Bonjour mesdames et messieurs. I'm right now in Italy.
I just came back from Tuscany. I'm on the way to the Amalfi Coast to take photos.
I love Italy. It's amazing. Huh? Last week. I took a photo that I've been waiting
for for 15 years when I originally saw this photo 15 years ago.
I dream about getting it but it's a hard photo because you have to shoot right into the sun.
Want to give you a couple of tips of how to get the best out of shooting to the sun.
I also came up with a great book on Lightroom.
It's called the five steps to Natural drama.
It's something you can use on your own Raw files,
to go through and go through these five steps and get The best out of your raw files.
The book is completely free. You can get it by watching the replay of the webinar that I
did in Tuscany where I give you really some cool tricks.
The first one is how to get great photos during bad weather
or no light or you can stay for the sunset.
The second tip I give you is how to find your voice as a photographer,
you know, when you're on Instagram
and you're seeing somebody's work and your didn't even see his name,
you know, it's blablabla’s photo. He's got a style.
He's got a voice. Well, how to do that, how to achieve that
so important as an artist and the third one is I want to show you a demonstration of the natural drama.
But for now, let's go back to tuscany, let me
Show you one of my favorite photo for the last 17 years,
Alright? I'm going to show you something something that I been wanting to do for 17 years.
So, 17 years ago. I, you know, looked
at what is the best photos of Tuscany and this place kept coming up,
called the Baccoleno, Farmhouse is actually a beautiful
hotel and it's got this little path there of leading lines here like this and I was always amazed, oh wow.
this one's even very nice with the flowers.
And I've always wanted to get that shot and I was hoping to get that shot with a really good Sunset.
And so here I am at The Farmhouse and this is what it looks like when I arrived at.
It was like, it was so overcast.
It was so overcast and then.. but you know,
there is a case when you have a lot of clouds above
you and if for some reason you get at the horizon line,
you get less clouds, something incredible can happen and this is what it started to look like.
So you see I started seeing an opening here,
which was amazing. Meaning, if the sun would come here.
Maybe it would light up the whole sky and it would be really,
really red, which is really what I wanted. So I waited,
I waited, I waited and check this out
and I want to show you because it goes really fast and the best tip to get it.
So I was so afraid to lose it that I went straight on HDR.
Because here is what happened.
So boom. This is the first photo where it starts to look like something.
But what what I wanted, what I was hoping for is that the sun was going to pierce and light,
a little bit the valley, because right now it's a nice sky,
but this is not lite, right? So I waited waited and Let's see here.
And now I'm starting to do HDR, so a normal photo,
an underexposed photo and over photo.
And then look at my settings, here.
I am at f8, right? I started at F8.
actually turn out to be the best for this photo because you will see I tried different.
I tried so many things, I was so afraid to lose it.
So normal photo, Overexposed or underexposed photo and I was just shooting literally every,
every five seconds. What I wanted was to Valley to… you see here.
Now. It starts to light up, we start seeing something in the valley.
So look at this. And I actually really like the glow.
So that's the underexposed photo. That's the overexpose photo.
That's sorry. That's the normal photo.
That's the underexposed photo. That's the Overexposed photo
and so I gave it one star to this one because I thought it would be good.
So then I was like, okay I kept on shooting, kept on shooting
I'm shooting and I change my settings. I went to F 16 now,
I'm at F16 and you see I get this star light effect,
but when the sun is so big and you're zooming in because I'm at,
I mean, I'm at 42 millimeters,
which is much tighter than I usually am.
I thought there was too much Flair at F16.
I wanted to get the Starlight effect, but it was too much flare, too much flare at F16.
And then I was hoping you know,
sometimes the best photo is when the Sun hits the Horizon because you just The little star light,
but the problem is that let's see here.
Let's move forward in time.
So I'm still at f/16 and I'm getting this star light effect and I can't really see it on my screen.
It's only when I went back home and I looked at it on Lightroom,
not gonna bore you with every single photo, but for me,
this is a little too much of flares because he gives flares here.
I don't know. I just didn't like it so much.
And now the Sun starts going down.
Let's go a little further. It starts going down,
going down, going down. But you see I'm losing, I am losing the valley.
This was my favorite. I prefer the one at F8 because it was less flare.
And so that's the normal exposure under exposure and overexposure.
So what I did is I select all three photos.
I right, click, I go to photomerge HDR and I auto-align not Auto setting but I auto aline.
And then deghosting on. I put it on high
because there was a bit of wind and the deghosting is going to help,
you know, making sure that you don't have leaf,
that looks like ghosts between photos. So now this is the HDR version.
You see it's a stack. So I'm going to give a five-star to the HDR version
and then I'm going to give a four-star to the normal version and look what I usually do.
So, what I do is I start with the HDR version and on this one,
I'm just going to open the shadows. I'm going to bring down the highlights,
but not too much. You see, I don't want that.
We see that. I think that's really not nice. I rather have a glow
and then I'm going to crush my blacks by holding the option key.
I want about that much black.
So when you hold down the option, you can see in green.
You know, what's really dark.
What's really 100 dark. So it's option on the Mac
and it's alt on Windows and then I'm going to boost my white.
And then I'm going to add some contrast to it.
Now. I don't like this. The white balance.
I think it's actually pretty good. Let's see what daylight would give me.
Oh daylight is even nicer. I think I'm going to go for daylight.
And what I'm going to do on this one is I'm going to create a gradient for the sky and not this one.
I'm going to go. This is one of my preset that I use.
I'm going to adjust. I'm going to go double click here.
Going to go to Temp and I'm just going to add a bit of blue even more bit of blue
and lower a little bit of top of the sky.
Voila. Okay.
I had a couple of this is a bit of a lens flare that occured.
And this is a bit of a dust. So let's take care of that.
And then at this point what I did is I take a little brush.
Oh, also one really cool trick. I shot this with a Sony A7 III.
I didn't expect it to be so good, which is only Twelve million pixel camera,
which is not good at all. Twelve million is not enough
because I'm going to make a big print to
what I did then is you can right click
and you can go to on hands
and you can use the super resolution
and that's going to turn this photo from a 12 million to a 50 million pixel
and it actually does a great job because you're really boosting the RAW file itself.
So not only I'm doing an HDR, but I'm also enhancing into a 50 million,
you know, photo So this is the version, look at the resolution now,
it's 8450 by 5644,
almost 50 million pixel and it's really sharp.
It is really nice and juicy. I love it.
Okay. Now what I'm going to do is I just want to enhance a little bit the the Highlight.
So usually what I do on this one is I take a brush.
And I just want to that,
I want to dodge the valley a little bit so we can see a little more see.
So I use zoom in and I just add a bit of exposure.
And here, I just want to dodge that make this a bit brighter.
Make sure you don't go over 0.50 on this one and let’s see maybe not a hundred percent.
Let's go back to fit here.
And then I want to make this a bit brighter and then voila.
And sometimes what I do is,
so all I'm doing is I'm looking for bright spots and making them brighter.
Okay, just to give a little more shape to the Hills.
Right? And I don't want too much retouching in this one,
just a little bit. Check it out before the brush stroke.
Makes quite a difference quite a difference and I'm pretty happy with the result,
you know, just a very lightly retouching. One of my favorite photo ever! If you ever get a chance
to go to Tuscany go if you can get the link down below
and don't forget to get my latest Lightroom book and watch my live from Tuscany.
I'm going to show you some really cool things. The three things I'm
going to show you is how to take great photos.
When you don't have light in bad weather. The second I'm going to
show you a really cool trick to find your voice
as a photo .
And third, I'm going to show you. You more about my natural drama,
retouching link down below.