Autumn is a favorite season among experienced outdoor shooters who understand the impact of beautiful light, color separation, dramatic skies, and the gorgeous warm tones that paint the landscape. Today’s tutorial from the popular PHLOG Photography YouTube channel provides eight Lightroom tips and tricks that even beginners can use to enhance their imagery in a big way.
Instructor Christian Mohrle is a notable landscape veteran based in Germany near beautiful Lake Constance. He’s also a post processing expert, and today he reveals a straightforward Lightroom workflow you can use when your fall photos need more emphasis with a realistic look. And if you’re interested in the gear and software he prefers, just scroll down to the description beneath the video.
Mohrle says, “the very first thing I do before I start with anything else is to open Lightroom’s Basic panel and adjust the Profile to my needs, and for autumn photos I generally want to push the foliage.” He choose Adobe Landscape for this specific task because it immediately provides an appropriate boost in base saturation.
He continues with the basic adjustments by reducing overall contrast for a dreamy appearance that mimics a soft autumn-glow effect. This is easily accomplished by dialing down highlights, bringing up shadows, and opening up the blacks. Mohrle accentuates these enhancements further by modifying clarity and dehaze to strengthen the glow.
Mohrle then accentuates a tree in the middle of the frame by selectively boosting contrast to make this key element stand out with greater texture and apparent sharpness on the leaves and branches. Here it’s important not to bias the intentionally soft areas elsewhere in the frame.
The next step is targeting the foliage with masks, beginning with a Color Range mask that selects all the leaves for various color and tonal enhancements. You’ll also see why and how a Landscape mask adds to the effect. All that remains to complete the impressive transformation are a few tweaks with Lightroom’s Color Mixer, additional color contrast, and a bit of final calibration.
Once you’re done watching head over to the instructional PHLOG Photography YouTube channel where there are many more how-to videos for landscape photographers of all skill levels.
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