Doing the first pass on the waterfall in Lightroom

After a great day of photographing water, it's time to see what we have and post process the image. In my catalog I have 84 images. And what I'm looking for is one great image. I'm going to go through each and everyone to see what exposure from water that I like. It can be different for everyone. I've gone through and I've found that 0.8 or eight-tenths of a second is really pleasing. It's also as pleasing to me in the field so it's interesting to see that it matched up in post. Another thing that we have to consider is movement, and what I'm going to do is check around that image and see if it's sharp. And as I went around that image I found some softness in the leaves, so I have to take an image with a faster shutter speed. Now because I noticed this in the field when I reviewed the image, I have it, so I shot an image that has the leaves nice and sharp. When you have the images you want to work on, I like to hit the B key. That adds it to the quick collection. If we come over to the quick collection, now we're dealing with a manageable amount of images. Now I'm going to only work with two images today, but before I do that I'd like to show you an example of polarization. These two images here, this is the first one, this does not have polarization. The second image does. And as you notice, as we move between the two images, not polarized and polarized, you'll see a great difference in saturation, and you'll see a difference in glare. I'm going to go ahead and select both of those images, and make them nice and large for you, so you can really see the difference. The image on the left is going to be very light through here, it's very dark through here, gives it more contrast. And the saturation is different. Even looking just in this background, it's amazing how rich and colorful this is compared to the left. So this is why we polarize. All right, let's bring the images back to all four. I'm going to go ahead and hit the B key to remove the polarized images. We're left with two now. This is the first image. Let's look at the settings, over here on the right. This was shot at F16. Remember all our images yesterday we're at F16 to maximize sharpness. ISO 1600 at one tenth of a second. This is the image that I took, to freeze those leaves. The next image that I pulled, is at that 0.8 seconds we talked about. I really like the water in this image. I'm going to go ahead and select both images and hit the C key, which means compare. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on the leaves in the lower left, and what you're going to see is softness on the leaves here, and sharpness here. This was the example that we talked about in the field. I notice with my Hoodman loop these are soft. I took the image at a faster shutter speed and I've gotten them sharp. Now we get to composite the images in Photoshop. Before we do that, what I'd like to do is just a quick adjustment in the develop module. When I'm in the develop module, I like to come down to camera calibration and I also like to work with lens corrections. Let's start with lens corrections. I like to remove chromatic aberration, which is purple or green fringing when highlights meet shadows, typically you see it when you have a sky, or a sunset, or a sunrise. There's probably not chromatic aberration, doesn't hurt to check it. And we also want to make sure that we enable Profile Corrections. And I want to show you what that does. That takes my lens, which is a Canon 16-35 wide angle lens, and it corrects distortion and vignetting. This is before, and this is after. You can see the distortion is corrected, and also the vignetting in the corners. Very important. Let's come down to Camera Calibration. Adobe Standard was the algorithm Adobe used to process the image. I can come down to camera standard. This is Canon. And then we also can come to Landscape to get more vibrant punch. So these are just tricks that you can do to get your image closer to where you want to go. For this example, I'm going to use camera standard. A very important note to remember this is only possible if you photograph in raw. Anytime that you work on an image, and you're going to then take that image into Photoshop to composite with another, we need to sync those settings. Okay? So if I shift-click on both and hit Sync, make sure everything is checked, and I hit Synchronize, the same adjustment will happen to each image. This is very important. One last thing I want to do before going to Photoshop, is I want to make sure that there are no blown highlights. As we can see in the whites here, I don't see any blown highlights, and how can we know? Well, we hit the J key. And the J key draws a square around each triangle. And what it's going to do is highlight in red if there are any blown highlights. Now you can really see 'em in red. So we gotta make sure that nothing is red. Now, at zero, which is the, the setting that I shot in the field, it's perfect. And the reason that this is void of highlights is because I checked my histogram. Very important to do that in the field so there are no problems in post. So because that I have no issues, we're going to go ahead and move on to Photoshop. Right-click. Edit In > Open as Layers, and off we go.