Hi, I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching
AdoramaTV. In today's episode we're going
to look at the graduated neutral density
filter that's built into Lightroom.
Now grads are an indispensable part of landscape
photography. Their primary purpose is to
even out light however, with the
camera mounted ones, such as this one.
There can be a slight problem, sometimes
your subject or part of your subject might
jut into the darkened part of the
filter and create shadows where you ma not want
them, but with the graduated filter in
Lightroom it goes a long way to solve this
problem. So we've chosen our picture, I
think it's quite a good one to
demonstrate the graduated neutral
density filter that's in Lightroom. We
got this valley here with two hirer
sides that I think will demonstrate
quite nicely how it works.
So first off we're just going to develop
the pictures as I would normally. So in the
develop mode. I'm going to click on the
lens correction box and just click these
two just to take any kind of chromatic
aberration out or any kind of
abnormalities in the picture. Back to the basics
and we're gonna find the white point
first as we normally do and then the
black point as well. We might just add a
little bit extra in the blacks to darken
up a little smidge. Then from there I'm
going to bump the contrast up a smudge.
10-15. I am going to bring the highlight
slider
down quite a bit you can already see the
sky starting to change up here. You can
started to see the blue coming out. You
can see the cloud being much more
delineated than it was before.
It's already starting to work. The exposure,
I might just drop that little a tiny bit.
Just -20 ish, -25 that's good enough.
The clarity we're going to jump that up
a little smidge as well, not too crazy to
clarity. Again with the vibrance just a
little bit, 5,10 and it will leave the
saturation where it is the moment. We're
going to go into the HSL color black and
white tab and we're going to bring down
the luminance on the orange slider and a
little bit on the yellow slider as well,
good. So now we're in a position, so you know what I'm going
to first? I'm going to do the details. I’m going
to do the sharpening. So I'm just
going to punch up the sharpening a
little bit, of the radius of suspension,
a little bit of luminance. 10 or so.
Back out to the full frame, leave
the computer to do it's job. There we go.
So it's looking ok, the horizon looks ok.
I might just adjust a little tiny bit, it looks a
little off there to me. So that's pretty
good but I think we can improve the sky
a little bit and definitely work on these
shadows here in the trees.
Now this is where our graduated neutral
density filter comes into play. So close
down the detail tab and we're going to
go into the grad tab. Just
double-click on effect to make sure all
the sliders back to zero, then place your
cross member here
bring it down and then you can start to
bring your exposure down a little bit
and we're looking at the sky mostly here.
We're trying to get the sky correct that's
not bad
it's nice and deep blue through here.
Clouds really standing out here. I think
it's looking pretty good. Now here's the
problem, you see all this black dark
shadow on both sides. Now this is
what happens when you've got a lens mounted
graduated filter on there. There is very little
you can do about it in post because
it's there, it's stuck there.
However with the lightroom graduated
neutral density filter you can access the
shadows slider here and just start
dialing up a little bit to the right. You
can start to see, you bring some
detail of those shadows and almost even it out.
It's not touching the sky at all,
it's not affecting the sky it at all.
It's only affecting the shadows. We will go all
the way up it might be a bit too much, so
just dial it back a little smidge.
That's not too bad,
so just close the,
close the box down and we're almost ready
to go.
Actually I think that's good enough to
export. So you can see the graduated
neutral density filter that's built into
Lightroom is a real help.
So when processing your landscape pictures
in Lightroom don't forget to use the
graduated filter, it will help immensely
with some of those problem pictures.
Thanks for watching I'm Doug McKinlay
for AdoramaTV. Don't forget you can
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