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Editing the Selected Landscape Photos

Lesson 15 from: Photoshop and Lightroom for Landscape Photographers

Matt Kloskowski

Editing the Selected Landscape Photos

Lesson 15 from: Photoshop and Lightroom for Landscape Photographers

Matt Kloskowski

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Lesson Info

15. Editing the Selected Landscape Photos

Lesson Info

Editing the Selected Landscape Photos

So let's go in and let's just start to edit some of these photos. So you saw some of the-- saw some of the ideas of what I did before. And for this part, I'm actually going to switch back over to Lightroom six, because that's got the full Yosemite shoot. And you can see I did the same thing here. There's my Yosemite collection set, and then there's' all the shoots that we went to while we were there, okay? So let's go to "Cathedral Beach." One of the first places that we went to. Let's go to this guy here. And so here's the original file. So how am I going to edit this? Well, let's hit Reset. And go to the, Develop module, here. Remember I did the same thing, I bracket. So that's Dark, that's Bright, and that's Super Bright. I got in here, I looked at the dark one, I looked at the brighter one, I started to play back, play around a little bit on there, and I thought, you know, the sky is a little bit too gone on that one. So I just went for the darker version. Open up the shadows, open...

up the exposure a little bit. Pull back on the highlights, warm it up. Crank up that Warming slider. Whites and blacks option, or I'll click a little bit of saturation. A little bit of clarity, and then, just kind of crop that around. This is probably a good time, because I shot pretty-- if I look at the histogram, (mumbles) yeah. So 14 millimeter, we didn't do too much of this today. Mainly because I don't normally shoot that wide, so I don't have that many photos to show, but with this, I don't know if you've ever been to Yosemite before, but to capture all these lakes, and these foregrounds, and then get all the peaks and everything behind them, you need to be really, really wide. So, when we come down here to Lens Corrections, we can go over to Manual and I can start to tweak that a little bit. Because you can see the trees all kind of converging in. That tree is actually-- that tree was actually converging in, so we're never really going to totally fix that one. But a lot of these other ones, we can take care of. So you-- that's a vertical perspective problem, so we fix that, I hit Constrain Crop. It'll automatically crop off all that stuff out of there. So that takes care of that for me. Looking pretty good, I might bump the exposure just a little bit more. And then, now comes the style. So, Photo, Edit In, Perfect Effects. And what I did is, just like I create presets in Lightroom, when I go on a trip like this, I usually-- I usually find myself using the same general style for the editing for everything. So when I get in here, you'll see like, I'll start-- I'll go to some of the ones that I used before, but I can turn them into a preset, so I'm not doing the same thing over and over again. So it opens up a copy inside of Effects. Mostly what I want to do here is what we did before, warming-- not too much of a glow, but a little bit of a glow, a little bit of a vignette. And there's a pretty cool way to add some detail and contrast to it. So let's go to the presets, and go to Landscape. I'm going to try out a couple of these, so Golden Hour will probably look a little better on this than it did on the other photos. Yeah, so that actually gives it a nice tone. So if I hit the backslash key, that's before, that's after, it's called Golden Hour. I don't know how else to explain it than it kind of gives it a golden look, all right? So let's go a head and add a layer. I'll go to my filters-- Dynamic Contrast is another favorite of mine. So what it does is it just puts, it's kind of like clarity, it just puts an extra amount of contrast on everything. So it will give a lot of contrast to the trees, a lot of contrast to that little cap back there. The best thing I can do though is just kind of zoom in and show you. So that's before, and that's after. And I'll reduce the layer opacity, I'll add one more layer, and just put the Big Softy vignette. Okay, and again, I'll just reduce the opacity, a little bit of it. All right, let's go ahead, oh, remember before I said I'll come up with the style? So, if I go to my Presets section, I can save this as a preset, so, "Matt's Yosemite." Put it under, "Matt's Presets," neat. And hit Create. Now, next time I come in here, I don't need to do all that again, I just do my preset. So I hit Apply. We'll save this back over into Lightroom. So now, there, it's almost done. So now we got our copy back over here, inside of Lightroom. And let's go take a look, we'll go to the original file. (sighs) It always does this. So, I can't be the only person, that when you go to Photoshop, or when you go outside of Lightroom, and you're in a collection, and you save a file sometimes it doesn't come back in the same order. It's-- some people are like, "Yes." So it's highly, highly annoying. It's just a Lightroom thing, and it usually has to deal with you being inside of a collection, and it's a big pain in the butt. But what we can do here is, let's go to-- let's go to our original. So I hit Reset. So that's before-- and that's after. So before, after. The rest of it is pretty much-- it's kind of a repeat, right? I just kind of go through, I go through and do a lot of the same work, so I'm not going to go through another Cathedral Beach, because they were all pretty much the same exact photo from there. There wasn't too much diversion from what we did there. All right, so that was Cathedral. Let's go take a look at another view here. So, let's go to, "Valley View." So Valley View was another popular one. So let's go to the original, and you can get an idea. Hit Reset. Nice part about this is, is once I get into that editing flow a lot of times I just go to the presets, it just makes it a little bit simpler for me. So, Camera Profiles, Camera Landscape, try Vivid. Kind of liking Landscape. White balance, Shade, looks good. Definitely needs to be brighter. Looks good. Toning-- I know I'm not really going to go subtle on this, I know we're probably going to need to go a little bit more heavy on it. Super light shadows, subtle with darker sky, there we go. So normal-- so basically I did normal toning up front, but darker sky, which is how we got more detail there. Clarity and contrast, light, add just a little bit of it. Saturation Boost, Light. No need to really boost any of the other colors, but I can boost the sky. Kind of get a little bit more blue. Sharpening, I'll just hit it with the Light Sharpening. Some lens corrections, and we can do a vignette. So that'll get me-- that's before, after. So that'll get me started, don't forget, you can always come back here and tweak it. You know, they're all just meant to be starting points. So if you want to make it a little bit, and say like, I'm probably going to go pretty warm on this one. The other thing is, let's start to-- we've got a lot of detail going on back here. So this is a good time to start to brush a little bit more. So I'll grab my brush, and let's go to-- try Grit. Little bit too much, try Haze, Haze Killer. Ah, there you go. So, just going to zoom in, just to kind of give you a feel for the brush. I'll just paint around the edges. As you're doing this, I'm not going to take up your time by doing an Automask thing, but that's really the way to do it, right? Turn on Automask, paint along the edge, and spend some time to get that the way you need it. So I'm just going to kind of just make my brush a little bit larger, and not be too careful with it. Okay, I'm going to click New, I'm going to hit the Blue Sky. All right, so that'll make the sky a little bit bluer, and then you can always tweak it guys, you know, if it's too blue? Pull back, and don't forget. I can change that a little bit. Okay, so that's-- I kind of processed it that way, I might actually bring the overall exposure down just a little bit. I processed it that way, I tried to do as much here inside of Lightroom, just assuming-- I know not everybody's going to go have the same plug-ins that I have for it, so, I tried to do some of those things inside of Lightroom too. But just kind of two different ways to process. If you're using plug-ins, use the presets. Whatever plug-ins you're using, make a preset for yourself, you'll find some of your favorite styles for it, but that's the way that I would go with doing those. And then again, you can get some of the same looks here in inside of Lightroom.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Lightroom Presets
CreativeLive Sky Pack

Ratings and Reviews

Barry Walsh
 

Great class Matt! I am about two-thirds the way through the class and have learned a lot about Lightroom and the objective of this course. I must admit I was over-whelmed by the amount of material covered and that was probably due to not having prior knowledge about Lightroom. I have since signed up for the 7 day trial of Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan and then went through their "beginner's" tutorial. If you are contemplating taking this course, I would highly recommend taking the Adobe Lightroom tutorials first. They cleared up a lot of confusion on my part and I now have a better understanding of the concepts Matt covered. I'm actually going to go back and retake what I viewed to help reinforce both what Matt initially covered and the basic concepts tutorials offered by Adobe. Again, great job Matt and thanks for all the useful information!

a Creativelive Student
 

Matt is the best and he his the same in person. I had the fortunate opportunity to run into Matt on the side of the road at Dallas Divide in Colorado a couple of years ago.... he is the real deal. I have learned almost all my LR post processing from him when he was with Kelby and have continued to follow him over to On1 as he is the best teacher out there when it comes to Post. Great class and bring him back again. Another great CL class ....... bravo!........ Johnny Boyd @ natureimaging.com

Student Work

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