Hi everybody welcome to this week's
episode of Exploring Photography, I’m
Mark Wallace. Well as photographers
sometimes we make creating images a
little bit more difficult than it needs
to be. Sometimes it's just not that
complicated, now I want to illustrate
that point by showing you these pictures
that I shot in Ireland. Some of them are
really saturated and lush. A few of them
I’ve created a black and white or
monochromatic images and I really, really
like these images and I posted them
online and I've had a lot of people
asking how they were created.
Well the reason I want to talk about them in
this episode is well, as you can see I’m
sort of stranded here in this hotel
conference room because outside, here in
Tanzania Africa, the weather is so bad I
can't get my video gear outside to
shoot an episode. It’s just rainy and
stormy and that reminded me when I
created these images, it was like that
in Ireland. The weather was not
behaving. I actually I was out to shoot Moore’s
castle, I got one image that I thought
was sort of okay, but the sky was just not
behaving, we had some clouds come rolling in,
we had rain coming on and off and there were
lots of tourists honking their horns
and stuff and so it was an episode that I
started to shoot but never finished, but
we've got enough footage that I can sort
of show you how I created these images
and it wasn't very difficult, and then
how I did the post-processing, again not
so difficult. So let's begin in Ireland
where the weather was just not behaving.
Well on a day when the Sun is not
behaving and you don't have great light,
there is one thing that you can do when
you're shooting scenic photos, if you're
near water. Now just outside of Moore’s castle
there are these tree stands that are in
ponds and there's water everywhere and
the nice thing you can do is instead of
shooting the trees and the sky, you're
not going to get a good shot because
it's outside the dynamic range of most
digital cameras, but you can take that
camera and point it down toward the
water and then what you'll get instead
is a reflection of the sky and because
it's a reflection, it is going to be much
darker than the actual sky and you can
get some awesome photos of the tree
stands, the silhouettes, the reflection of
the sky, the clouds and all that stuff so
that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to sort of
explore around here and take a few
photos of the tree stands and the sky
and we’ll see exactly what we get.
As you can see it wasn't very difficult
to capture those images. It's just not
that difficult all the time.
The key was to point the camera down at
the water and then focus my camera at
hyperfocal. I had my aperture set at
f 11 so everything would be in focus
and an ISO 200. Now once I had those I threw
them into Lightroom and again very, very
simple process to get those from
good to great. So let's take a look at that right now.
Here are a few of the images that I
shot in Ireland. All these have something
in common when they're finished, that are
they're very saturated like this image
here and they've got just a lot of
contrast to them. Now I didn't go through and
retouch each one of these individually.
What I did was I did one and then I
applied those settings to the rest of
the images, either very saturated
contrasting images or black and white
images like this one.
Let me dive in and show you exactly how
that happened because it's really, really
simple. I'm going to go to the develop module here
the first thing I want to do with this
image is just got a little bit of
parking lot at the top, so I'm just going to crop that
out, so I'm just going to go to the crop
tool and then quickly get rid of that
and we're off to the races.
The first thing I do
usually when I’m looking at an image is
I’ll adjust the color temperature. Now for
this image I want to bring out some of
that blue sky and so I'm going to take
my color temperature and I'm going to
take that down to about, oh the 4300
range something like that,
I'm eyeballing these. These don't have to be
really specific.
The other thing I want to do with this
one is I want to bring the exposure down,
so I get a little bit more of the detail
in the sky . So I'm going to go to the
exposure, bring that down to just a
little over half of a stop, so around
point seven, something like that and now
we're getting there now I can play with
the tonality, I can open up the shadows,
let's do that by crinking those up to
around the 70 mark, 78 something like
that and then I'll create more contrast
by taking the black levels down to about
negative 15.
We're getting there but what I really
want is more contrast or clarity and
that is why this clarity slider was
invented. It really can help you make
something sharp in contrast, so I'm going
to increase this to around
the 30 range, so something like that.
Really getting there.
We want some more color. Now on import I had
the vibrance set to plus 15. I'm just going to take
my saturation, bring all the colors up,
just a little bit so plus 5.
That looks pretty darn good the only
thing that I want to do this to make it
look a little bit better is I know that
I have some color here in the sky,
some blue. So what I'm going to do here is go down
and just adjust the saturation of the
blue color channel. So down here under
saturation, I'm going to grab the blue
slider and I'm going to increase that
way up here till I see something I like
so, I don't want to overdo it but I think
that looks pretty darn good so I can hit
the Y key and show you the before and
after, it only took a few seconds and we
got something that looks so much better.
Okay now let's go and adjust this second
image here. This image looks like it
should be a black and white image.
It has a lot of line and a lot of contrast.
It has a lot of shape that is what we want for
a black and white image, so again let's
go over to the develop module, so I've
hit my D shortcut key to get to the
develop module and then what I'm going
to do first
I just want to play with the white
balance, to see what we can do and just
for fun instead of taking it and cooling
it off, let's warm it up here and see
what we get?
Ahh it's not looking so good so
black and white is the correct way to go,
so I'm not going to desaturate this,
because I want the ability to adjust
each of the colors individually and adjust
the luminosity, so I'm going to click
black and white treatment at the top and
already this is looking better than we
started with.
So now let's adjust some of the
tonality, so we'll go into the shadows.
Let's open those up. So I'm going to bring those
open to about 30, something like that
and then the white levels I'd like to
increase those as well, so let's take
those up. That looks about right.
Again I'm just eyeballing this looking
at my histogram over here I'm looking to
see what I'm getting, it's not enough contrast
for me, so I'm going to take my black
levels down just a little bit and
getting there, again that clarity slider
was invented for this kind of thing so I'm
going to really crank up the clarity
here to about 40, 41, something like that,
and I think that's pretty good. The only
thing I don't like about this image is
it looks almost infrared. We have too
much white in the top and the bottom of
this image there and so what I can do
and this is why I convert this to a
black and white treatment is now I can go
and figure out which color this is and
adjust that color slider to change the
luminosity of that. I don't know what
color it's affecting their so what we
can do here in Lightroom, there's this
little dot right here. If you click on
that then you can adjust the
black and white mix by dragging on the
photo directly, so I'm going to click on
that, go up here, oops I got to click on it.
Click on that, go up here to this area
that's white, this bark. Click and pull down
and now you can see that I'm
affecting just that color. It looks like
it's the yellow and so then I can go
down here put this away and now we just
play with the yellow, yellow slider and
get the exact look that I want so I
think about there is pretty darn good.
Oops right there is pretty darn good and
you can see here's the before and after
that black and white looks spectacular.
Alright so the last image we're going to
do and you can see this is really quick and
easy, is this image right here, now notice
it looks almost identical to the other
one that we started with and so instead
of going through and adjusting
everything, I'm just going to click on
this one that we just adjusted and I'm
going to control click, I'm sorry command
click on the second one and then sync
settings and I'm going to say sync
everything, just sync it all and so now
the second image has all the settings
that I just made on this first image and
we'll start there.
It's really fast to do that. This looks
pretty good but I want to do something
different and so I'm going to go to the
left panel in the develop module and I'm
going to use one of the lightroom color
presets and I'm going to choose cold tone.
So as soon as I click that we have
this really interesting look. I like that!
It's almost done but what we need to do is we
need to adjust some of the contrast is
not as contrasting as I want,
and we need to fix some of the issues that
we'll see
here in the top, so still going through
and adjusting the highlights and the shadows
and the blacks and all that kind of
stuff to get the contrast to be what I
want, I'm just going to use the contrast slider.
It's there why not use it, some I'm just going
to increase that to about 35-40, looks
pretty good.
The last thing I want to do is fix this
up here, you can see some of the detail and
its branches.
Well it's just sort of going away so
that's in the the highlights of this
image and so what I'll do is I'll just
take the highlights and crank them all
the way down and that fixes the issue up
there. That's all there is to it. Again
here is the before and after, look, you
can see with just a few clicks we were
able to create some amazing images and
that's all there is to it. You don't have to do
a lot. You can just adjust the tonality
of already good images to make them
great. As you can see creating great
images doesn't always have to be
complicated.
Make sure you have an environment that
looks great and then do some minor
modifications in Lightroom or Photoshop.
You'll publish those and people will love them
for years to come.
Thank you so much for joining me for
this episode of Exploring Photography.
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