Lessons
Introduction to Adobe Lightroom Landscape Photography
1Introduction
02:51 2A Basic Process for Editing Landscape Photos
22:58Full Photo Editing Sessions
3Golden Hour Lake
22:12 4Sunset Skyline
18:51 5Snowy Lake Scene
12:29 6Sunrise Magic
10:47Lesson Info
Sunrise Magic
Welcome to this new landscape editing tutorial in this one. I'm going to be showing you how to take this photo on the left and turn it into this photo on the right. This is the sunrise photo if you are following along now, let's just go ahead and dive right into it. So we start off with this raw photo, which is basically, well, it's a white image overexposed image. You got some hills over here, it looks like a bright sun. Thankfully, this was a raw photo. So we have a lot of detail that we can pull back from this photo. So a lot of what we're going to be doing is just with overall exposure for this photo. It's actually a rather simple one. So first things first, I am going to crop this into a 16 by nine photo. I want to not have as much sky and I like having the hills close to this lower third line right here. So something like this is good. I can't really tell what this photo is gonna look like. Uh because I don't, I can't see very much. So I'm actually gonna make it a little bit wide...
r, just the whole width and all I might play around with the crop later based off of what it actually looks like. So overall, you can see from the histogram that the everything is too overexposed. I'm hoping there's enough information in this photo that I can pull back the overall exposure. Now, if I bring down the slider overall, you'll see that the graph starts to look a little bit better. This is what we would assume sort of a normal exposure might be something like this. Now, there is just some parts, some parts of this image that you don't have any information. Even if I drag the exposure all the way down, we still have you see on this graph, we see this line jet up here and it's touching the top of the graph that's just clipping and that means there's no information there. So because that is clipping, I don't want this to go down anywhere below the right side of the graph because it doesn't have any more any information anyway. So I'm going to go basically set the overall exposure until that line is right at the edge. Uh Because it, I want it because it looks overexposed. I want it to be overexposed and there's nothing I can basically do with it to pull back that information. Even if I pull down the whites and things like that, we might be able to bring a little bit of information back from around where the sun is shining, but you're not going to be able to bring down that entire sunshine, bring down the highlights can also may also help just a little bit, but the more I bring down the overall exposure, you'll see that. And as I bring down the highlights, yes, this graph is looking better, but the photo it looks like it has just like this overlay now and it doesn't have the right exposure range. So I'm gonna leave this over on the right hand side just like just leave it at zero now with the shadows. This is an interesting thing. Do I want these shadows be darker to silhouette those hills or do I want to try to bring back more information in those shadows playing around with this? I wanna then see what the blacks do and I think bringing up the shadows, which is something I would typically do to pull back some information from the shadows. It's not necessarily what I want to do with this photo because it just starts to look washed out. So I'm actually gonna create a little bit more contrast with this and make those hills a little bit more silhouetted just like. So now one thing that I wanna jump down and I'm not sure if I'm done with exposure yet because I wanna play with D Hayes typically with skies as you've seen in this class. If we crank up the de haze, you'll start to get more information in the sky. And when I do that, you can see that and then more contrast is added though. So I want to add some de haze just a little bit. If you go too far with this, it just starts looking unnatural. So just a little bit. And then I think to balance it out, I'm gonna bring the shadows back up just a little bit because it had added some contrast and made those shadows even darker with the haze in terms of colors, I'm fine with the vibrance and saturation right now, you know, bringing this up just makes it look unnatural, bringing it down. I think for this photo, it doesn't look good for as black and white. I might go back up here and play with the overall temperature. Now, I think just from seeing this photo initially, I want everything to be sort of the sky to be all orange. But if I crank up the temperature until the sky is all orange, which is about here, then the hills look a little bit too orange. It doesn't look very natural to me. And so what I'm going to do is actually leave the temperature as it is and then use a graduated filter to adjust the color of the sky. The rest of these look pretty good. One other thing is the co the actual yellow color of the sky to me and maybe it's just based off of my edits because looking at the original, which look at that before and after that's pretty wild. But looking at the original, the color of the orange that you see down here is or the yellow is a little bit more orange red. Here, it looks a little bit like it has some green added to it. And that's just because I've played with the haze and exposure. And so I'm actually going to change the hue of this yellow. So I'm gonna go to the HSL tab click hue. Click the color picker. Go over to the yellow right here. Looks good and then just drag down. If I drag up, it pulls in even more green, drag down. It makes it more of that warmer sunrise, sunset, golden hour color. So that looks pretty good to me. Detail wise. If we zoom in here, let's just click done zoom in. It doesn't have a ton of grain, everything. I it's not an image where I want things to be completely sharp in terms of like a lot of detail. It's more of, you know, just that it kind of looks like a painting. So that's why I skipped the clarity up here because I, I don't really need everything to be sharp. I actually like it uh glowing a little bit actually decreasing the cla clarity a little bit actually makes it look kind of nice to me. So with sharpening, I'm just gonna leave sharpening as is and there wasn't too much noise. So I'm gonna leave the noise reduction as is. Although if I want to even make it a little bit softer, I can increase that noise reduction to do that. I zoomed out. You don't see much, but if you're on your computer following along, you can see if there's no noise reduction compared to this still, it's like barely any noise. So I'm gonna leave the noise as is. So going back up, I want to play around with the color of the sky even more with a graduated filter. I'm just going to select everything above the horizon again o on your keyboard, selecting everything above and now I'm going to add color temperature to the sky. Now I might actually increase this graduated filter. So it's more just selecting the blue sky up above. We already made the those color adjustments to the yellow down below. So something like that to me is looking pretty good just playing around. So this is one area where because I'm not necessarily wanting to uh affect the entire sky. I'm more just concerned about the blue up here. I've moved this graduated filter up above the actual horizon. I'm just interested to see what happens when I play with the overall exposure, things like the highlights. Sometimes I'm just playing around just to, just to see what happens. Now, when I add some de haze, it brings a little bit more detail into the clouds, but it darkens the sky up above. So I might actually even make boost that exposure just a little bit. I might even just create another graduated filter. Go back there, click new just for this top of the screen, brighten it up just a little bit. So it's a little bit more natural. I would expect that there would be sort of a natural gradient from bright to darkness uh going from top to bottom in the sky that is so that's looking pretty good. Um And if we click done and we see the before and after a completely different photo, now this is one of those photos where if you're standing there on this hill, it's probably not going to look like this because the dynamic range that our eyes see is a lot greater. And so it wouldn't look like this and it wouldn't look like this either. I'm taking a more artistic approach to this photo to sort of bring back some of that exposure. We do have this super, super bright area over here. There's nothing you can really do with it. You're just trying to do as much as possible. Now, going back just to my basic sliders, I want to just play around with the shadows just again, just to make sure that I'm not going to boost those shadows. And again, I think trying to boost that shadows, get more information in here, there's just so much noise and grain in there when I do try to boost those shadows. So I am going to leave that crunch down just a little bit. Awesome. I think this is a pretty basic edit crop wise. I'm happy with it. I like that. The horizon is just below this third line. You know, it's maybe one of those times that if you want a more artistic piece, you know, you could crop in right here and just get rid of that over exposure. But for me, since that's where the sun is, we're just gonna leave it as so, something like that looks pretty good. Awesome. Thank you so much for watching this. I hope you learned a couple of things or enjoyed this edit at least, and we'll see you in the next one.
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