My SECRET LIGHTROOM tool to CREATE STUNNING photos

holy everybody fantastic to see you all again well what an incredible time we're going through at the moment it is so difficult and a lot of us are stuck inside and not allowed to travel which is difficult for being a landscape photographer but the most important thing is obviously to stay safe and protect others as well but I thought it'd be really a good idea because I've got more time on my hands now obviously I'm not travelling I'm not running workshops to be able to put out more videos to be able to do videos that I've wanted to do for a while but I'm not at time because I've done my Sunday videos which tend to be a little bit longer so these are going to be some videos that are really short probably around about five minutes long and are going to be things that you can do while you're inside so they're going to concentrate on things like Lightroom Photoshop printing you know cataloging your images cleaning your gear anything that you can do while you're inside now I'm going to need a name for them as well so when you've watched it you can maybe write in the comments an idea for a name but this one today this this video is all about the radial filter and five things you can do with the radial filter [Music] so the first one with the radial filter and if you don't know the radio filters up here and it allows you to select a part of your image so the first image I'm going to go to is this image here which was from Norway I know it's fantastic image I've done some very very basic editing on it but I want to sort of highlight this area here so this first one is using the radial filter to actually create almost like a fake Sun but like a bright area and and sort of just make it a little bit softer and it's really good if the Sun is just over off to the left of your image and you just want to sort of highlight that I am just going to draw that filter in there invert it you can press o on your keyboard just to see what it's affecting so it's just going to affect that I'm going to increase the exposure but the key thing is with this is I'm going to reduce the clarity so I'm going to reduce the clarity right down I'm going to add it a little bit warmer and I'm probably going to increase the Wyss a little bit and probably reduce the highlights so you can see that you know that's made this nice sort of look to this this area here and there you can move that around I can extend it and it's just a really good way I've just sort of softening that sort of soft that sunspot down and sort of broadening it out through your image so you get like that sort of nice sort of filter effect through your image now once you've done that a quick top tip this isn't one of the five so it's an extra one is that you can change it so here I can save it as as an effect so for wanter I can save this current setting as soft Sun too so if you want to get to that really quickly you can go back and get to it really easy okay the next one to go into this image is just using the radial filter as a vignette so here I've got the radial filter and I'm actually going to go and do vignette medium and then all I'm gonna do is just add that thing yet and the advantage of doing it with a radial filter is that I can have more control so if I want to just just going to darken it down a little bit more so if I just want to affect the top part of the image a little bit more the bottom part I can do this you can move it down a little bit and it gives you more control so you can do that in lots of different ways so in this image here if you look so this this one here you can see that I've just darkened down the outside quite a bit by adding this vignette and it just brings attention to the actual tree in the middle so it's super easy to do and it allows you more control of that video as well so if I wanted to I could add the outside brighter or I could de saturate the outside of it which is something that's a little bit more difficult to do with just a vignette tool at the bottom of lightroom the next thing is almost like an inverse vignette so if i go onto this image here I could add a vignette just to the middle here and say I just want to just add this a little bit brighter and add maybe a little bit of contrast I'm gonna reduce the highlights but what I'm gonna do invert it so it's just of a click Oh again you can see it's just affecting this middle part I'm gonna rather it's slightly bigger feather on it and what I can do now is I could just increase the whites again I'm going to reduce the clarity a little bit and then maybe just include the exposure and I'm going to move it over cuz I want it to affect the lighthouse a little bit more and maybe just reduce the shadows so you can see I've done something quite subtle there but if you get rid of it it's just added something a little bit nicer to the image and you can use that in lots of different ways are quite often use it in my woodland images so here for instance I might just want to apply it to this area here and just add a lighter area here so I'm just going to go and lighten up that area and I'm just going to reduce the clarity again as well so you can see that what I've done if I just switch this on and off is I've just added this light spot which draws your eye in and take your eye into that woodland and looks really really good oh for the next one an image from Norway in the summer and actually what I want to do is just brighten up the sky but just just the sky and not the land so I can use a the vignette tool really easily here so I can just select there I can see that I'm just invert it got that that sky area but I've also got these mountains down here so what I can now do is I can use a range mask and choose color so I can go and choose this color here and what that does is it just selects the actual sky now you can change the amount it does that with your mount slider here so if I get rid of over there I can then in this particular case I just want to increase the brightness a little bit maybe and then add a bit more saturation and maybe make it a little bit warmer what that's enabled me to do is just apply that to the sky and not the mountains or all the clouds and if I just switch that on and off you can see that that's made quite a big difference I use that all the time and lots of different things whether I'm selecting blue sky or just maybe some flowers or some foliage on the floor just to select that particular color and the final one which is a bit like that but just using a luminosity mask so looking at the luminosity is if I look at this image here maybe I want to make me more of a silhouette so what I can do is I can use the radial tool here and just select me and then what I can do is I've just click oh I'm gonna through invert it so it's just selecting me but it's also selecting all see in the background so I can use a luminosity mask and what I can do I can just say just effect the dark areas and you can see that's now just gonna affect me now if I didn't want it to affect this rock at the bottom then I can also edit the mask as well so I can just brush and a raise that bottom area so I could just get rid of this here so it's now just impacting me and nothing else so now if I wanted to I could make that more of a silhouette now you've got to be fairly subtle with this you can see now I can just dark and me down and it does a really good job of doing that and looking really good without going into Photoshop and that's it that's my quick five-minute hopefully five minutes to tutorial using the radial mask in Lightroom and how it just makes such a big difference is such a powerful tool to your photos I hope that's helped make sure you write in the comments ideas for titles for these five-minute quick videos it would be really helpful and then I can title them something I'll try and get one out every week in the mid week over there next sort of couple of months and hopefully that will help somebody get through the board and we're all stuck inside ok thanks ever so much for watching and until Sunday bye [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 66,546

Keywords: photography, lightroom, lightroom editing, lightroom tutorial, photography tips, landscape photography, radial filter, how to use lightroom, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: kcMqcGr60m8

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020