LR Secret: Fall Photos with Stunning Colors (VIDEO)
Autumn is finally here and with the change of seasons come a myriad of opportunities for breathtaking landscape photos. Today’s video demonstrates a straightforward Lightroom workflow for enhancing your images so they faithfully reproduce the vivid colors and tonal balance you witnessed through the viewfinder.
Instructor Mark Denney is an accomplished landscape photographer who says his primary focus is cameras, camper vans and the great outdoors. Depending upon where you live, peak fall color may only last a few short days, so the timing of your excursions is crucially important if you don’t want to miss the spectacular show.
Denny describes his timely episode like this: “I’ll show you Lightroom’s darkest editing secret for making fall photos pop—even if you arrived too early when leaves are still green, or too late when they’ve already started to fade.” He promises that these simple techniques will help you achieve rich, vivid fall colors every time, whether you’re new to Lightroom or an experienced user.
In the next 13 minutes you’ll learn how to employ a few simple-but-powerful tools in Lightroom’s Calibration and Color Mixer panels to transform dull, flat Raw files into attention-grabbing images that look as though they were captured during prime time, regardless of the actual conditions you confront in the field.
This impressive transformation can be quickly accomplished by manipulating a couple simple sliders, and Denney provides before/after examples to allay your doubts. His demonstration shot does display a few areas of yellow to work with, but the overall tone of the leaves is undeniably green like you’d expect to see in mid-summer.
The quick rehabilitation technique is surprisingly simple and Denney walks you through every step of the way, and we suggest that you add this seasonal approach to your Lightroom bag of tricks. Then pay a visit to his instructional YouTube channel for more practical landscape shooting and image-editing tips.
We also suggest watching another tutorial Denney featured earlier that demonstrates the power of an obscure light metering mode that enables you to capture balanced outdoor photographs without blown-out skies.
