Make the SUBJECT POP by doing THIS! (Lightroom Classic Tutorial)

every good image needs a clear subject but how do we make it stand out on a gloomy day like this let me show you with this Lightroom tutorial as always feel free to follow along by downloading the raw file from the link in the description of this video and now let's begin so this long exposure scene looks pretty good the problem is the subject is way too dark and it kind of Blends in with the rest of the image we don't want that luckily for us this problem is easily fixed with just a bunch of Lightroom adjustments and very first thing we need to do are the basic adjustments fixing the exposure of the image globally I'm going to change the profile from a duie color to a duie standard which as you can see already brightens up the darkest parts of the image slightly however this is not enough so what I want to do next is to just bring up the exposure and as I'm pushing the exposure I'm always keeping a close eye on the histogram since I don't want to introduce any overexposure still increasing the exposure like that we will lose a lot of detail in the sky which we also don't want so to counter that problem I'm going to bring down the highlights until we do have some nicely structured clouds appear perfect again taking a look at the histogram you can see there is a little bit of underexposure which we want to fix by bringing up the blacks and then we can bring up the whites to add a little more contrast to the image again just keeping a close eye on the histogram to not introduce too much overexposure wonderful at this point we can clearly see the image has a very strong blue color cast I do kind of like it but I want to reduce it a little bit a neat trick to neutralize any color cast is take a look at the histogram you can see there are different colored Peaks as we shift the temperature slider more towards the warmer side you can see those color colored Peaks are getting closer and closer together by overlapping the Peaks like this we have neutralized the colorcast and we kind of have a proper wi balance going on I think for this image it really doesn't look good so I don't want to go as far with the temperature let's bring it down a bit so we do have some cold color tones left in here perfect at this point we can also introduce some texture then let's bring down the clarity because I want this image to have a very soft look and I'm also going to bring down the DEH for the same effect and then bring up the Vibrance for more saturation so with step one of the postprocessing we have adjusted the overall exposure and we have fixed the white ballets the image does look quite a bit better however the subject is still kind of blending in with the rest of the image now how do we make it stand out of course we can't do that with global adjustments we need to focus on areas locally and as always for a problem like this we are going to make use of masks there are a few things we can do first we want to bring the sky in balance with the rest of the image and along the way make it more dramatic I'm going to do this using a linear gradient covering most of the sky like this let me activate the overlay so you can see what's going on and once the mask is set up I'm going to bring down the exposure quite heavily this will make the whole Sky a lot darker and by making it darker we get a lot more details in those clouds so not only will this help make this boat stand out a little more but this will also make the sky way more dramatic we can push things a little further by introducing some contrast and even introducing some clarity to make the clouds pop that looks awesome I do think we can make the sky a little colder by bringing down the temperature just a little bit introducing some more coldness to this image this way as we brought down the exposure for the whole Sky we did lose a little bit of contrast I want to fix that using a radial gradient just covering the brightest parts of the sky like this and I don't want to change the foreground here so what I'm going to do is to click on those three dots just intersect mask with and choose select sky so with this mask we only targeting the white part of the sky which I want to make a little brighter to it contrast and to do that I'm simply going to raise the whites and again I'm paying close attention to the Instagram to not overexpose too badly but this is looking very very good we can work on the sky some more so let's use another linear gradient for the very top part right here and again I'm just going to bring down the exposure making the very top even darker so by stacking all these masks I'm going to create a custom vignetting effect just pretty much for the sky this will already lead the viewers eye more towards the center of the image where our subject lies so now that we have worked on the sky let's also work on the foreground I'm going to use another linear gradient for that I'm roughly covering the very near foreground like this and what I want to do here is to make use of some extra Clarity I'm going to pump it up all the way and what this does is it just makes the clouds and the reflection of the water pop and also we can see a little bit of the jetty down below the water surface so that's really helpful another thing I want to do here since you have increased the clarity this leads us to a little bit of underexposure to fix that I'm just going to raise the blacks perfect then let's make use of a radial gradient and just place it right here over the center what I want to do with this area is to make it slightly brighter since at the moment it's lacking a little bit of contrast so I'm doing this by increasing the vies just adding more contrast and further guiding the viewer's eye towards the center of the image where the sub lies so that's looking pretty good but still the subject is not standing out enough for my taste so what we can do at this point is to specifically Target the boat let's create a new mask and choose select subject you can see Lightroom is doing a great job at masking out our subject what I want to do next since we have a few other things selected in this image which I would don't want to change is to go again click on those three dots choose intersect mask with and choose radial gradient then I'm going to just roughly create a radial gradient over our boat and just like that we have a perfect selection for the subject what we can do with this is to bring up the exposure and this will clearly make the subject stand out more from the rest of the image however this area right here at the bottom of the boat is still too dark and we can't really fix it by increasing the exposure more what I want to do for that is to create another mask choose a color range mask and I'm going to select this specific color by clicking right in here Lightroom is doing a great job at selecting this color we still have a few other areas selected so again I just want to go on those three dots choose intersect mask with and this time I'm just using the brush I want to bring down the brush feather and then just roughly paint over this area right here with this selection all we need to do is to bring up the exposure again and this is what really really helps separating the subject from the rest of the image as you can see of course raise ing the exposure this much will introduce a little bit of noise in this area however we can fix it later with the AI noise reduction that should not be a big deal what I want to do as well is to bring up the whites making this boat even brighter and then I want to introduce some saturation to make the green color really stand out from the rest of the image wonderful and then there's one more mask I want to create and that's a radial gradient again for the very bright part of the sky just above the tree line and I'm going to use this to introduce a little bit of glow coming from this area for that I'm going to bring up the blacks and I'm going to drop the clarity and the dehaze perfect now that's looking so much better let us compare the image from before with the basic adjustments to after you now can clearly see how the subject of this image is clearly standing out with the added brightness and saturation at this point we can continue doing just a little bit of color grading so I want to head into the color mixer tab in here let's start with the saturation I want to make the subject a little more colorful therefore I'm going to bring up the orange tones let's also raise yellow and of course we want to race the green tones the rest of the image could use some more saturation as well and for that reason I'm going to bring up the blue tones which will add some very cool looking saturation to the sky so that's great we can also head into the luminance tab here let's bring up the yellow luminance and the green luminance to make the boat stand out even more then let's do a bit of split toning in the color grading T I just want to affect the Shadows here giving them a blue color tone making the image look a slightly bit colder and let's bring up the saturation now taking a look at the histogram I think the midtones are kind of lagging so to change that I'm going to head into the midtones of the split toning settings I'm not going to add any color but what I want to do is to make use of the luminant slider bringing it slightly up and thus increasing the exposure of the midtones giving us some more contrast perfect and I guess that's pretty much it for the raw adjustment of this image what we can do is to sharpen it a little bit in the details tab so bring down the radius increase the details add a bit of masking and then increase the amount of sharpening I think that's pretty much it for the tutorial part I still want to clean up the image since there are some tree branches hanging in and there are a few other things I want to fix so feel free to stay as I'm going to edit this image at Photoshop real quick and what I want to do here is to First duplicate layer in case I mess something up and I have a backup this way then I'm using the remove tool right here then let's zoom in and just brush over all the tree branches as I promised earlier I have cleaned the sensor but there are still a few sensor spots showing up so you want to remove them as well later just roughly brushing over the three branches I also want to get rid of those things because they are kind of ruining the balance of the image and there's this thing in the foreground which we need to remove and I want to remove this Dre branch on the jetty as well okay once we have selected everything we just need to confirm this let's see how Photoshop will solve this that looks a lot better then let's zoom in one more time I'm going to clean up the sensor spots using the spot healing brush all right and then there is this strange thing here which was dirt on the filter I used so I'm just going to use the glone stamp tool copy an area from right here place it over there and just going to roughly paint over that dot all right perfect and that is the finished image so I hope this Lightroom tutorial was interesting and helpful as always if you have questions left feel free to ask in the comments and thank you so much for watching this video

Channel: Christian Möhrle - The Phlog Photography

Views: 38,766

Keywords: photography, photoshop tutorial, lightroom tutorial, photography post processing, lightroom post processing, landscape photography, landscape post processing, photoshop beginner, lightroom for beginner, the phlog photography, christian möhrle, how to edit raw photos, raw photo start to finish, adobe lightroom classic class, adobe photoshop class

Id: Q78zfRJ2DfI

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 16 2023