Landscape photography often calls for highlighting details like clouds, rocks, and foliage to give your photos depth and character. With a few targeted adjustments, you can make those textures and contrasts stand out naturally.
Coming to you from Christian Möhrle - The Phlog Photography, this insightful video dives into methods for enhancing details in Lightroom. It starts with basic adjustments, focusing on settings like profile, white balance, and exposure to create a solid foundation. Möhrle begins by changing the profile to a low-contrast option, allowing for more control over the image. This may seem counterintuitive, as lower contrast might initially reduce detail, but the flexibility it offers makes it worthwhile. The next adjustment is warming up the white balance to match the natural golden tones of the scene, followed by lowering highlights to reveal more detail in bright areas. These foundational tweaks make a noticeable difference, especially in landscape shots where subtle shifts can bring out textures in skies, water, or foliage.
Möhrle then shifts to more nuanced techniques with masking tools, which are essential for landscape shots with varied areas of interest. He shows how a sky mask can be used to target the clouds specifically, allowing for individual adjustments to contrast, dehaze, and clarity sliders. This technique is powerful for separating sky details from the rest of the image without affecting the foreground, which can otherwise become overly cluttered. This focused approach to enhancing just the sky reveals cloud structures that might otherwise go unnoticed, giving the scene a dramatic flair without overwhelming the viewer.
After masking, Möhrle introduces the value of using multiple gradients to build up detail step-by-step. He applies a series of linear gradients to enhance specific parts of the sky, adjusting contrast and clarity with each gradient to make clouds stand out more dynamically. This layered approach gives you a lot of control over contrast and sharpness, creating a rich depth that’s especially effective in emphasizing textures. While a single adjustment may feel insufficient, stacking these layers gradually enhances the effect, building a realistic, almost three-dimensional quality to the photo. It’s a reminder that taking time to carefully build up adjustments can result in a polished, professional look.
For those interested in going beyond Lightroom, Möhrle also explores third-party plugins and Photoshop for additional enhancements. Using the Nik Collection plugin, he demonstrates how to extract even more detail, particularly with the Detail Extractor effect. This step is optional but adds a final level of refinement, especially for photographers aiming for gallery-quality prints. Finally, Möhrle uses Photoshop to clean up distractions in the foreground, removing stray elements like sensor spots, shadows, and even trees that detract from the main focus of the scene. These finishing touches can make a significant difference, leaving an image that’s not only detailed but also free of visual clutter. 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!”
The shot of the tree would have been stronger if the right side of the image had been cropped to avoid having the tree centered. The "bullseye" composition was static and didn't encourage eye movement to make the image create a more dynamic photographic composition.