Lightroom Essentials for Landscape Photography

[Music] so one of the questions that I get asked most often and one of the areas that we cover really a lot on the workshops that I lead is post processing now post processing is a really important part of photography and it goes a long way to defining the look of your images and the overall mood of your photography no I use quite a lot of different software for my post processing I use Lightroom I use Photoshop and I use capture one but because of them Lightroom is far and away the most popular software that I encounter in workshops what I'm going to do in this video is just focus on techniques for Lightroom now a lot of the techniques that I use in this video you can also copy them and do them and catch on and if you're interested in capture one you can check out the other video that I made on that I'll link up there but right now I'm just going to focus on how I edit my photos in Lightroom now before we start any processing we should always have a relative clear idea of what direction we want to take the processing in it's rarely a good idea to just start pushing slide as left and right to see what looks good because that's always never gonna give you anything worthwhile what we should be doing is looking at the mood of the photograph of the mood of the capture and looking at ways in which we can enhance that now one of my philosophies for photography is that we're not actually photographing the landscape we're photographing the way the landscape makes us feel and this should always inform the decisions that we make when we're actually when we sit down to do the processing so if you have an image that was shot in the blue hour or it's quite cloudy and what you really going to try to do is to enhance that dark mood but if you have an image it's shot in the golden hour then you're gonna have a very different if you're going to be looking at the ways in which you can enhance the direct light and bringing out the colors and the textures of the image we should always be working with the prevailing mood of the image rather than trying to work against it now this is the image that I'm going to edit and the first thing that you can see straight away is and your experience damn there is a reason for that it's not because I'm completely rubbish it's because I was shooting a scene off in another direction with the camera settings in the manual when I turned around to grab this shot I could see through the histogram that I was getting all of the data you can see here the histogram but I think it gives good practice in a way to actually have a look at how we can pull an image that is underexposed that we can it's still even though you if you looked at the back of the camera it might like it so it's lost there's still plenty that we can do with it now before we get on to the editing I just want to go over the main principles for editing and about 90% of what I do is basically applying contrast to different parts of the scene because what we were going to be trying to do is to accentuate the interesting parts of the image and move the eye away from the less interesting parts of the image we're going to kind of try to shape or to sculpt the light and to bring people's attention to the parts of the image that we think are the most important and we'll do that by applying contrast and by contrast I mean darkening some parts of the image and brightening other parts of the image because that's what contrast is it's a relation of dark parts to the light parts and Lightroom gives us all of these tools over here to apply contrast there's the main contrast slider here which I'll get to in a little while but then we've got all of the tools below it highlights shadows and whites blacks which we can see here on the histogram there you've got the black stand the shadows these are the mid-tones and then we have the highlights and then we have the white but there's also the tone curve which I'll speak about later and even tools like the presents tools clarity and D haze all apply or remove contrast but they just do it in different ways at a pixel level brightening one pixel and darkening another now what I always avoid doing is using the contrast slider here because it is unsubtle it's like hitting the image with a hammer if we slide here what it's going to do is increase the contrast globally across the whole image because it's underexposed but just increase the exposure a little bit you can see here what it does is it pushes all of the highlights to the left to the right side and all the shadows the left side we have nothing here in the middle of the image if we go the other way what it does pushes everything into the mid-tones and you get a very washed out image and it's global and we should almost never be working globally pretty much everything that we're going to do when it comes to editing it's going to be local so first of all we're going to be using these tools here highlights shadows whites and blacks to be able to work on specific tonal values but I'm also going to be using these tools at the top the different filters the gradient filter the radial filter and the brush to allow me to just target particular parts of the image particular tonal values of the image to make them brighter or darker so my three key rules when it comes to editing images the first one is as I've just said avoid global adjustments for contrast the second point is that everything that we're going to do is going to be done in small graduation it's just adding a little bit what we'll find is that quite often is like when we're making a soup or sauce or something we add a little bit of one spice thing I don't know a bit of another we're going to be doing the same thing we'll be adding a little bit in one part and then taking it away and trying to get the image to balance and the final step is to always keep looking away from the image to look at different images so just just something to cleanse your palate so that because I find it very easy when I'm editing an image to take things too far because you get very focused on what you're doing you keep pushing things and you kind of forget where you've come from so it's always important to kind of cleanse your palate take a step back look away break your concentration in the image and then have another look at it to make sure that what you're doing is not taking the image too far okay so let's just reset this image hit reset there and as I said it's underexposed so the first thing that I'm going to do just to give me a blank canvas to start off with this to increase the exposure I think we'll just put it at about a stop and a half somewhere about 150 there if we look at the histogram you can see that nothing's clipping I pretty much got all of the data where I want it now when I look at the image the first thing that I notice is the sky is too bright but overall it's a good place to start now I usually will always start with gray filters working on the sky and on the foreground to get them to a tunnel value to a level of brightness but I'm happy with so let's have a look at the gradient filter up here just click on it and then we drag down where we want the filter to appear now if we hit o it will show us where it's gone green exactly where the adjustments that we make are going to be are going to apply so they start here at the third line and they finish and they finish here on this line so if we pull these lines together we get a much harder graduation if we separate them then the the feathering between where the adjustment stops to start it's much softer so for me for this image I would like to have a relatively soft graduation now just going to be working on the sky and what I want to do is to just darkened down the sky just a little bit particularly at the top because it's a little bit bright so you can see the tools that we have here on the left and I'm just going to pull down the exposure just a little bit if I press o to remove that so I can see what what's happening so that's getting the sky to quite a nice level know what it's also happening is at this top of the peak here because that's in the part where the where the with the adjustment is having an effect is also darkening down if I was using a regular filter in the field now I don't want to talk in that part of the peak so what I can do is go down here to the range mask and go down to the luminance now this is going to give me something a form of a luminosity mask what it will allow me to do is to target particular tonal values within this filter so if we just hit our again what I would like to do is to have my adjustment just take effect on the brighter part within this and not the darker part where there where the peak is so I can use this slider here to remove the effect from underneath the filter now if I press alt and then as I left-click what you can see here is it gives me a black and white graded so I can see exactly where it's white that's where the the adjustment is going to take effect now as I move this to the right now this is away from the shadows what this is doing is it's removing the shadows from the filter so you can start to see that the darker parts were the shadows are so where the murders are slowly getting darker and darker which means that they are being removed from the effect so now you can see that that actually hasn't been affected so much it's washed it out a little bit so I think what I'm going to do is just go back something like that it's green because I still have yeah I switched on so something like that now this is relatively subtle and just to give you a more extreme example of that let's have a quick look at this image here you know you can see I wanted to darken the sky down this is the filter that I used but I really didn't want to darken these Peaks so I used the range mask here which you can see if I just click on it to darken the to move this away from the shadows and remove the piece to mask them out from the filter and I find move that back you can see that it everything is affected and as I move that to the right then it meant that the filter the adjustments no longer affected the shadow part of the image you know the ridge masking is an incredibly powerful tool because it allows us to target even further localized parts of the image so you can see I've already darkened the sky just a little bit if I click this and you can see the effect that it's had the sky no longer looks quite so bright but it's still quite bright at the top and if I sang earlier on in the video what I want to do is to shape the light I want to focus the eye on these part of the peaks here and on this side of the ridge here what you find is that our eye is attracted to brighter parts of the image so when the sky is so bright what that's going to do is it's going to pull the eye to the top of the images so I'm going to create another gradient filter there this one has actually got effect already applied and just to darken down just the top of the image I'm not going to pull this down quite so much and we'll just lower the X just said the top of the image top of the sky isn't quite so bright that's too much just something like that I think what I'm also going to do is just to increase the color temperature there just a tiny little bit everything in small graduations as we said just to bring out this orange here and maybe just a little bit of clarity to separate to give more definition to these clouds but not too much if you do too much it starts to look unnatural so we just need and everything in small graduations now you know what I'd like to do is to try to create some separation between the three different layers of peaks this one this one and this one no this is looking very dark so I think what I'm going to do is just to put an apply another filter here just to bring it up and brighten that a little bit so we'll do that by lifting out the shadows and what that does is it separates this a little from here because we've got the scree on the side or if that's very much shadow it just gives it a little bit more of separation between these different peaks a little bit more detail but I also don't want this bottom part here to be too bright and you can see I just caught the roof of the refugio so I'm just going to drag another like I did with the sky just another gradient filter in and just darken and that was very bottom bit down just by dropping down the exposure and the shadows just a little bit so what I've done now by darkening the top and the bottom is kind of create a sort of vignette which pulls our eye towards the center of the image to this area here and that's what Vanessa for now later on what I might do is come back in and crop this so I will crop a little bit close to the side would crop that that roof off there but I always leave cropping to the end because it's I know I always think that maybe later on I'm gonna change my mind so with Lightroom you can always go back and adjust the crop but if I take this image out of Lightroom into Photoshop to sharpen it or to do some extra work on it then the crops going to be locked so cropping is always the last thing that I do in any part of the process now the next tool that I'm going to use him that is a part of all of my editing process is the radial filter here this one the circle now this gives you a circle or an ellipse if shape filter if we hit again you can see that all of the effect is going to take place within those feathers so it's not going to be strong now for some reason when I do my workshops this invert box here sometimes is is unchecked on some people's lightroom sometimes it's checked I don't know if it's one of the how people set it up I always have the radial filter check to invert because I want any adjustments that I make to take place inside the radial filter and not outside so just make sure that that's always checked and you should always have it further if you don't have a feather then you're going to have a hard edge between Worthy adjustment stops and where the adjustment finishes so I will always have the feather set to 100% because what I use the radial filter for most often is bringing in light it's bringing in some kind of side light or ambient light to brighten parts of the image and to enhance any light that kind of exists there so if I click off the own so we can see there is kind of alpenglow some light that's bouncing off the horizon and still giving some kind of ambient light to these peaks here you can see along here and along here what I'd like to do is just enhance that a tiny little bit and the best way to do that is with the radial filter because it just gives me a much better impression of light coming in from the side now there are different ways of brightening up an image the one that I prefer to do is to use as a D haze tool now most commonly the D haze tool is people take it to the right to take away haze which gives you this really strong high contrast look I never use that what I use a dije stool for most often is to bringing a kind of hazy brightness because it's much closer to the way light actually feels because the light that we see in or in any landscape is usually coming through lots of artifacts lots of bits of dust and stuff like that and the atmosphere so it often has a kind of hazy feel so the D haze tool will give you a much more natural light effect than just increasing the exposure or brightening the shadows will do you know you only need to do a tiny bit everything in small graduations so I've just taken that down by minus 16 and because I'm trying to give the idea of light what I'm gonna do is also push up the temperature just a little bit because the light had had a warmer color temperature it wasn't a neutral temperature it's bouncing off a very warm sky so I'm just gonna introduce a little bit of color temperature there just so the light that's hitting these peaks has just a little bit of warm so if we turn it off set it on again you can see the effect there now this is very subtle but it's a tool that I use a lot so just to give you an idea of the power of it I'm just gonna go and have a look at this image here which obviously has very strong light and you can see the light was coming down the side of this peak and I used the radial filter here just to really emphasize the sight that the light there so you can see that again I use the da's tool if we if we reset that if we go back to zero you can see what I did just by sliding the D haze tool kind of increase the feel of the light coming down coming down between those mountains and increases the separation there the same thing is the same tool here now you can when I when I applied this what I really didn't want to have was to brighten up the back of this peak and what I wanted to do here was just to have a little bit of light to enhance the light that was hitting this mountain here and separate this mountain from the mountain behind it so in this particular case what I did was when I was in the radiant tour I then selected the brush here not the brush tool from the top menu but from the mask tool here and then selected erase and this just allows me to erase parts from within the mask that I don't want to be affected so I just brushed out all of the the effect here that would have been affected the whole of the inside the radial mask because as I said I didn't want to have that effect that so always remember that when you're inside a mask whether it's a gradient filter or a radial filter you can always use as a brush tool to brush out parts of the area that you don't want to be affected in the same way that you can use the range masks down here but for something like this with a loop where the tonal values are relatively similar using the the luminance mask is actually quite hard to get a separation so I know him manually and just brushed it out okay let's go back to this image and just by looking away from the image and coming back to it and looking at it again actually looking at it with a fresh eye then it looks to me as though I think I've overexposed it I've increase the exposure too much it's a little bit too bright so there's a few adjustments that I want to make because I think when I push the exposure up originally I was coming in at a place from the image being very very underexposed so what I'm gonna do is just dial that exposure back just a tiny little bit and I'm gonna go back into the mask here and first I'm gonna widen it a little bit just to make sure these areas are covered here I think I'm just gonna pull that D haze back now one thing that I didn't do that I should have done is whenever you apply D haze it increases the brightness and it increased gives it a kind of hazy light effect but also it reduces as a contrast a little bit so just by adding a little bit of clarity that's just gonna make those Peaks just keep a little bit more definition that could have been removed when the D haste tool went across the whole lot of it there so I just had a little bit of clarity there not too much again everything in small graduations just a tiny little bit of texture okay so the image is slowly slowly getting there what I'd like to do now is have a look at the the final local adjustment and that is the brush here so if we just click on the brush again you can that we have access to all of these tools and what I would like to do is just to brighten subtly particular parts of the image here it's again increase the effect of the light on these Peaks and also just to give me a little bit of contrast these little bits of screen here just to separate it a little bit and you can see also here that there's a little bit of cloud so I'm gonna be using different brush strokes to bring out different parts of the image so I'll start first on this cloud again if I brush it I can't really see the effect so if I hit OH that's going to allow me to be able to see what I'm working on it and if you keep here the auto mask checked what that's going to do is do a good job of making sure that my brush strokes don't go to and don't go over this peak here so just want to brush on that little cloud press oh and then increase the exposure that cloud just a little bit something like that actually it's more than a little bit it's about a stop but just gives a cloud a little bit of whiteness now I'm going to apply another brushstroke I'm going to start working on these bits of screen here again I'm gonna hit oh so I can see where my line is now apologies for the fact that the computers a little bit laggy it's a very old computer it will be replaced next week so this is the last video I'm ever gonna be making with this computer you can hear the fans that whirring up in the background because I'm doing a full screen recording and a button like we were open and the computer is really kind of protesting so yeah this is the last time I'll ever be using this laptop as well next week and the next video and hopefully no more loud whirring fans okay so that's really that's kind of covered that's great I just want to click out to turn that off and again I'm just gonna push up the exposure here just to brighten I find it too much it's going to look obviously ridiculous so we're gonna do a lot less than that but just enough so we can see a little bit of separation what that's doing is giving this these Peaks a lot more depth giving it a much more through time because that's always something that I wanted to try to do here with the different steps we've got the foreground we have this peak here and then the peak at the back and by giving it these separations by brightening the darkening parts what it does it gives it a lot more of a 3d effect gives it a lot more depth if we turn off the brush and then turn it on again you can see exactly what that's done okay so the image is looking pretty much finished now one of the thing is looking at it that I'm not quite happy about is the top of the sky here it's starting to look a little bit washed out so I think what I'm going to do is go back to that filter that I put in the top of the sky and just we do so just a little bit I think it was just yeah that's much better like way way way overdone that vignette so let's just put it at a bit of an angle and again put some warmth in there a little bit of color and yeah that looks much better and it did before so for me now the image is pretty much finished and you'll see that I actually haven't touched at all any of the HSL the hue saturation or luminance sliders I do use them occasionally on images I don't think it's really necessary here what what I most often find that I'm doing is that I'll get the slider here and I'll select a particular color so let's say this kind of orangey pink in the sky and if I want to increase or decrease the saturation in that you can just drop it on and then move your mouse up to increase saturation or down to decrease the saturation I don't think it's really needed in this image I'm quite happy with the color balance I find that contrast any application of contrast is always going to make the image appear more saturated anyway and if you already have quite a pleasant color palette which I thought this image you did have I quite liked the magenta have the blue out then really it's very rare that I find myself playing around with with current with with saturation too much unless is a color that really needs to be removed or pushed up but that's again it's never globally I'm always just going to be working on particular color tone or a particular part of the image but here this doesn't actually need anything else I think in terms of color I'm quite happy with the way that it is now what I haven't also haven't done is applied any sharpening now I very rarely do much in the way of shopping to my images to my RAW images they will be sharpened just for output depending on what that is whether it is for web output or whether it's for print output I think because what I can do is have a look at this and maybe just apply some clarity and texture but I don't apply to the sky from an already apply clarity to the sky so I'm just going to use another gradient filter here and just cover all of the foreground all the way up to about there and just increase clarity and texture I think it's probably better to zoom in here we can just head it's a zoo so I can have a look at what effect that's actually having on the peaks now I'm not particularly obsessive about having super sharp super high detail images it's not something that's important to me so I don't really worry too much about it if we go down here you can see I'll look at that afterwards I can't look at it while I'm and it's all but that to me is probably as much texture or clarity that I need more than that I for me it starts to look over sharpened a little bit too much you can see there and I really don't like that look I prefer to apply the shopping just to the final output image so it's just like done and we can go here if we look at detail you can see this is my default chopping that's applied to our image detail radius one around 40 and detail 25 and that's happy this apply to pretty much every image that I import and with the exception of just a little bit of clarity and textures I've added that's all I'm gonna do to the image just before we finish we can just hit Y which will give us a before-and-after view with before on the left and after on the right so I can see exactly what I've done with the image where I've taken it or we can hit F to give us a full-screen of you and looking at that I realize that one thing that I've forgotten to do is just have a look at the tone curve now the tone curve is here it's a different way of applying contrast you can see that the histogram behind the tone curve matches the histogram of the image so we have over here on the right the highlights and over here on the left the shadows and by pushing up when we brighten the image by pulling down we darken the image and we can brighten the highlights darken the shadows which is a very typical thing to do with a tone curve just to give more contrast but I've spent a lot of time working with the contrast on this image I don't really feel that it needs anything else except for one thing that I normally like to do which is just to push the blacks up here just a tiny tiny bit something like about 7% a bit less than that let's go back down to here and because that's pushed all of the curve up I'm just gonna put a notch on here and pull to make sure the shadows are back down at the level where it was before so the rest of the tone curve is pretty much as it was and it's only the blacks here that I'm affecting now the reason that I'm doing that is that digital blacks are usually very very black and it's not the way that our eyes and normally see blacks in real life so just by lifting up the tone curve a little you can see the effect here if I turn it off and on what it does it just gives the shadows just a little bit more texture it makes it look a little bit more filmic it's brightening it up but so I'll just pull the shadows down just to counterbalance the overall brightening in the shadows and just as I say lift the blacks here to give it that little bit of texture down here in the shadows so just have a quick recap of everything that we've done pretty much everything that I did to this image was local if we look at the sliders over here you can see that the only thing that I really touched was the exposure to bring up the whole exposure of the image and everything else was then done just using local adjustments like the different gradient filters that I've used throughout the image the radial filters also the brush everything locally everything in small increments so just like to take this opportunity to say thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and by doing so helping creators like myself to produce these kind of videos now I've been using Squarespace for my website for quite a few years now and I've been really really happy with them because for me the the website is the center of everything that I do from there from the galleries of my dog free images to the workshops that I lead so it's really important in the website that I have represents my my work to the best put in the best possible way now Squarespace gives you all kinds of opportunities to create a website which look exactly how you want it to look and for someone like me it was utterly utterly useless at coding it's incredibly simple and intuitive to use to be able to design galleries to be able to create blogs and workshop by ten reasons that just look really really nice so if you're interested in having a look at Squarespace you can sign up for a free 14-day trial ww Squarespace comm slash any Munford and if at the end of the trail you decide that you would like to use Squarespace for your own website then you can just enter my name and demand foot into the box for the discount code and get a 10% discount so that's been interesting I hope it's been useful and if you've got any questions or if there's anything that you'd like to know just drop me a comment down below or send me an email and I'll get back to you and as always thanks for watching and thanks for all the support of the channel and take care you [Music]

Channel: Andy Mumford

Views: 23,856

Rating: 4.9797978 out of 5

Keywords: lightroom, processing, landscape photography, photography editing, image editing, lightroom techniques, range masking, luminance masks, landscape photography techniques, start to finish, editing

Id: kwBtgwZkLDo

Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 27 2019