Landscape Photo Editing Tutorial - Using Lightroom and Photoshop to add drama to a dull photo
It’s been a while since I’ve had a photograph that I’ve been really pleased with, what with the Pandemic and lockdown limiting photo taking opportunities. I had actually created this photo and posted it to Instagram, when some people asked me if I could do a tutorial explaining how I had edited the photo. So, I went back and recreated the edit and in this video I walk you through my process from start to finish.
I did my initial edits in Lightroom. I started with some basic adjustments and then went to try and create a “cinematic” or film like grade. For those wondering, the reason I used Lightroom (rather than Capture One) is that I find that Lightroom has better colour and tonality with raw files from my Sony ZV-1 (Which is funny, as it’s usually the other way around with Sony cameras).
Once I had the basic look dialled in, I realised that the bland sky was making the whole photo feel a little off balance, so I decided to replace the sky. I went with photoshop for this rather than Luminar, because Photoshop gives you the replaced sky as layers that you can further tweak. Also, the included skies in Luminar are too low-resolution, and I wasn’t in the mood to go hunt down other ones. I actually prefer Photoshop’s sky replacement, even though technically Luminar gives you more options.
Here’s the original image before I started…
And here’s the finished result…
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