Thomas Heaton is a travel and landscape photographer based in Northeast England. The photographer took to his YouTube channel with an audience of over 300,000 subscribers to share a tutorial on how to improve your landscape photography using Lightroom.
Heaton dives right into Lightroom editing his first photo of the video – one of his own photos of some snow-capped mountains in Scotland. The image looks gorgeous, but Heaton decides to bring down the highlights a bit in the clouds to show off the sunrise. He starts out by applying a graduated filter but notices one portion of the sky is still much brighter than the other.
To combat this, he goes into the Range Mask tool in the graduated filter toolbar and activates the Luminance Mask. There, he is able to target only the brightest parts of the image and get a more even tone across the sky. He is also able to seamlessly blend the darks and lights of the sky to get a more natural look by increasing the amount of Smoothness across the mask.
Did you know about the Range Mask and Luminance Masking tool? Do you use this tool in your general editing workflow? Do you have additional tips that could help landscape photographers who may be tackling similar images? Sound off in the comments below!
I've never used it. Nice tip!
12 min vid that could have been 2min.
It's a nice tool though.
I think it must be a Youtube requirement: drone on for at least 2 minutes before getting to the actual point. But, yeah, he's right: this is a new one. Nice tip.
yarp. i always hear good stuff about what comes out of Heaton's mouth but after 2 minutes in, i always want to punch myself in the face because he tends to take tangents a minute or two longer than need be. it's painful. (light scots) "i want to tell you about this tool in lightroom, but let me begin by telling you how i shot this photo... we got up at 7 am and loaded up the van...[10 minutes later]... so, this was beautiful, that was gorgeous, everything so amazing, except my photo just had these little details.. i tried this and this didnt really work, so i tried that and that didnt really work well either, so then i did this... [FINALLY]"
but i didnt have to watch since i'd learned this previously from someone who was able to get to the point quickly and concisely.
For those who just want to see how the tool works and don't need a 12 minute video and would prefer a 60-second condensed version: you're welcome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4RJLI-2rAQ
Nothing against Heaton or anything, but not everyone wants to sit through that.
LOL!