Working with cloudy landscapes in Lightroom (Free Lightroom preset and RAW file)
One of the great things about Hungary is it’s location in Europe. Lot of cool places are accessible by train from Budapest (which is quite cheap) and you can pretty much do weekend trips every other weekend! One of the places that I recently visited was Štrbské Pleso in Slovakia.
I clicked a lot of pictures as the location was very scenic and the clouds looked amazing. I thought it would be nice to share how I turned the image from the one on the left to the one on the right using just Lightroom:


The first thing I usually do is to add a gradient filter on top and pull the exposure down and choosing a color for the gradient. I picked somewhere around the brown/orange/yellow section for this image. Another thing I like to play around is with the clarity and sharpness slider for the clouds. Clarity can really bring out some character in the cloud, but it can start looking a bit unrealistic. This is when you could play around with sharpness and hit a balance to get dramatic but realistic clouds.

The next is the exposure, highlights, shadows and the contrast of the overall image. I try to push highlights down as much as possible and bring the shadows up. Also bump up the whites and pull back black a little till the histogram starts to look more even:

Now use a brush on the building next to the lake. That building is one of my focus ares of the photograph. I would like it top pop out so I bump up the clarity, saturation and shadows.

After a few more color and curves adjustment, I start getting some good results:

I have uploaded the original RAW image and the Lightroom preset here for playing around as it is quite hard to explain every step in an article. I tested this on another composition of the same place and the results are quite nice:

The pictures were taken with the Sony SEL1650 kit lens (except the one above). The kit lens is quite infamous for it’s softness and crappy quality. However, if you click at the right f-stop, with the help of some auto-bracketing and editing in photoshop, I could achieved results like this:
I am hoping to write more articles on how I post-process my images using Lightroom and Photoshop. Keep an eye on this channel or on my FB page.
Happy clicking and editing!
