I've shown you a lot of landscapes so far on this blog, but I haven't shown you how they end up here. Some images are simple, requiring minimal editing to produce nice results; some take hours. In this post, I'll show you how I edited one of the images I took in Norway, all the way from raw capture to final result.
I use Lightroom CC for my editing, but you can do all of this in Lightroom 5 or 6, or even pure Photoshop (as long as you have the Adobe Camera RAW plugin installed). Since I shoot all my landscapes excplicitely with post-processing in mind, I always shoot in 14-bit RAW format. JPEG simply doesn't allow me to do even half of the edits I usually do. I always take care to expose for the highlights when I take a photo. That means making sure that no areas of the photo are blown out (the sun being an exception). If you want to take landscape photos, and don't have the highlight warning blinkies turned on, shame on you! :)
Without further ado, here is the final image:
And here is the RAW file exported to JPEG with no processing whatsoever:
Note that the ground is a little bit dark; this is normal when exposing for the highlights when it's cloudy. Don't worry. As they say, we'll fix it in post ;)
OK, let's get started. The very first thing I do, is go to the 'Develop tab' in Lightroom, and go down to 'Lens Corrections'. Here, I check 'Enable Profile Corrections' and 'Remove Chromatic Aberration'. The first setting makes Lightroom correct for any deficiencies in my lens (in this case it was the Nikon 10-24 DX), mainly vignetting and barrel distortion. The second removes unwanted colors around high-contrast edges, which is also a defect of most lenses.
Corrections applied. Not a big difference on the final image, but especially chromatic aberrations show really well in prints if you don't remove them.
There is quite a big difference between the light and dark parts of the image; especially the mountain on the right is too dark. In real life the mountain was very dark, but it doesn't translate that well to the image. In my opinion, it's OK to modify your images. I'm still going to keep it natural, just not the way it actually looked ;)
To lessen the dynamic range (the difference between light and dark) I'm going to use a trick I learned from Sergio Ramelli of YouTube fame. He is very fond of the method, but I think it doesn't always work; in this case, it does. First, go to the 'Basic' tab. Take the 'Highlights' slider, and drag it all the way to the left. This makes light areas darker. Then, take the 'Shadows' slider, and drag it all the way to the right. This lightens up dark areas. The end result looks like this:
What we did was squish all tones towards the middle, making the picture look a bit washed out. Next, we'll fix the blandness using the 'Whites' and 'Blacks' sliders. You can drag these by just looking at the image and seeing the changes, but there is a better way; using the Alt key on your keyboard. Press down the Alt key and grab the 'Whites' slider. You'll notice the image goes black; don't worry. Move the slider towards the right, until small specks of white appear in the image area. Let go of the slider and the Alt key, and you'll see your picture again.
Tiny hint of blue where the clouds are, this is good.
Now, do the same with the 'Blacks' slider, but drag it to the left. The image will be white; stop when you get some black areas, and release.
You can go a bit farther with the black than the whites. As you can see, the lake is the darkest part in this image.
What we did was change the white and black point of your image; the lightest part, and the darkest part. When using the Alt key, Lightroom shows you the areas that are pure white and black, respectively. You always want a little bit pure white and pure black in the images, this helps with perceived contrast. Let's take a look at our image after the adjustment.
Much better than the last, right? It is basically the same as the first image, but we've added contrast. Now, you could do this with the 'Contrast' slider, but I find the results aren't nearly as good. Still with me? Good, then lets do the last bit of global adjustments before we pause and take stock. I do this by adding a touch of 'Clarity', 'Vibrance' and 'Contrast'. How much depends completely on the picture. I usually just eyeball it until it looks good, then take away about 10-20%. Your eyes deceive you into thinking you haven't gone too far, but trust me, you will. If you can pause at this point and come back the next day, do it. It will help you dial back on the heavy processing you are doing right now. I typically try to do two passes, where the second is during another day. Very often I realize my settings are too strong. For now, you can see my eyeballed settings for the three down below, with the end result.
The difference is again quite small. Editing is often about adding small changes, letting the sum of the changes have a big impact.
So, at this point we have a nice image, that could be printed and hang on the wall. But when I edited this, I had a couple of thoughts. One, I really liked the road form going down toward the lake and round it. Two, the scene is dramatic, but could be made more so. Three, There is not a lot of color information in the image. Granted, the colors are true to life, but I ended up trying something I usually do when there isn't that much color; I go black and white.
B&W is great for showing form and light; by not having colors in the image, the brain has less distractions to worry about. However, it also means you have to pay much more attention to the light and dark areas (contrast) of you picture, as well as the relationship between lines and forms.
You can go back and forth between color and b&w by clicking the captions. By default, Lightroom chooses the shown mix for black and white conversions; it looks more natural than a flat curve. You can of course change the mix if you prefer.
OK, I can work with this. First thing I did was pump up 'Contrast' and 'Clarity'¨. These sliders work extremely well in black and white, so you have more leeway in using them without the image looking unnatural. Increasing the values for both give us much more contrast, which translates to mood:
The next thing I wanted to fix was the road. I love the form, but I can't really see it. The rocks are a bit too distracting, and the road itself has the same tone as the rocks so it doesn't separate from the clutter. There are a couple of ways to solve this, but I chose a simple method. To reduce the clutter of the rocks, lower contrast and clarity on them. To bring out the road, increase contrast between the road and the rocks by making the road darker and the rocks brighter.
Time for the brush tool, then. For those of you not familiar with brushes, don't worry. Basically what I'm doing is localized changes that you can edit after the fact. If you mess up, you can undo anything. I'll start by selecting the brush tool and making sure the settings for the brush itself is OK. The effects do not matter at all at this point; I can change them in any way I like afterward. With brushes, you want to have a light touch, so I chose values around 75 for 'Flow' and 'Density'. For the size, I adjust it continually with my mouse wheel while I'm painting; big areas get a big brush, while small areas need a smaller brush. Lastly i press the 'O' key to turn on 'Show selected mask overlay'. You can also do this in the toolbar below the image. Now, start painting:
You can see the painted area above. Each click and drag will add a little more color. Remember, you are not painting the color, the color only shows you what you selected for your adjustments that will be done later. Carefully go through the area you want to change, in my case I started with the rocks in the foreground and between the bends in the road. When done, the selection looked like this:
If you paint on something you didn't intend to paint on, it's easy to fix; In the brush menu, you can select the 'Erase' brush, which does exactly what you'd expect. The same exact thing can also be found using the Alt key; when pressed, you are using the erase brush. To turn off the red mask, press 'O' again.
Now, the next thing is to do the actual adjustment. Remember, what I wanted was to reduce the contrast and make the rocks lighter, so lets do exactly that:
Add a bit of 'Exposure', drop 'Contrast' and 'Clarity'.
Next, let's do the road. We will need a new brush for this, because we don't want to mess up the changes we just did to the rocks. In the top right of the brush panel, select 'New'. This allows you to start painting a completely new area, that will have different settings. This time, paint only the road:
I wanted to darken the road, so lets do that:
'Exposure' and 'Contrast' darken the road, while 'Clarity' helps keep some of the detail.
There are a lot of things I could still do; the rocks in the foreground could have even less contrast, the water in the lake could be smoother, etc. I spent around an hour on the real version of this image, fixing small things like the reflections of the snow in the lake. I've ordered a big print for my wall, I think It will look amazing :) For this post, I think I'll stop here.
Thanks for reading, and please join me in the next one, where I create a high dynamic range (HDR) image!
