Lessons

Lesson Info

Landscape

Welcome to a new photo edit in the lightroom course, this one is on this landscape photo, we're taking this photo on the left, turning it into something like this on the right. Let me show you sort of the full screen so you can kind of get the full effect. So this is the end result and then this is the original photo again, this photo is from we saturate dot com. It's also available in the downloads earlier in this section of the course. So a lot of things going on, but really playing with color to make this more magical and almost a little bit more realistic in a sense because when you're out here shooting and seeing these the, the ocean and the sky, there's a lot more blue probably and when you're shooting in raw, you lose a lot of that color. So let's go ahead and dive into it. So The first thing we do is crop and actually just for fun, I'm going to give this a 16 x nine crops so that this would be a little bit better for like a desktop screensaver, something like that. Cool, so tha...

t's looking good. One thing I am going to play around with is the overall exposure. So I'm gonna bring up the shadows just a little bit to get some more information on the rocks themselves. Also bringing down the blacks, just a tiny bit just to bring back some of that contrast, bringing the highlights down a little bit and the whites overall, just down a little bit as well. Next we're going to boost clarity just a little bit for landscape photos. I find that adding some clarity can help make the things you're looking at more defined for D haze. I'm not really going to add D haze to the whole picture when you do that, it starts to look a little wonky. So I'm going to wait and do that to specific areas and then same for vibrance and saturation and really the rest of these basic settings, I'm just going to leave them as is for now, my goal is to make the sky a little bit more colorful blue magenta. You do see some natural magenta and sort of pink orange in the sky. So I'm going to try to enhance that, the ocean. I want to definitely make more blue and in these hills they're actually a little bit too warm to me. And so I'm going to try to cool those down to make them look a little bit more as if there wasn't actually golden hour sunlight shining on them to me. I just feel like it's a little too red. So let's start with the sky. So I'm going to take the graduated filter click here and create sort of a mask just like that along the edge of the horizon. And then I'm going to turn the range mask on. Let's try luminess first and I'm going to press o to bring up my mask overlay and let's just increase the range so that we aren't getting as much of this hillside over here, we can decrease the smoothness just a little bit. So we have a little bit of a sharper edge which I don't mind for this photo. Alright pressing oh to turn that off, So for the sky I am going to add some d. haze. So I'm going to go up around 34, something like that. We're going to make it a little bit actually cooler to add some more blue so I don't want to make it warmer. I want to make it a little cooler to add more blue and then we're going to add a little bit more pink as well. Alright, so this might seem a little weird but I'm also going to add a little bit of orange to it as well using the color tool. So I'm just going to start with this yellow, move it around over to something more orange and then drop the saturation a ton. So that's adding lots of color to the sky to make it a little bit more saturated. I can just boost the saturation here and then also something that's a little bit more interesting. I'm going to drop the clarity to make the clouds a little bit wispy er a little bit softer when I increase clarity or D haze, it brings out more definition, which is good and more color from the sky but in this case I actually want to drop the clarity to make sure that the clouds are still rather soft, so that's looking pretty good. All right, so next we're gonna move down to the cliffside and we're going to use a brush adjustment. So take your brush. I'm going to use the auto mask setting, turn on, show selected master mask overlay with that check box down there or o on your keyboard and then just paint over the cliffs. Now when you're using the auto mask, it does kind of depend on where you clicked first. If I had clicked in the sky first and then dragged down into the cliffs, it would be telling light room that I kind of want to just pick the sky. And so when I'm kind of brushing over the cliff sides, it's not going to work as well. And so now since I actually did click the cliffside first, it does a pretty good job. Even if I go over the edge a little bit, it pretty much knows based off of the colors and the exposure that that's what I'm trying to select. And also notice that my density is all the way up here. There's different ways that we could have done this. We could have used a radio filter or a gradient filter and used a range mask. But for me, I used the brush with auto mask and that was pretty good. So a couple of things I'm going to do, I'm actually gonna boost the exposure just a little bit making these hills a little bit brighter. When I do that though, it brings up kind of everything and the blacks and everything. When you bring up the blacks it can look a little unnatural. So I'm going to bring black back down the blacks. So we get a little bit more of that definition. Notice what that does from here to hear. Just bringing back some of that definition. Notice when I do that and I add that contrast back, we get even warmer. So to get rid of that warmth. I'm just actually going to bring down the temperature and also the saturation just a little bit or you can actually actually, I'm gonna leave up the saturation because I don't want to get rid of too much of that green up there. Just continue with the temperature here and that's starting to look a little bit better to me. They bring that back the saturation just a little bit cool. So you can turn this effect on and off. Just that one to see before and after here. You might like the warm hills personally, I think for this photo, I want them to be a little bit toned down cool. So those are the hills. Next let's pick the ocean and make it blue and this is going to be something that will really dramatically change this. This shot. So again, there's a couple ways to do this. I'm going to use the brush because I'm going to brush this entire ocean. I would use the graduated filter except we have this hill right here and you can't erase part of that. But I'm just going to start with the brush and make it easier on myself. So I'm just going to start up here over the ocean and we are going to use a range mask to make our selection a little bit more fine tuned and I'll show you why we're going to do that once we start applying some edits. So when you do want to be a little bit more specific, you can always change the size of your brush in the middle of making your selection. So I'm going to do that go up here. I'm not too worried about getting all of this ocean up here because it's mostly white and I'm actually not going to be wanting to affect the white as much as I am trying to affect the blue. So if you've gone too far, just click the erase button. Auto mask is actually a good thing to use, especially when there's hard lines. I'm gonna bring up my flow actually. And so it lightroom kinda knows that I'm I have that line right there. And so it kind of knows that I'm trying to get rid of that part. Let's just get that tiny little spot up there in the cove race. True. Alright, that should be pretty good. Well we'll see afterwards if I need to make any more minor adjustments. So we can just take our temperature, drop it down and that's starting to make the ocean look super blue. But notice when it is applied to the clouds are not really the cloud, the mist that's over the water and the spray from the waves. It starts to look kind of awkward. Like unrealistic. We can change that by using a range mask for this one. We're going to do luminant so that we can just select the lower exposures on the slider. So if I take this top part of the slider and drag it down, notice that the adjustment of the blue is still being applied to the ocean which is the darker parts of this image, but not as much to the white. And that's what I want. We can even drop the smoothness just a little bit and there's so much kind of intricate detail here by dropping the smoothness. It still looks pretty good. That kind of adding smoothness. It kind of blends together more feathers, it more decreasing. It makes the edges of where this is applied and where it isn't applied harder. But for this case it looks pretty good if this isn't exactly the type of blue you want. We can add color with this color selector. So say I start with the blue there, wow, that's way too blue. Maybe we need a little bit more green for example. We could add green, drop the saturation and if you ever are standing over well, I don't know actually where this photo was taken if this is the pacific ocean or not, but if you were standing over the pacific ocean, you would see that there's a lot of green in the ocean as well or if you want it to be a little bit more blue like that, just drop down the exposure and the saturation rather. I think I like it a little bit more with green. Not so much though, not so much saturation, something like that's pretty good. Cool. So again, we can see just this edit that we've applied from there to there. That's really what's making me go, wow with this photo now I'm going to go back to my overall adjustments and just play around with the contrast. I'm going to start with this point curve and just choose medium contrast and usually that makes things pop a little bit more. I feel like overall the exposure is a little bit dark so I'm just going to go up to the overall exposure, bring it up just a little bit .2. Oh that's looking pretty good to me. Maybe it's the shadows that I want to bring up just a little bit more nice. Alright so I think we got pretty close to the edit that I had done previously. I think this one that I had done previously, not as colorful, darker blues. The sky wasn't as red, but this one's a little bit more magical, definitely something that I would put on my desktop screensaver. Alright, so that's the landscape photo. If you have any questions, please let me know again. These photo edits are a little bit more creative. I know it might not be your style necessarily, but hopefully by watching through them and seeing all of the techniques I'm using, you're able to come up with your own style using colors, contrast, saturation exposure and all the amazing tools that lightroom offers. Thanks for watching and have a great day.