Photoshop Editing Tips | Post processing an Old Growth Forest to Enhance Drama and Depth

[Music] hello hello everybody and welcome to another Adam Gibbs non adventure now I've kind of succumbed to my subscriber pressure in that a lot of people have been asking about the pano image that I had in my last video and how I went about processing that so this week I've decided to show you how I went about that and some of you are probably going are really another processing video if you're wondering where I'm where I am right now I'm actually at my mum and dad's place on Vancouver Island we own the house or the cottage next door that we're slowly renovating so this is kind of my my base right now now unfortunately I just have my little laptop so I'm gonna have to edit this on my laptop which isn't too too bad it's just that the screen is so small it's it's hard to sometimes it's hard to open up all the different menus and windows at the same time so I keep closing everything so bear with me right without further delay why do I get stuck right in and show you how I went about processing that image all right all right now I've already gone through the process of making this into a panel image this was actually from five separate vertical images and the edited version it's quite a bit different there is some nice light in here especially on this this central douglas-fir and around here but you'll notice that in this area here there's hardly any light whatsoever and then this area over on the left it's quite a bit brighter so the first thing I do with an image such as this is try and figure out okay so what are the most important things in the photograph what do I want to draw people's attention to and the way that we do that is by brightening and darkening certain areas so I used dodging and a lot in in my processing and that's pretty much all I do in a lot of a lot of my images if you're not sure how to put together a pano in in Lightroom then I'll just leave a link up here to one of my other videos that shows you how to do that I just want to save a bit of time here and not drag this out too long this area here I've already established that it's quite dark so I want to bring the illusion of light in there so how do we do that well there's a little bit of light in here you can see it's a slightly lighter back there slightly lighter back here but I want to draw your attention to this tree here and you'll notice that this has quite a bright spot on the on the side and dark so I'm going to do the same thing with this tree and also I'm going to add contrast or the illusion of light to this area here or back here and also back here this area here is a little bit messy so I'm gonna darken that up and actually this log here is quite bright along the whole of the log I don't want to draw people's attention out of the frame so I'm going to darken this area as well and then I'm going to also add contrast to give the illusion of depth in this image because it is a little bit flat especially in this area here okay so let's just get out of the full screen here now the first thing I'll do in in Lightroom after I've made a pan out is I'll do general just general adjustments now again I've already done those and you've if you're not sure or you want to see what I did in another image I'll just leave a link up here like I said I don't want to drag this out too too long now there isn't an awful lot I'm going to do in Lightroom at this point other than I'm just going to do a general adjustment a dark in some of these areas here so I'm just going to pick the circular tool here and just run right across as you can see I have a nice screen as is pretty small so it's some it's hard to do some of these adjustments okay now I'm just going to click on this show selected mask I want to be able to see where these adjustments going to be made and it's a little bit too feathered so I'm just gonna bring that down just a tad okay and all I'm going to do is just darken it so bring the exposure down and you can see it's darken this area this area and this area here now some of the things I do are a little bit counterintuitive like I might dark in an area like this area here is really dark but then I'll brighten it up later some of some people may disagree with the way I go about things personally I just do things what works for me and I suggest that you do the same thing if you find a technique that works for you then just stick with it if people say well no no you shouldn't be doing it that way just ignore them just ignore them do it your way if it works great right now I'm also going to warm okay we'll just get out of that I'm just going to warm this this whole image up just a little bit okay you'll notice now that all of a sudden this area in the center is quite a bit brighter and that's kind of what I wanted but I'm also going to add light in Photoshop over here and here so now we'll just open this up in in Photoshop and continue from there okay now I've opened up the the image in in Photoshop and the first thing I want to do is create some contrast or the illusion of light in this area here so now I haven't have Tony Kuiper's panel which makes things quite a bit quicker and easier I'm going to click on the dodge tool here and it's opened up a layer here you'll see and I'm going to bright up the side of this douglas-fir here and then dark and the other side kind of like this tree here to give that kind of illusion so now I could either do it in just plain old white paint but I think in this case I'm gonna actually add a little bit of warmth so I'm gonna click on this white box here and just go over slightly and pick a color that should do it just a slight warm yellow click OK now B for brush I'm already in my brush tool and opacity I I like to build up slowly so in this case I've kept it at 10% and just let me just zoom in just a little bit here okay B for brush now I'm going to start up the top here so I'm just going to click that once then hold down the shift key and click again and you'll notice that all of a sudden it brightened up that area click the shift key again now you don't have to do it this way you can just paint it in I just find it a little bit quicker too till you hold down the shift key and okay so that's brightened that up quite a bit and now what I'm going to do is do a burn layer so I'm going to darken it so I'll just click on the burn layer there now we're in black and I'm going to leave it at black and the same thing again in brush 10% and I'm just going to go up and down this side of the tree and darken it now you can go as flowers or as little as you want so you'll see that I've darkened that consider considerably and I've lighten that considerably and if I back off you notice that all of a sudden it gives the illusion of light hitting the side of this tree here now actually I am I didn't I was a bit sloppy here you see how it's lighter here and then darker here so I'm just gonna pick B make the brush a little bit smaller I just paint this area in here okay I'll go back to the Dodge go back to dodge and I'm just gonna brighten this up even more let go quite dramatic with this yeah and then I'm gonna brighten up this area here I'm gonna brighten this up even more and then in here the whole idea is to try and draw your viewers attention to specific areas in the frame and this dodging and burning is a really effective way to do that and photographers have been doing that for years and years used to be done in a darkroom at now of course it's done in mostly Photoshop Lightroom the concept is exactly the same it's just back off there so now you can see that we're starting to brighten up this area and give that illusion of light okay now generally speaking I really touched the saturation slider or adjust saturation in my images the way I usually add saturation is just by adding contrast and I think with this image I do want to add quite a bit of contrast especially to the shadows and the highlights to give it that illusion of depth again so one way that I do that to selective areas rather than dodging and burning everything is to either use levels or curves and then mask out certain areas that I don't want that effect on so as an example with this image we'll just open up the curves here and if you click on this little hand here with the arrows on it I'll let me just zoom in here so I want to add contrast to the the others shadowed side of this tree but not affect the highlights necessarily so click on this little hand and if you click once on different areas in the frame you'll notice that these little pinpoints come up and they're just making little markers on the line on the your graph line there but I want to darken the shadows so now what I can do is click on the shadows and slowly bring my graph down and you'll notice that it not affecting the the highlights it's just affecting anything below these these points here that makes sense so I'm going to add quite a bit of contrast like that now if i zoom out you notice that it's made the image quite a bit darker obviously but it's given the illusion of that light it's made it even more prominent but I don't want this effect on on everything so what I'm gonna do here is well that should be above that what I'm going to do here is invert that mask and just selectively paint in areas that I want that contrast on if that makes any sense so if I click on the the mask here and just press command I on a Mac you'll notice that it goes back it reverts back to how it was before without the adjustments now I'll press B for brush and I'm going to go to about let's see here let's go to about 30% so I'm just gonna press 3 and make sure that my brush is on white I'm just gonna zoom in here and just gonna start painting this in and what will happen is those adjustments that I made will slowly build up in the areas that I'm painting now there isn't any proper way to do this it's all by sight and and and what appeals to you I definitely want to darken the shadows of this tree I don't really want to affect the highlights on the sunny side of this tree too much because they were already getting quite bright let's just zoom out here and if we click on this little eye here you can see the contrast that I've added locally to this little area here but not affected the rest of the image now I'm going to do the same thing with this tree here now I might actually even brighten that up a little bit more a bit later on but we'll just leave it for now this area here I want to add contrast so you can see that we're slowly building up the areas that we want to be prominent in the in the photograph if that makes sense so we just zoom in here so I want to add a little bit of contrast in there so you notice the blacks are getting darker and the whites aren't being affected too much now we might brighten those up just a little bit more later on but we're just working on the on the shadows for now now I don't want to affect this area cuz I'm going to brighten that up considerably but this area here we can darken even more I would imagine this looks great in the fall so I'm looking forward to going back to this area actually now of course I'll go back and there'll be some of those trees might be born I might have fallen down or things change quite drastically it's amazing so as you can see I'm just slowly painting in areas now I'm definitely going to brighten up this tree because I want to add a little bit of separation from this tree from the background just press zoom here I'm sorry B and we'll just keep painting this area add we're adding we're still adding contrast to this area we're darken beneath that tree there add a bit of contrast in here okay I think that'll do that for now okay now what I would like to do now is you'll notice that this area here is coming together quite nicely but this is looking rather dark in here now that's because I darkened it earlier but I'd like to brighten up some of these areas in here especially kind of in here and this Moss here so I'm just gonna zoom in on that area and again I'm going to grab a dodge layer so there's our dodge layer there again I'm gonna use a slightly different color for this so I'm just kind of going up a little bit use a reddish yellow orange I guess you'd call that right B for brush we're on the color now I make sure you bring the opacity down in this case I'm gonna bring it down to 10 and I'm just gonna slowly paint this and brighten these areas up a bit so not only is it brightening up a little bit but it's also adding a little bit of color in there so some of you are asking okay so how do you get your forest to look such a nice color but that's this is one of the ways that I do do that in certain areas I'll just add color not a lot of color it's very very very slight and see if we click on the you can see where I've dodged those areas okay now what I'm going to do I'd like to bind them up a bit more but if I keep doing it this way then I'm going to affect the background I don't know if you noticed that as I click there you can see that it's also brightening the background so you get that kind of weird halo effect so there's enough contrast there now that I could probably just use some curves and if i zoom in on this area here again I can just use I can just pinpoint certain areas in this case it's the shadows that's probably a bit too much look let's just zoom out there now that looks looks pretty good you don't want to overdo it because then it just looks too odd see that's overdoing it okay that'll work now you've noticed that it has affected the whole image and we don't want that so go down to the layer mask here and command-i and that just masks everything out and then we can just paint that effect in again so we pick brush that's on white we can go up to 40 50 percents fine and then we're just going to paint that in so you're painting this in and it's not really affecting the the shadows in the background we can also do it up here because it's kind of almost the same tonality so again it's not going to affect the shadows so much you just have to be careful that we don't overdo it with the highlights here you'll notice that that my beginning a little bit too bright so just hit B for brush and then X and make it into a black paint brush so we're masking it back in and you're just painting that back in so it's notice how it's darkened up again no we'll press X make it white again maybe we will lower the opacity down to 30 so it doesn't do it so quickly and we'll just slowly paint these areas in so now what we're doing is we're brightening up the the highlights and not affecting the shadows just email a bit here I just love these these mossy trees are just just beautiful so this is a this tree here is actually a cedar western red cedar and then the others are old Douglas fir Douglas fir don't grow as wide as cedar but they grow much taller some of these trees I believe are 200 feet or 300 feet okay that looks pretty good okay so as you can see the image is is slowly coming together now I I just want to brighten up this little tree here so it's separate from the from the background I'm gonna darken this a little bit more and brighten up this tree just a tad more so let's just start with this this little tree here I'm just going to grab another Dodge layer here and okay my brush make sure it's on white or actually why don't we go with a slightly yellow color again it's very slight probably won't even notice ten percent so just press 1 or type it in there and let's just zoom in a little bit more here okay and I'm just going to slowly paint this in again I'm going to [Music] let's see here I'm just gonna use the shift key and just a bit lazy that way just do it quickly that way so you notice all of a sudden it's a little bit brighter than the background it just just separates it a little bit okay I'm just going to zoom into this little tree or this big tree and just gonna brighten that up a bit the depth is is all about perception and darks and and and lights so if you can build up your image I mean not every image but seems like this the contrast works very well so you can direct people's attention by adding or subtracting contrast see so what I'm going to do now is I'm gonna create another burn layer and I'm just going to darken up this section here just ever so slightly so be make sure it's on black 10% again and I'm just going to slowly darken this area it just adds some separation from from this broken tree here now some of these things probably just aren't very noticeable but cumulatively altogether as you slowly build things up they are noticeable okay we're gonna darken this just ever so slightly and we'll just cut that back to the dodge layer here I'm just gonna lighten this a little bit more oops one brush and this section here not the whole tree I don't want people's eye to be drawn out through the top of it just a little bit along there whoops just zoom in here and just going to add a little bit more light in here this section here I'm going to darken again oops got to make sure you you pick the right color brush their white to light and dark to darken can we just zoom out again be okay how's that looking let's see here starting to come together pretty good okay now we're almost done and then we'll just add that piece the resistance just gonna brighten up I mean here sometimes you a lot of these scenes you'll get reflected light so you get light bouncing off one tree into another tree or there might be something there that it'll bounce light in into the shadows I quite like the texture of this the cedar here so I'm just going to bounce a little bit of light in there so I'm going to pick a slightly warmer color again and I've opened up another another Dodge layer we're at B and 10% and I'm just gonna add a little bit of light in here not too much don't overdo it again I can't stress it enough it's it's all about subtlety I mean there are there have been a number of times where I've overdone it and sometimes you have to go back to images and redo them I must admit this is a little hard redoing this image I was I was quite excited the first time we did it but the second time was he's kind of lost a bit of his luster but I think I'm doing a reasonably good job here I'm just gonna brighten up this little fern here just a little bit there we go right I think we're almost done let's just back off here sometimes it's a good idea to press the F key and it will give you a full view of the the image without all the clutter now I'm not sure about this that might be a bit too looks a bit cloudy in there so I'll have to go back in there and have a look at that but the arrest of the image is starting to come together quite nicely okay now I I've dodged this a little bit strangely it has this kind of a fuzzy look to it so what I'm going to do here is open up a curves layer here and I'm just going to add some contrast between the background and the area that I've liked of a tree that I've lined up so just click on the background there and bring that down just a little bit and then the tree I'll click on that and just bring that up so I have a little bit of an S curve curve okay let's just zoom out there okay that looks a little bit better okay so we're just going to invert that mask so make sure you've clicked on the mask command I and then again beef a brush white paint we can bring it up to I don't know 40 percent it's probably fine I'll just zoom in just a little bit and I'm just going to paint that area in and you can see that the contrast as somewhat come come back let's see there just click on that yeah that's great okay I might have darken that tree too much actually okay click back on the mask invert the paint so X black B and we're just gonna paint on the the trees at the back there they're looking at just a little bit too dark see that's the nice thing about masking is that you can go back and forth with a white brush or a black brush and reverse your mistakes or paint things in so if you don't like a certain area you know you just go back and correct it so it's great that way okay the last thing I like to do on some of my images not all of them is add a little bit of Gaussian blur or the Orton effect as some people call it and I realize it's not everybody's cup of tea the reason why I like it it really gives that ethereal kind of soft light appearance to two images so the way that I do it there are a number of different ways you can accomplish this the way that I've been doing it lately is first of all you want to make a layer or a copy of everything that you've done so on a Mac could be shift option command and E and then from there I got to filter blur Gaussian blur and I generally keep it around and I've just under 40 pixels and I'll go up to opacity and bring it down to about 17% and then down here we're going to go to brightness contrast now I'm going to click on this little box here so it just affects that that layer and I'm just kind of brighten and add contrast I mean it's it's there's no set way of doing things you just do it to the way that you like it okay that'll do I quite like that and that's pretty much it now I don't necessarily want that effect on everything primarily just the background because you know when we whenever we look at a scene you kind of have a little bit of haze in the background this particular day there wasn't any haze but I'm giving the illusion that there was a bit of haze or or mist in the background so I'm just going to put those two layers oops put those two layers into a group so command G and I'm gonna add a mask to those two layers and again B for brush this time we're going to use black paint probably around 40% would be good and I'm just going to paint the areas that I don't want affected by the the Goergen blur primarily the areas that are closest to me so this tree here this log here you don't have to be that accurate because that the effect is not so noticeable that you're going to notice if you go over any lines or anything like that and there we have it that's that's pretty much it okay so what I'll do for you I'll just grab everything here and we'll put it into a group so you can see all of the different things they did to this image so there's the raw file and there's the file with all the dodging and burning and all the other stuff that I mucked about with all right they're really still awake I hope you enjoyed this video as I've said in my previous processing videos I don't generally go this overboard with images and if I do it's it's usually just dodging and burning somewhat like a traditional darkroom except in a digital darkroom anyway regardless I hope you enjoyed this if you have any questions about processing or anything for photography related please put them in the comments below and if you did enjoy this video be sure to give me a thumbs up and if you could share it as well that would be awesome alright until next time thanks them so much and we'll catch you next time I guess alright bye bye [Applause] [Music] stepping on your roller coaster going down but I never felt this high biggest right have the century into the ocean wanna feel like we're the only ones [Music]

Channel: Adam Gibbs

Views: 39,360

Keywords: post-processing, editing, tutorial, photography, photoshop, learn photoshop, photo editing, tips, landscape photography, photoshop tutorial, photo manipulation, adobe photoshop tutorial, photoshop cc tutorial, adobe photoshop, photoshop tutorials, photoshop effects, adam gibbs, adam gibbs photography, gibbs photography, cathedral grove, vancouver island, editing landscape photographs, how to create light in photoshop, old growth forest, photoshop editing

Id: ioAdPR82zw8

Length: 36min 59sec (2219 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 31 2018