In this episode I'm going to show you how I use Lightroom
to take this image and make it look like this.
Adorama TV presents
Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody welcome to this episode of Exploring Photography. I'm Mark Wallace
and I just returned from shooting in the hills outside the Katmandu Valley
and I was able to capture this pretty spectacular sunset.
Now I did that without using any HDR
trickery. This is a single shot that I took in my camera using my RAW file.
But to get it I had to push my RAW file to the max.
You can see that the original file is totally under exposed. it's lifeless it has no color
nothing, but after some pretty extensive post processing
I was able to create this image! Lets start with the image itself. I shot this using my
using my Leica
M type 240 with my 35mm lens.
I shot this at f/8, iso 200 and I shot it at a180th of a second,
handheld and so, you can see that when I shot this image,
I exposed for the highlights, for the sky
and the shadow all fell into darkness, but that's okay
if you shoot RAW you can bring all that life back into your image, so let me show
you how I did that with dive into Lightroom you how I did that
So lets dive into Lightroom right now.
We're in Lightroom and I have a virtual copy of my finished product.
So this is the finished post processed, fully processed image. And if I go back one
his is the image before anything was done, and you can see
that if we compare those side by side that there is a significant change
between the before image and the after image. Now the way that I went about this, is I
process this using a global change processed this using a global change
and also a local change, so let me go to the finished product here.
and what we will do is we'll dive in to the Develop module
and I will show you exactly some of the things that I did and then we'll go back from
the beginning
and do all of that. So you'll notice that the bottom of
this image right here with all this green that was originally
very, very dark so we needed to apply some adjustments to
that
and the sky
globally. The entire image had to have some changes made to it,
and then I had to make some changes to the sky without messing up the bottom
here.
I did that using a gradient filter so if I click on the gradient filter over here
and then I hover over this little dot, you'll see that what I changed
is red and what I didn't change is still the normal colors, the greens down there so the
sky was adjusted separate
from the overall image. So I think that as
a global change; everything. And then a local
change; just the sky. Alright, now that we know that was done lets go to
the original image. This under exposed very dark
image. Now when I shot this I knew that my camera
handled the shadows very well and I could pull some things out.
You're going to need to play with your camera to see exactly how far you can
push your raw files.
Now what I can do is I can turn on my shadow and highlight warnings, by hitting
the ‘J’ key. You'll see that I have a loss of detail in the sky right here, where the
sun is. That's the red.
You'll see I have some loss of, there's just nothing where this blue is.
But everywhere else I've got a lot of latitude to play with
and so originally I thought I was gonna have to shoot this with an HDR image,
but it turns out that my normal raw file had enough information
to get me from this really dark image to this really beautiful image.
So let's start. The first thing I do when I approach this
are the global changes. This is underexposed.
We don’t have any detail here in the shadows, in the valley
and so what I did originally is I went over here to the exposure slider.
I’m going to bring everything up by about a stop. Just a little over a stop. So we'll
take it to about 1,
1.1. Something like that and so that's starting to give me
some detail in the shadows. I don't want to go anymore than that, any further than that.
Because if I do I'm gonna start to lose detail in the sky.
So that's why we're going to deal with the sky separately than the shadows here
on the bottom. The shadows still needs some work
and so this is where it gets sort of crazy. I’m going to take these shadows
and I'm going to slide the shadows slider
all the way to 100. Way over. This is something that's really rare I don't
normally do that but in this
instance that gives me all the detail down here in the shadows that I
really need, but the problem is up here in the sky and
in some of the building's my highlights are
overexposed. I need to take them down and so normally I take them down a little bit
but in this instance
I'm taking those all the way down by 100.
So this is really where that you'll see highlights: -100.
Shadows: +100, but you can see that we're getting
detail right here around the sun coming out of
the clouds. We're getting detail in all of these buildings down here. So we're really pulling
out full dynamic range of
this RAW file. we still need to do some more. The contrast of this image
isn't really contrasty. We need to kick that up. So I’m going to take the blacks here
and take those down just a little bit about 10,
maybe 12 and that gives us a little bit more contrast down here
in these houses and then I'm going to do something that I don't normally do
and that's play with this clarity slider. I’m just going to bring it up
about 15 or 20. What that's going to do is give me just a little bit more
contrast
and bring out the details of these building. So about 20,18 something like
that.
That's really giving me some details down here.
Now I need to do some more to this. What I want to do is I want to make sure that I
have
nice vibrance. So I've already brought that up to about 15,
and that's pretty good. Okay now we need to start working on the sky.
We need to bring in more detail. I'm seeing up here in the sky got one, two, three
little dust spots. So I’m going to get rid of those very, very quickly
here using my heal brush here.
So I’m going to click on that, that’s my spot edit and I’ve got another
issue up here in the sky I'll close that. I'll
zoom back out. That one right there. So I’ll click on that. Make
sure my brush size is large enough. Bam.
Get rid of this one right here. Bam. Okay so I’ve fixed my dust spots
in the sky. I still need to fix some contrast
in the sky and then we need to do some overall color correction. So what I need
to do to
fix this sky, is to go over here, I’m going to use a gradient
filter. Now to show you what a gradient filter does
I'm going to use this effective of exposure. Let me show you what happens. I'm going
to drag this
right about here. Like this, at an angle.
You can see where I have taken the exposure down
up here we have that and then here it starts to fade out
and in the center line is where the gradient,
the centre of the gradient is totally faded out by the second line.
So total affect up here. Starts to fade out at the first line,
the midpoint is this middle line, it fades all the way out by this second line. So
if you want a
more.. sharper transition
you can bring these lines closer together if you want something a little
bit more of a smooth transition you can bring these out. So I’m going to
put them about like this. I don't want this
under exposed by the way. I’m just showing you this so you can see exactly what this
effect is.
So I’m going to take this exposure back to zero. The exposure was just
fine, but I need to start playing with some other things. The highlights.
I need to take those down. So I’m going to take the highlights down just a bit
about 25, 23 something like that. That's going to start giving me some more
details
in the clouds up here. I also need to take my
whites and increase those. So I’m going to take those up by about 43, 45.
Something like that.
That's giving me more contrast. But I need to take my blacks now and take those
down take those down. So I’ll take those down by about 25ish,
27, 25 that looks pretty good.
So what I've done is I've created a lot of contrast in the sky.
This little switch right here lets me see
how that looks. So I can turn it off. See it sort of looks
low contrast. Turn it on. Bam. I've got my contrast the way I want it.
So I'm going to close that. So now I've made a global adjustment to
everything. Brought out the shadows, brought down the highlights and then I added
contrast to the sky.
We're almost there. The last thing we need to do is make this look
like a glorious sunset. Now glorious sunsets are golden.
To do that I'm going to take my color temperature
and I’m gong to increase it. Way up into about the 6,000 range. So
6,100 around there, and that gives us that nice
golden look. That's all there is to it. I just took these and really pushed my
shadows and took my highlights all the way down
and made sure I used a gradient filter to add contrast to the sky.
So if I click reset, you can see exactly
what that looked like before. I’ll undo that,
that's what it looked like after. I think you'll agree
that we didn't need a high definition or a high dynamic range image, HDR
image. We were able to get all the detail that we needed out on this one
RAW file by pushing it to its limits. Raw files
and Lightroom are made to go together because you can push those RAW files
to the max
and make some pretty spectacular images. Thank you so much for joining me in this
episode of Exploring Photography. Don't forget you not sure what raw files are, or
how to use Lightroom,
or you want some tips on how to create better scenic photos
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