Creating Wildlife & Nature Photos with Maximum Impact (VIDEO)

German pro Christian Mohrle is a favorite among Shutterbug readers who appreciate his detailed tutorials for enhancing landscape imagery. Today he’s switching things up by applying his post-processing expertise to wildlife photographs that need some serious help from Lightroom.

Whether your subject is a local bird at a nearby park or an exotic big cat in the wilds of Africa, this 11-minute episode will make a significant improvement in your results. We suggest downloading Mohrle’s demonstration image with the link beneath the video so you can mimic his edit from start to finish as the straightforward steps are explained.

It’s obvious that this unimpressive shot must be completely rehabilitated to keep it out of the trash bin. The bird needs separation from the background, and there are three major areas of concern. The foreground is too bright, and the background is a bit too dark with rather flat light,

And there’s the subject itself which can benefit from more natural colors in the feathers and increased detail overall.

Mohrle initiates the process by heading into Lightroom’s Lens Corrections tab. Here he enables both the Remove Chromatic Aberrations and the Profile Corrections options. Doing so immediately minimizes lens distortions for a better looking image.

Now it’s time for several basic adjustments, and the first step is to completely drop the highlights to dramatically increase detail. Mohrle then opens up the shadows, pushes contrast by bringing up the whites, and modifies the blacks in a way that provides the soft, dreamy effect that he has in mind.

Mohrle wraps up the preliminary adjustments by removing a heavy green cast, boosting Texture, dropping Clarity and Dehaze, and bringing up Vibrance. The foregoing global adjustments were made without much attention to the bird, and this is where the important selective enhancements begin.

This step is the real meat of the tutorial as Mohrle employs masks to enhance his main subject in various ways without biasing surrounding areas of this very simple composition. He also adds a Linear gradient near the top and bottom portions of the shot to make subtle adjustments that accentuate the bird further.

All that’s left to complete this impressive transformation is thoughtful color grading and very careful sharpening. Mohrle’s before/after images illustrate the effectiveness of his technique. Once the video concludes take a look at Mohrle’s instructional YouTube channel where there’s much more to learn.

And don’t miss the tutorial we featured recently with another image-editing expert who explains why and how selective post-processing adjustments (not just global enhancements) are necessary for the best possible photographs.