Editing a landscape image is not just about enhancing the picture, but about bringing out its full potential. This fantastic video tutorial will show you how to do just that using Lightroom.
Coming to you from Christian Möhrle - The Phlog Photography, this informative video breaks down the steps to transform a raw winter scene into a radiant and polished image using Lightroom and a bit of Photoshop. Möhrle begins by selecting five images and merging them into an HDR file in Lightroom to manage the wide range of tones present in the high-contrast winter scene. He emphasizes the importance of selecting the “Auto align” option during the merge to ensure everything lines up correctly. Once the HDR file is ready, Möhrle adjusts the basic settings, switching to the Adobe Standard profile to neutralize the image. By increasing the exposure, lowering the highlights, and raising the shadows and blacks, he enhances the image's details and begins to create a soft, glowing effect.
Next, Möhrle addresses the white balance to give the scene a warmer feel. Adjusting the temperature slider adds a golden hue to the sky, which contributes to the overall glow of the image. Enhancing the texture and clarity, while reducing the dehaze, further refines this effect, making the image appear more ethereal, his initial aim.
The video continues with advanced masking techniques to enhance specific areas. Möhrle uses color range masks and linear gradients to darken the sky and add contrast, ensuring the glowing effect remains pronounced. He then uses radial gradients to sharpen details in the foreground and adjust the sky's warmth and saturation. This precise masking helps in selectively enhancing parts of the image without affecting the overall balance.
Möhrle then moves to Photoshop for final touches. He corrects the image’s perspective using the warp tool and cleans up unwanted spots with the spot healing brush. To add more glow, he creates new layers, changes blending modes, and uses a soft brush to paint subtle light effects, enhancing the dreamy atmosphere. Lastly, Möhrle applies a luminosity mask to dodge (lighten) the foreground selectively, bringing out details without overexposing the image.
The final result is a beautiful landscape that looks both warm and vibrant, despite the snowy setting. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.
This edit is good, but there are things to do first or things that can be done if one likes it do to first.
When comes to dark images it is great to do Bracketing say at 5 at +/- 2ev you will get a very dark image and a very bright image and transitions between. The one thing that Lr does not give is the ability to select the center image and the settings image, were ON1 Photo Raw or Nik collections Nik HDR Efex that Dxo has, picking a center image and seeing how it give a different start is helpful.
Other options are to highlight all images and pick a center image and then goto develop mode and any adjustment will also happen to the others.
One thing to do is first is to select in profile the 4 little blocks and then pick the color profile of your camera not the Lr profile, these profiles are the profiles you would select if taking a jpeg but able to select for your raw image but are the best guess by Lr of what they would be - some great color profilers worked hard to get these right- Example whenever I do milky ways I select portrait for you get great sand color and the yin and yang colors. Just for info color profiles do not show in raw images!
The next is to select the lens profile and enable profile correction (most all post processing programs have the lens profile) also select Remove Chromatic Aberrations (this could be colors along an items edge, very hard to remove manually).
This last is for color picking but it will not affect the other images to a final image so do not be alarmed. In the final image you can color pick with the picker- there are many videos on how to use but if you have white spot or like in this video snow hover over and look over to navigator window upper left and see the image color change in the whole image but normally the whitest will give the best colors in this case for the image is to rid the blue tint of the white snow without increasing exposure slider.
Lastly the Lr denoise option will not work on the final image if you want to denoise the image you will have to use an external denoise app. But you can run each image through when you have all highlighted and run the Lr denoise app and get all 5 images denoised before processing in the HDR section, a little step few know about, it is like if you use a raw images on Dxo Raw or Topaz Denoise before editing in Lr, most times doing a Denoise of a RAW image you well not get white Chromatic lines along like tree limbs at the start when going 100x or 200x.
Final thoughts are yes this is snow but most boats have white hauls and if at sunrise/set they will have a blue tint due to being on the shadow side as well colors will be dim sort of and doing the bracketing will be of great help in the whiting of all things whereas increasing exposure may lessen the effect of the sunset colors being too bright of all things. If your camera has IBIS you should be able to do 3 at +/- 2EV and some using also a lens with OSS/IS 5 at +/- 2ev both handheld.
1. instead of a silhouettes you get the dark side bright. sharp and in focus also a very small sun not a large blown out sun.
2. you also want your clouds to be white.
3 and 4 whiteness vs dull bluish.