Image Rescue

Working with exposure restores the balance in this shot

This landscape photo has a common exposure issue where the land is too dark and the sky is slightly too bright in some areas. However, the tonal range can be manipulated to bring both areas under control and reveal the shapes of the landscape.

We’re going to do the bulk of the work with Lightroom’s Graduated Filter Tool, first dropping one ‘upside down’ on the horizon line so it affects the land

. You can press the letter O to see the mask and make sure it’s over the bottom half of the image. We can then take the Shadows slider to +50 to bring back the detail we need.

Now we can pop another Grad over the sky area , so it affects the area from the top of the image down to the horizon line. With that in place, we can just take Highlights to -60 to control the overexposure. That’s balanced the exposure between the two halves of the shot, so now we can nudge White Balance to the right to warm it all up .

We want to give the lit side of the castle a tonal lift . To do that, we can run an Adjustment Brush over it, select the Range Mask, tick Luminance and set the slider at about 50 so we are only going to change the lighter tones. Finally, we can push Exposure up enough to punch it out.