Landscape Photography Editing - Complete Post-Processing Workflow

[Music] i think it's probably fair to say that as landscape photographers most of us prefer to spend our time outside in the field taking images to spending our time sat at computer editing however the editing process is really an integral part of the art of photography and it's important i think for us to try and develop our own workflows and our own way of editing images so we can try and bring our own style to our photography i've been asked several times over the last few months what my own approach to editing images is and so i think it's a little overdue for me to produce a video really just walking through my own post-processing workflow in this video i'm going to be editing a photograph which i took when i was in mount cook national park in new zealand and the reason i've chosen this image is because i guess it's kind of a typical mountain photograph i would take and a lot of the editing processes which i'll apply to this image are fairly general to the sorts of processes that i would apply to many of my images i do think it's important though to understand that when editing images it's best not to take a painting by numbers approach every image should be treated slightly differently and every image will require different processes to create the image of the art that we want to create for that reason i think that it's important to understand that although this is how i've edited this image this isn't necessarily how i would edit every image however there are general principles that i would go through generally in my workflow and i think this is a good image to demonstrate those processes for my own editing process i tend to prefer using a combination of adobe photoshop and adobe lightroom i generally start off in lightroom where i make more global changes before then transferring the image into photoshop where i'll make more local changes of course there's a lot of crossover between those two applications and a lot of what you can do in lightroom for example you can also do in photoshop i know many people prefer to use either one or the other but for me personally the workflow that i've developed over the last few years has really involved a combination of both pieces of software i also think that it's important to know that adobe lightroom will do things slightly differently or does processes slightly differently to how processes are done in photoshop if you'd like to know more about that i'd really recommend that you go and check out alex nao's channel because alex has been putting some videos together recently explaining the processes that underlie sliders in lightroom for my day job i'm actually a scientist and so i think it's fair to say i'm a little bit of a geek and i've actually been really really enjoying those videos that alex has been making so if that's something that would interest you as well definitely go and check out his channel so this is the image opened up in lightroom and this is with no edits at all in it so the first thing i normally do when editing an image or first stage is normally to remove click these lens corrections i do remove a chromatic aberration and then i'll also more times than not normally i'll apply profile corrections as well so this is essentially adjusting any distortion that's been caused by a particular lens um that you've used in this case however i think i'll leave that unticked because actually i think i prefer um the image without those profile corrections it's always worth just checking both options and just going for the one that you prefer it might be that you want to keep some of those um lens profiles the next thing which i'll normally do when editing an image is crop it and in this case what i'm going to do is i'm going to apply a 16 by 9 crop the reason i want to do that for this image is i feel like the main interest of the image really is this band of orange light that's coming in from the left hand side and illuminating those mountains and without that 16x9 crop if i set it back to the original you can see there's an awful lot of sky up here um in the image which i think is actually just distracting um from the image so i'm going to try and cut that out by just applying a 16x9 crop and then this is also normally the point where a lot of the composition of the image will come into play so here when i'm applying this crop you can see you've got this grid which is the rule of thirds and i'm just going to adjust this slightly so the bottom of the mountains are sitting along the lower third i've got this little peak here which is on the left hand third and then the curve of the river is coming up to the right hand third as well because it's just about touching that right hand third and i think that that actually works pretty well there's no sort of um big straight horizon in this image but i need to worry about getting dead on um horizontal but actually it looks like i've i've had the tripod pretty well leveled when i took this image anyway um it doesn't look like i need to adjust the rotation at all so i'm just going to go ahead and crop the image there the next thing i'll start to do is work my way down these sliders and i tend to do these in pretty much the order in which they're presented lightroom has basically provided the sliders in this order as quite a useful way of working through the image so the first thing i would normally do at this point is check for white balance for me as i say i feel like the main sort of focus of this image is this band of golden light so i'm just going to enhance that slightly just by pushing up through the right the white balance only very subtly and i tend for most of these adjustments i tend to prefer just being on the cautious slide and doing things subtly i'm not going to start doing drastic changes like this i'm just going to push it ever so slightly to the warmth i might just sort of warm it up and then dial it back a little bit sort of see where i quite like it i think probably around about here is pretty good the next thing i'll do is adjust the exposure um you can see that i've got my histogram here's quite balanced over onto the left hand side i think a lot of people can be a little bit too over obsessed with a histogram and wanting to have it spread out evenly i find that's not always the best approach i tend really to first of all look at the image and see what i like about the image and then adjust things accordingly according to how the actual image looks rather than focusing too much on the histogram for me this is a dark and moody image that's the sort of feel i want it to have so i'm not too worried about that histogram being skewed over to the left but i do think that some of these dark areas are probably a little bit too dark so i might in this case just ever so slightly boost the exposure and then what i'll do is i start to bring in some of that contrast a little bit more i can use the contrast slider here to be honest i tend to prefer adding contrast using the curves as opposed to the contrast slider this contrast slider tends to boost saturation as well at the same time so i might just add a very subtle addition of contrast here using this slider but i think most of the contrast in this image is going to come out of using the curves feature the next thing i would do usually to pretty much every image of landscapes but not not always but a lot of the time as i'll drop the highlights um just to bring some of the brightness of that sky down a little bit and then also i will boost the shadows slightly as i say though i want to keep these shadows fairly dark i don't want a nice even histogram in this image because if i just show you what that would look like if i sort of even have a histogram it would look more like this and that's really for me the image has just kind of lost that feel which i want so i'm i'm not going to do that we'll keep we'll keep that down we'll keep the histogram skewed to the left hand side um but the shadows i will just boost slightly just so that there aren't any areas which are too dark but i also don't want to boost the shadows too much either because i i don't think that that's really necessary here um the next thing i'll do generally is i will check for white point and the black point i tend to set the black point pretty close to black so in a mountain scene like this um i would normally assume that there may be some small areas of actual true black in the image so what i'll do is i will on a mac if you press option when you adjust these sliders it will just show you areas of true black so if you drop if i was to drop that black slider right down you can see all these areas here would be appearing as true black what i'll do is i'll normally bring that slider back up until there's maybe only just one or two points that are showing up as black you won't always want to set that right down because there may not actually be black in your image but certainly for a mountain scene like this i quite like having that black point set um so that there's one or two areas of actual black in the image but nothing that's really clipping you can also check the histogram here just check these two little triangles in the top to make sure you're not clipping anything whites again there may not be areas in your image that are true white certainly in this image the whitest parts are these areas of snow up here they're actually yellow in this image really they're not really white so um what it what i do is i'll i boost the whites up until i can see whether i'm clipping or not and then i'll start to bring it back down just visually ignoring the histogram in the top i'll just bring it back down until visually it's looking about right the other thing which i'm going to do at this stage is i'm just feeling that the sky is just a little bit too bright i want to bring those clouds down a little bit make it a little bit more you know gloomy and oppressive really to try and capture that kind of gloomy cloudy oppressive feeling that we had going on in the morning when i took this photograph so what i'm going to do is i'm going to add a a glad filter um and this i'm just going to set everything back down here to nothing i'm just going to drop the exposure down about half a stop or so down maybe something like that and also the highlights here i just drop even further now for where i've got this clamp positioned you can see i'm just hitting that snow slightly so i'm just going to just going to bring it back up a little bit so that it's not really affecting that snowy area it's really just affecting the top area of this sky and then you can just adjust the gradient of how that glide filter is changing from dark to light and here i want quite a softer edge effectively on that drag filter something like that is pretty much ideal so i've still got this brightness here of light that's coming in from the left hand side but it's just toned that top bit down there a little bit so the next thing i'm going to do here now i think is just add some a bit of an s curve so what an s curve is doing in the curves adjustment as it's essentially enhancing the contrast of the image so for this darks area here i'll just drop those down a little bit and this is what i mean by i find that adding an s curve tends to be a better way of adding contrast when using the contrast slider and just be a little bit more accurate and selective about where that contrast is being boosted and you can see that that s curve has just if i take take that curve off you can see how that's really just sort of boosted the contrast in quite a nice way i feel so the next thing which i'll do is um i may do some color adjustments i tend not to do very much in terms of color adjustments because that's where i feel you can start to get just a little bit too carried away sometimes you know for me as i said at the start i very much want to keep my images looking as natural as i can and as soon as you start doing color grading and adjusting color sliders it can just start to look a little bit artificial if you're not careful so i'm always very careful about color adjustments and actually on that point um i just want to say i tend not to do very much with vibrance and saturation either vibrance sometimes i might just boost slightly and so i just maybe just boost up to maybe six something like that just to try and increase the vibrance of these light areas where the sky is coming uh where we've got these bands of yellow light coming across i don't think i want to do any more than that and certainly i tend not to boost saturation at all it's just not my style of photography i'm not a big fan of increasing saturation in these images here again what i might do is just bring up the warm tones slightly using um this color grading tool just to kind of highlight i guess these these warm tones that we've got going on in the light and it's very subtle you can just see that's very very subtle ever so subtle you can see it's just warmed up these these areas here in the sky that's all that's done it's just warmed that up slightly in these brighter areas um you can actually adjust with these nucleus you can adjust kind of the brightness of of those particular areas it's actually quite useful this this this tool is taking me a little while to get used to this new color grading tool in lightroom it is quite useful once you get the hang of it but it can also it can be easy to overdo things with it as well so i do tend to try and be very subtle with any changes that i make using that panel the only other thing that's standing out for me here a little bit is i feel like some of those blues maybe need to come down a little bit if i just drop the saturation of a blue ever so slightly you can see i think that just helps there's this little bit of blue up here in the sky it's also affecting the river here as well i'm just going to drop that blue saturation slightly there's still a certain for those of you who are into color theory you can see this image has got a little bit of natural teal and orange going on in it and i don't want to boost that too much because um i just feel like sometimes when you start to boost these colors for me it just feels like there's a bit of a an artificial kind of feel about them sometimes for me i just want to try and keep these images looking as natural as i can really so that's um almost it now really for what i would do in lightroom sharpening i don't touch the sharpening tool in lightroom at all i'm not a big fan of a way but like implies sharpening so so the other thing as well as i will not touch the clarity slider again i don't like waiver clarity slider in lightroom works i don't feel that it does a very good job really of boosting clarity so i tend if anything i will drop the clarity but again i tend not to boost clarity much in lightroom ever really on my images the only other thing which i might do here is just add a slight bit of a vignette um i tend to add do more vignette adjustments really in photoshop than i do in lightroom but sometimes i will just add a little bit of a vignette i think in this case i bring that midpoint in a little bit quite often when i'm making slider adjustments in lightroom what i do is i'll overdo it and then i'll dial it back to the point where i'm happy with it so here i think that's pretty good so i think that's all of the adjustments i need to do now in lightroom so i'm going to move this over into photoshop so to do that what i do is i'll right click it i'll go to editing and edit in photoshop okay so this is the image now opened up in photoshop and i suppose the first thing that i should mention is that when i'm doing my edits in photoshop um i use this plug-in it's called tk actions it's actually um a plug-in you do have to purchase it it's about 30 pounds i think normally i'm not sponsored by dk actions by the way but it's something which i i use i all the time when i'm editing in photoshop it just makes my workflow an awful lot easier um and you i it's designed for generating luminosity masks i don't really have time to go into luminosity masks in detail in this video you don't need to have this plug-in everything that this plug-in does you can really do anyway in photoshop but it just speeds up the process an awful lot and there are other plugins like this available um i would recommend actually that maybe you go and check out some of the videos by nick page on comparing the different tools that you can use for generating luminosity masks but one which i prefer is this one tk action so if you wonder what these are these buttons are that's what they are but they essentially each of these buttons triggers an action so it's a sort of shortcut really for for doing certain processes in photoshop so the first thing which i will do actually normally in photoshop is i will delete any dust that's appearing in the image i don't have too many dust spots in this image there's a couple up here in the sky but yeah you can do your dust deletion in lightroom um i prefer to use the heel tool here in photoshop for doing it and actually um tk actions has got this button here if you press that and it actually creates a couple of layers which enhance for contrast and makes from those dust spots easier to see um so what i'll do is i'll normally work round the image here i've got this heal tool selected and i'll just find any areas like this this could actually be a bit of a cloud actually but it looks a little bit like a dust spot so just to be on the safe side or just correct that this here is certainly a dust spot so i just um correct that the other thing which i've got here it looks like there's a track or something here it's just creating a little bit of a distraction so i'll just remove that and one of the things which i like to do is a sort of squint test so if i sort of look at the image and squint if there's anything that sort of throws itself out as being a particular distraction that i want to get rid of this is often the stage where i will get rid of those distractions so using the heel tool is what i normally do for deleting dust and removing distractions and i'll also have that set to content aware for doing that and i do this on a separate layer in photoshop and i'll have sample all layers selected severed basically any changes that i do in photoshop are non-destructive because i do everything on a separate layer so i'll always keep the base edit as my background layer in photoshop and then build up layers of edits over the top of that so i can always go back and change things if i decide but i've gone too far with a particular edit the next thing i would tend to do after doing my dust deletion is i will do my sharpening so um the technique again i'm in this video i just want to provide an overview of my my workflow so i'm not going to go into too many details of how the processes that i i use work um but suffice to say but i prefer to do any sharpening in photoshop using a high pass filter and i find this works a lot better in my opinion it looks a lot more natural than trying to do it in in lightroom and also what i like to do in photoshop is just apply that sharpening very locally to specific parts of the image rather than applying it to the whole image so what i'll do to do this is i'll create a duplicate layer um of my background so i've got two versions of the same image then what i'll do is i go to filter high pass filter and so i'll set this radius to 1.7 for this particular image and that's really the maximum amount that i would ever really set it to and then what i'll do is i will adjust the um uh the blend mode to overlay so if i zoom in on this section here you can see how this has sharpened these rocks that's the layer hidden and then i've applied that sharpening using a high pass filter you can see how it just brings out the sharpening the other thing of course when you sharpen things what it does is it enhances any noise that's in your image you can see all this sort of sky has got a lot of noise in it so that's why i think it's important to just do this locally so the next thing i'll do is i will apply a layer mask to that layer just to hide the sharpening layer and then what i'll do using a paintbrush and i'll set that to white and opacity 100 and then on my layer mask what i'll do is i'll just start to paint in that sharpening just on the areas where i want it so now it's not appearing in the sky here it's only appearing on these little areas of rocks where i want to apply sharpening and so i will do that literally just in these points where i want to just apply a little bit of sharpening and i want to be fairly subtle about it so it's really just these areas here where we've got a few little rocks which i think just need to be sharpened ever so slightly the next thing which i will do is apply um the levels and have levels here this is where i'll normally again just check for black point and the white point so the next thing that i will tend to do is i'll do some curves adjustments using luminosity masks now again this subject is quite complicated and i think in the scope of this video i don't really have time to go into detail of what luminosity masks are and for this video i'm just providing an oversight of my own process so that you can see um what i'm doing if you're interested in learning more about luminosity masks and you'd like me to do some more detailed videos on this then do let me know in the comments section below there are plenty of fantastic videos out there describing what luminosity masks are so i would also particularly have a look at nick page's videos because he's got some really fantastic ones explaining the ins and outs of luminosity masks and it was those that i used to learn the use of these so the first thing i do probably is i'll select a lights luminosity mask so this is essentially what it what what a luminosity mask is is it will apply a mask to an adjustment layer in photoshop and that mask will be essentially a black and white version of your image so a lights will be a sort of standard black and white um version of your image a darks will be an inverted black and white uh version of your image and if you understand um the concept of masks so essentially when you apply a mask to a layer white areas will let your adjustments come through and black areas will hide those adjustments then when you do a luminosity mask it allows you to selectively apply your adjustments to areas of your image based purely on their luminosity values so for instance um if i wanted to darken the lights what i'll do is i'll apply lights luminosity mask and then adjust curves so what this has done is it's created a curves adjustment layer with a light luminosity mask on it so now when i adjust my curves you can see that it's just doing those lighter areas it might be that you want to boost those lighter areas of course and i think that's probably what i'm going to do in this image just ever so slightly just a very subtle boost of those lighter areas essentially i'm increasing the contrast again you here see that's just boosting those areas ever so slightly the other thing that i'll do if i've made an adjustment in photoshop on a layer and i think actually maybe that's a little bit too much what i might do is just dial back the opacity slightly here what i'm looking at is this area of of snow here i just feel like i'm boosting the lights a bit too much there so i'm just going to bring the opacity down slightly so the next thing i'm going to do is kind of um the reverse of that this time i'm going to go for darks luminosity mask with the tk actions um uh panel you can select either all of the darks or you can go in for just the darkest levels here um i'm probably going to go for like a darks free something like that so i'm just adjusting the darker tones of the image and again i'll go for a curves adjustment and you can see um these tones showing up in the histogram these are the only ones in the image that are going to be adjusted um here so if i just drop that you can see it's just affecting the lower the darker tones of the image it's not affecting the lighter tones and that's what these luminosity masks enable you to do is to very selectively select certain tones in your image and make adjustments to them so you can see that's just and darken those slightly i think it's probably a little bit too much so again i'm just going to drop that opacity slightly and something about there i think is is pretty good now i think we're we're almost there the only thing that you might want to do is maybe do a little bit of dodging and burning now again i use the luminosity masks when i'm dodging and burning my images um in this case i just want to brighten this sort of valley floor here where we've got this this river running through i don't want to brighten this area it's just this kind of area where the actual river is sitting so i'm going to very subtly apply a slight bit of dodging to that area so to do that um what i'll do is i will create a dodge layer and i will apply a lights one luminosity mask to that layer so in this case i find um that using luminosity masks in this way acts as a kind of a stencil so it means that you're just applying um your adjustments to the lighter sort of areas of your image based on the luminosity and it just makes things look an awful lot more natural than if you were to do it without a luminosity mask so um maybe if i just show you quickly what i mean by that if i have a dodge layer here without a luminosity mask applied to it and i do some dodging let's drop the opacity down to say 23 and i'm just using a soft edge brush everything i do in photoshop by the way i always use a soft edge brush and so what i can do is i can just sort of dodge this area like this and it looks okay it doesn't look too bad um but what it's doing is it is it's a very kind of i guess crude way of doing things supposed to do the same thing with a luminosity mask applied to it what this does is it effectively acts as a stencil so it's only going to apply those adjustments to the brighter areas and it just i feel just gives it a much more natural feel i just boost the opacity of that slightly and it just looks a little bit more natural so now if i do a before and after so that's that's it done with luminosity mask and that's it done without and i just feel you can see that it's just brightened that whole area when i've done it without the luminosity mask and when i've used luminosity mask it's only really affecting these brighter areas of the image and i think that just works a lot better it just looks a bit more natural again i feel like i brightened this orange egg a little bit too much so i'm just going to bring that opacity down a little bit and so i think i'm almost there this is almost complete now this image i think the one final thing what i'm going to do is i'm going to add a vignette now you remember i added a slight bit of a vignette back in lightroom again using the tk actions panel it works slightly differently when you're adding a vignette this time this time it's doing it using a curves adjustment layer and a mask so it's just affecting those corners um and i normally set the radius of this vignette to 500 which makes quite a sort of soft edge vignette and then i'll drop the opacity of that vignette layer down a little bit um normally what i'll do is i'll drop it right down so the vignette's not there and then i'll start to increase it until the vignette becomes visible and then i'll just start to dial it back a little bit this is how i do a lot of my adjustments as i'll go a little bit too far with my slider adjustment and then i dial it back a bit until it becomes less noticeable and that's how i like to try and keep these adjustments fairly subtle so that's it i think that's my image now complete i'm pretty happy with that final edit this is the point now where i would then save the image um i won't go into my sort of filing systems and how i save images but normally and what i'll do is i'll save a high res tiff version of the image that's flat with no layers i'll also save a version of the image it's got all these adjustment layers in it so that if i want to i can go back at a later date and see how i've edited the image or make slight adjustments if i've decided i didn't like the way i did something and then i'll also normally do a low res jpeg save of the image which i'll save as an srgb file which will then be used either for my youtube videos or posting under social media so that's it i hope you've enjoyed this video i hope you found it useful um like i said i'm sorry i've not really had time to go into a huge amount of detail or some of the specific steps that i've taken in this post-processing process um if there's anything that you'd like me to go into more depth on in future videos then please do let me know in the comments below [Music] you

Channel: Sam & Hannah Bose Photography

Views: 10,850

Keywords: landscape photography, photography, photo editing, landscape photography post processing workflow, workflow, landscape photography tips, landscape photography editing, landscape post processing, landscape photography tutorial, photography post processing, editing landscape photos, landscape, landscape photography editing photoshop cc, landscape editing, photography tips, photography post processing workflow, photography tutorial

Id: FJO_PUbK-Uw

Length: 30min 4sec (1804 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021