Creating dramatic lighting in landscape photography often involves taking risks with exposure. Allowing highlights to clip intentionally, for example, can dramatically alter the mood and visual interest of your images.
Coming to you from Christian Möhrle - The Phlog Photography, this practical video walks you through how to creatively use clipping in Lightroom Classic. Instead of the traditional HDR approach, Möhrle deliberately pushes the exposure, creating a striking light burst behind the subject. While this initially causes heavy clipping, it strategically accentuates the foggy atmosphere, enhancing the image's emotional impact. Möhrle emphasizes gently balancing shadows and blacks to maintain contrast, rather than recovering all clipped highlights.
What makes this tutorial especially valuable is Möhrle’s nuanced approach to textures and tones. He manipulates clarity and dehaze sliders minimally, creating a subtle glow effect that complements the scene’s foggy setting. Vibrance and saturation adjustments bring warmth to the overall image, counterbalanced with slight temperature tweaks to avoid unnatural color casts. Notably, Möhrle demonstrates a thoughtful use of masking techniques, selectively adjusting the foreground and road to produce depth and dimensionality. He even carefully tweaks temperature and saturation for specific masks to refine the color balance, illustrating how minor changes significantly influence the image’s realism.
Throughout the editing process, Möhrle maintains attention to detail. He carefully manages radial and linear gradients to emphasize areas like the clipped highlights, adding subtle yet impactful glow effects. His precise handling of color grading through Lightroom’s Color Mixer panel shifts hues gently, enriching warm tones while toning down overpowering blues. The video highlights a thoughtful use of split toning, applying warmer tones to highlights and midtones and cooler tones to shadows, achieving pleasing color contrast. This color work, combined with calibration adjustments, enhances the image's natural look, avoiding exaggerated results.
One particularly insightful segment addresses image sharpening and sensor spot removal. Möhrle demonstrates an effective sharpening approach, emphasizing the importance of masking to limit sharpening to essential areas, ensuring crisp details without unwanted noise. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.
And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, "Photographing the World: Japan II - Discovering Hidden Gems with Elia Locardi!”
