Mountain Photography - Capture to Editing

so the thing about photographing in the mountains is that you get the very best view of the mountains when you're up amongst the mountains in the pigs themselves so we've come here to to laga SOI to the top of logosol it's about 2700 meters to try get an image of the surrounding Peaks but the other thing about photographing is about is that the weather is there it's pretty unpredictable it can be pretty extreme so it's about and about -9 out here and you can see it's a lot of wind blowing it's blowing a lot of storm a lot of snow through and we really don't have very good visibility so the lights great the sun's just come up with some really nice orange colors but unfortunately just can't take an image because there's just too much too much of stuff to it just know between between ice and months what we try to photograph so gonna try again tonight and if that doesn't work gonna try again tomorrow morning but hopefully while here going to get an image because this is a really really beautiful place [Music] [Music] right so back again sunset now conditions are a little bit more well a little bit less challenging the winds load a lot because this morning looks pretty much impossible to shoot we couldn't even focus so so much is now between the camera and the mountains that we were trying to shoot the cameras are missing focus we couldn't focus manually because you could barely see what we're shooting but I think we managed to get shot still conditions are better now except we've got absolutely no clouds no clouds at all so what we're gonna try and do is just play around with the light and shadow I've got a telephoto lens on so I'm going to be looking at these Peaks over here looking at where the light hits them just as it goes down behind it slows down over there behind marmolada and hopefully it's going to just pick out some of the peaks we're going to get these kind of contrasts and I'm going to be seaming in with the telephoto we're just picking up certain small parts in the scene and making abstract and because I quite like this stretch along here what I think I'm going to try and do is shoot a panorama so we'll see how that gets on so what I want to do because I'm going to shoot this in a panel I'm gonna put the camera in portrait mode and shoot it as a portrait with it as a portrait panel using an L bracket for this now brackets are really good because they allow you to keep the camera centered on the tripod they don't unbalance like they do like a boar head would if you tilt the camera over so first thing to do when you're shooting a panel is to put the camera in manual each one of the frames should be should be the same exposure so you move the camera around basically going all the way across all the different frames that you're going to have making sure that there's an exposure that's captures all of the highlights and all of the shadows because if you leave the camera set on auto what's going to happen is is you move the camera across the scene you're gonna get changes in exposure which you're really going to be noticeable when you try to stitch the panel together you get the sky is going to be different kind of things like that same is true for white balance because some parts of the scene of blue are warmer than others the white balance will change to compensate so keep the white balance also set to manual so the thing about shooting pianos is that you have to make sure first of all that you've got everything in the shot so you pound the camera across like that just making sure everything fits in this here this mountain that one there is a little bit too close to the top so I'm just gonna just gonna pull the camera back a little bit and then try again so we're starting about here going all the way across to there and oh yeah so that's everything and the final thing about panels is make sure you've got plenty of overlap in each image I usually like to do it with about 1/3 to 1/2 of the frame so how that would work here is and make sure you've got plenty at the edge so we start here and that's about a third of the frame it's about their next shots nots there and then about a third of a frame is there so we go to about there that's the next shot and about a third of a frame is this peak here go to that there and then here next one be there I think that's gonna be the last one but I'm gonna put another one on the edge just to make sure it's about there's always ready to have more too much than not enough all right so that's probably it and now I'm just gonna no just gonna shoot the shot and then see how it comes out the light is is really nice it's probably got a little bit more to go because it's I think about 10 minutes before the sun's going to go below the horizon maybe 5 minutes and I'm hoping that these will get really warm and really really red and really pick up some color because we don't have anything that we don't have any interest in the sky so really this is all about the light [Music] now let's have a look about how I would go about editing these kind of images so this is one of the images that I took it's not a panorama you can see it's just one image taken just as the light as the Sun was going down and I think it's really important when you're editing images to always have a really clear idea of where you're gonna take the editing process so you're not just sliding around randomly trying to do what looks good down I think what I like about this image and what's important is about is it's all about the way that the light hits the peaks that's the way the drama of the images there's nothing really happening in the sky so that's what I'm gonna focus on in the editing process trying to bring out that out as much as possible so the first thing that I'm going to do is just to increase the highlights and the white just a little bit which is just going to kind of push out that that light even more and I think I'm also going to change the color temperature I'm just going to increase the temperature cuz it's a little bit blue so I'm just gonna warm it up to something around about 6500 just to give the whole image a bit more warmth and perhaps also just increase that tint a little bit just doing cruise introduce a little bit of magenta into the image now I want to further enhance the way that like the light is hitting the peaks what I'm gonna do is use a couple of radial filters so I just put a radial filter across here across where the lights hitting a peak just shift that around to fit and reset settings and what I'm going to do in the radial filter is just brighten it up a little bit so just a tiny tiny bit of exposure around about nine or ten and also push out the highlights again just a little bit not too much or it's gonna look really obvious and I'm also gonna just so that's it's a little bit warmer I'm just going to introduce a tiny bit of color temperature there something like that just to make the light a little bit warm light just to really increase the water the white hitting the peaks and then I'm going to duplicate that and drop the duplicate radial filter on these Peaks down here they both have have a similar amount of of adjustments to them okay that's that now what I'm gonna do to try to focus the eye on this is it's bringing a gradient filter here and we basically just a little bit of vignetting just to darken the bottom this image by darkening the image what that's going to do is just to pull your eye into the important part of image into the focal point around here our eyes tend to just skip across darkness so what I will do is just reduce the exposure of that and I'm also going to put another radial filter in the top here it's just clear that so I'll darken this down a little bit more or what I'm also gonna do is to take away some of that yellow in the sky and to call the sky down a little bit so I just pull that down to act when she introduced a little bit more blue in the sky and just push out the highlights where the air radio filters going across the peaks there and that also just gives the sky just a little bit more pop that's what you can see now is by darkening the top and the bottom and really bringing out the light on the peaks it's made of the whole image a lot more focused so our eyes just automatically go to the light on the peaks here I think we're also going to do is just I don't touch the saturation but I'm going to increase the vibrance a little bit to something around 10 and also the clarity just to give me a little bit more punch in the details as I just assume anyone introduces narrative just to make sure I'm not introducing any noise or any artifact that looks fine and then the last thing I'm going to do is go down to the split toning here what I want to do is just put a little bit of color into the into the highlight so I'm gonna ignore the shadows and just look at the highlights in if I press alt and then hue what that does is it gives me a full saturation version which tells me what color I'm introducing into the highlights I want it to be something warm so I'm gonna be looking at somewhere something around here about that color now obviously saturation is set to zero so it doesn't it's not not having any effect at all so - that's just tell me which color that I'm gonna actually introduce so I will just put the saturation up to something around about a little bit more than 10 less than 15 just to give me a little bit more of that orange e-reading warmth into the into the highlights on the peaks there and that's pretty much it I don't think the image needs anything more than that what I would do is then resize and sharpen that for the web upload but it's a very simple image it really doesn't need anything more special than that anything more doing to it than that now the next image that I want to have a look at this group of images here which is a panorama that I took no it's not the one they actually film myself taking because when that happened they were still lighting the sky this was taken in the blue eyed just after the Sun had gone down and you can see that there's actually quite a lot of there's a really nice pink in the sky it lacks the dramatic light of the previous image but if that were the case I'd probably editing it in a very similar way so just to do something a little bit I'll have a go at looking at this pet looking at this panorama now what I'd like to do this is actually have a look at editing it and capture one because I kind of used both of my processing I use Lightroom and capture one I like them both they both got different advantages and disadvantages and just so I'm not doing the same thing what I'll do is edit this in capture one but what I can't do in that software is stitch the panoramas I'm going to have to do that in Lightroom so I just select more right-click and go to photo merge panorama so this has just given me a preview of the panorama perspective usually gives you something that looks a little bit weird so generally all of Maya I tend to go with spherical or cylindrical yeah that looks okay and then I just hit the merge and Lightroom will stitch it together okay so now you can see that the panoramas finish it stitched it together and Lightroom does a really nice job with panoramas you can see that it there's no mark at all in the sky it's all blended so anything getting and the individual images it's taken care of and smoothed away just apologize for the noise of that's Maya the noise of my fan kicking in on my laptop because when I'm screen recording and using Lightroom and the fan kicks in to try to keep that to keep the temperature of the top down because it's not a new laptop it's about five years old and it's starting to show its age in a little bit so apologies for the background noise now what I'm gonna do is edit this in in capture one okay so here we are in capture one I'll just click import here and it's pointed out the same folder so there's that there's the stitch palette so I just imported like that and then open it now the way that capture one works is that you're supposed to basically just work your way through across the different the different here tabs here when you do your processing it doesn't really work for me it's not something that I find particularly intuitive so what I've done because what you can do and capture one is you can basically take all of these different things and stack them and arrange them how you like so I've got pretty much everything that I use for editing stacked in the same and the same sidebar here in very much the same manner that you would see in Lightroom because it just makes the switching editing in both both software's a lot more clearer to me so pretty much everything that I need is is here you can see the histogram different layers going all the way down through the different exposure white balance control holes etc and then the color controls and then things like sharpness and noise reduction at the bottom so now looking at this image it doesn't really need that much this really it's again it's very simple there's not a lot of drama in the image it's got a really lovely color palette so I'm basically just going to be trying to enhance what's already there now you can see because this was a DNG that was stitched together from the panorama in lightroom it's kind of it brought it over with these with the edge it's not cropped it and that's doesn't matter I could crop here or just leave it and crop it when it gets back into Lightroom what I'm going to do is just leave it because it's just simple that way and work straight on to editing it so the first thing that I need to do is it looks a little bit darker in encapture one it tends to a rendering which is slightly differently suffice I'm just going to increase the exposure a little bit just about half a stop somewhere around somewhere around about there and I'm also because I really like the tones and I want to actually increase the coolness of it and increase the magenta so I'm just going to have a look at the white balance call them the white balance a little bit and increase the tint so just somewhere around about there I think it's okay and then increase the tint just a tiny amount to to around about there just to give me a slightly different slightly more pleasing color palette to play with and then gonna go to the height this is where you find the highlights and shadows as you can see it's later slightly different to light rings I'm just going to increase the highlights just a little bit to somewhere around about 10 and the shadows as well just to bring everything out a little bit and then I'll go to levels no because I often use whites and blacks as you saw in the previous image because we don't have whites and blacks and capture one basically we use and levels with this slide on the high light side affecting the white and then this slider on that on on the shadow side affecting the blacks now I don't really want to touch the blacks I'm just gonna brighten up the the shadows the highlights a little bit so we just pull that in just to make the snow pop a little bit more now I think the next thing I want to do is do some of the things that capture one gives me the the tools to do that I don't have in Lightroom now or capture one has layers so what I'm gonna do is go here to create a layer I keep so it's a long click and I go for a filled layer and what I'm gonna do is create a luminosity mask in in capture on a luminosity mask is basically a mess that works on a particular tone within the image so it can where you can be just applying that adjustment adjust to the shadows or just in the highlights or just to the mid-tones what I want to do is apply adjustments only to the snow so what I do is I click on luma range here and I'll just click on this button which allows me to see the mask because everything's gone red that means everything's affected but as I move these sliders here what you'll see is that that narrows down a little bit and the bits that are red basically the bits they're gonna be affected by any adjustment that I make as I said I want to I want to pinpoint the snow a little bit so I'm just gonna slide this around it's probably gonna be a little bit brighter than what on the bright side here and just affect the snow yet it's something like that now the shadows this sliders at the bottom this kind of effects that the fall-off it's how broad or narrow the selection is so something like that and I just click apply no because I'm working on this layer all of these tools below here are now basically only working on this layer I'm only working on that area that I've just masked which is the snow area so again because I just want to brighten the snow just a little bit what I'm going to do is just come back down to levels again and just again pull this in it's just gonna brighten the snow just a little bit and also the mid-tones of the snow here so if I turn this off and on you can see really it's just making that's no pop a little bit now with images taken in the blue hour you really have to be careful with contrast they shouldn't be to contrast it look it looks a little bit force at this kind of time of day these kind of shooting conditions there really isn't a huge amount of contrast so it's better not to push things too far now what I'm going to do is work make another layer because I want to work on the air on the sky now I could just do this on the background but I'd like to work with layers it's the way that I work in Photoshop and I think it's one of the nice things that capture one gives you is that you can work on separate layers which can be turned off and on so I'm just going to create an another low there film layer and then go to this tool which allows me to create a linear gradient mask so this works very much the same way that it does in a in the Lightroom or in in Photoshop if I click M that shows me what's being masked and I just want to mask the sky so again I'm gonna go down to the levels but because I want to darken the sky I'm gonna pull the shadows in a little bit here which is gonna darken the darker parts of the sky so it just needs to come and turn a little bit somewhere around about there but I'm also gonna brighten the brighter parts of the sky to stop it from looking too flat so I just pull that down to about then we can see the effect that we've had it just gives us guy a little bit more punch a little bit more depth and to finish I'm gonna go back to the background layer and do some more adjustments on here I'm just gonna push the shadows out a little bit more which is here and I don't have a range and the reason I'm doing this is actually just to reduce the contrast because I think it's looking a little bit contrasting around here so I just pushed that out to somewhere around about here and now I'm going to work on the detail so we're just zoom into to 100% and just introduce a little bit of clarity don't need too much I find capture one already introduces plenty of detail into the images as well now what I'm going to do is go down to the color editor now this is something that is really powerful and capture on it has a really strong color otic is it's really nice to play with the Coliseum see I've got this color wheel which is kind of split up so I've got these controls for the different smoothness hue saturation of lines for the different aspects of the color wheel now this part of the color wheel here is actually already selecting the sky which is the area that I want to work on what I want to do is to make that a less warped and make it less orange II and a little bit cooler and more magenta so I'm gonna look at the hue control here now you can see this basically is just controlling the hue within these tones in the color wheel so the more I go that way the white goes this way to the color wheel which is orangey and as I go that way it takes a hue in this direction to the lower part of the color wheel so I'm just going to go down there to somewhere like like that just to give it a little bit more magenta a little bit bluer and then I'm just going to increase the saturation of that to somewhere like there okay and the final thing is sharpening now for sharpening I should always zoom in to 100% so I can see what I'm working on I just can then navigate to tool there so I can move around the image and if I left click it get really gives me quite a few shopping presets and I find that this soft image sharpening works really quite nicely you can see that I actually get a preview on the images I as I scroll through them but this soft image sharpening one works really quite nicely if I move around I can see looking at the edges here that they aren't really not on any halos at all if I go up into the sky I'm not seeing any noise which would be a sign that it's being over sharpened now if I really wanted to work on this and if I were probably taking more time I basically just paint on with the brush in the areas that I want to sharpen which is mostly around these clip there because the sky never needs sharpening and neither does this snow really but because this is just basically a quick and a quick and nasty process just doing as quickly support other possibly can for the video I think that looks okay I'm quite happy with that setting and that is pretty much it for the image I don't think it needs any more than that it's very subtle it's I I didn't want to really change the feel of the image very much and what I would do now in capture one is go over here to the process and you can see that this I've got a process calls it here recipe but it's just the same as the export presets that you have in Lightroom and you can see that I've got it as a full resolution TIFF and it's going to a particular folder here if I click process it's going to basically export this as a full resolution TIFF to that folder okay now that's done so what I'm going to do is close capture one and go back to your Lightroom and back in Lightroom you can see the image here and I've got this folder capture want images which is set up to auto import any images which capture on exports to a particular folder so the images kind of done a circle and come right back into Lightroom now all I've got to do is just drag it and drop it into the original folder and you can see that it appears here alongside all the original RAW files that I made the panorama with well okay that's it for this video I hope it's been interesting and hope it's been useful if there's anything at all anything that you'd like to know just drop me a comment in the comments box below or send me an email and until the next time thanks for watching and take care you

Channel: Andy Mumford

Views: 30,363

Keywords: dolomites, photography techniques, landscape photography, landscape tutorial, landscape photograpyh vlogs, lagazuoi, shooting panoramas, mountain photography

Id: bPhd05eRUrs

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 23 2019