Warrior 1 Sean McCormack

The fresh breeze is clearly blowing in this shot. You can practically smell the salt from the sea, with the clouds moving quickly, creating little pockets of light on the land. The shot is really wellexposed, but it’s definitely lacking in both contrast and saturation. You can fix this without actually going near either the Saturation or Vibrance slider, though: most tools that increase contrast also increase saturation.

I’ll start this photo by first getting the overall tone and colour where I want it. This will be about 90% of the look of the photo. Next, I’ll add additional pockets of light to bring out the hills. I’ll apply a Graduated Filter to warm the clouds and bring them out more. I’ll also darken the foreground, which is drawing a little too much attention.

Some of the tools I’ll use will accentuate previously hidden dust spots (Dehaze especially!), so these will need fixing. Finally with a view towards social media posting, I’ll crop to a 4x5 ratio – a ratio

I’ve come to love for vertical landscapes.

Base tone 1 and colour

Probably the first thing I do with a landscape shot as a raw file is to decrease the Highlights to -100 and increase the Shadows to +100 in the Basic Panel. If the darker parts get too muddy, I’ll put Shadows back to 70 instead. Here 100 is fine. Next to boost contrast and colour in one slider, I push Dehaze to +53. Often I’ll boost Exposure after this, but it looks fine without it here.

The shadows are darker now, so I take Blacks to +28. Next I’ll boost the overall Contrast to +34 to give a pop to the photo. Just by way of checking, I see how the Adobe Landscape profile looks. It’s definitely better than Adobe Color, so I keep it. My final step in the Basic Panel is to add Texture, a new tool in Lightroom 8.3, which really brings out detail. It’s somewhere between Sharpening and Clarity. I set it to +35.

2 Light and clouds

Now that the main image is sorted, we’re on to the sky. The sky is still a tad bright, and very blue. I drag a Graduated Filter down to the horizon, holding the Shift key so it stays straight. To bring the sky down, I drop the Grad’s Exposure down to -0.24. Often a small amount makes a bigger difference than you’d think. To counteract the blue, and give more overall colour in the cloud, I set Temperature to 10.

The foreground is a little bright, so I click New, then drag another Grad over the bushes. I set Exposure to -0.21, enough to allow the eye to be pulled to the waves. This allows the eyes to wander through the photo more, making for a more satisfying photo.

To add light to the fields, I create a Radial Filter that just fits over each field. Set to an Exposure of +0.52, this adds a little pop of light to them.

3 Cleanup and cropping

Using Dehaze has made the sensor dirt a little more obvious, so some Spot Removal is required. Press Q, or select the circle with an arrow icon in the toolstrip under the Histogram. Change the Size slider, or use the square bracket keys [ and ], to match the spot. For hairs or long spots, set it slightly larger than the width and draw over the spot. You can also use the Visualize Spots tool (shortcut A), to create a black and white inverted image which helps show the spots.

My final task is that 4x5 crop I spoke about before. It looks way better on social media, and takes some of the length of the photo. It’s also a standard traditional print shape as well. Press R, or click the Crop icon at the start of the toolstrip under the Histogram. From the Aspect dropdown, choose 4x5/8x10. A centred version of the crop will show. As I want to minimise the foreground, I drag the image down, which moves the crop up to give my final look.