James Abbott

Walking through the countryside with your camera can be both relaxing and enjoyable, and when you’re carrying the minimum of gear you’re nearly always challenged in ways you wouldn’t be if you’d been carrying everything but the kitchen sink. In this shot, shadows and midtones have been underexposed to help maintain detail in the sky without ND grads to hand, but with plenty of detail in the darker areas, there’s potential here for some cool ‘blue hour’ style processing.

WHAT I WANT TO CHANGE :

1. Lift the shadows 2. Enhance the sky 3. Bring out the detail 4. Add a burst of light

1 Shadow lift and cooldown

The first thing I need to do here is to recover shadow detail, so the Shadows slider needs to be dragged over to the right to +65 to lighten the foreground. At this stage I’m going to avoid using Highlights for the sky because this will dull the foreground: I’ll do that later with the Graduated Filter. Next I increase Clarity to +20 to increase midtone contrast before setting Temperature to 3000 and Tint to +10 to create a ‘blue hour’ look. Finally, I click on the Tone Curve tab and set Medium Contrast before applying Lens Corrections.

2 Enhance the sky

I select the Graduated Filter from the toolbar at the top of the window before holding down Shift to keep the tool straight, then I drag a medium graduation from just above the horizon line to just below it. Exposure needs to be reduced to -40 and Highlights to -60 to reveal colour and detail in the local area only. To finish off the effect,

I click on the Color box and set Hue to 305 with Saturation at 15.

This will subtly enhance the pink light that’s reflecting on the clouds, to make the sky look even more interesting.

3 Reveal detail

I click on the Adjustment Brush on the main toolbar and make sure Feather is set to 50, Flow to 50 and Density is 100. Next, I make sure the Mask is active. I set the brush size and carefully paint over the two tracks. I use the right and left square bracket keys to change the brush size as I go along. If I make a mistake, I hold down the Alt key to activate the Erase Brush and paint out the offending part of the mask. When that’s done, I turn off the mask and set Temperature to +10 with Tint at +10 to warm up the track, and set Exposure to +55 to lighten the shot.

4 Create a light burst

I’m now going to add an elliptical area of bright warm light, so I select the Radial Filter and drag an ellipse over and to the sides of the brightest area of the sky. I make sure Feather is set to 100 for a soft graduation, and Effect is set to Inside. Next I set Temperature to +100, Exposure to +1.65 and Highlights to -79. To enhance the warming effect, I click on the Color box and set Hue to 64 with Saturation at 40: this adds a light yellow colouring effect to the selected area to work alongside the warming colour temperature.