Photographing Horseshoe Bend with Elia Locardi and the GFX 50S (USA)

my name is a Lila Carney and for the past seven years I've been traveling the world photographing the most beautiful landscapes and cityscapes on the planet whether dealing with harsh weather conditions challenging hikes massive crowds of people or hours out under the stars a night sky each photograph I take presents its own unique challenges in my video tutorial series photographing the world I take you along for the ride and show you exactly how I capture each of these amazing world locations as well as how I edit and post-process every photograph from start to finish in this tree lesson I'll walk you through my workflow step by step as I shoot the famous Horseshoe Bend in Page Arizona with a brand new Fuji film GFX 50s medium format camera and the GX 23 millimeter wide-angle lens sit back relax and enjoy the tutorial and welcome to photographing the world [Music] [Music] [Music] hello everyone and welcome to Horseshoe Bend just outside of Page Arizona my name is Lela Lok Rd and today I'm going to walk you step-by-step through the process of shooting and editing images using the new GFX 50s camera and 23 millimeter GF lens I've been traveling the world with the crew from F staffers dot-com creating a series called photographing the world where we photographed some of the most beautiful destinations on the planet I've been using the new GFX 50s camera and I thought Horseshoe Bend would be a beautiful place to teach you the strengths of working in medium format now Horseshoe Bend is a beautiful destination and as you can see it's also pretty busy the nice thing is there is so much space out here for everybody to be able to get set up you could literally have a thousand photographers up here and as you move from the left and right around this beautiful meandering river the composition is beautiful the other nice thing about this location is the Sun sets right behind these mountains giving you the opportunity to capture a fiery sky over this incredible landscape let's go ahead and dive right into my composition here now again I am using the 23 millimeter GF lens now that in full frame format would be equivalent to 18 millimeters so it's already pretty wide but I also have a benefit working with medium format that I don't have with aps-c or full-frame DSLR cameras and that's the aspect ratio of four to three now ATSC cameras and full-frame cameras use three to two now if you imagine three to two is already a little bit wide or two three actually gives you more image which allows you to get the most out of the millimeter of the lens that you're using now let's take a look at a quick example I'm going to go ahead and shoot an image at four by three the native format using the GFX and I'm going to do that using my trigger release cable right here let's review this image together this is going to be my composition for the sunset right now everything's a little bit blown out but as the Sun starts to get lower in the sky what I'm hoping is it's going to illuminate those clouds and create a beautiful fiery sunset over this landscape to take a look at how much sky I have and how much of the lower foreground I have this is the advantage of four to three now let's take a look at three by two if you're used to shooting with the XT two or any of the Fujifilm cameras an aps-c or any full-frame cameras any DSLRs you're going to be used to this feature if you go in the menu the first option is image size I have it set to four by three let's go ahead and set it to 3 by 2 and I'm going to take another image reference if we take a look at this 3 by 2 image now you can see that I've cropped the top and bottom of the image in fact what I've actually done is crop the image if you shoot with a medium format camera in its native 4 by 3 you take advantage of the entire sensor and the whole megapixel range if you change it to 3 by 2 you're actually cropping and losing some resolution on the top and the bottom so my recommendation even if you're used to working with aps-c or full-frame cameras go ahead and change it and embrace using the 4 by 3 format and in this case it gives me a nice advantage because I like it better than 2 by 3 because it gives me more of the bottom and more of the sky while still maintaining all of the 18 millimeter aspect of this beautiful scene in front of me the next thing I want to do is talk about my camera settings I'm obviously shooting in RAW I'm shooting at f/8 in aperture priority mode at an ISO of 100 that way as the sunlight starts to change I can keep taking images and the camera in aperture priority mode is automatically going to calculate my shutter speed based on the metering of the camera and the metering is always perfect using the GFX 50s another thing that I'm doing is I am shooting five exposure brackets now in order to enable exposure bracketing on the GFX it's a button right on the top here it's called drive when I press that button and go to drive gum down from single image or still image to down to AE bracket and I can say okay next thing I can do is press the button right on the front the function key on the front of the camera I press that button I can go to frame steps and setting and I'm going to choose plus five frames at one stop and I'm going to say ok again now the next thing that I'm going to do to because I'm shooting into such a bright background is I'm going to easy shift down so X want to change this if I left this natural at my metered exposure I'd actually be getting the metered exposure zero a plus 1 a plus 2 a negative 1 and a negative 2 what I actually want to do is I want to shift this down so instead so I can capture the very bright background I actually want to be able to get a 0 negative 1 negative 2 negative 3 and a negative 4 now I'm going to go ahead and shoot these exposure brackets so we can take a look at the reason behind this let's take a look at this image sequence first the darkest image the darkest image the negative 4 you can see I'm still getting a really hot Sun but if we go up to a negative 3 then a negative to a negative 1 and a 0 you can see that it brightens the foreground later in post-processing I'm going to be covering how to manually adjust and blend these exposures together but for now it's very important that I capture every exposure range that I think I'm going to need and whenever I'm shooting into the Sun I always want to make sure that I expose for both the shadows and the highlights that's very important so far I'm really happy with my composition I know I'm going to have to wait a little bit more time for that Sun to come down and for the sky to hopefully light up with beautiful colors but I already see some challenges the main challenge number one I don't know if you guys can see this but there are flies all over the place they're swarming around me these little flies don't bite but they really like the front of the camera they really like crawling around on the lens itself so I know as I'm shooting this I have a bunch of flies zipping through my frame but thankfully in Photoshop it's really easy to get rid of little spots like that little flies in the frame and I'm going to walk you through that step by step if they happen to make it into my exposure the other challenge I anticipate here is as the light changes as that Sun goes behind the horizon it's going to one create a beautiful sky which is a good thing but it's going to make the foreground much more dark so I might have to adjust my exposure range a little bit and compensate with my EB shifting but that's pretty easy to do on the fly because every time I shoot here I can actually go through and review my images and make sure I captured everything that I need but even still I'm going to pay close attention to these exposures and make sure that I'm exposing correctly for the floor ground and the background so I give myself everything that I need to put it together later in post-processing something to point out that's very important here is choosing not to use any neutral density filters including a graduated neutral density filter if I had a three-stop graduated neutral density filter I'd be able to fix the exposure a little bit on the sky and require less bracketing but I'd also get sort of a dark line on the horizon as backwardation messes with the landscape and because I want to teach you guys everything about shooting and post-processing I like the challenge of having to potentially blend multiple exposures together in post-processing to overcome the challenges if you don't happen to have any graduated neutral density is yourself so the Sun is just about to set behind the horizon and as it was touching the horizon I went ahead and shot a sequence of different f-stop so I could show you guys how that starburst changes as the f-stop increases so let's take a look at the f/8 shot first now at f/8 you can see that the star lines are starting to exist a little bit but watch what happens when we move up to f11 they become a little bit more defined now take a look at f-16 here we go at f-16 you can really start to see that starburst effect let's take a look at f-22 now f-22 it becomes very intense but just so I could show you guys all the ranges of this camera I also shot one at F 30 to check out the starburst at F 32 now that one's pretty intense and it's very very defined but something to point out with landscape photography in general my comfort zone for shooting is typically around f/8 to f/11 because that's usually the sharpest point of the lens before anything like diffraction occurs the other thing you have to be careful about is when you start to go past F 11 in to f-16 f-22 f-35 each when we go up that high and there are probably ten billion little flies out there in front of this so I have a feeling that if we use one of those shots at f-22 or f/32 we're going to have a nightmare of flies to get rid of in Photoshop that being said I'm going to base it clearly on the star that I like the most and if f-22 is the one that I want to use I'll find a way to clean up this and remove any problems with dust on the sensor and of course flies in front of my lens now unfortunately since I'm shooting right into the Sun something very negative happens to and what happens is because the Sun is hitting the front of the lens it's creating not only that beautiful star effect but also a glare - so if we take a look at this image right here you can see that there is a lens flare right in front of the frame now I don't want to spend time cloning that out in Photoshop so to compensate for this after I capture my star image and I'm going to do that one more time here I'm going to go up to f-16 because that looks really nice with the edges of the star I'm going to shoot an additional set of exposures but I'm going to block the Sun I'm going to very carefully just put my hand up here block the Sun and I'm going to take these exposures again let's take a look at that shot without my hands see that big lens flare now let's switch over to the shot with my hand in the frame see how that now has taken that away so the idea here is in post-processing we can decide to do some additional blending use the Sun or the top of the image with the Sunburst and on the bottom what I can do is blend in the shot that had my hand this brings up another interesting point another reason that I didn't want to use a neutral density filter is anytime I use a neutral density filter any glass in front of the glass of my lens causes a potential for more flare from the Sun so this is very intense and as you can see when I shoot right into the Sun a flare happens right across the screen but I don't get as many problems as if I have a piece of glass you think of that as a piece of glass in front is going to have reflections and different refractions it can cause all sorts of problems as well so right now I'm just going to do it this way and I'm going to show you guys how to blend it in post-processing so far bear in mind what I've been doing is I've been shooting here an hour before sunset to lock in my composition make sure I get everything exactly how I want everything's exposed properly everything's focused everything's perfect so that I could capture the starburst before the sunset but there was no guarantee that I was going to have a starburst at all what if these clouds were covering up the Sun well then the key to this shot would obviously be when the Sun sets far enough below the horizon light up the clouds the reason I decided to shoot the Sun was because it was purely optimistic this shot may actually come out better with a starburst in it rather than the sky because at this point I'm not sure if that sky is going to turn colourful I certainly hope it does but there's never a guarantee but now that I've shot all the way through the late afternoon I've captured all of the starbursts than I want I've captured clean frames using my hand to block any flare on the lens the next step is just to wait a little bit longer and see what the sky decides to do my hope is we're going to get some beautiful colors and textures to capture in the meantime I'm going to go ahead and shoot every few minutes now this whole time I've made sure that the camera and tripod are rock-solid I've set this tripod up in a way where it's sitting all of the feet are sitting in grooves in the rocks nothing will slide and of course there's no chance that I'm going to accidentally push it over the edge everything on this ball head everything is completely locked down to ensure that as I start taking these shots and again I'm using a remote release cable as I take these shots nothing changes in between the shots that gives me the opportunity to blend my exposure brackets together without any shift at all so I'll end up with a seamless result and a beautiful image to share in the end so the next step is just to wait this out and see what's going to happen with the sky I'm going to go ahead and shoot every few minutes so we can take a look at the progression in post-processing [Music] I think this is about the peak of the colors of the sky that I'm going to get tonight so I'm going to go ahead and take one more sequence of exposures right now honestly I think the sky looks great there's some really good color to work with and I think we're really going to bring this out in post-processing so right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pack things up because it's going to get dark soon next time I see you guys we're going to take everything into post-processing I'm going to show you everything that I shot and we're going to talk about how to get the most out of editing these RAW files using a combination of Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop [Music] [Music] [Music] hello everybody welcome to the post processing studio today I'm going to be walking you through step by step how to edit the photos that we captured together in Horseshoe Bend remember I shot these with the fuji film GFX 50s medium format camera and I shot everything in raw mode so we can take advantage of all of the best editing features in Adobe Lightroom so let's get started by taking a look at Lightroom I'm going to walk you through some of the basic features that I'm going to be using if you're new to Adobe Lightroom it's actually a great program to be able to catalog and edit your raw photos if you already use Adobe Lightroom this is just going to be a little bit of a review but I want to get us all on the same page what I've done here is I've imported a selection of the photos that I shot and what I mean by selection is I was there for a couple hours I may have shot somewhere between 100 to 150 different images but for this lesson I just want to focus on the ones that we're going to be using and post-processing so down here on the bottom you can see all of those images that we're going to be looking at today currently in the develop panel but if I just click on the library panel here some different options are going to come up you're brand new to Lightroom this is the panel where you do all of your importing this is the button I hit to bring this selection of files into Lightroom once they're imported this panel here on the right will show you all of the exif data so you can see the size the dimensions the exposure time focal length ISO and the make and model of the cameras you can actually review everything that you shot if you set everything correctly in your camera you'll actually get the correct date and time of the exposure here everything that we're going to be focusing on is actually in the developed panel now while this developed panel has a lot of options we're mainly going to be focusing on this panel here which are the basic adjustments we have the tone adjustments exposure contrast highlights shadows whites and blacks and then we have a little bit of stuff down here that we use clarity vibrance and saturation we're also going to be talking a little bit about the selective adjustment tools but before we start editing these images I just want to show you guys a few of the things that I do to every Fujifilm file that I import so right now I have one selected here I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to change a few things first thing I'm going to change here is sharpening by default in Lightroom it gets a sharpening 25 now this is a post effect sharpening now these files already razor-sharp so there's no reason to have Lightroom sharpen it anymore so I'm going to take that down to zero second thing I'm going to do is go all the way down to this area called camera calibration now if you're like me you really like Fuji films color modes and by default on the camera it's set to Pro via which gives it a beautiful color tone inside a light remote it's set to Adobe standard which isn't necessarily a problem but it's not going to simulate the film style that you chose in camera so what I'm going to do is click here where it says Adobe standard I'm going to go down and I'm going to set it to Pro via now I want this to happen to all of my files and you can see that it got a little bit more contrast II there but it's hard to tell because this is a very dark frame since I have changed the sharpening I've changed the camera calibration what I'm going to do is right click on this image go to develop settings and I'm going to copy settings so here depending on how much you use Lightroom this could have anything checked so sometimes you can have everything checked or nothing checked and this works in synching anything in Lightroom whether it's color settings processed versions different things like that so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select process version and I'm just going to select the things that I changed in this case it was sharpening and it was also the calibration so those are the only two things that I changed I'm going to copy them here next thing I'm going to do is select all of these images I'm going to do that with a hotkey command since I'm on a Mac command a control if you're on a PC control a select everything right click develop settings and I'm going to paste those settings inside a Lightroom you can see I get this little plus minus icon on the lower right that means that everything has been synced and just to make sure if I scroll up here back to sharpening if I come through any of these files you can see that that sharpening is set to zero so we're all on the same page again before I get into editing these specific photos I want to talk a little bit about editing RAW files in Adobe Lightroom so let's take a look at this post son set now remember in the field i shot directly into the Sun and I'm going to be showing you guys every step that I shot into the Sun whether that was f/8 f/11 16 22 or above 22 but right now just so I can show you the differences and how to get the most out of these RAW files let's take a look at these five bracketed exposures now this was after the Sun already set you can see that's a negative two this is a negative one this is the metered exposure if I didn't have exposure bracketing on this is what would have come out through the camera you can see that I still have some problems in the shadows it's really dark and that sky is already really blown out going up to plus 1 and plus 2 here you can see that now I'm starting to get more of a proper exposure for the foreground or the shadows in this case but the highlights are really blown out now with RAW processing you have the ability to push and pull the data both in highlights and in the shadows now sometimes we call that recovery or recovering shadows and recovering highlights great thing about RAW files especially the Fujifilm GFX 50s medium format big sensor lots of data we can actually pull a few stops in either direction bear in mind is a very extreme situation it's an extreme situation because I'm literally shooting directly into the Sun or the brightest portion of the sky since it's completely backlit so you can see here all the way at negative 2 I have the correct exposure for the sky or the highlights all the way here at +2 I have a better exposure for the foreground so we're going to kind of have to meet in the middle and what I want to do is try to get this in a single exposure I shot bracketing so I could show you this example in post-processing but my main goal in post-processing is to always use the least amount of exposures possible so let's just take a look at a quick example let's say that I shot a single exposure out of camera now using the develop panel here I'm just going to make some simple adjustments let's say to exposure right now we know we can all agree that that Sky's blown out well can I recover it can I recover that much of a difference in the sky let's start by just changing the exposure if I go down to the left you can see that the sky does start to get a little bit better but as I start to move a little bit more to the left you can see it's look all right I'm going to move down to the highlights I'm gonna pull the highlights down and you can see it is correcting pretty much everything if you look with my mouse is here above this area but right here in the center I'm going to zoom in you can see that I still have some big gaps missing now that's because this can't be recovered if I reset this one here I'm just going to put this back to zero really fast you can see that there is a lot of data missing in the sky so I went almost three stops there and you can see that I can recover two stops very comfortably but when I go past that this area starts to look a little bit gray so what I'm going to do is go on the reverse end so that's pretty powerful though it was already able to cover nearly two-and-a-half stops but what if I went down instead all the way to the bottom highlights are completely intact how much can I recover from the shadows as opposed to the highlights the first thing I'm going to do is ramp that exposure up let's try to bring it up around three stops so it looks pretty good I'm also going to bring up the shadows not too bad I'm not going to worry about the highlights right now but what I want to do is try to simulate my overexposed image my plus two so I'm going to bring this down a little bit and I'm actually going to take a look at this and I'm going to command click this image and hit the right arrow on my keyboard I'm just going to toggle in between so there you go this is the adjusted one here this was the negative two exposure and then you can see there was a little bit of a lag thing happening on the screen but now that it's rendered here you can see this one all the detail here and you can see this file here you can see there's not a whole lot of difference so right off of that what I wanted you guys to learn from that is you can usually in most cameras and this camera particularly you can actually recover more from the shadows than you can with the highlights when you start to pull the highlights back a little bit too much let's say we were working with this file we really pulled that exposure down you can see that I'm not actually going to get anything back in those whites it's actually just going to become gray and a little bit washed out whereas if I'm in the shadows and I'm in a situation where I need to recover more in the shadows when I pull the shadows up I'm able to retain most of that detail now if I go too much past too two two three up to four stops this will end up getting a little bit grainy and in that situation you may want to go up to a different exposure so let's begin editing the photos themselves first thing I want to do before then is I'm just going to reset these settings for later so when we come back they'll be ready to go so the first thing let's take a look at the starbursts themselves I'll come back to my hand blocking the Sun a little bit later I'm going to pick each exposure here this is a plus one exposure in the bracket series and I'm just going to command click through these to show you all of the versions on the previous section the video we did talk a little bit about it but it's really nice to see it here on screen let's start at the beginning this is going to be and you can read it right up here this is f8 so you can see the star burst at f8 if I arrow to the right we're going to see f11 I go one more time we're going to see f-16 you can really start to see how defined this is and then from f-16 I can go to 22 and from 22 I can go all the way up to 32 not all lenses go up to F 32 this one does a lot of lenses do stop at f-22 but between 22 and 32 star doesn't change too much I do like this one it has some really nice lines in it 22 looks pretty good and to be honest my favorite is 16 and I even kind of like 11 I like that it's soft so the first thing that I want to do is identify which starbursts I want to use and when I'm in a field I like to shoot them all because looking in post-processing it definitely tends to look a little bit different you may find it in the field on the back of the tiny LCD screen in the Sun it's hard to see the detail but once you're in post you can see everything so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to decide that we are going to use the f16 version for the shot now let's really dig into this now I've made this one green here in the center this is my neutral exposure I was looking at these a little bit earlier today and I did that by just right-clicking and setting set color label to green that's just so I know no matter where I am if I had 3000 images in here it's easy to visually recognize where this scene is right now same situation with the exposure you can see the sky is fairly well exposed a little hot on the horizon but we are shooting into the brightest object known to man the Sun so of course that's going to happen but you can also see that just like the other scene that I showed you guys extreme lighting situation so this is all dark so let's go up and exposure so I go up and exposure to a +2 you can start to see this being well exposed in a way but also very washed out so you have to be careful when you're shooting right into the Sun because you can tend to wash the scene out most importantly I want to show you all this so we have this as a lens flare here's the starburst that looks pretty good but notice all this this part of the lens flare doesn't look really nice I don't like this sunspot and you can see just if I do this really quickly if I pull the shadows up you can see on the left you can see all of these little dots see that red mark right there I know exhumed in quite a bit but now that I've done that you can see this huge array of just it's a mess because that light is hitting the front of the lens and sort of refracting off of it causing these elements so what I've actually done and let's just go ahead and put this back we're going to go to the other scene I remember when I was in the field what I did was I shot in the starbursts and then in order to block the light in front of the camera I put my hand in front of it so I'm going to go ahead and select that as well and if I toggle back and forth between the Sun flare and my hand shot you can see that Wow the foreground looks really clean I'm going to do that one more time pay close attention here and also the lens flare itself it's like a night and day difference you can see how washed out this area is all of these things reflecting off the lens so the idea here is what we're going to do is we're going to balance both of these exposures and I'm going to start with this layer right in the middle let's say that we only shot one exposure we didn't have any exposure bracket I'm going to use this as a base and then after I have this nice and balanced I'm actually going to combine these two together in Photoshop to take advantage one of the beautiful flare of the Sun the starbursts here and also the clean frame that I was able to achieve by blocking the Sun and keeping the lens from hitting the front of the glass so let's go ahead and get started by picking the metered exposure with the f11 starburst now just like the example I showed in the beginning of this post-processing lesson the reason that I'm picking the middle exposure is I know that this is way too underexposed and this is way too overexposed so one I was using this one I couldn't get the sky back and I know if I was using this one it'd be very difficult to bring all of that back you can see on the histogram here the shadows mid-tones and highlights everything's pushed over on the left hand side which means that the shadows are very clipped and stacked and on this one you can see that it's pushed over on the right so I'm starting right in the middle I'm going to have to push and pull a little bit but the first thing I want to do is bump the overall exposure so let's go ahead and bring that up a little bit right around there say 1.25 next thing I want to do is start bringing the shadows up we'll bring these up a little bit to bring that up so this is nice because here on the exposure I can independently control the entire thing it's kind of like grabbing the middle and you can see if I do grab the middle here the histogram I can move from left to right and get a visual reference of that slider moving with the histogram the shadows here allow me to just tweak the shadows if you ever curious what you're actually selecting here in Lightroom you can just highlight it and I'll show you the slider that it corresponds to so here I'm bringing the shadows up which further corrects it and I'm also going to give it just a little bit more contrast because I know that's going to match my other image what I've done here is I've done global adjustments so I'm just tweaking it just a little bit and what I mean by global is when I use these sliders here it actually affects the entire image but here's what I've done though is I've moved the exposure up I've moved the shadows up but I've also blown out the highlights by doing so if I were to pull the highlights down here I could correct that sky but I don't like the way this is starting to look so what I'm going to do instead of using a global adjustment I'm going to use a gradient selective adjustment these are really easy to use it's this option right here is the gradient tool click the gradient tool I'm going to create a new one just by clicking and dragging so the first part I click you can see that'll allow me to grab and create a gradient if I hold the shift key it will lock it to 90 degrees here so I get perfectly linear gradient stop it here right below the mountain now it doesn't look like much yet but if I change the exposure here you can see now I'm getting an even change from the top of that gradient all the way to where it terminates and as I move it you can see that it's affected inside the confines of these two lines above the center of the gradient marker so let's go ahead and reset that and start over so obviously the first thing I want to do is I definitely bump that exposure up a lot so what I'm going to actually have to do here is pull it down in the sky and I'm going to do this sort of subject to taste and as I do it I'm also going to make small adjustments here the other thing that I want to do is go ahead and pull the highlights down just a little bit so I can get some of the blue sky back and to compensate here while I'm doing that I'm actually sort of affecting the horizon and I can fix that by actually changing the shadows and sort of pull that accidental vignette engaging some quick adjustments here just to offset the damage I did to the highlights now remember since this is a raw photo as I slide this stuff around it's basically a nonlinear workflow I can change any of this at any time it's saved into my Lightroom file before I go to photoshop I can make sure everything's perfect and just like I've slid the highlights all the way to the right by bumping the exposure that doesn't mean I can't get them back by sliding it back to the left using selected adjustments working in RAW gives you the greatest power and flexibility over the files colors and contrast itself now that that's set any final adjustments I'm going to go ahead and make I definitely want that Sun to stay bright but I definitely also want to see some of the sky itself maybe not quite that much just to make it a little bit more realistic I'm going to click on the gradient tool again just to close out of that go back to global mode and I'm just going to slide over here to the left and I'm going to select the shot that I'm going to be using now what I'm going to do is I am going to use the +1 exposure here rather than this one the +2 because I feel like this area here is very blown out well this still has some room to work with so to match the other exposure what I'm going to do is just bring this up and make some small adjustments here somewhere around there and I'm also going to bring the shadows now when I think I have something close what I'm actually going to do since the other one is still selected I'm just going to toggle over there and see if I'm close or not so what I need to do is first select this one here go back here command select I'm just going to hit the right arrow and we can see if that's pretty close now obviously they're way different you can see that this one with that flare on the foreground looks completely different but what I'm trying to do is just get a basic read for the luminance itself make some more adjustments here pull the highlights down just a little bit check that one more time and that actually looks pretty close take this down a little bit more to darken it up and I think that's perfect so now that these are pretty much balanced in luminosity they're pretty close to the same side from that lens flare itself it's time to bring them into Photoshop now before I go into Photoshop I just want to point out that there are many different ways to get your files into Photoshop from Lightroom but I'm going to be using a very specific way that I like for my workflow the most common way though is to select the image or images right click and then say edit in Adobe Photoshop so what that's going to do is it's going to automatically export your file and open it as a PSD or whatever your preferences are set to in Photoshop and allow you to edit it now that's great but what it also does is it imports that PSD back into Lightroom itself now I don't want that to import back into Lightroom so I'm going to do it a different way I'm actually going to export this and bring it into Photoshop so I'm going to go to export and the export command I'm just going to walk you through this now I have a folder called temp or temporary where I put all these files and once they're in Photoshop I save them to something else so if you want to save this or name the file you can do that all right here but essentially what I'm doing is I'm setting it to be a PSD because I'm going natively into Photoshop prophoto RGB which is the widest color gamut we have available here and I'm also using 16-bit from there I am NOT doing any sizing on this image any sharpening anything else for that matter the only thing that I'm doing is under post-processing and that's open in Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 and I'm going to click export once I do it's going to export that file it's going to open Photoshop because I believe Photoshop was closed and we're going to have a look at this file bear in mind the larger the file the longer it takes this is a medium format camera and it is 51 megapixels so it tends to take a little bit longer to open than the x-series cameras at 24 megapixels so there we go Photoshop is open I'm just going to do a command zero to full screen this image and I'm going to go back into Lightroom inside of Lightroom here's my first file I'm actually going to go over to the other one that I want to import which is this one right here do the same thing right click go to the export mode but instead of doing export I'm going to export with previous I want to do export with previous it's going to take all of the settings from export but it's going to bypass opening the panel so I don't have to click the export button okay here we are in Photoshop again now essentially I have two files as the one with my hand over the Sun and I have the one with the Sun in frame so what I'm gonna have to do is combine and merge these files now again there are other ways to do this there were ways to do it to load them as a stack from Lightroom but I'm going to do it my favorite way and that's with a collection of hotkeys it's actually a sequence of hotkeys what I need to do is select all first on a Mac is command a for select all and I'm going to copy copy and paste is probably the most commonly used keyboard shortcuts for every application so that's command C and I'm actually going to do a command W which is close and now that this file is open because I closed the other one I'm going to do a command V for paste and there you go now I have two layers remember in the field when I said my tripod never moved between frames well this is going to become very important in this scenario because the version underneath the version with the Sun flare is in the same position that is the one with my hand over it so as I toggle this on and off nothing changes about the scene except for the scene itself in other words nothing moved these rocks are in the same place every line every chiseled edge every piece of detail is in the exact same spot and ready for blending so let's take a look that again we have the background here I'm going to double click on it to turn into a layer and then we have our layer that we want to replace part of the foreground now a couple things are going on here and I just want to zoom in a little bit so we can take a look one remember those flies I was talking about they are everywhere and we're going to have to do something about that but two I have two images that are not usable by themselves this one looks great but it has all of this stuff all of these issues in the foreground and this one well obviously we can't use it because my hands in frame so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to mask in a portion of this clean image on the bottom while leaving the sky from the other frame so again if you're new to this if you're new to Adobe Photoshop don't panic this is actually pretty simple masking so what I'm going to do here on this layer is I'm going to create a mask this is the first time you've ever created a layer mask all you have to do is select a layer and click the create new mask tool a masking is very simple and let me just explain how it works whatever is white on this mask is visible whatever is black ends up becoming invisible so for example if I put a big square with a rectangular marquee and I actually filled this mask with black inside of that square you can see that would create a window so I basically have cut out that portion of that image now it's better than actually just cutting the image itself on a layer because masks are nonlinear in other words I can change it manipulate it or just throw it away if I mess up so what I want to do is I want to keep most of the bottom of the image but I'm going to start by doing is creating a gradient that gradient is going to be based on white to black so you can see this is my foreground and background as I swap that you can see it's black to white or white to black I can do either way but what I want to do here is I want to make sure that this part of the layer this layer that's on top is visible here on the bottom so in other words this bottom part of the mask needs to be white and it needs to fade in just to where my fingers are because I don't want my fingers to be in there at all so what I'm going to do is click and drag just like the gradient tool inside of Lightroom if I hold shift it will lock it to 45-degree angle so I perfect linear line Coleco and you can see that I have instead of just this now I have this so that's actually getting there that's starting to look good but it's not exactly complete remember that area that I was talking about those problems on the foreground here where you can see that they're still there because they're part of that image and you can see as I start to add more of this image if I disable this mask you can see that they disappear so now what I'm going to do is a little bit of local adjustment and I'm going to do that using the brush tool so the brush tool is over here you can click on it or you can hit B on the keyboard and I'm actually using a Wacom stylus here so I have a special set of hotkeys for the Mac bound to one of my buttons here my thumb button and what that actually is is control option and click and you can see if I click and drag to the left my brush size gets smaller to the right it gets larger if I click and drag and go up it gets softer down it gets harder so again you can do that just by holding ctrl option on the keyboard but I'm actually doing it here on the stylus with an Express key so this is a really powerful way to be able to change the brush size on the fly now I'm painting with flow here and my flow is set to 10% and what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to start painting white here and if I show the mask I just want to show you this is actually what I'm doing I'm just painting white on this mask a white is visible so what I'm able to do is kind of clean up all of these areas so you can see I'm cleaning all that up here cleaning that up getting rid of some of that ugly stuff that ended up in my frame another thing I might want to do is get rid of this I may also and this is purely a style choice of how you want this to look with some of this as well maybe this spot here and of course will zoom out just a little bit all of this over here and it's just going to take just a few more minutes just a little bit of painting here a little bit of painting here I want to make sure what I do not do is actually paint out areas where my fingers are that would mess the whole thing up so I just have to be careful and avoid those areas but everything else nothing else is off-limits any part of this image is the areas that had the biggest amount of problems in the foreground all right that looks pretty good so I'm going to go ahead and back off of this here I'm going to hit command 0 just to show the whole scene and I'm going to toggle it on and off now before I go any further on this image what I actually want to do is go back to Lightroom and I'm going to reset the original file by reset means I'm just going to go ahead and delete this gradient go back to the global adjustments and what I'm going to do is just kind of manually reset this really quick because I want to look at the before and after and the progression of how we've been building this image so the same way I'm going to get this into Photoshop by right-clicking export and export with previous since I have exported this before it's going to ask me if I want to overwrite it or use unique names I'm going to use a unique name once again this is in Photoshop I'm going to do command a4 select all copy for copy command W for clothes and I'm going to paste this in and move it to the bottom so I just want to show the progression here started with this we ended up doing some adjustments inside of Lightroom to take it to there which is already pretty extraordinary then we've used another exposure with my hand blocking the Sun to get to here now that our basic blend is built it's time to address something that's well I'm not going to lie a little bit annoying so remember all those bugs that were in the scene let's go ahead and zoom in and see just what an impact they made so see all these streaks all of those hot streaks especially in front of here you see all those it's amazing these are all little I don't know if they were sand flies or they didn't fight so they weren't sand flies they were some type of swarming desert fly and because this camera is such a high megapixel I don't think if I was shooting with my iPhone I would've seen all these since the time megapixel we see every single one so I'm not going to lie this is going to take a little bit of time but it is very simple so what I'm going to do first is show you a technique to get rid of annoying little things like this doesn't just work for deserts and flies it also works for dust spots in the sky on your sensor or any little artifacts you need to get rid of in the scene first thing I'm going to do though is I'm going to create a fresh layer if you've never created a layer before it's right here we're going to click on it to create a blank layer that way when I do any painting cloning or healing it applies to that layer and I can always delete it if something goes wrong I don't want to apply it to one of these layers just in case I need to go too far back in history and I can't get the clean result I had before so right now on a fresh layer what I'm going to do is I'm going to attempt something first the easy way let's try the easy way and that's the heel brush here so right here the heel brush I'm going to go ahead and click on it but make sure it's set to content-aware now the same thing here I can change the brush size I suggest using a harder edged brush for this and what I'm going to do is just sort of paint over these so if I start painting here here here you can see that because this is a lot of detail here it's pretty good at picking it up and fixing it even over these edges so this works really well actually have to go in and zap out every single one of these little things that I find now if the heel brush is not doing it for you if it if it creates some sort of problem replaces texture improperly you can use the clone stamp the clone stamp is here now most people would rather use the heel brush than the clone stamp clone stamp works a little bit different by holding the option key you can select an area by clicking on it and then when you move over and paint you can actually paint that area back into the scene so this is kind of an extreme example I'm taking that crack and putting it here if I undo that and I actually pick something like this you can see that I can paint this out as well by just painting similar texture around it so my advice is to start by using the heel brush until it doesn't work and then use the clone stamp now this is a tremendous amount of work now obviously if you're posting something to Instagram you probably don't need to go through the trouble but I want to actually go through the trouble and remove all of these they don't become distracting later but rather than make you sit through me cloning out every single one of these we're just going to speed up I'm going to go ahead and start [Music] all right and just like that after about 10 minutes I believe 10 minutes I was able to remove and I'm just going to zoom in here thousands of these little slides as I talk about on and off I also did a style choice here I like the burst of the light but I didn't really like some of the lens flare so you could see if I just toggle this on and off I dampened I didn't get rid of it completely I use the clone stamp to sort of just soften those hard edges of those octagon so to speak from that lens flare the other thing that I want to address before I move on and this is a great example to show how the clone stamp works is if we look at this globally you can see these little rocks on the lower left I find that very distracting so what I want to do with this layer and using the clone stamp select the clone stamp is I want to actually just paint these out now I'm using a very low flow which is going to give me a light opacity and what I'm going to do is select some of this green space down here and I'm just going to move down you can see that as I roll over it it's going to show me exactly where it's going to paint that and as I press down this is a pressure-sensitive stylus that I'm using here in my right hand it allows me to paint just like a paintbrush so I can just reference some areas that are similar like this dark area here you can see that I can just put that right down here clothing things out like this is very simple because this is a repeatable pattern it doesn't have any real form or function other than being green having some rocks and some moss on the edge in other words it's not like a building or a car or a person or something that's really hard to replicate really this is just color and texture and as long as I match it as close as possible nobody's ever going to notice that those rocks were there to begin with I'm not going to speed up through this one because it's really fast it's a good example of removing distractive elements like I find these to be a little bit more distracting than useful side rocks all the way around the composition on both sides they kind of be leading lines but these are just tiny little rocks in the foreground zoom out on that a little bit now we have our blended shot so this point what I want to do is just go ahead and move the to a folder to get a little bit more organized and I'm just going to name this blend the other thing I'm going to do is just save this in the background just in case something happens remember these are huge files so I want to make sure I don't lose the work that I've already created now from here from blend what I'm actually going to do is create a new layer from this folder and to do that I'm just going to drag it to the create new layer and I'm going to now have a duplicate of it and I can do one of two things I can use the hotkey to merge this together or I can actually go through here and use one of the options here so it would be merge group or what I usually do is just press command D pressing command E is going to turn this into a group or a folder of multiple layers and just going to compress it into a single layer the reason I wanted to have this as a single layer is now that everything's blended together I want to do some additional editing I want to warm up certain areas I want to change the contrast maybe tweak the highlights a little bit and I'm going to do that using up here under filter the Camera Raw filter so I'm just going to go ahead and click right there the Adobe Camera Raw filter inside of Photoshop is pretty much the exact same tool set that you have in Adobe Lightroom but it looks a little bit different you can see it has a little bit more color here some of the icons are a little bit different but for the most part it's exactly the same in fact any adjustment that you make here is going to give the exact same effect the biggest difference being we are now in Photoshop we are no longer in RAW so inside of Lightroom I did all the broad strokes the big adjustments are shadows and highlights here now all I'm doing is fine-tuning the image since I changed the shadows so much and the highlights I managed to remove some of the contrast I'm just going to bump the contrast up a little bit you can see that happening the other thing is I feel that even though it was shot using Pro via which is pretty contrasting in the camera for the film simulations in Fujifilm cameras I feel like it could use a little bit more vibrance now you don't want to take the vibrance up all the way you can see that that's a mistake but just pulling it up a little bit pop some of the blues reds and greens out just a little bit more now what I really want to focus on to here is if I go all the way over to the FX annal I have a lot of options but my favorite here is D haze D haze actually does is it calculates the depth of a scene you look at an infinite scene you have foreground middle-ground and background now that is represented here based on the horizon being shades of the atmosphere so you can see if you can imagine looking at a mountain scape in those mountains getting more blue and lighter blue as they get further and further and further away from your vision that actually is the depth of a scene so behaves calculates that and adds contrast you can see as I start to do that I add contrast in those varying degrees those are all global settings now what I want to do is adjust the foreground as independent from the background being the sky itself so here I'm going to use a selective gradient tool and I'm going to click again and you can see it's almost the same but it has a green for the start and a little red circle for the end so I'm going to start and end right about here and you can see that I also have some settings intact when you create one it's going to remember the last settings that you had used so what I'm going to do is click up here to this little flyout and I'm going to say reset local correction settings biggest thing I want to do here is address the warmth of this image I feel that it's a little bit too purple a little bit too cool so what I'm going to do is bring the temperature up because it is really being illuminated by the Sun itself so you can see as I start to do that it brings back some of the red in the rock and I can actually bring this up a little bit higher to compensate the other thing I'm going to do is pull the shadows up a little bit more here so you can see it I'm going to bring the overall brightness of the scene up just a little bit what I also might want to do is pull the blacks up just a hair just to get a little bit more luminance in the foreground to make some other adjustments I may want to add a little bit of a tint this is sort of a hue shift into the magenta just to give it a little bit more of that warm pink value so it's going to basically start to bring this alive I'm not going to use any of the clarity or D haze or the saturation or you know what scratch that let's use a little tiny bit of D haze just to add some deep contrast in the foreground well that's starting to look pretty good so some minor adjustments here and I think we're pretty close to something that's looking pretty good and address the foreground here warmed it up now let's go ahead and do the same thing with the sky and when I create a new gradient you can see it's retained all of those settings you can see it's crazy warm not exactly what I want so what I'm going to do is just create the gradient here right on the sky and what I really want to do for this one and this is going to be a little bit different since I've warmed up the scene before let me go ahead and change this I'm going to reset it I kind of want to cool down the sky so right now I have all of this warm coming from the Sun illuminating the foreground itself but I also want some blue so I have some differentiation in the color tonality of the image and we'll do that by going the opposite spectrum instead of warming the temperature with the sky selected I'm just going to cool it a little bit so you can see that I get that blue back in the sky I want to go ahead and adjust this a little bit accordingly so I get the right amount here I also might want to bring the shadows up just a hair in the sky and if you want to try you can always add a little bit more d haze and what the haze will do you can see I went a little overboard there it'll make that blue much more dramatic so that again subject to taste depending on how contrast and saturated you want your blues what I can tell you though is if you use D haze and you end up with a little bit of vignetting or some darker spots around the edge of the sky you can always offset that just by pulling up the shadows a little bit that usually compensates for it and gives you better tonality all the way through without any accidental vignette II I think this looks pretty good I'm going to go ahead and apply it by just saying okay the more you do the longer it will take to render and it's going to apply it to the scene itself so if I turn this off and on you can see what we had underneath and now you can see what we have as a result so that's starting to look pretty good at this point it's time to take this image a little bit further I'm just going to do one or two more little things and then we're going to move on to the next image and take editing just a little bit further but after this after we blended everything together in light removed everything into Photoshop created the base blend I've done some global and local adjustments using the Adobe Camera Raw filter now if I wanted to do any more adjustments what I could do is use the next set of tools which are called adjustment layers so these give you control over every aspect of the contrast the color the saturation of your image but the best thing about adjustment layers if I were to create a curves layer here it comes in with a mask and I can turn it on and off delete it start over or just selectively apply it for example if I wanted to brighten up this image even more and I'm just going to do that with the gamut here if I do that you can see it brightens up the whole image but what if I just want to brighten up foreground or more specifically the lower part of the foreground well since this adjustment layer has a mask I can do the same thing with a gradient and just paint it from white here to black and now this new color correction this curves layer will just happen in the area that I've selected for the mask and if I hit the backslash key on the keyboard and there's revealeth mode which basically shows everything that's masked out as a magenta q so you can see that I only have the bottom of the image here that has that effect applied so if I wanted to add more contrast I could do that here to brightness and contrast and I could change just the contrast but if I didn't like the contrast I was getting here in the yellow and the sky what I could do is be a little bit more dramatic with it and I could draw a gradient from here to here and then I just get the contrast in the bottom and I can make the adjustments from here there are definitely more steps we can take but I want to go ahead and get into editing the next file but first let's go ahead and wrap this one up by taking a look at everything we did step by step so I'm going to go ahead and expand everything here so you can see it started really simple as one layer here inside of Lightroom but you can see it was really dark this is a single exposure by making adjustments in Lightroom to the shadows in the highlights global and selective we went from here to here after that we got rid of the Annoying lens flare and changed it to this then we addressed all of those little flies if i zoom in here you can see all those little flies disappeared and from there what we did is a nice color shift adjustment and then some fine-tuning here so we take a look at this we've actually gone from start straight out of camera to finish so we've actually been able to push this very far here we are back in Lightroom now it's time to go to the beginning the one that I showed the raw adjustment examples on but this time we're going to edit the photo and bring it into Photoshop so just like I explained before we take a look at the overexposed file we know that I can't get that sky back it's not going to happen and we also know that I probably don't want to go too far here to try to get the shadows out because that's going to be further than four stops so the other thing with the last file I picked the neutral exposure the metered exposure out of the camera that would have bracketing off that's what the camera would have shot if I try that here I can go up to the sky and I can see if I can actually bring this back but I feel like this area here it's still too hot so this exposure may not work for me what I'm actually going to have to do is go to the negative one so this is a good example when bracketing really comes in handy for most scenes the lighting is not going to be this extreme and certainly not just in this little area if you have overexposure warning set on your camera it may not even pick up this tiny area so I tend to shoot instead of just one shot three to five exposure brackets just in case just in case I need to go one stop under or one stop over depending on the severity and intensity of the light so here's a good example of that I believe that I can get the shadows back from this and also retain the highlights that are missing so first thing let's bring that exposure up let's bring it way up to go past two stops because we know we can do that with this camera the other thing I want to do is just go ahead and bring up the shadows globally it's already starting to look pretty good and sometimes I like to use even numbers just to make it easier to read so two point two five and thirty in the shadows makes it nearly three stops of recovery in the shadows themselves next step is to create a new gradient here and I'm just going to do that by selecting from the top to the bottom holding shift and moving this around now obviously I'm going to have to compensate get that exposure back let's bring that down and also the highlights themselves let's go ahead and pull the high down let's get back some of that detail and this is going to take a little bit of adjustment just to get it just right because I want to be able to pull those highlights back but I don't want to overdo it if I don't have to as I am doing this you can see them also darkening up the horizon itself so if I go too far you can see the horizon is getting darker so after I balance the highlights the way that I want to being very careful here you can see that I've darkened some of the horizon and some of the top of the sky so to compensate for this what I'm going to do is also push the shadows back up so the shadows are not going to affect the highlights but they're going to give me a more natural blue in the sky and they're also going to fix that problem on the horizon let's go ahead and take a look at that if we add a little tiny bit of the haze it's going to add some contrast overall and that's starting to look pretty good I may want to pull the highlights down just a little bit more to get those yellows back so I'm going to toggle this off I'm going to click on the gradient button going to go back to the global settings here and I may just want to pull the shadows up a little bit more for good measure let's add a little bit more vibrance and that looks pretty good next up let's go ahead and bring this into the Photoshop for additional editing right click again I'm going to say export export with previous it's going to bring it right into Photoshop for editing here we are back in Photoshop once again with my face layer before I go any further though what I'm going to do is go back into Lightroom and I'm going to reset this just by deleting everything and I'll click off the gradient and I'll set these just manually quickly back to zero because I want to export this into Photoshop as well export with previous and I'm going to use unique names this is our base layer unedited straight out of camera and select all copy close and paste so that we could just see before straight out of camera after raw adjustment in Lightroom now that both these layers are in Photoshop I'm going to select them both just like last time drag it to the new group and what I usually do is I'll call this blend or base layers just to stay organized and what I'm going to do is drag that to duplicate use command e which again merges these layers into one once it's a layer I can go up just like last time filter the next step that I like to use the Camera Raw filter first of all let's adjust it globally I think that the white balance came off a little bit cool here the sky looks good so what I'm going to do is just go ahead and warm that up just a little bit you may also want to add just a little bit of contrast while we're at it let's just globally bump the vibrance just a hair just a little bit of fine-tuning here now what I'm going to do is actually do some selective adjustments let's start with foreground here all the way up to the sky I'm going to want to reset those adjustments now the first thing I want to do is address the white balance issue we have some warm light on the top here we have some cool light on the top of the sky so what I'm going to do is adjust the temperature until I feel like that warmth is being reciprocated or bounced here on the foreground below the other thing that I want to do is bring the exposure up a little bit now if I start to mess with the exposure I have to be careful because I don't want it to touch the sky so what I'll do is I'll just bring this gradient down so it never touches the highlights here in fact let's keep it comfortably out of those highlights now since I have the highlights D selected in this guy let's go ahead and bring them back in the foreground I think we have some room here to bring these highlights and whites up and that looks pretty good let's also add a little bit of D haze just to pop the contrast a little bit to give us a little bit more deep contrast and you know what I'm just going to adjust this temperature just a little bit make sure I have it exactly how I want it and I'm also going to bring the shadows up in the foreground here just while I have everything but the sky selected next thing I want to do is add a complementary gradient on the top here to adjust the sky again I'm going to want to reset that because just like last time I want to cool down the sky so I want the top to be nice and cool and what I want to do is cool down the sky a little bit I want those Blues to come back and also pull the shadows up a little bit just to adjust those Blues themselves so that's starting to look pretty good now what I'm going to do is take this one step further by introducing a new tool similar in that it is a selective adjustment tool but it's actually an ellipse allows us to select a circular or elliptical area first thing I'm going to do is a reset local Corrections and then I'm going to show you if I change the exposure here you can see it's just inside of that ellipse which is really nice this gives me the ability to change the temperature so I can warm up that part of the sky and maybe into some of the bottom of this image without upsetting the blue that I just set I can also go in and add a little bit of D haze to give it a little bit more contrast in those clouds I can also pull the shadows up just a little bit now that actually looks pretty good from here I can actually tint it if I want more of a purple sunset you can see that's changing and making a little bit more fiery red I wouldn't go the green side that's going to make it a little more yellow and orange but here between the temperature and the tint this is done completely to taste you can create sort of a custom color profile that you want the warmth of the Sun to be based on let me go ahead and go back to the global settings here just in case there's anything else I want to tweak this is when I go ahead and add a little bit more contrast a little bit more D haze or change the exposure globally but looking at the histogram it actually looks pretty good none of my shadows are clipped and everything seems to be coming together nicely so let's go ahead and click OK now that looks pretty good you see the before and after so we already did a very big leap from here to here but you can see with the color Corrections here we're starting to get back to a true life scene let me zoom in now again remember that other area down here that we talked about which is those rocks now again this is up to you if you want to get rid of these elements or if you have any distracting elements in your scene but I'm going to go ahead and do that very quickly by using the clone stamp tool that's s on the keyboard I'm actually just going to go ahead and quickly paint these out just like last time I know exactly where I need to click exactly what I need to reference from and exactly how much I need to paint these out so it's really easy and truth be told I should have done it in the last but again I haven't gotten that far in editing so it's pretty easy to just fix this on the fly right now now speaking about on the fly let's take a look up here there are no flies so pun intended the flies actually went away when the Sun went down thank goodness because you saw that actually took a lot of time to remove them so I don't really have any things to worry about here and since I wasn't shooting directly into the Sun or rather I'm shooting into the direction the Sun is fallen in the sky I'm not actually shooting directly into the Sun itself so you can see the clarity of the scene is much better and better intact than the last version was so now this is all starting to look pretty good I'm going to merge this so if I do that I'm going to actually take this layer and this layer select them command E again I can do that up here with the merge layers command the command E is the hotkey from here the next step is local adjustments again using the same technique I showed you before let's say I wanted to brighten up the foreground a little bit I could do that with the curves I can add a little bit of contrast in that curves and then adding a gradient will allow me to lock it right in just into the area that I want to correct now these are basically micro adjustments there's small adjustments to the scene either using gradients or paint brushes or anything else like that same thing with global contrast it's nice to have it on adjustment layers we can actually pull the contrast up globally this time we can add a little bit of contrast to the entire scene now to take this one step further than last time what I'm going to do is show you the technique I use to sharpen my landscapes I like to use something called a high-pass filter high-pass filter is actually very simple to use but it requires having a duplicate of the image itself so let's go ahead and turn these off those aren't important or even if you just leave them on what is important is we take our most recent edit or most recent layer and we duplicate it drag and drop it to this icon itself if you want to use a hotkey instead you can use command J on a Mac or ctrl J and that'll make a new layer what we're going to do here with this new layer selected we're going to go to filter other high pass right now it's going to look pretty strange if I change the radius you can see that it looks like a very bad HDR picture so don't do that what we're actually going to do is try to find edges you can see that in this little square here and if I were to zoom into this image you can see that it's finding the edges of the image for me it's different than fine and it's command where it's actually putting a shade a light shade in a dark shade around the edges so for 50 megapixel images I would say the radius between three and five works pretty well five at an extreme 4 is something pretty good so 4 being the middle of three and five let's go ahead and go with that and I'm going to zoom in to show you exactly what this layer looks like you can see that it's finding all these edges with this layer selected obviously we can't use it like that I'm going to use a blending mode called overlay now you can use a couple different blending modes and some people like to teach it a different way but I tend to use overlay so if I click on overlay you can see that it seems to have disappeared but if I turn that layer on and off you can see the tremendous amount of sharpening that it's applying let's actually zoom in and take a look at that look at this image now and look at it before the image itself was already razor sharp you can see that this layer adds an incredible amount of detail and sharpness to the image the thing is I don't want to sharpen the sky itself the problem is if there's any noise in the sky and I'm going to zoom in you can see that noise happening there the noise from the camera if I turn this off you can see it disappear so what I want to show you guys is an easy way to sharpen just the landscape and nothing that shouldn't be soft so we can agree that the landscape looks a little bit better sharper I like that but we don't want it to be in the sky and of course the water should be soft shouldn't have any extra noise so I'm going to do is create a mask and I'm going to paint a gradient from white to black and then I'm going to press the backslash key enter Rudy lift mode and you can see that I've painted this area out if I select the paintbrush that's beyond the keyboard I connect paint black here so I can go ahead and paint this out so I don't want any of the water to be sharp really quickly I'm just going to paint that out doesn't have to be precise because you can feather these edges of the brushes so I'll just kind of blend itself right in to the background so some areas will be sharp you can go very low paced if you want to maybe not sharpen the infinite background things like that very very easy to quickly add sharpening so if I click on that again revealeth will disappear and I'm left with a tack sharp image right in the foreground now what I'm going to do now there are so many things that I could do little micro adjustments changing the greens on the left adding warmer tones here and the highlights or offsetting the shadows so that we have variation of color and tone but since this is just an introduction editing what I want to focus on is just one more technique that I like to use in landscape photography and that's a classic technique actually a very old technique called dodging and burning and since I already introduced the high pass filter and the overlay mode I want to show you guys how to quickly be able to redistribute or accentuate light and shadow in the scene so I'm going to do instead of clicking the new layer button which we've done before I'm going to hold alt or option on the Mac and click create new layer I'm going to name it Dodge / burn now if I just create a layer it's going to be a normal layer but it wants to know if I want to do anything special well I can change the blending mode to overlay and when I change it to overlay it's going to ask me if I want to fill overlay with a neutral 50% gray if I say ok to that it's going to create a layer that guess what is completely transparent now that's because everything 50% gray one set the overlay mode disappears but if I happen to brush white on here it would actually create a highlight if I brushed black it would actually create a shadow thus dodging and burning the image now that's a very extreme example so let me just go ahead and undo that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to set my flow very low to something like 5 and I'm going to pull the opacity down and what I'm actually going to do is start to rush in highlights and shadows I'm going to be able to accentuate some of the lighting that's missing from the scene since the Sun was behind it it's backlit it doesn't have any real front light or intense lighting but what I can do here with the paintbrush tool and here I want you guys to take a look at my palette this is the foreground and background color right now it's black and white but if I hit X on the keyboard it actually rotates that or I can click this little arrow right here and that allows me to quickly paint white hit the X key quickly paint black zoom in a little bit I'm just going to quickly start painting some highlights it so let's go ahead and bring these highlights here that's stripe over let's go ahead and come down here and where we have these natural highlights I just want to make them a little bit more intense so this gives you the ability to sometimes completely redistribute the light in the scene but in this case just accentuate some of the natural lighting that's already there so we know we're getting a lot of lighting here we may want a little bit more light here on the water itself from the sky it's going to bring this in some of this natural area here looks like it would pick up highlights very well even back here maybe in the background close to that sunspot all the way across here and then you can even do these global moves like this or you can zoom way in and you can chisel out little detail just little areas like this we can bring these little areas to life dodging and burning is really fun gives you a lot of flexibility over the look and feel of the final image now so far I've just been dodging I'm going to go ahead and dodge some of this but if I wanted to I can also darken areas up to hit X on the keyboard spot to black and I can also start to darken some of these make it a little bit more intense make the shades very a little bit more and you can see here on this platform sort of plateau I can make it a little bit darker same thing here in the Greens accentuate the green some of the dark areas here and I can just kind of have fun with it and it looks pretty nice so let's go ahead and back off that a little bit and what I'm going to do is just bring this closer to the center here and gonna toggle the Dodge and burn layer on and off you can see that it actually creates a little bit more drama in the scene really nice thing about dodge and burn layer is you can paint on it in different varying levels of opacity to intensify it or decrease the effect that you can also change the opacity overall so if I thought that was too intense I can just bring it up when I'm done add a little tiny bit maybe 66% you can see now or even less than that let's say around 50 ish % and you can see that we have a little bit more of a dynamic lighting environment created at this stage there are a lot of things that I can do a lot of things that I still want to do to this image but this should have given you a great idea of how far we can push these RAW files from the Fujifilm gfx 50s in post-processing just like the file before let's take a look at the progression so we started out here with just this image I'm going to zoom it out here so that I have it completely in frame this was straight out of camera so this was straight out of gamma you can see it's almost like there's nothing in the foreground but with some quick adjustments in Lightroom we were able to take it from here to here again it came out a little flat so using the Adobe Camera Raw filter inside of Photoshop we took it from here to here so tremendous difference in the color tone we also removed some of the rocks from there we added sharpening using a high pass filter dodge and burn and a couple color Corrections using adjustment layers and I turn all those on we went from here to here now that's starting to look really nice well that about wraps it up here in the studio I hope you guys have enjoyed this tutorial from horseshoe bend all the way shooting with the GFX 50s by fuji film and all the way through post-processing if you're curious about photographing the world and you'd like to learn more from my tutorials visit the store at f stoppers calm you want to know more about me some of the work that I create the places I travel to and of course more free tutorials and online content laia liccardi calm so with that it's time for me to get out of the studio and back out in the field so I can capture some more images all over the world [Music]

Channel: Fuji Guys Channel

Views: 569,663

Keywords: Fuji, Fujifilm, Digital, Camera, gfx, gfx50s, medium format, digital medium format, Elia Locardi, USA, Horseshoe Bend, MF, Locardi, GFX 50S, Landscape, World, Travel

Id: AS4x2IUjqfU

Length: 77min 24sec (4644 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/itryanddogood]

so... tl;dr anyone?

[u/qtx]

I downloaded his (fstoppers) Photographing the World series the other week and I loved his post processing tutorials.

[u/ManOfTheForest]

This why I love internet, a lot of good content. When it comes down to his actual photography skills, not to be negative... but his portfolio consists in 90% of exactly the same shot that everyone else takes in that city/country. I guess all of us are guilty of this to some degree but to have a portfolio only of that? I'm not impressed. His creative input at the time of shooting the photograph is close to zero.