Hi, I'm Chelsea and today I'm going to teach you how to edit landscape pictures.
I'm going to be editing this picture and I provided a link down below in the
description so you can follow along. I'm going to be bringing out the clouds
using the gradient filter and a few other techniques and just overall making
the photo pop. So let's get started. First thing that we're going to do is level
your picture. You probably hear Tony complain all the time about horizons that aren't
level. And I already started doing that but what I did was look for the horizon
which would be
the water line right here, and then I try to get it straight with the gridlines.
Now that's one way to do it, you can also select this crop tool here and use angle,
select the spot on the horizon and drag it and that usually can be a little
bit more accurate. The next thing i want to do is just overall process the picture.
So let's go to temp and just warm it up a little bit.
I'm actually going to bring up the exposure just a tad, the contrast. It depends on your photo, if
you're not working along with me, but I'll bring this up just a little bit.
I'll drop the highlights and i'm going to raise the shadows.
Now for the whites, you want to press alt and just make sure that there's a little tiny bit
of a white point in your photo and then the same thing with your black slider. Press
alt and drag down until you get just a few speckles of black.
I like to bring my clarity up just a little bit and if you want to be more
precise you can hover your cursor over the slider and then use your arrow tools.
Here it's bringing it up in increments of 5. I'll bring up my vibrance a little
bit and my saturation. And then i'm going to my tone curve and i'm just going to
bump it up at the middle a little bit.
Bringing my blacks up just a tad, cause i noticed I was losing details here.
And my photo's already sharpened a bit, but i'll bring it up just a little bit more and remove the chromatic
aberration, that always helps too.
Ok so the next thing that I want to do is bring out the clouds. So i'll select
my gradient filter tool and start at the top and bring it down to about the top
of these mountains here. And then I'll bring down my exposure a little, bit drop
my highlights, you can see that brings up more details in the clouds and you can
even drop your shadows a little bit just to give them more definition. Up your
clarity to about 30 here and I'm bringing up my saturation a bit too.
And when you're done, you can click on the graduated
filter tool again and it disappears. The next thing that I'm going to do is bring
out some of the colors. So we'll go into my greens and i'm going to raise the
luminance a bit. So if i raise it all the way you can see what it's doing or if I
lower it. But I'll raise it to about 20, I'll leave my saturation since i already
bumped up my overall saturation, I don't want to overdo it. And I like to go
into all of the colors and see where they are in my pictures and then see how
I can adjust them. So for example ,go into the oranges and i'll slide up the
luminance and show you where the oranges are. And i like the idea of those popping
a bit, so i'll bring those up to about 30 and i'm going to bring up the saturation
to about 30 as well and the hue, i'm just going to make it a bit more red just to
add some more colors to the photo. I'm gonna bring up the yellows luminance just a bit
and saturation. And then for the blues, i'll drop the luminance and you
can see that it brings out the clouds even more. I don't want to do it too much
because I'll zoom in,
I'll show you why. If you drop the luminance too much, you have a white sky in
the background and then some things in the foreground you can see that you get
like kind of ghosting around them or just a brightness around them that's
unnatural, an unnatural haloing, that's the word I'm looking for.
So I don't want to overdo it. I'll bring up the saturation a little bit too.
If I press the backslash tool
under backspace you can see the before-and-after of the picture.
And it's already brighter and looking better.
So I'm going to go back to my gradient filter tool again and this time go from the bottom up.
I'm putting a little bit of the
greenness back in the water because the water actually was really
green when I was there, but it got lost in a lot of these highlights.
Okay, and those are just some small alterations.
I want to go into split toning and show you how to use that. And for my highlights
I'd like to choose more of a peachy color so this is about 37. And then I
like to go in and just lower the saturation, so it's very subtle. And for my shadows I'll
pick something very light blue, it's about 215. And you can see if I toggle
it on and off, that it's a very subtle difference but it creates a warm glow.
Next i'll be going into my brush tool, and double-click effect to reset
everything and let's see. And then press O and you'll get a mask that comes up.
My flow is all the way down, i want to bring it up just a little bit more.
More than that, that's low. And i'm going to select the water.
This is where I get a little Bob Ross, this is so relaxing. Just paint around this
happy little tree.
Nobody's going to judge you.
You can use your left and right bracket tools to make your brush bigger or smaller.
If you mess up, that's fine, that's what your erase tool's for.
Okay, you can see it's a little bit sloppy, so I'll go into my erase tool and I'll just erase where I don't
want it highlighted.
You should probably be a little neater than me. You don't want to be like me, kid, I'm a loose cannon.
Ok that seems fine. So press O and make the mask go away and then I will be
bringing up the saturation just a little, we don't want things to get crazy, and
bring the tint towards the green side again.
And then if you hover and use your
up and down arrows it will just do it in increments of 1 this time. So, hmm, I say
eight is good. I think that's somewhat natural. You can do the same thing with
your sky, so you could make a new adjustment brush and let's press O and
select the sky.
Ok, then you can bring up your highlights, bring down your shadows a little bit,
bring your saturation up and you can drop it a little towards the blue side.
Also a little bit towards the magenta side.
Not too much, cause you
can see that I kind of blended it into the sky, so you don't want there to be a
really severe contrast.
That looks to magenta to me, I'll just bring it back.
Okay, so let's see the before-and-after, and I would go in and tweak it. There's some
things are a little bit overdone. I think the trees look maybe a little bit too
green, but now you have all of the techniques and you can make it look the
way you like it. You could not bring down the shadows so much, not bring up the
highlights so much, and that will give it a less HDR look. You could dial back
the sharpening which will also make it look more natural. You can use the same
techniques and get a natural look or a more surreal look like this. So, you
thought that was great right?
You're like well I need more of this we have a whole book the lightroom 5 book,
if you don't just want to learn one little tip at a time if you really want
to understand the ins and outs of lightroom the book is for you and you
get access to a free group if you are a part of our later in group already you
can go in and we have all the shortcuts posted so you can save a little time
learning all of those so thank you very much for watching and stay tuned because
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