A Scenic World

Want to know how I processed my day 150 shot? Read on! Want to grab the lightroom preset? Skip to the end and download :)

First, we start with the original. It’s going to look pretty bland, as there really wasn’t a lot of contrast in the sky or the ocean:

By changing the white balance to a bluer temperature, we start seeing the colors that you’ll see at the end:

Frequent readers will know that I love to change the camera calibration settings, and with this one, I made quite a few changes. To wit:

Red Hue: -79
Red Saturation: no change
Green Hue: no change
Green Saturation: -67
Blue Hue: -93 (toward the aqua end)
Blue Saturation: no change

These changes resulted in this:

I did some pretty drastic things in the Basic editing. I increased exposure and brightness by almost a full stop, applied +100 recovery, a tiny bit of fill light, and pushed the blacks to +39 and the contrast all the way to +100:

Likewise, the tone curve has some interesting values. Highlights were increased to +48, which led to blowing out that strip to the left in the clouds but also gave some texture to the upper clouds; Lights were increased to +12; Darks were increased to +40; and Shadows were decreased to -67, making for a very dark photo indeed:

Next, a few color changes are going to go a long way toward lessing that aqua tint. First, Vibrance and Saturation are both going to be decreased a good bit. Next, I manually decreased the saturation of every color except blue. I changed the hue of the blues in the photo toward the purple end of the spectrum to combat that aqua and increased the saturation of just the blues:

There was no split-toning or vignetting added to this photo, so for once we get to skip that step :)

The true magic for this photo happens when we add the localized edits. First I did a little burning in that bright cloud on the left:

Granted, that’s not much of a difference, but it was something was bugging me. But take a look at what happens when we add a gradient from the bottom of the photo to the horizon. The gradient increases exposure by +.70 and lowers the contrast of the area by -100:

Pretty cool, right? The hardest part here was knowing that all that detail could be recovered from such a dark photo, but remember that all that darkness was added – the original photo was well-exposed and retained a good bit of detail. It would be much more difficult to start with an under-exposed photo and expect to be able to get the same effects with similar processing.

Another gradient over the bottom third of the photo (although at an angle so that the gradient takes in that bit below the pier) with the exposure pushed to +.40, contrast increase of +82 and clarity increased to +60 results in this:

A final gradient that only increases contrast by +43 and clarity by +100 was added from the top to the horizon for the clouds:

And if you want to skip all the stuff above (except for the gradients – those would definitely be photo-specific), just download this, unzip, and add to your presets: Dark and Stormy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 9:50 am and is filed under Lightroom Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.