Lessons

Lesson Info

Color, Working with Sky & Clouds and Matching Exposures

Another place that I go to a lot is the camera calibration panel if you will go into her, you're going to see there's a section called profile so inside your camera you got these picture styles landscape portrait it kind of boost your contrast whose thoughts up when you shooting raw white room and photoshopped strip all that stuff away so you can get it back under these profiles so I like the landscape profile see, it just gives me a little bit more contrast a little bit color boost its just a little bit of a better starting place alright come back up here to basic overall exposure I think we're pretty good on exposure highlights I don't have any brakes highlights that I have to I don't want to pull the water back anymore I actually like the water to be bright I could even make the water brighter if you wanted to ah shadows will open that up a lot of detail in the shadows here whites and blacks option are all click get our white and black point boost the saturation a little bit and I w...

ant to make it warmer zoom in good down here to detail it's just that the toggle switch you can see before and after just on the sharpening alright and then uh see here you guys guessed it actually going to do a little bit different this time so normally I would go over here and add the thin yet so what's the problem with the vignette is that it always assumes your center point of focus what you want people look at in the center of your photo so in some of the other photos it works fine but in this photo id to me this is a big focus over here so we've seen the grad filter but there's also one right next to a call the radio filter radio filter works just like the grad filter does except that works in a circle I'm gonna turn on the radio filter bring my exposure negative like I work for the graduated filter and then click and drag see that it's like putting a spotlight on something and then you can control it you can even control the feather so I can make it hard or soft er and then the last thing here is I like I like drawing attention to that part of the photo uh the other thing though is to me there's a lot of interest up front too and I want to bring that out so I'm gonna go to my grand filter and I'm going to use it in a way that it's you know it's nothing to do with the sky but this time I'm going to bring the exposure up and just drag from down here giving maybe open up the shadows a little bit more so that we can start the balance aiken kind of direct your eye to these different parts of the photo that's before that's after okay, so well just so you know before or after but that's here before image and that's you and by the way little tip for you if you press f goes into full screen movie just press f for full screen and then you compress f again and take you out but that's your before and afters yeah do you ever use multiple graduated filters on the same image uh great questions so can you use multiple graduated filters on the same thing? Absolutely. I wonder if I have I wouldn't normally I don't normally use it for for something like this I use it in two there's there's two places where I would do it one would be clouds another one would be like if you just want a grungy scene I wonder if I I should have an example here because I want to show you that one here uh adjustments let's see oh, crap. I'm not gonna have my example anyway. Okay? We'll come back to it but um yes is the answer yes, you can use multiple grand filters have an example coming up where I start to stack things on each other so I'll show you that in a second but you don't work create if you got like, a really grungy scene especially you downtown like walking around and you have some of that some of the great things that'll work out great and the way you do it is you literally just, you know, drag, click new drag again, click new drag again and keep dragging him on top of each other different angles, you know you can use them at different angles. Absolutely, yeah, I could have brought one in from the side too on the when you're doing the circle, what the radios are you clicking, anything that's holding it, particularly because I seem to sort of get like, weird shapes when I'm using it. You get weird shapes when you use the radio filter, so click and drag yeah, yeah, if you hold down shift, it makes it a circle if you don't hold down shift, you could make it whatever shape you want and what's cool about it too is you might have a photo with, like something off at an angle. Leo let's say let's say I had something like this, you can actually move your cursor outside and you can start to rotate it two if you hold downshift, it'll make it a perfect circle. All right, so before we go on, I won't talk to you a little bit about some of the pre capture stuff, because I think with landscape photography a lot of it is knowing what's available to you after I think some of this stuff's important um number one I bracket everything okay brackett everything when I say bracket exposure bracketing where I'm taking really dark kind of dark metered whatever the camera would have chosen kind of write really bright so and then sometimes only take three somebody really dark middle super brain usually that's good enough my bracket everything here's why brockett everything because I don't want to think about technical stuff what about in the field do I know do I know meeting can figure all that stuff out kind of look at my camera can figure out the shadows kind of figure out the highlights look at the history graham kind look at the colors that are clipping absolutely so I want to when I'm out there and the sunrise is happening in front of me and I want to move around and get some different compositions and concentrate really on what I think the most important part is which is getting your camera in front of a great looking place I don't want to concentrate on that stuff I get my camera in front of great great looking place I want to concentrate on taking photos of it so I bracket everything and what that allows me to do is I got my cable release guys set the camera down, I concentrate on composition get the right composition I set my camera down it's on bracketing hit my cable released once it fires off three or five or however many photos I tell it too and you know what I'm able to do after that I'm able to pick the camera up and walk somewhere else I never have to look at that tiny little screen while this beautiful sunrises happening in front of me because I know that one of those photos is it one of those photos captured everything that I need and if one did it than a combination of them will but I know that I got the shot I don't have to look at a history graham I don't have to look at rgb values and what colors air clipping and highlight warnings and all that stuff just concentrate on getting the shot so you're going to see like what you'll see is a ton like if you look through my grid you'll see a ton of photos that looked like this back I could show you under my live right here look, I did three's dark middle bright so that's that's what my great looks like one neat things though is inside a light room because a lot of times and especially when it comes to the longer exposures from photographing water all those shutter speed work in my favor right? If as I bracket and I'm on aperture priority I decide I want to shoot this scene at f sixteen online aperture priority when I bracket what happens my center speed's going to change for each one one of things that I can do is if I'm photographing water it looks great because now we get different patterns of water but the problem is if you ever bracketed this is what your great looks like write all these dark too bright photos check this out if I take one photo and let's say I go and maybe boost the exposure like you know I boost the exposure and I say okay, this photos it like that's the right exposure but now I have several other versions with maybe different water patterns if I select each one down here and then I go up to the settings menu maybe yes. Um see this thing called match total exposures watch what happens here I got it. I got duty because you gotta watch it so I've chosen one photo but then I went down here and selected the other ones but the middle one is the one I chosen that's what its basing it off settings match total exposure see that so it went through and it balanced the other photos to match it don't ask me how question what's the difference then between the match the total exposure versus sinking because I see it sort of under the thinking kind of question what's the difference between match total exposures and sinking sinking ok, if I crank this one upto plus one fifteen and I select all these photos and I click sink and I tell it to sink the exposure it's going to sink a mall plus one fifteen but that's not gonna be enough this is balancing the exposure's across so neat little tool um, one other thing that you should know about as a landscape photographer is you have a crap load of highlight recovery in like, okay, I'm boatload of example, I'm out of this great place, great fall color, all cool stuff, I don't have an indy filter and there's this creek, and so what I get is kind of choppy frozen ish water, which when you're photographing water, we tend to want we want to capture the movement, so I get this thiss frozen choppy water, I don't have an indy filter, which I could have put on to extend the shutter speed to slow, so what I did is I over exposed it and look at how much highlight recovery you have and that look at the water I'm able to bring all that down. So should you decide one day that you forget your andy filter over exposed the crap out of your photo and I get a lot of questions from people that will say, you know, it was raw jay paid better and all this you know, this is this is wrong that's why it's gonna work? If it was a j peg, I wouldn't be able to have regained all that because it's wrong? Because it's got a lot of information I can regain. So now the only thing I would say also because the raw j peg debate um, if you left the scene with your photo like this, you've got way, way more things to worry about the raj. Okay, I did it on purpose, but don't you don't ever wanna overexpose and wow, that looks good on you. Walk away, so but there, yet there's got there's a ton of recovery detail in the sky and anything with with, like room. Okay, so let's, go back here, it's talk about replacing a sky first off. Oh, god question you sit up, tio. So when you're like let's say you had to do that and you forgot everything at home, would you at that point, check your history and to make sure like you're not clipping anything? Or is that something that you just kind of knew you could d'oh so if I realized I forgot my nd filter and I was going over, expose what I checked the history, graham I probably just if it was that important of a shock to me if I thought it was that pretty of a shot and I forgot one, I'd probably just keep stepping up you know? I take over exposed by a stop and then two stops and it's free, right? I just keep stepping up three, four, five stops and that way when I got back home I could figure it out and then that's you know when I said I bracket everything guys that's how I figure out what I want to do is I'll go you'll just as you do it more you'll start you'll start to get more of ah taste for it. But here here is my buddy chris warwick, one of the instructors for photoshopped weak but as you look through like I'll bounce the exposure slider back and forth, you know, like when I get to this photo, I realize you still get a ton of recovery from but eventually you're going to get to that point where it's like I can't really recovery. But it's it's a lot of this trial and error first I look at the photo all bounced the exposure backo crank it up, I don't see which one gives me the highlights and gives me the shadows all right, make sure you say hi to chris and tell my nephew scene later this week and tell my show this photo you don't want to believe where he went out to god. We didn't think he was going to be able to get back because he climbed across all these rocks. And then the tide came in, and it wasn't stuff like it was not stopping. It was about ten minutes at the citizens that there and wait for wave after wave before an open back up. So tease him about that one, too.