Clean up Nature Photos with a New Tool that Detects & Removes Distractions (VIDEO)
Landscape shooters often confront complicated scenes with distracting elements that can cause confusion and spoil the impact of an image. Removing these unwanted objects during the photo-editing process is often a daunting task—unless you unlock the power of a new Photoshop tool that automatically gets the job done with a single click.
Instructor Christian Mohrle is a highly acclaimed landscape photographer and image editing expert based in Germany near beautiful Lake Constance, and he provide a link beneath the video for downloading today’s sample Raw file so you can follow along and make the changes yourself as they’re explained.
The shot is a beautiful lakeside image with a mountain looming in this distance and eye-catching reflections in the water closer to the camera. There’s only one major problem; namely, people walking on the shore in that distance that detract from the overall cohesion of the shot.
An secondary issue is the uneven tonal balance of the photo, and Mohrle begins here by demonstrating how to quicky resolve this problem with a five-image HDR technique. This involves capturing multiple photo of the same scene, each shot at a slightly different exposure setting and then blending them together to achieve a single image with perfect light values throughout the frame.
Other preliminary steps include a few basic global adjustments to the overall photo that will greatly simplify for following selective adjustments before turning to Photoshop’s 1-cick solution. These include simple masking, thoughtful color grading, and a bit of careful sharpening.
With the image looking as good as possible, it’s now time to employ Photoshop’s new Find Objects tool that automatically rids photos of distracting elements in a single click. Mohrle demonstrates how this works in the context of landscape imagery, but it’s equally effective for all sorts of other outdoor scenes that need a bit of cleanup for optimum results.
So we encourage wildlife shooters, sports photographers, and those who shoot environmental portraits to pay close attention. After the video concludes be sure to visit Mohrle’s PHLOG Photography YouTube channel where you’ll find more instructional videos on a wide range of landscape photography shooting and post-process techniques.
And don’t miss the tutorial we featured earlier from another accomplished pro who demonstrates an enlightening method for processing your photographs faster, not harder, with a straightforward batch-editing technique.
