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Friday Image

New Photo Editing Mini-Series

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Finished example image from my latest YouTube Photo Editing Mini-Series. Peak District Millstones. Click the image to enlarge.

Due to the popularity of my first photo editing mini-series on YouTube, I’m doing a second. This time I’m processing the image you see above.

I’ve already published the first two videos:

  1. Image Assessment https://youtu.be/NCvT71cgxO8
  2. RAW Conversion (using Affinity Photo) https://youtu.be/MkSl1Rz3ENM

The other two videos in the series will follow next week.

If you missed the first mini-series, I’ve grouped and published them as a tutorial on my Lenscraft website (https://lenscraft.co.uk/photo-editing-tutorials/post-processing-landscape-photography-workflow/).

I hope you enjoy these.

Friday Image No.228

I did think about using the image above as the Friday image but decided not to. I cover the above image in the video and wanted to include a different image here.

Peak District hillside. Fuji X-T3 and 55-200 lens. Click the image to enlarge.

This is from a recent trip to the Peak District. I captured it around 40 minutes before sunset when the sun was low and the light warm. What I like, besides the lovely warm light is the contrast between the “colder” background hill and the “warmer” foreground. It’s also nice the way the solitary barn in the field acts as a focal point.

In terms of technicalities, I was using the Fuji X-T3 with the Fuji 55-200 lens set to 86mm. The camera was set to ISO160 which gave a shutter speed 1/17” at f/13. I could probably have used a wider aperture than f/13 but I wasn’t really thinking about it at the time. I was more interested in capturing the light before I lost it. I could see the sun heading for a bank of hazy cloud on the horizon which damage the crisp direct light you see here.

I mounted the camera on a tripod because the shutter speed was slow, and I didn’t use any filters. I was shooting at around 90 degrees from the sun and the shaded hillside wasn’t dark enough to require I use a filter.

I hope you like the image and have a great weekend.

Friday Image

Landscape Photo Editing Workflow Mini-Series

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Landscape Photo Editing Workflow Mini-Series

Last week I mentioned that I had published the first two videos in a new mini-series. This week I recorded and published the remaining two. If you haven’t seen these, they explain and demonstrate my simplified four-stage workflows for editing landscape photos:

  1. Assessing the Image.
  2. RAW Conversion.
  3. Photo Enhancements.
  4. Applying Special Effects.

Here’s the link to the playlist on YouTube which includes all four videos.

If you have suggestions for tools to include in future mini-series, please add a comment to the videos.

Friday Image No.226

Near to Surprise View in the Peak District National Park. Fuji X-T3, Fuji 16-55 at 17mm. ISO160, 5″ at f/11.0. 0.6 (2 stop) ND graduated filter. Tripod mounted.

Last weekend was excellent weather for photography. Unfortunately, I wasn’t out taking photos but rather attending a drystone walling course. Thanks to our efforts one of the local farmers now has a new 70’ stone wall and I have a new hobby (along with learning to play Bluegrass Banjo).

So instead of a very different image, this is another shot of the heather. I shot this a couple of days after the photo from last week.

As with the previous photo I shared, I shot this around 10-15 minutes after the sun had set. Notice how the heather seems to glow with the diffused, soft light. Despite this, I still had to use a 2 stop ND grad on the sky to try to balance the exposure. There’s also some nice movement in the heather and grass which has helped to soften it.

When I came to process the image, I also had a few problems. To create the best exposure that I could, but retain the feel of the image, I had to create three separate exposure from the RAW file. I then blended these (in selected areas) using Luminosity Blending techniques. After that, the processing was like that demonstrated in the video mini-series.

I hope you like the image and have a great weekend.

Friday Image

Photographing the Heather in the Peak District

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It’s Friday again and I’ve managed two days photography this week. The reason, besides the weather not being too bad, is that the heather is out.

Both shoots were in the afternoon and both in the Peak District. The first was Bamford Edge where I captured this shot. The other was near to Surprise View, but you will need to wait to see those images.

Before I explain a little about how I captured this image I should mention the accompanying video.

Landscape Photo Editing Workflow – The Miniseries

With my latest book in proofreading, I decided to take advantage and publish a video showing my editing workflow. To do this I used another image from the same evening shoot as this one. But rather than publish a long video which may be hard to watch, I’ve broken it into a small series.

There will be four videos in total:

  1. Assessing the image.
  2. RAW Processing
  3. Nik Processing
  4. Special Effects

I’ve already released the first two and I’m planning to do the other two next week.

If you want to watch the videos, here’s a link to the playlist on YouTube. And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to my channel.

Friday Image No.225

I shot the image for this post around 5-10 minutes after sunset and up until this point, I had been struggling. Because we were facing towards the sun and the contrast was high, most of my shots had a harsh look that I didn’t like. It was only once the sun had set below the horizon that I was able to capture the dynamic range and open the shadows. Even then I needed to use a graduated ND filter (0.9 Soft) on the sky.

Another advantage of waiting until after sunset (besides lowering the contrast range) is that the heather glows and comes to life. This isn’t always the case, but if you are facing towards the stronger light, it works well. Turn away from the light and the heather looks grey and lifeless.

In terms of the shot, this is a single image captured using RAW on the Fuji X-T3. I used a 0.9 Soft Kase Grad filter as mentioned. I also had the camera mounted on a tripod and used a cable release. The image I used for the video is like this one and I used the same approach if you want to know more.

I hope you like the image and videos and have a great weekend.

Friday Image

Brilliant Free Luminosity Masking Tool

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Godrevy Lighthouse, Cornwall.
Godrevy Lighthouse, Cornwall. Fuji X-T3, Fuji 55-200 at 55mm, ISO160, 1/12″ at f/13.0. Tripod mounted with Kase 0.9 (3 stop) Soft ND GRad filter.

This week I have another image from my recent break in Cornwall. I shot this on the same evening as the one I shared last week. The only difference was that I used a long telephoto lens to capture this image. I must admit that I was being very lazy and didn’t even move my tripod.

The reason I wanted to share this image is that I used it to illustrate my latest YouTube Video. If you haven’t seen the video, here’s the link. The video demonstrates a great free tool for Luminosity Masking in Photoshop.

This is the best free tool that I’ve found. I would even say that it’s better than some of the premium tools on the market. In fact, it’s so good that I used it extensively in my recent Luminosity Masking course.

If you’re interested in Luminosity Masking, you really should try this tool (I included the details and links in the description below the YouTube video).

August Newsletter

If you’re on my mailing list, the Lenscraft August newsletter goes out overnight.

You can also read all the newsletters on this page of my website. The August issue will appear in the list tomorrow.

Have a great weekend.

Friday Image

Friday Image No.195

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The Peak District, Nikon D800, Nikon 16-35 at 30mm, 1/3″ at f/18.0. Kase Wolverine 0.9 Soft ND Grad, Tripod.

I’ll start with an apology that I haven’t posted to the blog this week. I’ve been out taking photos (that’s what I’m supposed to do after all) and working on the Lenscraft website.

If you follow my YouTube Channel you will already have seen todays Friday Image. I won’t make any apologies for this though as I really like the shot. I’ve wanted to photograph this scene with heather for some years, but I never seem to time it quite right. This year is probably the best I’ve managed, but the heather isn’t brilliant, probably because of all the dry weather we had earlier in the year.

If you haven’t seen my video showing the processing of this shot and you’re a Nik Collection user, it’s worth watching (but I would say that). I do everything in Color Efex Pro, just to demonstrate the potential of the filters.

Now that I think about it, I probably need to reprocess the photo using more tools.

Have a great weekend.

Software

How to use the Nik Collection in Lightroom

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HDR image created with Nik HDR Efex in Lightroom. Do you know how to open Nik HDR Efex from Lightroom without looking it up?

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? If you want to use the Nik Collection in Lightroom, you right click and choose “Edit in” from the popup menu. You can then pick the Nik Collection plugin you want to use from the list. But life and Lightroom aren’t always quite this simple.

Have you tried to use Nik HDR Efex with this technique? By default, you can’t. It’s not in the list of available plugins. And what about all those new image files each time you launch the Nik Collection from Lightroom? How can you better manage those?

There’s a lot more to using the Nik Collection in Lightroom than is immediately obvious. That’s why I’ve published a free video tutorial explaining how to best use the Nik Collection in Lightroom. I even demonstrate how to add the missing HDR Efex plugin to the “Edit in” menu.

You will find the video on my YouTube channel with this link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl4hCzK35Gk&t=2s). I’ve published an accompanying article on Lenscraft about using the Nik Collection with Lightroom; the article also has the video embedded within it.

This is the first of a series of Nik Collection tutorials I’m intending to publish. I’m calling the series Bitesize Nik Tutorials, with each video being between 5 and 10 minutes (but don’t hold me to that). I already have 12 ideas to progress, but if you have any requests, please let me know. I will be publishing a new video on YouTube each week, usually on a Thursday. If you want to be sure not to miss any, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel.

I hope you enjoy the video.