That first image doesn’t look so good, does it. So how do we get it to look like the second…?
So I took this picture today at Boyd Park in New Brunswick, NJ. I was scouting out potential locations for shoots, and I hadn’t been to the park in a long time. I figured I’d swing by, take a look at the place since they renovated a few years back, and see if there was anything worth looking at.
Turns out there was an outdoor amphitheater that looked pretty cool, and there was this huge ramp that led up to the side of the highway. I wanted to take a picture, but there was one problem… the sun was shining down towards me from pretty high up (it was a little after noon). If I exposed for the sky, then the structure came out underexposed (which is what I did). If I exposed for the structure, the sky would come out white (I tried that, too, and I didn’t like the final outcome).
So, I opted to underexpose the foreground, save some detail in the sky, and see how I could fix it up in Lightroom later. The only other solution would have been to haul out a bunch of lights to illuminate the structure from the front… and that just wasn’t going to happen.
Lightroom Step by Step
This was just kind of a spur of the moment thing, and I edited it without much thinking about using this as a teaching tool. So, I’m not following any kind of logic here. This isn’t an editing “system” or “method” so to speak. It’s just a step-by-step rundown of what I did. If you’d like to play along and make some of the same changes, you can work with the Boyd Park Unedited, Raw Image (DNG).
So, first let’s diagnose the problem. We need to brighten up the foreground, that’s for sure. I also definitely want to brighten up the metal archway bearing the title “Boyd Park.” But, in doing so, I don’t want to lose the blue in the sky or some of the definition in the clouds.
First thing I did was create a graduated filter. The shortcut key for that is “M” or you can grab it in the develop module underneath the histogram.
I pulled a large, gradual filter from the bottom left corner almost all the way to the top corner. I left the center line even with the top row of fence that runs at a slight diagonal from the top left to the lower right. The major thing I wanted to adjust with this filter was the exposure. I jumped it up 2 full stops.
Voila. Instantly, the bricks start to brighten up, but the sky is left more or less untouched. If we wanted to edit this in 10 seconds, we could stop here. But, I felt like playing around some more. I ended up pulling the exposure on the filter back down a bit, to 1.66. Then, I upped the Clarity to 50, increasing some blackness and contrast in the bricks. Finally, I also upped the Contrast to 25, again to help give the bricks some contrast and texture.
Next target? The metal archway.
I created an adjustment brush (shortcut “K”), and painted in the archway. See the red area in the picture to the left. I tinkered with the exposure adjustment on this brush, and I eventually left it at 2/3 of a stop.
That brightened up the metal signage, left the text clearly visible, and helped it pop a bit against the bright sky.
Next, I added another graduated filter… this time from the top right going down towards the center. That part of the sky seemed a bit dark, so I used the filter to pull it up 2/3 of a stop and balance it out better. Come to think of it, the top left probably got brightened up with the first graduated filter… so this just kind of balanced things off.
But, this was a temporary brightening. I really wanted to darken the whole sky a bit to get some better contrast and saturation. So I created a second adjustment brush and fairly carefully painted in the entire sky. I later went back up and touched up the edges a bit.
I brought the clarity up a bit first, which added some contrast and texture to the clouds. Then, I increased the saturation, which brought out some of the blue in the sky. Finally, I lowered the exposure a little bit, about 2/3rds of a stop, which helped everything look nicer.
From there, it was just a matter of tightening up the brush strokes and cleaning everything up.
Stupid me, I actually just realized I could have done one more thing to make this come out better.
If you scroll down in the Develop module sidebar, you’ll see an option labeled “HSL / Color / B&W.” If you choose Color, you can independently alter the hue / saturation / luminance of different colors.
This isn’t always helpful, but if you have an image that has no other blue in it… it’s a great way to make the sky pop and get over-saturated. The +61 I applied might be a bit much… but I literally just remembered to do this as I was writing the tutorial. Oops. I’ll go back and play with it to see where I really want it.
So… the key here is to selectively edit parts of the image. Although Lightroom is built around the idea of applying non-destructive, mostly global edits… the graduated filter and adjustment brush are powerful tools for selectively altering parts of an image. You could have pulled this image into Photoshop and done the same thing (probably with some better results), but you’d then have a monstrous .PSD / .TIFF file on your hands.
One thing I love about editing things like this in Lightroom is I still only have one file to manage, my original DNG file. Even if I wanted to do six versions of this image, I could just make virtual copies and edit each one differently. Imagine how much space all those PSD / TIFF files would take up if I made six copies of this in Photoshop. /shudder.
You’re camera has a setting called “exposure compensation,” usually labeled or represented by “EV” and a + or a -. What is exposure compensation, and why would you want to use it?
