How To Edit Landscape Photos in Lightroom
One of the biggest benefits of shooting in RAW is the ability to recover a lot of information in post-processing. Adobe Lightroom is excellent for this, especially when editing landscape images. There are tons of tools we can use to achieve all kinds of effects, from Exposure to Vibrance, Clone stamp to Dehaze, and more…
This video is by Bendon van Son. Brendon has been living the nomadic life for 9 years and has visited over 100 countries – and has lived in many of them working as a travel photographer. He has a brilliant portfolio that he has been built over the years on his journey. In this video, you will see how he uses Lightroom to finish off an image. Like us, he is a great advisory for getting it right in the camera first.
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What I love about the video is the passion that radiates for Brendon. Just listening to him describe the moment when the image presented itself. The combination of perfect timing and pot luck, get’s me excited. We all know a good edit can make an image stand out more, especially when editing landscape photos in Lightroom. We’re huge fans of post-processing, that goes without saying! we built two world-leading post-processing plugins in Raya Pro and Lumi32. What’s important in this video is, not to overdo it. If you get it right in the camera you’ll not have to spend much time post-processing. Sometimes all you need just a little tweak here and there.
Below we’ll outline a few of the adjustments Brendon has made in this edit.
Adobe Lightroom Adjustments
Editing images in Lightroom is very simple to do. All you need to do is play with some really intuitive sliders. However, going too far can add serious noise and degradation to your images. This is why we must do our best to get it right in the camera first so that we only need the slightest adjustments later.
1. Highlights in Lightroom
By moving this slider you will change the brighter parts of your image, making them even brighter or dimming them down.
2. Shadows in Lightroom
Moving this slider you can soften or deepen the darkness of your shadows. By softening the shadows you can often recover hidden details.
3. White in Lightroom
You can probably guess that this slider affects only the whites in the image. Anything that is white this can pick up. It can have a very powerful effect.
4. Black in Lightroom
The opposite of the white slider. This can make your images harsh if they need to be, or soft. It all depends on what feel you’re going for.
5. Exposure in Lightroom
Brilliant, we use this often if we only have a single RAW file that we want to exposure blend. This can be seen in our How To Digitally Blend a Single RAW File Tutorial.
5. Vibrance in Lightroom
Vibrance is a much softer way of adjusting the presence of colour in your images. As opposed to saturation which changes the strength of colour.
6. Contrast in Lightroom
Contrast can really bring an edge to your image or make it relaxing. It can bring a very different mood to your image as shown below.
7. Using Dehaze in Lightroom
Be careful with this one, it can create an unbelievable amount of noise in your images. Brilliant for bringing clarity and countering color cast. But, use with caution.
8. Clarity in Lightroom
I favor this setting too much. It is incredible how much texture this little slider can bring. But there are times where you want to smoothen texture, it can do that as well.
To see Brendon’s finished image from this edit, you can find his prints available here: https://www.brendansadventures.com/photography-gallery/
The mood that a contrast adjust can bring: -40(left), 0 (centre), +40 (right)
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If you enjoyed this quick video and would like to learn more about editing in Lightroom. We have a host of various posts, click HERE for more.
I also did a bit of digging around and found a brilliant article by Adam Welch on How to Edit a Landscape Image Like the Pros in Lightroom.