Understanding the Power of Luminosity in Landscape Photography

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I don't know whatever possessed me to make a video about what to do in bad weather because we've had lots of it this last couple of weeks now I've come away from the waterfall because obviously talking near there is it's kind of difficult but yet again we've been up here doing something on a day that most people would probably stay in during we've got soaking wet it's been snowing quite heavily it's turning to rain now as a warm fronts coming in no when we get back to the house what I want to do is I want to look at these images and look at why I took them you know obviously in weather like this it's perfect for waterfall photography for the first for the best reason is that there's no bright sunlight so the dynamic range is reduced hugely white water and sunlight is extremely bright and therefore you end up with a huge amount of contrast so what we have here today is manageable contrast the second thing is looking at layers from how the how the transition moves through the frame so we're going to back back in the studio with a cup of coffee and we'll talk about some of these images it's been wonderful this morning though I mean Ann and I are just both thrilled to be night here we are quite damp but it's it's good so let's head back to the office door and get warm so here we are back in my office and I'll tell you it's nice to be warm and dry again we're going to spend a little bit of time now in Lightroom and what I want to do is look at some of the images that we took just a short while ago I'm going to do some processing and in that processing I want to cover the use of transitions how to affect luminosity in contrast in our photographs I want to look at 20 kuipers luminosity masks and how to use them in Asti mask to make extremely detailed adjustments local adjustments and then the overall feel and before that I want to look at some images and talk about shutter speed so if I look at these first three photographs this was taken at if I bring up the Ikey 1.3 seconds for this first image and something I get a start off alone workshops is what's the perfect shutter speed for shooting flowing water and there is no answer and anyone that gives you an answer is doing you a disservice because it's up to some variables one of them is how fast is the water moving vertical flowing water I water this falling like in a waterfall it's obviously moving faster than water that's meandering over a surface when you look at a river falling down a mountainside what area is moving faster the waterfalls are out in the river mouths where it needs to see water flows at different speeds and therefore how fast the water is moving is going to affect how fast a shutter speed is going to make it look a certain way so that's our first variable is how fast as the water moving the second one is how close are we to it because obviously water that's closer to us is moving through the frame faster than if it's further away and the third thing is how in are we and that really is a bit like number two in terms of the second point there which is how fast is the water moving through the frame so those three variables lead us to an aesthetic preference which is how do we want the water to look if you just randomly shoot 2 seconds 5 seconds 10 seconds half a second it doesn't mean anything because there are too many variables out there they can affect that aesthetic so this was taken at one point three of a second and I felt that I didn't have enough structure in this water there was flow and there's you know there's some shape but I didn't feel I was getting enough detail this is not 0.6 of a second and to me there's more structure in this you can see the streaks and the water and I think that adds interest but again we'll talk about some of these little dynamic things and then finally this is one third of a second and you can see there's way more structure in this and it's the more structure is the more engagement there is because there's nothing else in this frame except the water so therefore is the water that's the interesting thing so if we go back and have a look at some of this the the bottom line with waterfalls even this was such a great day I mean it was really really overcast and you can see from the film with the snow falling and stuff you know the only luminosity here is the water everything else is in deep deep shadow the rocks the you know the trees everything is in deep shadow so the the the water becomes the subject the water becomes the shapes and and the interest in the film or in the in the photograph here and for me landscape photography in general is about following the highlights you can see here that the shadows create structure they show you the shape of the landscape but it's the waterfall it's that luminous water that's giving us the map that's what we're hooking on so you can see how we look at the snow here we look at the water and we can see the light at the top of the frame so any example that we look at is exactly the same is the brighter areas are the thing that attracts our eye and our attention and what processing is is seeing the highlights that we want to see ignoring the ones that we necessarily might not want to see and creating transitions between point a point B Point C and point D and those journeys are the things that engage us they attract us they bring us back for more so if I hit the D key and take this one into the develop module but the dynamic range of this scene is really quite contained I'm just gonna help the blacks there just so we stop clipping the luminosity as soon as you increase the whites the waterfall becomes more significant but soar does all this area of snow on the right left-hand side if I just pull in a gradient there and pull down the whites so that they're no longer at their 100% spot you can see just by turning that on and off we now see that left-hand side less and the waterfall becomes more significant if we turn it on again the left-hand side becomes more significant again and we want to look at it the same applies to this stuff on the left if I bring in another gradient here if I increase the whites in that area your brain says oh let's go there if I decrease the whites on that area then your brain just says well there's nothing over there but it gives you a sense of space perhaps but there's no desire there's no luminosity desire to go there and we know from previous examples that we can come in with the HSL slider and grab our yellow Channel and increase the brightness of our yellows and maybe our greens and that is adding luminosity to those areas and it's a bit more of a subtle adjustment rather than just hitting the the white so the exposure slider if I come in though and take a look at this file I'm gonna work this one from start to finish it looks simple but I'm gonna do some quite complicated things to it overall what I want to talk about is I was attracted by the the Reds in this it's a Scots pine tree branch that's falling down and got lodged in the water there we've talked many times now about contrasts and transitions if we can create a contrast or a transition between this red and the water then we end up with a strong compositional element so if I open up my shadows so that I can see just a bit more we want to emphasize the warmth in here without making everything else warm so again camera calibration blue slider instantly gives me more saturation than my Reds and I always look kind of cool that I think generally this image can be a touch brighter and I'm going to do something I don't often do we just I'm just gonna grab the contrast later and yank up the contrast I don't do that very often because it's a bit of a it's a bit of a kind of heavy-handed way of doing things and I'm just going to grab a little bit of D haze in that top left hand corner and pull the century the break the stone a touch and while that's done if you just see there was a little dark corner up there and there's any number of ways of getting rid of that we get a warped I would get a clone that I add D haze make it fuzzy the brain just ignores it it's got a little bit too dark though there we go so I'm gonna take this down to cool it a fraction I think the thing with water is it's really nice for the brain to think of it as cool it's a refreshing element so I'm going to take this so I'm going to right click and edit it in Photoshop and when I take it into Photoshop I want to look at luminosity masks and I want to look at ways that we can affect contrast and luminosity in Photoshop using fairly advanced techniques now this is me this is my panel you'll notice it everything's on the right hand side and I do that because it's more ergonomic I don't want to have to come over here to click and then come back over here this is a 27-inch monitor I'm using and therefore there's a lot of real estate to cover so all I have is my tool palette there in the right hand side I have properties adjustments and history panels and layers and channels on the bottom there and that's all I use on a regular basis and then this is my 20 Kuyper 7 which is the latest version of the Tonique wipers so I'm gonna use the composite button and this is the base mask well it's just basically a basic luminosity mask but the new TK panel allows me to make masks that are super specific so I can look at the red channel and as you can see those Reds on the branch there became brighter and then what that basically means is they're more selected the brighter something is the more is selected so just by using the red Channel I'm getting more data out of that now I can further come in and look at color specifics so if I go into the yellow Reds you can see now that is just the only color in this image are the only reds and yellows in this image were there now that's a pretty dim mask but I can modify that and make a super detailed mask so this is now just the log everything else isn't selected and what this is now going to allow me to do is to make specific adjustments just to that mask now I can see that mask as something which means I can go back to it and it'll appear in my channels there as a mask called log now I'm going to come in here with that mask and just have a basic curves adjustment and I am going to what am I going to do I'm going to brighten that lock and as you can see now just those reddish areas and what that's done is created tons of contrast I can pull in my black point I can pull in my white point and that is gonna create more and more contrast just in that log and now we've got that little highlight on the top of the log it's giving it a three dimensionality because that's what dodging and burning is is creating three dimensionality and the more of that 3d effect we can have the more believable our images are going to be RAW files have a tendency to be quite flat and we want to avoid that so that is just the simplest little fix and I can now come in and let's just grab saturation and make that clipping mask now there's a couple of ways to do that I just use the little clipping mask icon in my toilet papers panel which just makes any adjustment is just going to affect that mask area and if I increase the saturation you'll see that those Reds have just warmed up a little bit more and we've now created if I just stick that whole thing in a group and turn it off that's how we entered this scenario with a log that looks a little bit flat and this is just with the T key adjustments that I've done there and it's given it this this nice rounded feel to it I am NOT a firm believer in keeping layers under any shape or form we move forward with confidence I'm not going to come back and change that layer get rid of it it's not doing anything it's just taking up space so I've now got this file I do hit command S on a regular basis which is saving the work because I'm going along No what else can I do to this I'm going to hit the composite button again to get my base luminosity mask and I'm just going to come in and with another curve and hit the screen screen is the lightning it basically brightens the the lights and I can decide to change the opacity I want it to be quite bright so that's fine I'm happy with that and I will flatten again no the final thing I'm going to do with this image is I'm going to take it into Nick and use color FX Pro to basically add a kind of glowy and the serial look to this image I use glamour glow quite frequently there's any number of different ways you can make images glow with art and effects you can use blur layers with with different opacities there's lots of different ways we can do this Nick and glamour glow if you've got Nick especially back in the day when it was free from Google this is a really cool way to do so we can affect our warmth so we can make it warmer which will make it more accessible we can make it cooler and therefore make it a little bit more austere and this is a critical thing is that color is a huge trigger to our emotional resonance with images the cooler it becomes the just a little bit more tense it will appear if it gets warmer it becomes more joyful it's as simple as that we're all drawn to sunsets but a beautiful red log in amongst all these waterfalls can be our sunset even though it was a cloudy foggy snowy day I'm gonna combine this with tonal contrast and now unfortunately is bringing in the default which is way overboard so I'm gonna add a little bit mid-tone contrast a little bit of highlight contrast and a little bit of shadow contrast the saturation just a touch and the impact of that is just a deliver structure so it's like micro structure and that's just adding a little bit of grit to the image which just gives it a little bit of a bite and makes it feel less floaties in area so the combination of those two filters creates a glow enos but brings back some structure so it's this is something I came to do quite a lot with my image just to make them feel just a little bit larger than life maybe just a little bit more fanciful not quite as literal it's a way of just creating some atmosphere so we've got nice elements we've got diagonals we've got nice color we have a slight warm to cool transition and this will more or less be the finished image so if I flatten that and hit command s that will take it back into Lightroom and then I'll pick up in Lightroom we'll just finish off and then we'll move on and that's the final image more or less in lightroom and and I like it it's something that I would happily post with confidence sissing this is something I like I'm just gonna make a couple more tiny adjustments with a gradient I'm just gonna add a tiny little bit more detail and structure into that bottom right-hand corner because I think that what is quite joyful in there I can give the vibrance a little boost as well just to bring out at that the warmth there and I'm just gonna cool it a couple of spots too and that will do so yeah happy with that finally I want to discuss these two images and these were both taken within five minutes ten minutes of the house as part of my three six which some three six six image add a project that I'm doing and I think both of them are good examples of the points that me that the luminosity of the water becomes an incredibly important part of any composition and on dull days that luminosity is so huge because everything else is blacked out and shadowy so the image on the right is a good example of transitions we have the bottom left-hand corner with the little fern down here I'm a strong triangle which is texture it's colored so it we've got green texture and that then transitions into smooth flowing water which has its own texture but it's different and these transitions are so important the late great Galen Rowell the Californian adventure photographer he said way back in the 90s look to the edges look to where different elements meet and there you will find your photographs and this is a classic example of that we've got structure and texture and color changing moving into something else and it creates a very very strong transition the image on the left is exactly the same shadowy boulders on the left and the right hand side the water becomes the the whole image is the flow of that water and the juxtaposition and the transition between the water and the the landscape and then leading up to those trees at the back there where we have another element another set of structures another set of textures and colors and luminosities and this is what landscape photography is to me is finding areas where you've got different things meeting different luminosities different colors live different structures different geometry different atmospheres and all of these things make engagement I hope you've enjoyed this little session here in the office it's just in the background this so is the snow where I have a final message for you and you wonder why I'm lying begging and the - no on my hands and knees so I hope you've enjoyed this and have a great day everyone bye so what am I doing here hunkering down in the snow on my knees with my hands clasp together in a in a token of my devotion well what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna ask you to subscribe to this channel click the thumbs up and hit the bell notification button so we can get these videos out to you guys this is our job I get paid to do this so it's not all suffering but it is very very important to us to get this stuff out to you in an efficient way so please let's do those buttons [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 7,680

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, tutorial, tutorials, how to, processing, landscape photography, expressive, creative, creativity, get better, waterfalls, luminosity, contrast, luminosity masks, advanced, technical, Tony kuyper, TK actions, v7

Id: pZkJtEF0vJY

Length: 22min 53sec (1373 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020