Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization

Landscape Workflow Lot of this is going to seem pretty similar to what we talked about with the Portra Workflow only we're going to spend a little bit more time on the editing side because I love landscapes. (laughing) No, there's a lot that we can do with it, so. The Workflow, let's just keep that in mind. Bridge, cataloging, organizing, prioritizing. Adobe Camera Raw, basic adjustments, chromatic aberration, reduction, noise reduction, mild sharpening and then Photoshop for advanced things like color grading and our personal effects. Things that we're considering there are going to be tone, color, and effects. Now if you use Lightroom, you can supplement these with Lightroom, I won't hold it against you. (laughing) I need to show you some before and after examples of this and how Workflow can be pretty powerful. This was from the Notre Dam. Beautiful ten millimeter spread. Both of these here is one shot, one take. This would be what I would consider probably where most people would s...

top. You got the tone right, you got the color right but it's the artistic effect that takes a little bit further. It's subtle but it's important. Notice that we also did here with this images there's even a little bit of perspective correction that's happened here, some of that custom perspective correction, that warping that happened in this image that needed to happen to make the symmetry just fit and feel a little bit better. This the delicate arch in Moab. Beautiful sunset. You don't see the other 400 people behind me that were trying to take pictures either. But again this is where most people would stop, but that's not where we stop. We get the tone, we get the color, we push that image to its extremes, to its maximum. Here's another example. I was going to throw this image away. It's a complete accident this photo. This ended up being my favorite photo from Second Beach when I went to Olympic National Park. Took this shot. If you see the whole which one of these is not like the others, you look at my contact sheet from this, this image is blue and all the rest have perfect white balance. I have no idea what happened. I can't explain it to you. For some reason this one didn't turn out right. I had to scramble to put my camera down to find this spot. I think it had something to do with the neutral density filter that I was using as I put it on as I was basically setting up. It looked horrible. But of all the shots I took of Second Beach this was the one shot that was the best. It just needed to be rotated a little bit, add a little bit of headroom for it so that after I straightened it I didn't lose the top of this image, fixed the white balance, add my effects to it and it was cream of the crop. This one I printed 24 by 36 onto a canvas and it sits in my office. Beautiful shot that I would of thrown away if I didn't know anything about Workflow. If I didn't know anything about Photoshop or what I could do in Photoshop, this is a perfect example of something I would of just dumped and there was no other images that were like this and if you see what makes it so unique is that as right when I took the shot, longer exposure, you can see some of the reflections of the water pools that were there and then there's a wave coming up over within the last five or six seconds that makes it feel kind of eerie and like there's a haze going on between these rocks with the water underneath. So let's go ahead and jump in. We're going to first go through Bridge again as we did before, go through Bridge, then go to Adobe Camera Raw, and then go into Photoshop so I can show you how to push and pull some of these landscape images to make them absolutely brilliant. So here we are in Bridge. This is a landscape shoot that I did in Olympic National Park. What you're going to see is a major difference between a landscape photographer and a portrait photographer is happening right now between this lesson and the last lesson. In this lesson, when you look at these images you see a lot of the exact same shot of the exact same thing. This tree, I shot so many photographs of this tree just to get that one perfect shot that was right. Looking at this waterfall, how many different angles do I need to take of that same waterfall? Now the difference between this and that portrait shoot that I showed in the last lesson was that those kids run around like crazy. You know you get that one shot, that's all you get. Here you take a ton of shots to get that one shot, that's all you get. So, just to start this out, if I was going to go ahead and keyword this out, I would go under places and I would add not to them, going to my places, and add a new sub keyword and that sub keyword would be Olympic National Park and I'd probably even sub keyword that to say Marymere and Sol Duc or I could even go even further and just make it Marymere and then another one that's Sol Duc. So I'm going to go ahead and click all of these images here, shift click and call this Olympic National Park. These are all from Marymere and Sol Duc so I can go ahead and click that one as well. Now they're all tagged with Marymere and Sol Duc. So let's go ahead and look at the film strip view so we can see these. You know, as landscape photographer you take a lot of the same, a lot of shots of the same exact thing making sure that the light is right, your exposure is perfect and you have the time to do that. It's not like a portrait photographer where the portrait photographer you don't always have the time to get, I should say the movement just perfect because this landscape doesn't move, the water moves but the landscape itself kind of just stays the same, so as long as I sit there, as long as I stand there to take those pictures, I can take many different shots of that exact same scene and just wait for the light to change and wait for the light to get better or the light to get worse. What I do on sunsets and sunrises, I show up probably about two hours before the sun is stated to set, I stay until probably about two hours after the sunsets just to get different examples of everything in between. I've been known to even stay in the exact same spot. Once I get that one shot that's dialed in, and it's like a form of insanity too because I'll sit there and every five minutes I'll take a picture of the exact same thing. It's like nothings really changing here man, why do you keep doing this? And then once you get to the very end though then you see all those pictures and how the light has changed over the course of time and then you get to pick the one shot that looks perfect. This isn't a sunset or a sunrise, this is just walking through Olympic National Park but what I really wanted to talk about is this tree. You know, photography, especially when we talk about landscape photography, we have to think about things in the round, we have to think about things in the 360. This tree on the way to the Marymere Falls is absolutely gorgeous. It's one of the most beautiful trees I've ever seen in my entire life. I had about a one hour moment with this tree where I just, I shot the living junk out of this thing. So I shot it from the front. I shot it all around that tree. The thing about this tree is that right here, this is 101. People are driving by just oblivious that this is the most beautiful tree that some Podunk guy form Missouri has ever seen. So I went all the way around that tree. I shot it with a 16 millimeter lens, I shot it with different varying millimeters and then I went down to a 10 millimeter lens to really get as much of this tree as I could get until I got the one shot that was just perfect for me, which the one that I processed is this one right here. And you can see the difference between this. It took all that time for me to walk up to this tree to get that one shot that would just bring the whole thing all together. And this was the one shot from that day, this is the one that I processed of it. So here's the before, here's the after. You can see the difference between some of the cloning that's happened there and everything. So while I'm there, I'm thinking about what's gonna happen and then I do things like this too where sometimes I just do some wild things with my lenses or maybe I was just walking by and I'm telling you that I do some wild things but it was clearly an accident. (laughing) But I'm thinking about the post production of the image while I'm on the scene. I'm looking at the area around it. Here I'm bracketing, I'm bracketing because I want to make sure that I get a good photo. I might not actually do the HDR process on this image but I'm bracketing because I want to make sure I get a good image that I can use afterwards. So let's go ahead and go more over towards Sol Duc. So here's Sol Duc, we'll just go through here and here I'd be going through and calling these images in control one, control two, control three, again the ones I want set up. But typically what I'm doing here with landscape which is a little bit different than the one I do with portrait photography is I'll go through here and sometimes I just see that one where I'm like, yep, that's it, boom. Control three like that. And then one of my favorites was on the way to Sol Duc which is this little stream set of falls that's just absolutely awesome I think. So I'll just go through and we're going to process one of these ones. Let's process, let's do this one. Or let's do one of the side ones that way I can give it away cause this one's one of my portfolio ones. This one, I'll use this one that way you can work along with me. (laughing) So, I'm going to get one that has a good longer exposure on it, like this, right there. That's a little over exposed. How bout that one? SO looking at these two, this one's a little bit over exposed. Looking at this image I can see this one's a little overexposed cause the whites here are kind of blowing out, so I'm going to go with something that's a little bit darker so I'll use this one. And I'm just going to open this up. Landscape processing and how I landscape process and how I portrait process are two very different things. A lot of times I go through and I call these things and I just very seriously look at the image and I say, that's the one. And I don't really need to worry about the rest. I don't delete the rest, I just hold 'em like they're my little precious little things that are mine and only mine. But I will only process one image from that entire thing, of this whole series of shots that you see here. Two of what I would consider portfolio images came out of three to 500 photographs from that one thing. And of those, are they really that great of portfolio images or do I just still have some emotional attachment to them. Sometimes we have to separate ourselves from the emotional attachment and what's actually good. Some of these images, I'm really emotionally attached to. So I'll just go ahead and open this up. And we're going to start in Adobe Camera Raw. I'll always start in Adobe Camera Raw and a lot of times what I'm doing for my landscape work which is a little bit different from my portrait work is I want to get a good quality baseline image. I don't want it to be perfect in Adobe Camera Raw, I want to fix minor blemishes, I want to fix minor problems, I want to straighten horizons. But I'm not trying to make something amazing here. I want to use Photoshop and all that Photoshop entails and gives to me to really exploit this image. So what I'm going to do, is I'm going to start by pressing auto. And auto in Adobe Camera Raw now or Lightroom gives you a really good bad looking HDR image. (laughing) Right but that's what I want to start with. Believe it or not, this is something that I would want to start with going into Photoshop and the reason why is this gives me, if you look at the history it's just a very basic image, there's no really high highlights, there's no really deep shadows. I don't want to make those decisions right now, because I'd rather make those decisions with highlights that I know are highlights, shadows that I know are shadows and mid tones that I know are mid tones. You can say, well you have these sliders here Blake, well you're right, but I can't click on any of them to see where my highlights are and I can't individually go in and add mass to those things to really fine tune that highlight or that mid tone or that shadow. So I actually do appreciate the way this came out pretty well, it looks pretty good. So you know what I'm going to do? First of all I'm going to drop down my saturation and my vibrance and I'm just going to open this up Photoshop. I could open it up as a smart object if I want, press shift and open it up as an object. So if I ever need to go back to this in Adobe Camera Raw I can.