today i'm going to share an often overlooked filter that can produce beautiful lighting in your
landscape photos be sure to watch the entire video because there are a few tricks to applying this
filter that make it work so well hello i'm robin whalley welcome to lenscraft this is my starting
image opening the on1 photo raw software where i'm using the effects module whilst the camera has
done a good job of capturing the scene the colours in the image aren't what i want the scene looks a
little bit gray and the sky is a bit too cyan in this shot ideally i'd like the light to be bluer
with a nice pink glow to it the way i can achieve this in on1 photo raw is using the simple
photo filter there are a couple of ways i can add a new filter to an image over on the right side
of the interface i can click the add button and then choose the photo filter option from the list
after adding the filter i can choose one of the color presets by clicking the icon there's also a
drop down where i can choose other options because the list is too large to be displayed as icons
for this photo i'm going to select the magenta preset which applies a magenta color across the
entire image if you want to change this behavior you'll find a small drop down where you can choose
from four different filter types let's keep this filter simple and use the solid option
but i do want to change the color as i don't think magenta is working quite right
i can do this by clicking the colour swatch which opens my computer's colour picker dialog
the colour wheel allows me to pick a better colour which i can see reflected in the preview
the nearer to the edge of the wheel i select the stronger the color is
for this image i want something in the middle from the area between the blue and the magenta
if i turn the filter's visibility off and on you can see it's having a nice effect on the
image one reason the photo filter works so well in landscape images like this is seen at the bottom
of the filter here there's a small mode drop down which is set to clean shadows this helps to limit
the strength of the color in the shadow areas of the image you can see the other options don't
work nearly as well as this one but even with the clean shadows option on you can see the dark areas
are still discolored by the filter if you think the filter is too strong you could try reducing
the amount slider to refine it unfortunately this can make the effect on the sky too weak
let me show you another way of protecting the shadows which is to use a mask
you can turn on the masking options by clicking the mask icon at the top left of the filter
this reveals a default white mask thumbnail along with several buttons and sliders
the mask is white by default which indicates that the filter is affecting the entire image
if i paint black onto the mask using the masking brush it hides the effect in the areas i paint
let's just reset that by clicking the reset button and you can see the mask turns white again
in this image what we want is a mask that's dark in the shadows so that it hides the photo
filters effect there the way to produce this is by clicking the lumen button when i do that you can
see it creates the mask hiding the colour in the darkest areas if i click the view button you can
see the mask that's been created click it a second time and you return to viewing the image with the
luminosity mask in place i can now adjust the amount slider to create a stronger effect in the
sky when i turn the filter off and on you can see the effect is much less in the darker areas than
in the sky now let's use a similar technique to add a blue tint to the shadow areas of the image
this time let's use a different method to add the photo filter over on the left side of the
screen there's a panel displaying presets and filters if i select the filter option you can
see thumbnails for each of the different filters in photo raw now i can select the photo filter
which opens a series of filter presets let's select the blue preset by clicking the thumbnail
now i can click the colour swatch to open the colour picker and colour wheel again
personally i find the colour wheel the easiest tool to use but there are other options in the
dialog what you see here though depends on which options you select and your computer's operating
system let's use a blue that's edging towards ping as before i'll click the lumen button to produce
a luminosity mask for the image but this time i want to affect the shadows and not the highlights
i can do this though by inverting the mask using the invert button
now the mask restricts the blue tint to the shadow areas in the image another way to control the
effect is by using the blending option controls for the filter you can access these by clicking
the cog icon to the top right of the filter and each filter has its own set of options
there are several controls in this section but we want to use the three sliders to the bottom these
allow you to protect the highlights or shadows or skin tones in the image from being affected by the
filter you can see when i move the shadow slider over to the right the effect becomes less intense
in the dark areas of the image we can then adjust the overall amount slider to control the effect
in some situations you might find it hard to control the effect using just the amount
slider when that happens try using the opacity slider for the filter instead
by reducing the opacity slider you lessen the filter's effect if i click the preview button at
the bottom of the screen you can see the effect these two filters are now having on the image
this gives the image a completely different feel and we've achieved all this using a simple
luminosity mask together with the simple and often overlooked photo filters but if you want to take
this one step further on one photo raw gives you greater control over the luminosity mask than i've
demonstrated and i explain that in this video by learning how to use the other controls to limit
the filters you can produce excellent lighting effects i hope you've enjoyed today's video and
if you have please take a moment to share it with others i'll see you soon for another video