Finishing a Photo in Lightroom 2

When I started blogging, I thought I would do more tutorials, but to be honest, other photographer’s do it so well, I didn’t really think there was much of a demand for another learning site.

When my good friend, Florida photographer Tim Darby, e-mailed me last night asking for help with an image from a recent trip to Alaska I thought it would make for a great tutorial opportunity. This post is a bit longer than usual, and probably not of interest to my non-photographer readers, but I thought I’d take a crack at trying to help Tim out.

Here my disclaimer on this:

• Tim only has Lightroom 2.0, so I’m going to stay within the Lightroom boundaries – if this was my image I’d work it in both Photoshop and Lightroom.
• I skipped a few steps I’d normally take with a raw file (like sharpening and camera calibration), as my starting point is a high-res JPEG of Tim’s image.
• Click on the images to see them larger.
  

Here is Tim’s initial image, shot in Alaska with a Nikon D300 at F/10, 1/500, ISO 200 at 135mm with his 70-200mm lens.

At first glance there appears to be a slight blue color cast along with some exposure issues. While the sky/fog on the top third of the image is overexposed slightly, compromising highlight detail, the image also suffers from a lack of a true black point.

If I was taking this image into Photoshop, setting the black & white points would be my first step. In this case though, because we’re going to stay in Lightroom, and I’m workingon a JPEG file, the first step will be to attempt to remove the color cast on the white snow.

To remove the color cast I’ll click on an area that’s supposed to be white, in this case the snow on the glacier. I’ve picked an area where the R/G/B values are almost equal. The result is a Temp setting of -2 and a Tint setting of +3.

The next area to address is the exposure issue. As you cansee by the histogram, the image has no true black or white points (the histogram does not extend to the end on either side). The result of this is an image that lacks contrast.

To fix this, I’ll first increase the blacks slider to 34. The image looks almost instantly better and picks up a lot of contrast, but the histogram still doesn’t stretch all the way to the right. To fix this I’ve increased the exposure to +.4 of a stop.

Here’s the image so far, you can see how the whites are whiter and the blacks have gotten blacker, and the image now has a true black point.

The next thing I want to address is the midtone contrast, using the clarity slider. Here’s a 100% crop before and after boosting the clarity slider to 50.

Things are looking pretty good now, but I still think the image could benefit from an added contrast bump. For this I’ll move down to the tone curve and use Lightroom’s strong contrast preset. Notice how the histogram spreads out – more data is pushed to the left and right as the transition from dark to light gets steeper.

Now that we’ve addressed the color cast and exposure issues, let’s look at the color in the image. To me, this image really screams for a black and white conversion, as the colors are muted to begin with.

I think a conversion to black and white would really lead the viewer’s eye through the photo well, from the water up the glacier. But, Tim asked for color, so we’ll stick with that.

To make this image pop in color, I’m going to want to boost the blues and greens, pretty much the only colors that exist in the image. To do this, I’m going to bump the image’s Vibrance setting to +40, then visit Lightroom’s Hue/Saturation/Luminance panel. (The Vibrance too increases saturation only in colors that are lacking saturation to begin with).

The image on the blog here might look a bit blocky, so you’ll have to take my word for it, but by boosting the Luminance in the Yellow, Green & Aqua channels to +100, I’ve been able to increase the brightness of the plants and trees growing on the mountains.

I stayed away from using the Blue channel because when I shifted the Blues, the whole image was affected too much. Because the scene was shot in fairly blue conditions, pushing the Blue’s Luminance around was almost akin to moving the Exposure slider.

Now, the final step (and I probably did this a bit out of order, I should have done this after addressing the Exposure issues), is to add a neutral density gradient filter to pull back the exposure on the sky an additional stop.

You can see how much additional detail I’m able to pull out of the sky by selectively darkening it with the ND gradient.

Now if I was working in Photoshop I would have done things differently and skipped some steps. Without getting into too much detail here, I would have skipped the Luminance step, opting to boost the colors in Photoshop’s LAB mode. I also might have skipped the grad filter step in favor of the Shadow/Highlight tool, or I would have created two exposures in Lightroom and blended them with a gradient layer mask in Photoshop.

This entire process took me about 10 minutes in Lightroom – much faster than it would have been had I used Photoshop. For me at least, Lightroom saves me time, Photoshop is about getting an image perfect when time is not a factor.

Tim I hope this helps and gave you some ideas for processing your images going forward. I know you shot a bunch of images in Alaska (for Tim’s entire set of Alaska images click here), and once you run your adjustments on one photo, you can now sync them all to save even more time.

Here’s a final before and after comparison of Tim’s images:

To see Tim's entire set of photos from his Alaska trip, click here.