From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Landscape in Lightroom

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Landscape in Lightroom

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- [Chris] Hello, friends. This is Chris Orwig and welcome to Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we'll be working with this photograph here inside of Lightroom. And this image comes from a course that I recently launched which was about combining portraiture and landscape photography together. So here we have a portrait of someone in this beautiful location, not too far from where I live, and I love the ocean, I love the landscape. I love people photography, so I wanted to create something where the person kinda fit inside of this scene. And here in Lightroom, I wanna talk about how we're going to process and improve this image. Also, if you wanna watch that course, you can find information about it on my website or in the library as well. First of all, what do we need to do to make this image work? Well, one of the first things I need to do is clean up a few details, so here in Lightroom I will grab our tool which allows us to retouch away issues and problems. It's a spot removal tool. And there is a little oil rig off the coast, here, so I'm just gonna go ahead and click and drag over that, and then I want to delete that. There's also a little blue flag here in the foreground, and I wanna cover that up with something else. So really simple adjustments, and often with landscape you'll find there are simple little things that you need to deal with like that. You don't wanna make a landscape so pristine and perfect that it isn't real, at least that's my own take on it. Next, I'm going to crop the image a little bit. So I'll tap the R-key to access the crop tool, and I'm just gonna crop in, and I'm gonna do this from above, here as well. And find just the right crop for it. I just wanna kinda bring us in a little bit further into the scene. So I'm just looking at different ways that I can do that. And I like the idea of having a path that goes this way, tree branches that bend over this way, so we kinda have these two little balancing points here. All right, let me just get this, yeah, something like that looks cool. Next, color and tone. What do we do with an image like this? I mean, straight out of the camera, it's almost good enough, right? Well here's what I would do. I think I'm gonna cool off the color temperature. You know, sometimes when you catch images at sunrise, it can have a little bit too much warmth in it, so I want a little more cool tones for my ocean and sky, so drop that down. I will bring clarity up in vibrance. That will help me have a little more color variety. Boost those shadows; this'll be a big one. Take a look at the difference, you know, exaggerating it for a moment, but we can really bring those in and then deepen the blacks. So all this is gonna do is help me to kinda elevate the overall snap or pop of the photograph, and just gonna try to find the right value here with all of this. And it's so easy to go overboard, 'cause you get excited when you see that, but you don't wanna go too far, right? So maybe something like that there. And then if we zoom in on our subject here, I feel like the tones on her are too strong. So I'm gonna use this tool which allows me to make an adjustment over this area. And the adjustment that I wanna make is just to desaturate a little bit. So I'm just gonna take this down and then cool off my color temperature here a little bit. So I'm looking to do that, because when you zoom out, it just was kinda like glowing red in that area. I'll make another one of those adjustments. Right-click or Control-click and choose Duplicate down here for the feet and hands. And again, just desaturate a little bit. Yeah, that's kinda nice. I like that, that looks a lot better. The H-key hides those overlay graphics, so that can be a nice way to hide those. Then as you're processing, it's always a good idea to press F to go to full-screen mode and look at it without all of the tools and controls. When I do that, I kinda realize that I need to push my crop back this way. So I'll tap the R-key. I wanna see the edge of the tree. I hadn't really realized that before, but I think I wanna bring it a little bit further over there. Not quite that far, but something like that. There we go, I like the balance of that a little bit better. And the reason why you need to go to full screen is because look at my screen for a second. It's totally imbalanced, right? We have the image, we have black up top. We have gray over here. So the density and the weight of the interface is affecting the way I view the image. But when I press F, all of that's gone, it's only about the image. The image is now actually centered in my screen. Before, it wasn't, because I had some panels close. And I can just really focus in on this. And mostly what I wanna do is just make sure the viewer is drawn right into this scene. Like, get a little counterbalance over here and over here. I like the two bending lines, but really drawn into this area here, and then also these kinda fly out above. I love this tree, it's beautiful. And it's so close to the edge of the ocean. I imagine it's only gonna be there a few more years, so I'm glad I got a photo of it. All right, well that's a wrap with this one. Now that we have seen that, let's look at our before and after. Tap the backslash key. Here's before, and then tap the backslash key again, and there's after. And if I zoom in, let me see if I can get a better zoom rate so you can see this a little bit better. You can see that before and after, you can see a little flag down below, the oil rig over there off in the distance, and you can see how really it was about changing the color just a little bit. It was doing a little work so the tree popped and came to life, and adding some nice little adjustments here in the basic panel. Not a lot, and that's one of the wonderful things about getting out in landscapes. You get to beautiful places, and it's not necessarily about all the post-production. It's just about taking what you have and then kinda adding that little bit of snap to the photograph. All right, well that wraps up this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope to see you next time. Have a fantastic, creative, and inspiring rest of your day. I hope you get out there and capture some good photographs. See you next time, and bye for now.

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