Bonjour Madame and Monsieur in this episode I'm going to give you seven tricks
to make amazing landscape photography
Bonjour Madame and Monsieur my name is Serge Ramelli I am a french Photographer from the
amazing city of Paris France but living in Los Angeles California
and I'm back in Los Angeles California after a few weeks of travel in Paris
south of France and the north of Italy and I was doing this challenge while I
was travelling 30 days 30 videos in the end I finished with only 27 videos
because at the end was really rough you know no Wi-Fi changing hotels all the
time but anyways I did 27 out of 30 videos I hope you enjoyed it - two things
first I made a challenge while I was doing this on the black-and-white video
where I propose people if they would leave a comment to win one of the Paris
or New York I will reveal the winner at the end of this video for now let me
show you seven tricks seven special sauce secret sauce to improve your
landscape for the weapon just before we get started if you don't have Lightroom
and Photoshop Adobe is going to stop the promotion of 20% off on the first year
on Lightroom and Photoshop I think it is going to be this Friday the 2nd of June
so if you want to pay seven dollars 99 instead of $10 99 or you have to do is
act now go to photo 3 calm my gear page my gear page and click here if you
create a free account you will get the 20% off on Lightroom 4 surface of the
entire alright let's jump over to a Lightroom and let me show you what we're
going to be doing so this is the before photo and this is the final photo much
nicer and I'm going to show some secret sauce so I'm going to give you seven
different tricks that are seeing a really special and I can really help you
you know maybe to take your landscape to the next level trick number one find an
interesting foreground you see in this photo I have that sunset you know
everywhere is nice but I really took the time to find the right flowers the right
combination of flower until I had something that was really
interesting so you know it's always easy to find a sunset it's always easy to
find like a nice tree a nice hail or a nice you know subject but it is really
hard to find right for one and I spend most my time when I do cityscape and
then cable looking for the right foreground I love how the flowers I mean
that that poppy field was amazing but I love have you know this is a bit more
green and I'll have this flower in here this hour there anyway it took me a bit
of time to fight to find the right a height for my tripod to get the right
for one so finding the right for gun is very important of course the street
number two is shoot at the right light if you come on this scene like an hour
before or two hours before you you wouldn't get the Sun coming through the
flowers you wouldn't get this shininess you wouldn't get this amazing sky that
you wouldn't get the third trick is focus on the for one element a lot of
people is asking me Oh where do you focus when you do your landscape on this
one I really wanted to focus on the flowers because I wanted to be sure them
to be really sharp you see and I didn't care that this was not sharp here in the
back if you look at my settings I'm shooting at seven point one I use a 100
always the lowest ISO I'm on a tripod but the thing is one eight years of a
second was the speed I needed because it was a bit of wind to make sure that all
the flowers are super super sharp so if I went to f-16 or f-22 to make sure that
I had enough you know that everything was in focus everything with sharp the
problem is that I would have a low shutter speed or a high ISO and I would
get everything would be blurry basically so yes my you know that's a field would
be big but because that is slow speed I would you know I would get the flowers
not sharp so if you have to choose always make sure you're for one is very
sharp doesn't matter that the trees in the back are a little blurry you know
people are going to look at your form especially when it's the you know the
main interest so that's one thing that's really important you can use manual
focusing or you can just make sure that the focusing in your photo you know if
you can tell press halfway on your on your shutter to
make sure the full run is really the focus point okay the next one is the
retouching itself and the way I retouch it and the way I'd give users guy now
why do I say it's important to diffuse this guy well let me show you you see me
over yours often you open up the shadows and bring down the highlights and doing
the whites and a black the problem when you do that you get a very contrasty sky
and in this case that is not something that I want I don't necessarily want
that because it looks you know contrast in the sky looks very HDR looks very
basically retouched I want to give the illusion to people that you know I don't
want to put the attention on the retouching I just want to put the
attention on the beauty of the scene so what I do now when I have bright clouds
like this is instead of going minus 100 i defuse the sky a lot so that's one
thing they do then I have to find the right white balance so that let me do
some let me do the blacks here add some contrast now for the white balance of
the overall white balance I think I'm going to go to shade because I like the
idea that's very warm and I'm going to add a bit of magenta that's usually what
I do okay I'm also going to recrop the photo so
that I have a lot more attention on the flower and less on the aamna on the back
here so that the trick really number four is diffuse the sky so what I
usually do to even diffuse it even more is that I take a graded filter here and
I go to clarity it's going to put everything down to zero and add a bit of
- clarity here in the sky just to diffuse this guy even more and on the
opposite to make my point I create another gradient here at the bottom for
the flowers and on this one I'm going to add clarity and on this one I'm going to
add it maybe a little bit of green I can even change the white balance here I
could add even another one - you know make the foreground a little darker here
so I basically have one white balance of and another one for the overall photo
okay so that was a trick the main trick here was to diffuse this guy I think I'm
going to bid the whole photo a load brighter add a bit more contrast but
that's not all because we're going to do a lot more in in Photoshop because you
know we have this ugly lines here and I want show you really cool trick that not
a lot of people know to raise this really quickly so let's go into
Photoshop and continue this retouching
Photoshop and the first thing going to do is going to take my background I'm
going to drag it drop it here to make a copy and lets you raise these power
lines the thing with power lines which is
really painful is that it's long lines like this and it's kind of a pain in the
butt if you see what I mean so what I usually do is I going to take this tool
here you can press J which is called the spot The Healing Brush tool you got two
tools in Photoshop that can erase part one is called the Spot Healing Brush
tool and the other one is called a Healing Brush tool what I'm looking for
is a Healing Brush tool why because the Healing Brush tool basically works a
lack of the stem tool meaning you can click here I can click here and say okay
I want this pixel here to be copied here okay and then of course you can drag you
know with your mouse like this and it's going to do its best but it takes a bit
of time let me undo this I'll show you a faster way so you hold on the option key
you click here you click one time you hold down the shift key you go all the
way here although at the end and you just do one click boom look at that and
it just erased the whole thing in one click okay so for the second line I'm
going to take care of the bottom one first I'm going to click option click on
this one and I'm going to go all the way here and see what that's going to happen
not bad not bad this one when you have a small one there you can just click maybe
click here and it talks it takes a lot of power so sometimes you have to wait a
little bit have to wait a bit and you know it does create some like pattern
that you see that we have to correct but that's fine it's a second passing book
so next time is click here one time here hold down the shift key again let's go
here boom see we have a pattern here that we
need to clean up okay again click here hold down the shift key
boom let's make this a little bigger to make any tool bigger in Photoshop you
just hold down the ctrl + Alt key I'm going to click here one time hold down
the shift key oops again
alright so it's not doing it sorry I'm going to click here click here
and hold down the shift key voila alright and okay now let's
continue to zoom in this I can this I'm going to do with the stem tool when your
thumbs or I don't know no actually let's go back to this one like this let's
clean that up so I'm going to sample some stuff from there and click here but
like the main trick I want to show you is this long lines you know you can just
hold on a shift key goes really fast some people don't know that well ah
and this I'm going to click here hold on the shift key boom hold on shift key I
used to spend a lot of time before I found out this trick of the shift key it
goes much faster so that's okay now we got something we are there so when it's
like this usually I go and take the stem tool you press s with stem tool and I'm
going to make sure that my harness is about 80% and maybe I'm going to copy
that here voila and let's go back and put the harness back again at zero the
reason why I put the harness at 70 year is I wanted to have the top of the tree
to not be fuzzy but now I want to get a clouds back so I'm going to put the
harness back at zero I'm going to copy this and is going to make like a soft
copy okay and using this tempo I can go back and usually what I do is I lower
the opacity of my stem tool and I just do some correction so I'm just gonna I
just sort of bland different clouds with different clouds really fast and the
fact that I'm not that my opacity is at 57 it just makes both of things here
that's some weird pattern there and you know it just uses them too like this to
make it more random again and voila here we have some patterns and there was
a lot of wires and you see in a few clicks in a few seconds I erased
everything with that little trick of holding the shift key
voila so that's the before and that's the after I'm in a bit more before after
you can see a bit of a pattern you're so stem tool here again and let's
just click here the good thing is you know clouds are so random that it's hard
hard to tell okay so now we raised the power line let's go to the next thing
units which is tip number six AB bag the Sun so what I'm going to do is I'm have
in my library and I'm going to give this if you subscribe to my website if you
use the link that's below this video it's going to take you to my website
it's a special link where if you subscribe to my daily newsletter you
will be able to get this for free so the way it works is I'm going to use this
Sun I drag and drop this in my shot by default it's a smart object because
it's coming from the library and library is so cool in in Photoshop because you
can just drag and drop items into it and reuse them later so if you open this
file if you download this from my website you can just open your library
and drag and drop it back in into into your library it will be there for you
forever so this is a cool Sun and I'm going to make this one smaller so I'm
holding on the shift and option key to make it smaller in its center I'm going
to put it roughly where the Sun is and voila the Sun is there now kind of wear
them but if you use the screen mode boom it takes out anything which is basically
black and makes it transparent and now all we get is a sunrays so before after
before after that expressing but you see here there's a bit of a square so you
can just add a little mask by clicking here be for brush make sure but a black
is your foreground color opacity around 40 that's fine and you just brush out
that little the top here so that we don't see like a sort of a square you
know we just get the light rays and what up so that was tip number six add back
the Sun to make the light rays more interesting and now I'm going to save
this I'm going to close and save and I'm going to go back to Lightroom and we're
ready for tip number seven which is double development what I mean by double
development is usually I go back into Lightroom and I reopen up a bit the
shadows are we do I blacks it gives an extra punch to your
photo in this one I think I want to make the bottom of the photo a little darker
again I basically take a fresh look at it you know and give it a second pass
let's put it this way I can try making the top of the sky lower no I don't want
to do that I really want have this diffuse sky
okay and one thing that I do also is I usually take a little brush add some
exposure some and some clarity and I just bring back a bit of light randomly
here in the flower on the foreground maybe a little more not that much with
contrast and clarity just to make some of them pop a little bit more drag a
little more attention okay and if it's too much which is the case here you can
just lower that's a good thing about you know non-destructive workflow and voila
so just that extra little you know white going on here in the foreground and this
is how we went from this to this seven little secret sauce to you know help
boost your landscapes and now I want to talk to you about my training if you go
to my course page you will see there is a list of sixteen different courses
which is my sequence of training that I recommend you can either buy the course
individually or you can buy them is in one package where instead of paying one
thousand seven and forty eight dollars you'll pay three hundred forty dollars
okay in this video I'm going to talk to you about one course for example the
portrait composite workflow it's really one of my favorite course and some of
the photos that I got are some of the ones I like the most all time so
basically here you have an actor on set that there is some flash so I'm shooting
the background I'm shooting the actor on set so that's the background that's the
actor with some flash which are very cheap and I give you all the you know
where to purchase a flash and that's the final result same idea
small flash I mean I think the whole thing cost like $200 this is the cowboy
that's the background and that's the final result here is another one with
the flash so with the flash that's the foot of the
background and that's the final result that's another one in the bar so we have
the actor that's there with the flattest my buddy Kelvin and that's the final
result that's another one that this one is really straightforward I just took
him against the wall I found this background in Los Angeles
and boom that's the final result if you enjoy this type of Rafi this is a radio
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alright guys I hope you liked this video so I just want to announce the two
winners the one that got the Paris book is Alex on holdin I'm going to send him
the Paris book with a little signature and the new book is Joe Belfort very
wrong for winning this I will do more contests like this where you just have
to subscribe my youtube channel leave a comment and get a chance to win one of
my books alright don't forget to hook up to the
YouTube channel I'm going to try to do two free videos per week oh you have to
do is hit unsubscribe also you have a little belt up and you can click on that
to make sure you get a notification every time I do it for video and please
leave me a comment of what you would like to learn and if you do like video
will like it it really helps me thank you very much and I will see you in a
few days
you