Editing forest photos with Lightroom and Photoshop
A blog about photography
Everybody knows about the Coronavirus by now. Or COVID-19 if you want to use the technical term. Every country is dealing with this virus differently. In the Netherlands, there is a semi-lockdown. This means that we are allowed to go out, but not with more than 2 persons together and we need to keep 1.5meter (6 feet) distance between us and everybody else (except your household).
During this semi-lockdown, the most photographed and busiest forest is empty. Completely empty. It’s a strange feeling, but also pretty satisfying to be alone in such awesome forest. The morning I had chosen, should have had a lot of ground mist, no clouds and a lot of direct sunlight. This gives you, in theory, some beautiful light rays. In reality, the weather is never what it is suppose to be.
An empty road in the forest
Despite that the weather conditions weren’t perfect and there wasn’t enough ground mist for those beautiful sun rays in the forest, there was enough to have some on this road. With the photo above, I was lucky enough to have sun rays on two different places.
How did I edit this photo?
For the photos above, I have used the Orton effect. Or some version of it, my own version of it. Below you can see two screenshots. In these screenshots you can see the image transform from the SOOC (=straight out of camera) to the final image.
Left = SOOC
Right = First edits
Left = photo before Photoshop
Right = final image after Photoshop
What I have done, besides the standard contrast, highlights and shadows edits, is an Photoshop edit. When the image is opened in Photoshop, I made copy of the background layer. I have added a gaussian blur. To know how much of a blur you should add, it’s a good ‘rule’ to add as much blur as as many megapixels your sensor has. So, if you have a 45 megapixel camera, you have 45 pixels of blur. If you have a 24 megapixel camera, you add around 24 pixels of blur.
After I added the blur, I decreased the fill of that layer to 20% - 35%. To enhance this blurred layer I have clipped a highlight layer. By adding this highlight layer, you are able to get this Orton effect.
By adding this Orton effect, the photo got a glow to it. This will add something different to your photos and gives it something extra. If you have any questions about this, don’t hesitate to ask!
PS. All my photos are on sale as long there is a lockdown. Send me a message for more information.
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