SPLIT TONING: An Easy Way to Boost Impact in Dull Landscape Photos (VIDEO)
Landscape photographers typically strive to capture images with attention-grabbing colors, but sometimes flat lighting conditions make this difficult to achieve in the camera. Fortunately, there’s a simple Lightroom tool for making the fix as you’ll see in this tutorial from the popular PHLOG Photography YouTube channel.
German photographer Christian Mohrle is a highly acclaimed landscape photographer and one of our favorite post-processing experts. In this episode he explains why “Lightrooms Split Toning tool is the best way to give your landscape photos cinematic color grading and how to use it.”
Mohrle always provides a link to his demonstration image in the description beneath the videos and we encourage you take this opportunity so you can make the changes yourself as they’re explained. Today’s example is a beautifully composed lakeside image with majestic mountains looming in the distance.
So what’s the problem? The photo is virtually devoid of color because it was captured on a cloudy, lifeless day. The process begins by merging a three-image HDR and this process is super simple. Then Mohrle proceeds to make several basic global adjustments to the merged shot. He begins by changing the profile from Adobe Color to Adobe Landscape which immediately pushes saturation.
Other preliminary enhancements include increasing overall exposure, modifying white balance, dropping highlights to fix the blown-out sky, and maximizing dynamic range. He also adds contrast by bringing down shadows, and he pays close attention to Lightroom’s histogram as he makes other tonal adjustments.
It’s virtually impossible, as many of you know, to achieve optimum results with global adjustments alone. That’s why masking is the next stop in the process so you can make selective enhancements to different areas within the frame—each requiring different adjustments for maximum balance.
Now it’s time for the meat of the lesson; namely, Lightroom’s Split Toning effect that transforms Mohrle’s ho-hum original shot into one that screams “WOW.” He walks you through the step-by-step process which you’ll undoubtedly want to include in your everyday workflow from now on.
All that’s left to complete the impressive edit is a bit of careful sharpening. There’s much more to learn about shooting and editing landscape photos on the PHLOG Photography YouTube channel. So don’t forget to take a look at what’s available.
We also recommend watching the earlier tutorial we featured with another image-editing expert who demonstrates the straightforward post-processing technique he recommends for isolating and transforming different colors in your photographs.
