CRAFT LIGHTING AND EXPOSURE
Control tonal balance using local adjustment tools
Exposure and colour in photography are often discussed independently as if they’re unrelated topics; however, it’s important to remember that the brightness of an image directly impacts the appearance of colours. In landscape photography, the decision is often taken to underexpose slightly to maintain highlight detail but also to create richer colours that appear more saturated. This means that you need to be mindful of how your exposure choices affect the colour fidelity of your photos.
In scenic imaging, this can be challenging due to the tonal range of many compositions. The sky is usually brighter than the foreground by a significant margin, which means colours will be impacted differently in each area of the frame. This is why localised adjustments are hugely important in landscape editing.
Most advanced software applications offer adjustment tools that allow you to make localised edits to many parameters, including exposure, colour saturation, white balance and clarity. This workflow is far more flexible than simply applying global adjustments. However, when we make changes to the tonality of an image, especially in local areas, we must keep the dynamic range natural. We must also ensure that we don’t change the lighting structure of the shot, creating hotspots where none could exist in reality due to the lack of a light source.
A professional approach is to work in rounds of edits that get progressively more concise. Start with global edits, then move down to working using local adjustment tools, before finally targeting the brightness and intensity of specific colour ranges.
ON STREAM
The exposure range in this shot is wide, but the topography results in isolated areas of clipped detail, and using grad filters was impractical