Scott Kelby’s 10 Amazing Landscape Editing Tips | OPTIC 2021

well hi everybody and i'm so happy to be here as part of the b h photo optic and we have got a class for you on it's called my my top landscape and outdoor post-processing tricks but i have a very limited amount of time so i was trying to do 10 like my top 10. i'm thinking maybe this will be my best eight or maybe my best seven but i'm gonna try to get through as many as we can i gotta have more than we need well more than we're gonna get to so we'll just call it and make it kind of nebulous a loose number of really handy the techniques i'm going to show you are the stuff that i use in my own studio all the time every day so i hope this is stuff that you find handy i'm working on a mac laptop with a wacom intuos pro so this is the intuos pro medium so i have a medium and i have a small the small go with goes with me because it fits in my laptop bag and they're they're quite awesome as i'm sure that many of you know already it's kind of a tool used by by very very many photographers and kind of kind of once you once you use a pen you can't go back to using a mouse yeah the 1990s called the 90s called and said hey we want our mouse back it's like so anyway but this is this is what we use all right so let's start off with this first image let's go ahead and do this so um i i this is it's it's got a bad foreground it's just it's not an awesome shot so i'm starting in lightroom we're going to jump real quick over to photoshop i'm going to do a little thing there so to jump over to photoshop from lightroom because they were they were born to work together you press command e on a macintosh or control e on a windows machine and it just takes a copy of your image over there uh and and we're gonna work on a copy so you don't ever have to worry about messing up your original image back inside of lightroom all right let's go over to photoshop over here all right here's the image in photoshop so here's what we're going to do which is something quite simple we're going to take the rectangular marquee tool and i'm going to select all the way down to basically the bottom of the mountain so something like that right along the bottom edge of the mountain now i need to get that particular area up on its own layer like i needed just that part on a separate layer the way we do that there's a keyboard shortcut it's command j on macintosh or ctrl j on a windows pc and it just puts it up on its own layer so let's go ahead and do that and and here what you have is this there it is you've got half of the image up on its own layer now we're going to go to that part of photoshop that lets you do all kinds of stuff it's free transform a command t on mac is the shortcut on windows it's ctrl t and if you right click you can see all the things you could do now you can change the size and you can rotate it you can skew it to the left or to the right you can just do all this terrible stuff we're going to go all the way to the bottom to flip vertical all right to flip vertical it's going to flip our image upside down and you hit return or enter to lock in your change now here we go we're going to create a reflection we're going to hold the shift key drag straight down and what no no yes yes yeah there we go yeah it's a it's a mirror-like reflection now you're thinking that's cheating yes it is and does everybody do it yes they do it's done by so many photographers that you look up to including photographers here at optic and you're thinking man that looks really good i'm sure it's real sometimes it is not as much as you think let's move on here's what i do next to make sure that it looks more realistic first is we need to darken that reflection so an easy way to do it you can go to levels or curves or whatever you like to do i'll tell you what i do to darken it i go up under the filter menu to camera raw filter so it brings up the develop module from lightroom inside of uh photoshop it's just called the camera raw plug-in but look it's the same sliders in the same order as lightroom that do the exact same things using the exact same math so i'm gonna go to exposure just darken this way up and then click ok so i just drag the exposure slider to the left to darken it almost two stops click ok and so you can see here's the before and after how much darker i made it all right now the last one a little finishing move makes a big difference we're going to slightly blur the water so we're going to go filter blur and go over to motion blur and then what you do is you aim the angle of the blur straight up and down and then you decide how much blur you want you can have a ton of blur or just a little bit of blur i'm gonna have just enough to where it doesn't look so obvious that it's like a super glassy mirror like reflection and there you go and and you're done so there's a quick reflection trick okay i got to keep moving because lots of stuff little amount of time all right how about some sky tricks all right i got a bunch of them i got i'm going to give four sky tricks and i won't count that against the overall overall number so first let's look at this one now i'm going to do this one all in lightroom but you can do it also in camera raw in photoshop but here's the thing this is a typical situation where if i had an nd filter i probably would have put it on my camera if i'd had a nice neutral density gradient filter uh graduated filter i would have put it on but it didn't so what i've got is a backlit mountain and the sky is washed out this is typical you've seen this a million times yourself and you might go and put a neutral density gradient on here in lightroom and we'll talk about that a little later but i have another trick the trick is this i'm gonna tell you what it is and then we'll do it instead i lower the exposure until the sky looks awesome so i lowered it so the entire sky looks great and then what i wind up with of course is the mountains are dark well they're backlit anyway and then i just go fix that problem so i fix the biggest problem the sky and then i have some little mini problems to fix but it's easy and and this works surprisingly well so go to the exposure slider and just drag it to the left until the sky looks awesome there we go now sky looks pretty good so then i'll go to shadows i'll open that area up all right and then i do an exposure trick the exposure trick sets your white point and your black point for you and it does a really good job it expands the tonal range and all you got to know is the secret handshake you hold shift hold shift and double click right on the word whites and then write on the word blacks and that's that's your white point and your black point for you and it it made it a little bright i think i could actually take my whole exposure down just a little bit now i'm sorry i'm moving the wrong slider uh here we go move the whole exposure down just a little bit all right what do you have to do left let's increase the texture right that brings out detail let's increase the clarity why do i add clarity after i just did it clarity makes your water shiny it makes metal shiny it makes water shiny so watch when i add the clarity look at the clarity how it makes the water shiny and really i just add maybe a little contrast and we're done so here's a before and after and you can see how that trick of just darkening the sky and then making the rest of the adjustments i use it all the time and it works really really well all right i want to give you another sky trick let's move on this one uh this is another sky as you've probably noticed uh let's do this go over here and to get more blue in the sky make the sky bluer and richer there's a trick go down here to the hsl panel and there's three tabs hue saturation you want to click on luminance go over here to the blues and just drag the blue slider just a blue slider to the left right so just drag it to the left what yeah look at that this is one i use quite a bit so you're basically just you're that's it you're just going to drag the slider to the left and you're done i wish i could tell you more but that's it okay so that's that one tip number three really really simple one and i do this i would say in almost every landscape and outdoor and travel photo that has a sky in it and it's gonna sound like it messes up your photo 99 of the time you won't notice any difference but in the sky and that is i take my highlights to minus 100. what does that do it makes the sky usually a bit bluer it makes the clouds have more detail and it gets rid of any clipping and it makes your sky look better it's a trick i've been using for years i get emails from people that say i've been doing that it's awesome so just go here to the basic panel go to the highlight slider drag it to minus 100. you can see in the image on screen look look what it did it brought back definition to the sky is bluer there's more definition the clouds have more definition i do this a lot just give it a try don't just poo poo it start trying it and and you're going to find out that the brightest parts of your images are almost landscape images are almost always going to be in the sky so drop into 100 doesn't affect the rest of the image just give it a try the next one this this this next one's a miracle all right so um spent four days in monument valley never saw a cloud the entire time heartbreaking but you know what here's what we're gonna do we're gonna jump it over to photoshop recently they added a new feature to photoshop that actually worked stunningly well go into the edit menu and choose sky replacement now well first let's watch give it a second yeah it automatically masks the foreground objects it knows what they are it knows where they are it uses ai and boom it builds a mask and it comes photoshop comes with a bunch of skies already you can try out different skies if you want no let's try out a different one okay that's not so bad that that's certainly better that other one was kind of crazy how's this one that's not ideal how's this one that's really not too bad though i think i like the first one we started with so if i had to choose one of theirs but here's the thing don't use their skies bring in your own skies there's a little button at the bottom right here a little square with a plus sign right there just click on that and bring in your own bringing your own skies because if not everyone's going to go hey i recognize that sky from photoshop so don't do that but what's nice about this is not only does it put in a sky but it also puts a little of the same like tonal tonal color from the sky onto your foreground to unify the two so you don't stick a blue sky on an image that has kind of a warm look to it it actually would put some of that blue in there to make it look more realistic and they they've done a really great job with it so if if i i'm not going to go through the ethics of sky replace because i just taught you how to do a reflection that doesn't exist this is way down the list of things that you know okay but anyway i wanted to introduce you to skype uh if you're not familiar with it because it's really simple just remember the key is use your own skies okay let's move on this next one is a huge thing the problem will probably start in lightroom but you got to jump over to photoshop to fix it but my gosh it does a great job it's glows i see this all the time when you have glows around the image like let's look at this little image on screen here i'm going to zoom in here let's assume way the heck in see the glow look at that glow around the edges i mean i know i put it there sometimes it comes from too much contrast too much sharpening and there's all kinds of things that will cause this little white glow around the edges of objects in your image i can get rid of this i'm going to show you a way to get rid of this so you can get rid of this so quickly it's a photoshop thing but it's really easy jump over to photoshop let's zoom in on that stuff here's what you got to do we're going to use a tool that was in photoshop 1.0 the clone stamp tool but the problem is if we just use the clone stamp tool like it normally works right we'll go over here click on this ocean and it'll just paint ocean over the rock not cool you're going to change one setting you're going to go up here to mode change that mode to darken now when you click over here hear me out now it only affects the pixels that are brighter than where you option click on a mac or alt click on a windows pc so if you click in that ocean when you go to paint it will only affect pixels that are brighter than either the ocean or the rock so what can it affect the glow that's it so watch so go next to it option click on a mac paint and look the glow goes away look at that it just goes i just messed that up here we go the glow is gone come on people look at that it's globigon and what happens when you get up to these you know grass and stuff it's gone there too it goes right between the blades of grass come on now that's slick and you can get rid of those glows that i know have been bugging you you know they're there i know they're there nobody else is going to see them now because now you know how to get rid of them all right let's roll on but glows that's a big thing and remember just a reminder that the key was this thing right up here darken switch it from normal mode to darken and then that's that's the trick okay let's go back to lightroom and see what's all right so this one is one that i've been burned with so many times look on screen look at the image and here let me just close this side panel over here all right and we'll make the image a little bigger hold on my my lightroom is just being uh it's being awful to be honest with you all right there we go kelly just yeah hit that hit fit now close it okay all right you see the spots in the sky right sensor dust uh how many do i have one two i can see three four i can see four or five spots so here's what happens you get this done maybe doing something for a client you make a big print the client calls you and says are there supposed to be these spots in the sky and you're like i got rid of them all they're so hard to see on a blue background i've been burned so many times by making a print or doing a project and all and people are emailing me or calling me or saying there's spots in the sky don't let that happen to you here's what you do go get the spot removal tool when you get the spot removal tool look down here in the bar at the bottom the gray bar there's a thing called visualize spots click on it and it does the negative of your photo drag the slider kind of over to the left until the spots really stand out so now how many spots do i have to fix one two three four 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 probably 12. and the nice thing is you can fix them right here you can click right here and just get rid of them right there just one click and they're gone so you can do it actually here so you don't get burned right there's one one in that mountain there but i'm afraid i want to go look at it and see if i if i do it is it gonna is it gonna mess me up no i picked a pretty good spot sometimes lightroom picks a funky spot by the way here's bonus tip if lightroom picks a bad spot when you click the spot removal tool hit the slash key on your keyboard the slash key where the question mark is and it will actually pick a new spot look at it watch i'm hitting the slash key it will try different places until it comes with one that you like actually i just saw a really good one a second ago just keep pressing until it come there you go until it comes to one you like okay we got more let's go we got a lot to cover a little time to do it i might have mentioned that all right this next one is just a finishing move it's something that i do to the end of almost every single photo i do whether it's a portrait or whether it's a landscape or a travel or whatever i add this little tiny finishing move it is so subtle you probably wouldn't know it was there unless you take it away it's going to sound bad when i tell you about it but it's actually really good i'm going to give you the exact number i use i'm going to go out of vignette i know vignettes look dated unless you put on so little that no one even knows you did it the number we're going to use is a minus 11 that seems to be the magic number so watch i'm going to go down here and i'm going to go to effects and i'm going to drag the amount slider to -11 and you're going to say it didn't even do anything scott all right so there's minus 11. you're looking at the image i don't think it did anything at all why do you even do it i'm going to toggle it on and off so you can see watch look at that it focuses the eye towards the middle you don't even know i put a vignette on there but there's so much bad stuff that happens at the edge of images by darkening that in there a little bit look at that it really made a nice difference i do it to every photo minus 11 make it a preset you do it'll do it for a week and you'll be like gosh the i can't believe what a difference it makes just it takes the i call it taking the heat off the edges and anyway that's that's that one real quick one all right moving on so i mentioned uh neutral density gradient filters right earlier so and we would use that to darken the sky in a shot like this but i'll tell you what the problem is let's grab the neutral density gradient let's uh double click the word effect if you click the word effect it resets all the sliders for you so let's double click effect and then i want to way darken it all right and and i'll show you two tricks here one is let's let's darken the sky down like we've used in an actual nd and the second thing is and this is what i love i'm going to show you two things that you can't do with a real nd that you could that are better than you can do in lightroom the first one is this you can go and add white balance you can add blue into the sky like you can add a little bit of blue there so if it's kind of looking dark i can just add a little bit of blue using the temperature slider but the problem with this whole thing is is there hold on is there a hold on it looks like there's a yeah there's a smudge on there okay there we go yeah there was like a brush stroke on there so i think okay let's go back to our garage all right where is it right here so the problem is is that when i drag this down to darken the sky and have it look good it also darkens these rocks and it darkens this part of the mountain just like a real nd filter would but what do we really want we want to darken the sky we want to have it graduate from dark to light but we don't want to darken our foreground lightroom can fix that look at this go down to the bottom here to range mask and switch it on you can try color and then what you do is you grab the little eyedropper tool and say yeah uh don't don't do it in these colors and or don't do it in the sky so watch did you see how it automatically when i said these are the colors we need to do it masked the whole thing for you look this gradient no longer goes over the foreground object right look that's before click and drag and look it masked if you want to see the mask hold the option key and click on the amount bar you can see and say oh i need a little bit thicker mask there we go and look at that now you've got the sky it's just graduated back there and not in the foreground that is honestly pretty amazing those are two things that you can't do with an actual nd filter because most of the time i go you're better off to do it in camera if you can do it this is the case where you're better off in lightroom if you can do it because it offers you things your your nd cannot physically do all right that's it's a physics thing okay next look at this thing this is this is not good okay so um i want to introduce you to a tool you may or may not use but first off is if i want to get this looking better anything would be better i'm going to start by hitting the auto button now five years ago i would never said use the auto button because it was we called it the overexposed button you'd click and made everything too bright today it uses a new algorithm and it's not bad it's not good but it's okay let's try to add some contrast because this looks really flat it's a little better how about texture bring out some detail clarity is that helping yeah it's not so great what's it missing it's missing the magic slider dehaze now you you probably already know the slider takes away haze but what it also does is it introduces a huge color cast it introduces a big blue color cast which in some cases can be marvelous in some cases it can be bad let's show you how to deal with both watch what d haze does i'm going to go to the dehaze slider drag it to the right watch what no yes yes now if you go too far you're going to see a lot of noise and stuff so don't go quite that far all right maybe right there now if you like the blue you're good and in fact i might even just drag a little just a tiny bit of magenta in there or if you want it more neutral just come back and warm it up some but what a huge difference that made however it did bring out the fact that there is a spot there and a spot there and a spot there so i'm just going to fix those while we're there all right so i i kind of liked it with the more bluer look to be honest with you but i just want to let you know if you get that blue look what you can do is either offset it by going to yellow or you can go to the vibrance or slider and lower it until the blue goes away and gets you back to more of a neutral look all right in this case i kind of like the way it looks and here let's take a look at her before and after and it what did it take us 30 seconds 60 seconds okay it's good it's only good that it was quick because we don't have much time okay let's roll on here is another way we're going to use the haze this is the uh the dark woods the dark forest i can't remember what it's called it's in ireland i was there and so were a bunch of instagrammers the dark hedges that's it okay um the one thing that uh i have in my earlier photos when i got there got there before dawn is there was nice mist and then the mist burned off as soon as the sun started to come up you can bring back your mist go over here to dehaze wait a minute i thought that takes away haze it does if you drag to the right you drag to the left it brings in haze now it's not quite as much haze as i'd want here's how to get a second layer of haze go to the adjustment brush take the haze down to zero and then also lower the clarity and that will also make it softer so whoops i got some exposure in there too we don't want the exposure now we can go in here and paint in some more hazy stuff i call it hazy stuff so a lot of clarity and dehaze kind of gives it that so look at the difference between the left and the right it gets that kind of hazy hazy look all right so there we have time for another one i think we do all right so this last one i want to give you is i was talking about i was talking about exposure earlier and that i used that white and black thing so here's what i want to show you if i take a photo and i just use the exposure slider it looks kind of man by adding that shift double click the white shift double click the blacks i think that little triangle shift double click and you actually in lightroom you can click on the word whites and click on the word blacks i'm going to go to the second image it's the same exact image i'm going to hold the shift key i'm going to shift double click whites shift double click blacks and then i can go to exposure and i'm just going to nudge it if i think it's a little too dark i'll nudge it to the right but look at the difference here's just exposure here's whites blacks and exposure that's the triangle i used to set my exposure every day shift double click whites shift double click blacks and then because this one it still looks like it's flat right this is just the exposure one look just the exposure then i'll switch to the other one and look how much better it looks so this one looks kind of flat it almost looks like you were looking at a dirty window and then when you do the shift double click white shift double click blacks and then the exposure slider now becomes a fine tuning slider so instead of making it your whole exposure you're going to go oh i want a little darker and you're just going to move it the smallest amounts but it makes the biggest difference all right guys we have 25 seconds left i can't believe i got through like all the 10 things that i wanted to do it was very expedient but i'm sure that b h will give you an opportunity to watch this again online so thank you guys thank you for allowing me to share some of my favorite post-processing tips for outdoor and landscape stuff and take care everybody and thanks again to my friends at b h photo greatest camera store in the world

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 72,832

Keywords: photoshop tutorial, lightroom editing, lightroom tutorial, photography tips, how to edit photos, how to edit like, how to edit photos in lightroom, outdoor photography, adobe photoshop lightroom, lightroom editing tutorial, landscape photography tips, lightroom workflow, lightroom tutorials, lightroom tips, landscape photography for beginners, how to edit in lightroom, how to edit landscape photos in lightroom, landscape photography post processing, landscape editing tutorial

Id: CW23oYjmlgQ

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021