How It Was Done? | Quick Photo Editing Tutorial
This is the first edition and an example of the idea that has come to my mind recently and was requested by Shuttout users. The idea is to create short, step-by-step tutorials on winning photos from Shuttout showing “How It Was Done”. Think of it as a photography reverse engineering. First, you see the final result and then the whole process of how the author gets there.
Disclaimer: I am using a photo that was not yet uploaded on Shuttout, to gather your feedback on the process and to show an example for future photographers that will be willing to share their knowledge with others on their winning photos.
So here’s the final picture. How It Was Done?
A short story about the photo itself.
This photo was taken during a weekend late afternoon in September. This was the first time at the location so I would rather call it a scouting trip, in search of the best angles and frames. I was hoping to capture a sunset over the pond.
Gear used
I used Sony A6300 with Sigma 16mm f/1.4 lens
Camera settings
From the beginning, I knew I will use bracketing to capture at least 3 frames of the same picture with different exposure settings. The reason for that is simple — to get more data in the highlights and shadows that would help with the final edit. I ended up taking a horizontal panorama consisting of 5 frames and combined with the bracketing settings. That’s a total number of 15 photos to combine together in Lightroom CC.
Each shot was taken with 16mm and f/4 as due to the “scouting” nature I didn’t take a tripod so all the shots were hand-held. The exposure time, thanks to the bracketing option, varied between 1/50s, 1/100s, 1/200s.
Raw files
After merging the bracketed frames I ended up 5 raw images:
After merging them into a panorama in Lightroom I ended up with one big raw file 10412x6340px that looked like this after setting boundary warp to 100 (an option that I prefer to just crop the image):
Editing — the basics
Now, with just one click of a button to check how much details we’ve got, I used the Auto Tone option in Lightroom and this is the result (keep in mind that I haven’t even started to edit the photo, this is just adding some auto settings to start with):
See how many details we have in the sky? In the shadows? In both foreground and the background? Now we can play with it a little bit.
Cropping & Straighten
With the panorama photos (and wide-angle in general) it’s kinda tricky to straighten the horizon as it’s often a little bit curved. I always try to fix it manually and if necessary to crop the photo a little bit. In this situation, I liked the foreground so I didn’t want to crop it, just slightly removed trees from the left and right side of the picture. See the difference?
Finding a perfect mood
In the next step, when I got the basics, basic (auto) tones I usually check how the photo looks with different presets. It’s not a surprise that my favorite ones are Official Shuttout Lightroom Presets, so I basically check the first look with each of them before I decide on the direction I want to take.
Finally, I’ve picked LandscapeAdventure preset to start with. Here’s the difference between the photo without and with the preset I picked. Can you see the difference?
As you can see the difference is very subtle. And this is what’s very important when using presets. They should make your work easier and faster, they should help to highlight what you want to show in the picture, but they shouldn’t change the picture too dramatically.
Editing — the final touch
The amount of work on edit is something that can vary from minutes to hours. I rarely edit one photo longer than a couple of minutes. So here are some edits that I usually do and steps before the final export.
First — graduated filter to work on the sky. As you can see above the sky is still overexposed and that’s something that we can definitely fix.
Gradient filter in Lightroom allows you to add some corrections only to a part of the image. In this case — the sky. The first thing you can try is to lower the exposure and highlights of the sky a little bit to remove that overblown parts. Lowering shadows can help with contrast.
One thing I like to do is to play with the dehaze option, but you need to be careful with this. In most cases, more than 15 dehaze will make your picture looks unnatural so use it wisely. This is what I’ve got after a minute or so tweaking the sky. It’s a little bit better. But I wouldn’t call it perfect yet (picture below, upper one).
In such situations, I use the radial filter that allows me to select an oval shape and adjust settings only inside (or outside the area). This way I can select the area where the sun is behind the trees and try to make it look even better without changing the rest of the sky. At the same time, I could add a little bit more orange color to this part of the picture making the sun feel warmer. (picture below, lower one).
As you can see each time there are some changes visible but are quite moderate.
After finishing with the upper part of the picture it’s time to add some light into the foreground. It looks a little bit dull and there’s probably too much shadow here.
This time I will use a radial filter to change the exposure of selected parts of the image to add some depth to it and some warmth on the foreground too. Then if necessary I use the adjustment brush tool that allows me to paint over specific parts of the image. With this tool, you can make changes even more precisely to some parts of the image if you feel they are too dark, to bright, etc…
The final (almost) result
It’s time to play with colors. At this stage what I like to do is to play with colors a little bit in the HSL/Color section in Lightroom. In this situation, I decided to make the blue color a little bit darker (Luminance -50). I pushed also the blues a little bit toward purple on Hue slider (Blue +30). Increased the saturation of yellow +20 and reducing it’s luminance -20 to make the sunrise a little bit more saturated and darker. The last thing I did was making the grass more bright (green luminance +20) but at the same time making green more yellow (green hue -10).
The final result
And just as a quick comparison. Here’s a raw photo BEFORE the edit (after merging the panorama) with the final result AFTER the edit. And it was all done in less than 30 minutes. Is it perfect? Definitely not. I am still learning and in most cases, I would edit this photo differently next time. And this is where you can learn too. Try a different approaches, test, play, and have fun!
Now It’s time for your feedback
I hope that you get the idea behind the quick editing tutorials now and hopefully, you see the value for yourself here.
The biggest question is: Do you like this approach — a simple, step-by-step quick editing tutorial without going into many details (you can learn all about how to use Lightroom and settings in many places if you are not familiar with the mentioned settings).
Should we brake it into the same parts with every quick edit? Like chapters: “Image Story”, “Gear used”, “Camera Settings”, “Raw Files”, “Editing”, “The Final Result”? Maybe there’s something missing? Maybe it’s too much?
Please leave your comment and your thoughts. I will appreciate it a lot!
Want to contribute?
Are you a winning photographer from Shuttout? Would you like to share your quick photo editing tutorial and be the first one to gain some additional exposure? Contact me through Shuttout!
