Adjusting light and shadows skillfully is one of the most impactful ways to elevate your landscape photography. Mastering this allows you to guide attention, build mood, and create genuinely captivating images.
Coming to you from Christian Möhrle - The Phlog Photography, this informative video walks you step by step through transforming a raw landscape image into something striking. Möhrle starts by carefully adjusting exposure and contrast levels, emphasizing the importance of initially reducing contrast to gain control. Through straightforward adjustments like boosting blacks to recover shadow details and carefully managing highlights to keep the sky’s detail intact, Möhrle ensures you set up a solid base image. He stresses the value of working systematically, building complexity from basic corrections toward detailed masking, enabling selective manipulation of your image.
Using Lightroom’s masking tools, Möhrle demonstrates how targeting specific color and tonal ranges dramatically enhances the scene. For instance, he skillfully applies a color range mask intersected with a sky selection to deepen the blue sky, adding noticeable drama. He moves deliberately through various masks, meticulously selecting mountain peaks to make them more distinct without affecting surrounding areas. His detailed breakdown of each masking technique clarifies how targeted adjustments lead to a refined, professional look without complicating your workflow.
Möhrle’s detailed yet accessible teaching reveals insights about balancing the nuances of shadow and light, an aspect many overlook. One notable technique involves creating a subtle yet effective separation layer between foreground and background using clouds or fog—an approach you might overlook without thoughtful guidance. By selectively enhancing highlights on illuminated hills and darkening shadowed areas on the image's left side, Möhrle teaches you how strategic contrast enhances visual depth. His advice on maintaining a natural feel while amplifying dramatic effect through careful adjustment of exposure and clarity ensures your final edit remains realistic.
In addition to Lightroom techniques, Möhrle provides valuable guidance for fine-tuning the image in Photoshop. He demonstrates practical ways to clean up sensor spots, remove distracting elements, and refine the image through straightforward dodging and burning techniques. His method for enhancing foreground highlights using adjustment layers and gradients showcases efficient yet highly impactful Photoshop practices, proving that significant improvements don't require overly complicated edits. Möhrle also explains how a carefully applied Orton effect adds subtle glow without overwhelming detail. 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!”
