HDR for Landscape Photography
Matt Kloskowski
Lessons
Course Introduction
08:52 25 Things Every Landscape Photographer Should Know
23:32 3Camera Gear
11:26 4Gear Q & A
33:04 5On Location: Weather & Safety
18:55 6On Location Pre-Visualzation Sutro Baths
07:29 7On Location: Camera Settings
21:59 8On Location: Composition
27:09Matt Klowskowski - My Story
06:28 10On Location: Bracketing
15:15 11On Location: Artistic Choices
16:12 12On Location: Pre-Visualzation Marshall's Beach
06:09 13On Location: Long Exposure
15:05 14On Location: iPhone
17:31 15On Location: Wrap Location
02:15 16Location Challenges: How to Shoot in Open Sun with No Clouds
01:52 17Location Challenges: How to shoot Cloudy, Stormy, & Blah Weather
01:50 18Location Challenges: How to shoot Beaches
01:27 19Location Challenges: How to shoot Waterfalls
01:40 20Location Challenges: How to shoot Panorama Vista Scenes
01:38 21Location Challenges: How to shoot Lakes
02:11 22Location Challenges: How to shoot Mountains
02:24 23Location Challenges: How to shoot Deserts
01:29 24Location Challenges: How to shoot City Skylines
01:44 25Location Challenges: How to shoot Snow
02:53 26Location Challenges: How to shoot Backlit Situations
06:56 27Outdoor Landscape Workflow & Organization
31:38 28Basic Editing in Lightroom: Part 1
44:17 29Basic Editing in Lightroom: Part 2
26:52 30Lightroom and Photoshop: Intermediate Techniques Pt. 1
30:35 31Lightroom and Photoshop: Intermediate Techniques Pt. 2
12:31 32HDR for Landscape Photography
07:54 33Panoramas for Landscape Photography
18:14 34How to shoot Landscape with Adobe Photoshop in Mind
21:14 35Sky Replacement in Photoshop
18:48 36Processing Project: Stormy Mountains
09:12 37Processing Project: Crashing Waves on the Rocks
10:01 38Processing Student Raw Images
41:03 39Final Q&A
14:17Lesson Info
HDR for Landscape Photography
All right. Let's take a quick look at HDR. And I think... I think one of the ones that we saw yesterday actually make a good case for HDR. Remember, that was our dark one. We talked about bracketing in the landscape part of this yesterday. That was our dark one, that was our middle, and that was our bright photo. K. This is a perfect case because I got all my sky. That's my middle of the road version and then here's my bright version where I have all the foreground and it's fairly noiseless. Remember how noisy the dark version was. This is a good candidate for HDR. Even though one of these exposures we could probably tweak and do what we want, you still get a lot more information in leeway if you wanna do the HDR merge. So, we'll go over here up to the photo menu, go down here to photo merge and you'll see HDR as an option. Lot of people, if you go over here to edit in, you'll see see merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop, so that's the old way to do it. Photoshop has HDR merge inside of it. T...
hat's the old, old way to do it. The new way inside of Lightroom, keep things simple, is just merge to HDR. It's pretty cool, it happens very, very fast considering how long HDR merging used to take. So, not bad. There's couple options here. Auto tone, auto align. I always turn on auto align cause if there is any shift in the versions it'll align 'em for ya. And auto tone, I'll show you what it does in a second. It will auto tone this but it's not making any changes that I can't reverse later if I want. So I'll hit merge. And what it's doing is it's actually creating a brand new file for us that is a DNG, it's basically, it's pretty darn close to a RAW file. S you're getting a whole new image that you can do a ton of things to. If we look over here under the toning section in the basic panel, so we've seen this before, you could see. See what's it's done? It's made some toning adjustments for me. K. That's what auto tone did, I can undo all those changes if I want. So we have our auto tone. If I zoom in. Remember this? Remember how we trashed this on the darker version of the photo so it looks really clean now. Let's see here, so what kinds of things do we wanna do to finish this... I mean the sun looks great. You even kinda caught the rays from the darker version but brought in all the highlights too. What kind of things do we wanna do to this? I think first off, I kinda wanna warm it, just a little bit. Let's see here. Loading up the crop tool. Just rotate it around just a bit. Blacks and whites. Little bit of clarity. Saturation's tough on this one. Cause I mean the sun goes... See, the sun goes radioactive almost immediately. Gotta be careful with that. We'll try HSL. I'll go to my blue saturation. See if I can pump a little bit more into the blues. Maybe even the aquas. And then the luminance is gonna go... That could make it brighter or darker. Detail. Again, I usually zoom in on what's important to me. It's gonna be whatever's up close. Crank up my sharping. And this one's really bugging me. See the edge vignette? There we go. I can check that, it'd be an interesting one to check the chromatic aberration, oh yeah. This is a great example. See that fringe? So we got that. I'll save my vignette for last. I probably wanna work on the sky a little bit. I'm gonna go jump over to the presets. I got my grad filter. Sky presets, I'm thinking one stop... Oh, you know what? Part of the presets I got blue sky, light and strong. I'm gonna go blue sky, light. Yes. That's the one. Just so you guys, again, I promised I would show it in the preset. You can buy 'em mattkphoto.com, but here's the ingredients. Negative exposure, I opened up the shadows and then where I got the blue from was I took the temperature slider and I moved it over to the left a little bit. That's where you can kinda boost the blue a little bit. All right, so we got that and then probably just move it up. Oh, you know what else, I almost missed a spot. Hold on. The other thing is is color. You can actually add a color tint to those areas too. I used just kinda a light blue. Just to show you what the difference would be if I used yellow. See what it does? And it maybe be a little too blue so I'm gonna back off a bit. Looking pretty good. Oh! How can we forget a vignette. There we go. So let's take a look here. That's before. After. Well, it's hard to do before and after cause we had three, or four photos but you get the idea. Question? When you merge three photos, does it triple the size of the HDR file? Let's check. When I merge three photos, does it triple the size of the HDR. I'm gonna say no but I could be wrong. (chuckles) Yes! (laughs) So that photo is now 81 megabytes where the photos that made it up were 26. 25, 25, 25. Yes. Thank you. I should of just shut my mouth. I should of made it seem like, "Oh yeah, let's go look. I'll just show ya." All right, so that's our HDR.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
Christian Ruvolo
Mat Kloskowski class is really amazing, full of very useful tipps and inspiration. Wonderful pictures by him help to understand the explanations an I am learning A LOT from him!!! Thank you for the class!!! TOP!!!!
Louie
I love Matt's teaching style, humor, honesty, friendliness. I love On1 and all the other demos and critiques he does. He makes me enjoy the craft/art of photography much more and is a great inspiration.
a Creativelive Student
This class was for beginners and I believe Matt did a great job of giving students an great introduction to landscape photography. More on the practical than technical side, but that seems appropriate for an intro class. He comes across as a "real" guy who loves what he does and is eager to share his knowledge. Those new to photography will get a lot of helpful information and tips in this course.