How to Boost Midtone Contrast for Punchier Photos (VIDEO)
One common reason for unimpressive photos is a lack of attention-grabbing contrast with weak highlights and shadows, along with an insufficient difference between these two crucial elements. Today’s Lightroom tutorial from the popular PHLOG Photography YouTube channel explains how to deal with high-contrast images and achieve a wide range of tones from bright whites to deep blacks, and everything in between.
Instructor Christian Mohrle is a highly acclaimed German landscape photographer and one of our favorite post-processing experts. This 12-minute episode will help give your images more punch so that you’re not temped to punch a wall in frustration when photos are boring and flat. The trick is understanding the benefits of mid-tone contrast.
Mohrle presents his workflow in the context of landscape photography, but everything you’ll learn will work wonders for all sorts of disappointing outdoor images. His sample shot was captured in a forest against the light, and we suggest downloading the Raw file with the link beneath the video so you can follow along and make the adjustments yourself as they’re explained.
The magic occurs at the at the 8:33-minute mark of the video, so if you’re just concerned with mid-tone contrast techniques you can jump straight there. But Mohrle kicks off the edit with some important basic adjustments, masking, and color grading to make his original shot as good as possible before proceeding. Thus, we suggest watching from beginning to end.
Mohrle begins by merging a sequence of multiple photos by selecting all five shots in the film strip, right-clicking, and choosing Photo Merge and then HDR from the dropdown menus that appear. The final result appears in the filmstrip, and Mohrle uses this merged file to apply his initial adjustments which start off by changing the Profile from Adobe Color to Adobe Landscape for reasons he explains.
Next Mohrle walks you through several quick global adjustments to the image as a whole, before turning to local enhancements that target specific areas in the frame with different tools. Then you’ll see how he improves the photo further with thoughtful color grading—just where’s it’s needed to balance out the tones.
With all the preliminaries out of the way, it’s finally time for the meat of the tutorial, namely, understanding the concept of midtone contrast and following Mohrle’s straightforward advice for putting this method to work. The PHLOG Photography YouTube channel is a great source of how-to viseoa, especially for landscape photographers, so be sure and take a look.
We also recommend watching the tutorial we featured with a 35-year pro who discusses three “huge” exposure mistakes and how to fix them fast to achieve photographs with perfectly balanced light every time.
