Landscape photos can be spectacular or mediocre, depending on the use of tonality in the image. If you don’t pay attention to the areas of brightness or which colors stand out, you can be at a disadvantage. Understanding luminance and the tools to adjust luminosity can help you improve your images.
Using the brightness of subjects in your landscape photography image is a key component of getting your viewer to focus on what drew your interest to the scene. A viewer's eye is drawn towards the brightest elements in the photograph. In this video, Todd Dominey takes a close look at luminance and tools to adjust luminance in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.
Dominey begins by explaining the difference between brightness and luminance, with the latter being a quantitative value that can be measured. By working with luminance and hues, a photographer can have a highly targeted influence on what objects are bright in a photograph.
Using an example of a rock against a bright sky, Dominey demonstrates options in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to target specific colors in an image to make them brighter. By using targeted adjustments, he can bring the rock to be a more prominent subject in his scene.
Given the importance of directing the viewer's eye via brighter tones, I appreciated Dominey’s comparison of brightness and luminosity and how they differed. His demonstration of adjusting luminosity via multiple tools was quite helpful.
