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Lesson Info

Editing: Atmospheric Mountains

So it's been a dream of mine to photograph this particular mountain peak for quite a long time. And you need really specific conditions to get a moody atmospheric photo, while the peak is still visible, and clouds behind. So we got really lucky to get this scene and be able to capture it in the way that we were, you know, able to, and it is going to be a bit of a interesting edit to get this frame into my style. And additionally, using the telephoto lens, we have had to sacrifice a little bit of quality, again just like the seal. So we'll be trying to bring back some detail in the mountain. We're going to be pushing the dehaze and the clarity to bring back some, you know, extra contrast because it's so far away up in the mountains. But let's look in this edit and try and see what we can do. We're going to bring up the raw file. We can see here on my screen that we have both a landscape and vertical format. As I've done in previous shoots, I like to shoot both vertical and portrait, whe...

re possible, just to keep the options open. You never know which client is going to come up and take an interest in this shot, so having both is great. Looking at the raw here, we've got a long way to go to get it to the final product, but it's always fun to dive into these ones. First thing I'm going to do for this. I'm going to show you the vertical edit for this one. This one is structured specifically for something like posting on Instagram, in an eight by 10 ratio. So bringing the eight by 10, looking at the crops first up, finding a way to crop out these details in the bottom, but of course I'm not that concerned because I can open them in Photoshop, if I need. Thinking something like this. It's going to give us a nice result. Check back to the edit. Wow! Almost identical. There you go. Bring back a tiny bit of top. I'm actually working to just go right beneath the line of the clouds, because otherwise we get some inconsistencies in the sky that I don't want to deal with. Let's start this edit. Going for a darker theme with this one. I think it naturally lends itself to that. It already has the blue hues that we are looking to get. So it's thinking, okay, I want to keep the viewer's attention on the mountain top. And we have this beautiful kind of curved composition here using the clouds in the foreground, the shape of the mountain, so let's try and enhance that and bring that into detail. I'm going to go straight for it. I know it's a big call, but I'm very confident that dehaze and clarity's going to bring back the necessary detail in the shot. It's going to look pretty weird for a moment, but that's okay because we can fix the colors that this makes. See one little dust spot, better than before. Very satisfying, having that clean sensor. Oh, one more. Gone. Okay, now that I've used the dehaze and clarity sliders, I know that the image is now darker, so maybe I'm going to either increase or decrease the exposure again, a few times. I'm now working the tone curve, looking at how the colors and the distinction in contrast is appearing, especially in the clouded area. We don't want this to become too harsh. Going to begin to desaturate the overall image and think a little bit about the highlights because we don't want to blow it up, but I want some impact in this shot, and this is going to be one way to do it. Playing with the tone curve again. This one is again sticking to the histogram. I didn't even, it's so built into my system that I didn't even consider where those points were until now, but really working with the natural shape. This is almost uniform exposure, with of course the bright white and then just like this flat, darker tone. So starting to get this quite dramatic appearance now, and we haven't even moved past the basic sliders yet, so that's a good sign that we're going to end up with something quite cool. Seeing a couple more dust spots. Doing my head in these dust spots. I'm going to move now into the graduated filter and bring down some darkness from the sky, just like that. That has just made such a big difference to this shot, but I want to be careful not to ruin the color of that sky too much, so I'm going to focus on balancing, once I've darkened, going to use the white balance to bring back some of the blue and try to get more of a uniform color and just a nice graduation in exposure down to the mountain peak. Thinking of even just dropping one more in this top section, but it might require even a couple of other filters just to get it to look smooth along the top. We're just going to apply one radial, feather it, of course, invert it, and just drop that exposure down a little bit. We don't want it to be visible though. Just like that. I'm always checking another tip to look at the preview image in the navigator panel. You can actually see quite clearly some of the, some of the selected filters unfold before your eyes more so in that than in the big image. It's kind of interesting. So I'm always going between the two, and of course the before and afters, just to slowly gain an understanding of where this edit's going. I'm noticing the pinks coming through, this magenta hue in the blue, so I'm just bringing the tint back a little bit now. And we're getting, we're getting somewhere with this. Going to move down to the sharpening quickly because I'm slightly worried about the detail in this. Again, I don't think this one is going to be a major, three meter print, but for any computer screen and phone screen, it's going to be perfect. We can at least get that out of this image. It's just those telephoto lenses. Sometimes when you're shooting through the haze just the detail is just naturally lost, but I think we can, we can bring some of it back through this method. Working with the radius, and you'll see that over time, using these sliders, you'll get more and more attuned with them, and they'll become second nature. You'll start to do these without even realizing you're doing them just because you're so focused on, on the image itself and bringing that detail out. So we're getting quite, quite close now actually, but I'm noticing that this area on the top right of the image is still looking a little bit bright, and I know that if I bring another graduated filter down from the top, it's going to create too much of a dark area. And I'm not a big fan of like very evident graduated filters, when you can clearly tell that there's just been a one slid down and there's a clear distinction in exposure. I want it to be really smooth. So I'm going to try a different method of darkening this area, just using another one of these radial filters. I'm sure these methods are coming across kind of strange, but this is just my own way of developing this type of editing strategy. And it works for me, so hope it can work for you too. I'm always looking at the way the color is being affected by these small changes in exposure. So in this case it's almost too blue, so maybe even just a little warmth is going to bring that back. I'm happy there. Very minimal adjustment, this one. One more up here in this slight bright cloud here. Feather, invert feel like story of my life, feather and invert. Yeah, okay. How do we get that to not look clearly evident? Something like that? One thing I'm always on the watch for is if there's too much patchiness in the sky when you upload this online, you get these really strange artifacts in the sky, so the smoother that I can get it the better, really. I think it's something to do with the compression. So basically what you can take out of these filters that I'm using here is just to sculpt the light and really think about, you know, the natural flow. Like it's like the sun is almost coming in from the right hand side in this frame. So you can use that to your advantage and kind of hone in on that structure of the light. As you continue to put more filters, you may have to go back to your basic panel and just kind of tweak it a little more. You'll find some other little artifacts that come up, like I've found another little dust spot. I'm going to try one sneaky tactic here and just apply a brush over the bright area of the mountain's peak, and do a luminance mask on my selection, so if I tap O, I can see where the selection is currently. So if I go range mask, luminance, this is a little pro tip, and then you can actually grab the dropper, select a square over the area you want to effect, then refine using the range slider and the smoothness, and actually create a selective mask over just that one shade of white that you're looking to adjust. It's quite cool. I'm just going to play with this for a second and see, I really don't want it to look overexposed, but I want it to be the correct color, so I'm going to make it a little cooler. Now just one more thing, going to bring a filter up from the bottom and just balance this color. It's slightly affected by the sun down here, so we're getting a little bit of this yellow tinge. Just going to brighten it a little bit, see how that affects it. It's giving me this nice flow of exposure from the bottom to the top. I'm a big fan of just creating this kind of spread of light across images. It also really enhances that kind of minimalistic feel of a scene, really liking where this is going now. Just balancing the color a little bit. I'm always on these same kind of sliders. You see them over and over again in my edits. They're just so useful for these small fluctuations. Now I'm just going to go down to the HSL, have a quick play around. I'm kind of liking just a tiny, tiny tinge of this greeny blue in this one. It's giving this kind of warmth to such a cold scene. Going to desaturate a little bit and just see how it looks. It's looking quite nice. Slight desaturation. Luminance is already heavily affected by the dehaze and the clarity, so I don't need too much on that, but it'll also create some more artifacts in the sky that I don't want to deal with, so I'm not really going to touch this too much. Going to just go back up, check a few things, see how they appear now, but we're getting pretty close to the final result. I'm going to go command E, open in Photoshop to get rid of these little corners. Of course we could try the clone stamp, but for the sake of teaching you guys something cool, just going to show you an alternative method of getting that. We're in! All right, back to business. Got the patch tool here. And there's various methods to do this. The patch tool is a super fast one. It's not so accurate, but I know it's going to work in this case. I'm just going to scan over like this, make a circle selection around the area I want to replace, let it load and then drag over to the white and select the source, a new area that I want to replace that darkened section with. And boom, done. One click. Again on this side, just remove this distraction. Boom, done, click. All right. Am I good to go back to Lightroom? Command S, simply just saving the shot, and it's going to take me straight back in. Here we have it. I've noticed one more thing before I finish up with this image in that the sky has this small band of black at the top. I'm just going to see if I can brighten it a tiny bit and then bring an overall darken to the sky again, just to compensate. It's so subtle. It can be really hard to tell what you're even changing sometimes. Now, keep in mind, once you bring the Photoshop image back into Lightroom, you are now editing a TIF file, and you lose some of the flexibility of editing a raw photo, but because we've done most of our color manipulations already, we don't really have anything left to do that requires the raw. So now I'm just going to add a final little piece of fade to the image, little bit of extra contrast, and of course, once this is then put into my grid format, in my plans, compared against other images, maybe I'll come back in and make some minor changes, just a few tweaks to finish up, but overall here we have a really dark and moody scene of somewhere that I've dreamt to shoot for a long time. Finally got the shot, put that kind of blue tweak edit that I love to do on it. And it's ready to go for the internet.