Lessons

Lesson Info

Ocean Sunset

Welcome to this new lesson in the landscape editing course. This one is more of a cityscape Seascape. It's a photo that I shot in Waikiki. So making it a little bit more magical and stylish with our color profile and doing a couple of other things that we actually haven't done as much throughout the lessons uh including playing with uh the upright tool as well as split toning. So let's get into it. If you're following along, go ahead and follow along with the sunset skyline photo. Awesome. So getting started, there's a couple things about just this photo that I don't like that much and it's these corners. I was standing on this sort of like pier that jetted out into Waikiki Bay and I was using a 16 millimeter lens on my Fuji XT two. And because it was so wide, I got a couple parts of the pier that I'd like to get rid of. So I could either come in here and crop. I like the 16 by nine aspect ratio. But if I come in here and crop this much, I still get this little piece down here and then...

also this little piece down here, which you can barely see, but I just want to get rid of those first and foremost. So with this spot removal tool on the heel mode, I'm going to go in here and just click paint over there and automatically that looks pretty good. Same down here, click picks a pretty good spot. So those are automatically gone. This was a long exposure. So you get a little bit of funky colors from the ND filter. Uh But in general, I want to make the colors pop a lot more. I also just for a sort of creative look. I want, I want this to be a very well balanced sort of HDR looking photo in the sense of a great dynamic range. What that means is I'm going to boost the shadows. I'm going to decrease the highlights to get a very sort of basic everything exposed photo. So going down to my basic sliders, I'm going to do just that increase my shadows, decrease my highlights, which brings back a little bit of information in the sky like that. I like I don't want it to be completely flat though. So I am going to take my shadows down ju or my blacks down just a little bit to have some more of that natural contrast that you would see and bring my whites down a little bit. Now you could see in the histogram we got a range of exposures. So I like that in terms of clarity, de haze vibrance saturation. If I crank the de haze, you start to see that we do get a little bit of nice detail back some colors. But if I go too far, it just looks a little bit crazy. So I am going to boost my de haze. But at the same time, I'm actually going to decrease my clarity to soften things a little bit, which helps soften. what happened when I added de haze, which adds a little bit of contrast and detail, which I, I want that color, but I don't want the grungy iss of the de haze. So decreasing the clarity can help with that in terms of my overall color as I do a lot in my photo edits, I'll play with the exposure before getting to my white balance adjustments just to see what happens with the colors. As I adjust exposure, it's not completely off and I could make the whole photo warmer. I could try to make it a little cooler. But what I'm actually going to do is skip the overall temperature adjustment and play with some specific color adjustments in just a second because I think that's going to be a better route uh of playing with colors overall saturation and vibrance though I am going to boost my saturation. Actually, I'm gonna boost the vibrance because I wanna boost the blues and the non yellow is a little bit more at a higher rate than my yellows. And the vibrant slider can do that saving the tone curve for later skipping over HSL panel for this photo. Because what I can do with this photo is split toning and make it look really, really cool split toning is an effect that I haven't really played a lot with in this series of lessons. But it's a way to add a color effect to the highlights and the shadows separately. The way that I like to add a split toning effect is to go crazy with it and then dial it back. So what you'll see by that is I like to go to my highlights, crank up my color all the way to the top of this color picker to find sort of a color that I'm going for and for this photo, I think with my highlights, I'm going for a warm color, something along the lines of that I can change this in a second and then go to my shadows and do the same crank it up and find sort of a color split that I like. And then I will play with the balance and the saturation right now. I'm just trying to find the colors. Now look what happens if I do the opposite. If I made my shadows yellow and then my highlights blue, it's a completely different effect. And as you can see when I'm doing this, this quickly gives you sort of a stylistic effect that you see in a lot of color filters that you might find on Instagram or whatever app you're using this sort of color profile that I'm choosing a warm highlight and a blue shadow is more of a natural look. That's generally what you get in shadows. You get sort of cooler temperatures and then highlights, you get warmer temperatures just because you have the sun and that in terms of highlights, the sun creates a lot of warmth, especially at golden hour, which this was shot at. But these colors are way way too bright or way too saturated. So what I can do is decrease the saturation, which with this slider, which is basically just dropping the saturation in the color picker, you can see as I do that and do the same with the shadows to get a a better balance. You can also use this balance slider in the middle to make the shadow more powerful or the highlight effect more powerful. So if I go to the left, it's making the shadow color or split toning a little bit more powerful or vice versa. So this is sort of another sort of stylistic approach. You might wanna kind of decide what, what you're going for. I think for me, I'm gonna go edge towards the highlights a little bit because I like the warmth and the oranges and magenta that you get from the sky. I'm gonna make some other edits to just the water in just a minute because I don't want to get rid of all of that blue that I have there. So that's looking pretty good. Now, I'm gonna go in and play with specific areas of my photo uh using some adjustment filters. So starting with a quick edit with a graduated filter. I wanna bring up the exposure of this right side of frame. Everything is looking a little bit dull down just a little bit at this point. So I'm gonna create a graduated filter, selecting everything over on the left hand side and just bring up that sort of exposure overall and the shadows is gonna help as well, something like that, it's looking pretty good. So now we have a more even exposure across this entire frame. The next thing I'm going to do is create a new graduated filter for our ocean. So selecting just the bottom and this time I am going to use a range mask for color. I get my eyes picker or color picker. Select more of just the ocean colors drop down the amount because I don't want to get as much of this uh this sort of barrier right there. And now I'm going to drop the exposure down to blue, dropping the exposure or adding color here as blue is a great way to add blue to your water. And here, I'm also going to decrease my clarity just to make the long exposure effect that I got in camera of the waves kind of going through and having this water be really soft. I'm going for that effect. I'm going to enhance that with dropping clarity. So that's looking pretty good. Now, I'm going to do the same or a similar effect for the sky or just a specific edit to the sky. So selecting over my horizon like so this time I'm going to create a color range mask Again, select it's back here, click my eyedropper and then click and drag. So I'm selecting a lot of the warm colors. Let's do that again. That's pretty good. I don't wanna select the buildings in the foreground. Let's go back to that. And now I'm going to actually have a de haze filter to bring even more detail in the sky. So again, adding de Haes, maybe balancing that out with a little less clarity as well. I don't want it to get too crunchy there and that's pretty good. Maybe dropping my whites playing with my highlights, something like that's looking pretty good. One other thing that I did in this edit was played with the upright tool because I was using a wide angle lens, buildings and architecture, the lines start to be a little bowed. So you can see that the building over here, it, it almost looks like it's tilted even though in reality it's not. And so using the transform tool or the upright tool, what we can do is click and drag along lines that we wanna straighten, which works perfectly for architecture and building. So if I click this little button right there and then go over my photo, what I wanna do is click and drag along vertical or horizontal lines to make them straight and you do this by clicking and dragging and doing just one, won't actually affect anything. What is going to change is when I click and drag along another and they have this nice sort of window that pops up so we can get a really good look. Doing two is going to help. Let's do another one along this line over here. I think that line was a little crooked. So let's undo that and sometimes it might not really do much depending on your lines. Let's do the last one you can do up to four. All right. So that does a pretty good job. The first adjustment was pretty much all we needed when it did that though. It kind of crops into the photo. So I'm gonna go back up to my crop. I'm gonna take off my 16 by nine aspect and actually just make this sort of a wider frame and you can see actually using the upright tool, uh, does a pretty good job at the corners and those blots spots that we got rid of with, uh, the healing brush are gone as well. Uh So we don't have to do any more. Healing brush and this is a pretty good aspect actually. So this is looking pretty good. I might go down and now play at a little bit of contrast. The whole thing looks a little bit dark in my opinion. So with my tone curve just crank up the exposure, just a little bit of everything, but still have sort of like the S curve look as I do that. You start to get a lot of more of that magenta in the sky and that's looking pretty good. I might come down here play a little bit more with the balance and the saturation of our split toning. Now that I added that contract, I, I think I'm gonna go back a little bit the other way with the balance being a little bit heavier towards the split toning of the shadows and that's looking pretty good. This is one of those things that I could play with for for a long time. I might come back down here and decrease my overall vibrance just a little bit, get rid of that because I think it's starting to look a little bit too over processed. And again, this is one of those times I would probably walk away from the computer, come back to it with fresh eyes and see if I really like the color adjustments that I made. But in general, this is the direction I am headed towards and I'm really liking this and I hope that showing you what you can do with the split toning effect can show you how you can create powerful sort of style with your colors. And this is what a lot of Instagrammers do is create a custom split toning style that they use for a lot of their photos. And that's how you, you know, you go to those Instagram who are very popular who have a unique style and you'll see that the colors are often very similar. It's not just because they take photos of similar subjects. It's because they edit and process them in a similar way, often with some sort of split toning effect. Cool. I hope you enjoyed this lesson if you have any questions. Of course, let me know. I hope you've enjoyed the lessons across this entire course. And as always, I hope you have a beautiful day and enjoyed this course.