trees here have brightened somewhat i'm going to do more with that again i'm going to increase my blacks so that i'm taking away those shadows um i don't want um sorry taking away the blackest parts of the frame i'm not wanting contrast i want some contrast but i don't want tons of contrast so what i've done there by opening up the blacks is i'm actually reducing contrast as we just said i'm compressing the histogram so that the blacks are getting closer to the whites and that produces less contrast i can use my white slider to introduce some brightness again which is you can see it's up here in this top left hand corner if i push it too far we start to get clipping up there which i want to avoid but equally i can use the highlight slider to produce a little bit of highlight contrast and i'm clipping in the blue channel so i'll just avoid that now the shadows slider if i open my shadows you can see i'm getting less contrast again because that's also dragging the left hand side of the histogram and pulling it to the right hand side and the less contrast i have the more high key it's going to feel high key just means highlights and whites it just means brighter so the less we have from the midpoint of the histogram left the less of that information we have the more high key the image is going to be and the more we push histograms into the right hand side of the histogram the the more airy and bright and ethereal they're going to feel so candidates good candidates for high key photographs can be just about anything as long as you take away your shadows and your blacks and push them towards the mid-tones now something else i'm going to do with this shot is i'm going to add some vibrance because i really want to pick out the greens in those pine trees because i think the green is in this particular case it's quite a joyful element it's it's uh it's showing life yeah but i'm gonna also have a look at my temperature and tint now you'll see again if i pull this down towards the blues the hue of those greens has gone to the cooler side and it's taken on a slightly melancholy feel personal preference again and again and again yeah but it's up to you to look at your photographs and determine where your emotional preferences with what you're making the photograph look like every look has an equivalent feel to it so that's really really important in the new book that i'm writing the color of meaning this is exactly the type of thing i'm talking about in significant detail so i hope you're going to support that when it finally comes out i'm going to move on to the next image i could i could work this one for a while because it's an image that i actually really like i'm going to add a bit of texture i just want to bring a bit more of that kind of snowy atmosphere into this scene and again that is an image that i really like uh tons of atmosphere tons of mood but it's bright and and exciting as well so yeah happy with that one the third example is from the gobi desert as you know my kind of playground um now this is one that i've already upped the whites this was the exposure as it came out of the camera i've the first thing i've done is i've added luminosity and i'm just doing that with the white slider and as soon as we do that the mood changes this is something that i can't repeat often enough every slider tweak that we use in whatever program whether it's lightroom or adobe camera raw or luminar or whatever that's called or capture one adobe camera raw photoshop you name it every slider movement changes the emotional feel of the photograph and this is what expressive photography is is understanding what those emotional changes are so as soon as i brighten that two things happen one is we lose some of the saturation brighter images have lower saturation natively if i take off even more of the saturation then the impact of the photograph is reduced we're allowing just the geometry and the the low contrast to have the impact we're taking color out we're making it less of a powerful trigger if we crank up that it just becomes this orange uh kind of shout fest we need to appreciate that we can make images that are really subtle in their color space as well and i will add a bit more of the warmth into there the cooler it goes you'll see we start getting into a ghostly feel uh it does look like a ghost this is the head these are the arms so we don't want to get it too ghosty but equally ghosty is also good let's go go stay in high key so i'm going to make it really bright i'm going to add my highlights again i'm going to get my black slider and i'm going to take out the blacks so that it gets really ethereal i'm going to use the dehaze to make it even more diffused but i'm going to bring back in some contrast with my shadow slider and i'm just going to pull my down a fraction talk amongst yourselves now look what happens when i pull the black slider to the left we're increasing contrast increasing contrast we have lots of contrast the mood changes the ghostliness disappears the ethereal quality disappears yeah so i want those blacks out of the equation and i want to take that right up to the point of it clipping the dehaze was a bit too much and i'll bring in a little bit of that vibrance back in and i'm going to take off the ghostiness and make it just a little bit more joyful again now this is an image that it could go so many different ways because all we could do is we could stick it straight into black and white and make it really really high key come into the tone curve you know so we can make this image just like so faint and minimalistic that it's almost well what is it we've lost that kind of idea of what it is i'm not processing this image to to come to some kind of final conclusion it's more demonstrating the different techniques i think the first two images i process them more as photographs this one i think was a good opportunity to look at different things that we can do the final photograph no one in the right mind is going to call this high key it's dark it's gloomy it's mysterious anything i do to this photograph is going to make it more gloomy and mysterious so cooling it down taking some dehaze i guess will make it a bit more atmospheric what i'm going to do with this one is i'm actually going to invert it and turn this into a negative of itself so what i'm actually going to do is darken the photograph until it starts to clip and what that's doing is it's making the blacks as dark as they will go and i'm not going to add too much in the way of whites i will open the shadows a bit because that will help um i'll add the whites a bit but i can't go too far without those clipping i might be able to use something like the camera calibration to help to create some more contrast in those greens and i might be able to have a play around with the temperature and the tint to do something like that now the way to invert a photograph in lightroom there's a button that does it in photoshop we just go image invert we use the tone curve in lightroom and what we do is we take the blacks and make them white and we take the whites and make them black now this is obviously a color inversion so the greens have become purple or magenta so we need to go into black and white so now we have a black and white photograph where the blacks are now whites and the whites are now black and we can come back into our basic panel here now and as we move the blacks you can see we're introducing detail and the whites we can make them less white the highlights can become less highlighty and then our shadow slider is going to determine how much detail we have uh in our shadows and then our white slide our mid-tone slider we can play around with and as you can see we're darkening this image on the exposure but it's getting brighter because this is an inversion now i'll crop this down to a four by five because anyone who knows me knows i have a complete aversion to three by two verticals and this is a high key photograph now i get that this is unusual and it's not something that's done very often but we can make dark moody photographs into high key photographs something i'm going to do again with this photo is flip it horizontally and see what it looks like now i don't like this yeah the way it's falling over like that those angles have got unnatural to me so i'm going to flick it back the way it was and it feels okay like that because this is where our eye is going to and that vertical branch has a stable feel to it and therefore psychologically it's saying this is okay and the stuff falling off to the left doesn't bother us quite so much and our eye does get drawn through to this area in the back but i kind of like the way the the ivy uh kind of stands out there and it's quite incongruous so here we have four uh very high key photographs from our original four raw files i would like to think this little demonstration shows you that as long as we don't have too many things set in our mind in terms of how things have to be that we have freedom to to make photographs any way we want and it's our imagination that powers that creativity it's not what somebody else thinks about it or what they want it to look like it's how we feel about it if you go over now to the zen haggis channel i've just published another film another video on on there where we're talking about dissolving the box we talk an awful lot of time in our creative conversations where we think of thinking outside of the box or you know that that image is very outside of the box and people think about breaking rules as being outside of the box but the video we've just published over on the zen haggis channel which is new we just started it last week is all about personal development how we can make creative living much more important to us where we are doing things in a far freer far more intuitive far more exciting and passionate way so please consider jumping over to the zen haggis and watching that movie where we're talking about dissolving the box all together no more outside the box just no more box that's a far better place to be i hope you found this useful if you have please hit the subscribe button that's really helping us out please look at some of the products that we have for sale creative black and white processing cover some of this stuff as does the luminosity and contrast ebook thank you very much for supporting the channel and thank you once again to everyone who's hit that join button down below and is supporting us with your monthly subscriptions that's hugely appreciated have a great week everyone next week i think we're going to be diving back to the trip i went on to iceland with thomas heaton and adam gibbs there's quite a few uh images that i really like that i haven't shown yet and given that a bit of time has passed now two two and a half months it's kind of exciting to sort of go back and visit some of that so next week tune in for a little trip back to iceland where i'll be comparing some of the shots i took on film with some of the shots i took on my digital d850 my nikon have a great week everyone i hope you've enjoyed this thanks for tuning in i'm aleister ben this is express photography bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 11,066

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, be better, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, engagement, better photographs, landscape, mountains, process, meaning, emotion, personal development, contrast, Transitions, Adobe, Nikon, creativity, KASE, abstraction, local, change, development, growth, get better, improve, high key, bright

Id: OQxyCPTwXdc

Length: 26min 27sec (1587 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020