Skip to main content

Things Landscape Photographers Stress Too Much Over

Lesson 4 from: Photoshop and Lightroom for Landscape Photographers

Matt Kloskowski

Things Landscape Photographers Stress Too Much Over

Lesson 4 from: Photoshop and Lightroom for Landscape Photographers

Matt Kloskowski

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

4. Things Landscape Photographers Stress Too Much Over

Lesson Info

Things Landscape Photographers Stress Too Much Over

We're gonna kick off with our second segment here. A couple of things that I'm gonna do during this segment, we are, we're gonna spend a couple of minutes on this slide because we kind of talked a little bit about this one. But from there we're gonna jump into some more workflows. So we've seen a lot of the basic stuff, you know, how to edit our photos, you've seen the graduated filter and the brushes and all that stuff. What I wanna get into next is things as a landscape photographer that we're gonna run into over and over again. Times where maybe we have to layer one photo on top of another, somebody asked the question did you earlier where, you know, when he opens up the shadows it gets too noisy, well that means you're gonna have to take two photos in that situation. So how do we start to layer these things together? We're gonna talk a little bit about waterfall workflows, beaches, panoramas, and I'll kind of give you a preview when we come back from lunch time, I have a whole clas...

s on the sky. So it's all about the sky. The sky is probably one of the most important parts of the photo for a landscape photographer. So I put a whole class together for it, with replacing, even all the way to replacing the sky, which if you're opposed to it then you have to leave. It's 'cause it's a secret witchcraft and we have secret handshakes, so. Anyways, all right, so things we stress over too much. These are, these are things that just, you know, I get out there and I see probably one of the most beneficial things that I get to do during the year, I teach, I teach several photography workshops. So I do a couple private workshops back in Tampa where people will fly in just for small three or four person groups. And then I usually go out, I try to get out two or three times a year to do like a 20, 25 person workshop with some friends of mine where we take a group out to a cool location. I got to say, like, every time I do one of these, it is the most enlightening experience as somebody teaching because you get to really hear the questions. 'Cause these are, these are, you know, people getting out there and when you see them get it, it's a great feeling but you also get to see the sticky points. So when I see somebody struggling with composition, that's a sticky point we're going to spend a lot of time on because I want them to get that. When I see somebody struggling with ISO, that's a sticky point we're not gonna spend a lot of time on because I don't want you to worry about noise, okay. I don't want you to, when it comes to landscape photography, 97% of the time we're on a tripod, all right. We're on a tripod and 90% of the time, we don't care what the shutter speed is, okay. We don't care, so we're on a tripod and we don't care what the shutter speed is, at that point you're gonna put your ISO on whatever the lowest setting your camera will allow you to put it on and you have to worry about noise reduction. It's, I mean, it's that simple. You're on a tripod, you're not worried about shutter speed, you're not having to crank up your ISO to get a faster shutter speed or anything like that, so we don't have to worry about ISO. Over by far, the biggest question is always noise reduction, and it's just interesting coming from a landscape photographer because most of the time we shouldn't be shooting at these higher ISO's. And it's great to be a landscape photographer because you really get to have some of the cheapest gear out there and I know you don't feel that way because I know that you've probably got a closet full of 50 dollar bags in search of that perfect bag, right? You're always looking for that perfect bag and you think you found it, and you tell all your friends, I found the perfect bag, until the next perfect bag comes along. But you really do, when it comes to your camera, the only thing you want a bigger, better, badder, faster camera for is a bigger print size. 'Cause that's only, that's all it's gonna do for you. Right, I don't need to shoot at 128 thousand ISO, indoors to freeze a basketball player or something like that 'cause I'm not a sports photographer. If you do that as well then you might have to get one of those camera's. But as a landscape photographer, you could really go with a lower end type of a camera 'cause you don't need a lot of those feature. You don't need fast frames per second, which is a lot of the bigger camera's offer. So noise, forget about noise. I'll show you noise reduction later on, I'll show you how we do handle it if you ever do. What are, the common question to follow that up is what are the some things that we do need to raise the ISO for? If I'm standing in front of a scene and there's maybe, maybe I'm using a flower or some wildflowers as a foreground. It's a little bit windy. That's a time here I might have to raise my ISO. 'Cause at a lower ISO, the longer the shutter speed, the more time I'm giving the wind to move those flowers, then I might start to crank it up a little bit. Sharpening, sharpening's the other thing. So we talked about that a little bit before. Don't stress out on sharpening too much. Don't, don't create a workflow within a workflow of sharpening. Like, oh, I've got a sharpening work flow, you don't need a sharpening workflow. Again, you're a landscape photographer, 97% of the time you want everything sharp from front to back, okay. And if you don't want everything sharp from front to back, then maybe you want the foreground focused, you can still crank up your sharpening settings and you'll see here, I'll show you later on inside Allegram how we can remove the sharpening from those areas. But don't stress out on sharpening. Really, really simple for landscape photographers, we don't have, we don't have skin or things to grade. I know you're, you're like half portrait, half landscape photographer so you have to worry about skin a little bit but again, some of the things we can show you later will help out with that. And then the other one, is highlights in the sun. So, the sun is white. It's gonna be white no matter what you do to the photo. So when you're standing there and you're taking a picture and you see the little blinkies on the back of the camera and, and this actually happens, someone calls me over to their camera at a workshop and says, Matt, I got the blinkies, it's blinking, I can't get it to go away, and I look at it and it's the sun. It's white, it's not gonna have any detail to it so, don't stress out about that part, and the reason why I say that in the midst of this class is when it comes to post processing, we're not gonna stress out about it either. We're gonna let the sun be white.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Lightroom Presets
CreativeLive Sky Pack

Ratings and Reviews

Barry Walsh
 

Great class Matt! I am about two-thirds the way through the class and have learned a lot about Lightroom and the objective of this course. I must admit I was over-whelmed by the amount of material covered and that was probably due to not having prior knowledge about Lightroom. I have since signed up for the 7 day trial of Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan and then went through their "beginner's" tutorial. If you are contemplating taking this course, I would highly recommend taking the Adobe Lightroom tutorials first. They cleared up a lot of confusion on my part and I now have a better understanding of the concepts Matt covered. I'm actually going to go back and retake what I viewed to help reinforce both what Matt initially covered and the basic concepts tutorials offered by Adobe. Again, great job Matt and thanks for all the useful information!

a Creativelive Student
 

Matt is the best and he his the same in person. I had the fortunate opportunity to run into Matt on the side of the road at Dallas Divide in Colorado a couple of years ago.... he is the real deal. I have learned almost all my LR post processing from him when he was with Kelby and have continued to follow him over to On1 as he is the best teacher out there when it comes to Post. Great class and bring him back again. Another great CL class ....... bravo!........ Johnny Boyd @ natureimaging.com

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES