Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey everybody, this
is alternate from Hungary and professional
landscape photographer, ambassador of OMC system, aka Olympus and
Manfrotto in Hungary. In this video, we will learn on this image and actually
you can download all the raw files and
follow along and follow all the steps I do in
Photoshop and camera at all. In this video, we
learn much quicker. In my opinion, I was
lucky enough to have the permission and climbed a
walk-in or twice actually. And I had to wait months for the perfect condition
when the top of the volcano is snowy and
the foreground is frozen, It's just really, really rare. It was a real journey
to take this image. And I hope you will appreciate
it and you will learn some new techniques
that you can use on your own images
in the future. So don't hesitate to download the row fires and
let's get started.
2. My Best Advise for Compositions: Hey everyone. This is the image we
will edit together. But before we start editing, we need to discuss
the few things. Start with the composition. I really want to give
you some cool tips. I don't want to just talk about boring and
composition rules. So every photographer in his or her life goes
through an evolution. So first you learn
composition rules, then you break all
of them probably. So It's really
important to learn these rules, but later on, the balance and then
some other things I just share with you now
will be more important. This more important
thing is your viewer and the people who watch
or look at your images. And what you need to do is to
guide them on your picture. So you can do it in
multiple different ways. Generally speaking,
most of the people, when we look at the picture
and watches the main subject, we choose the mountain or
actually volcano here. By the way, this is the volcano, it's in ten or if Canary Island and this is the highest
point in Spain. So the first thing we, the people will look at
is the mountain itself. Then the second thing, probably the foreground
and the third thing, probably this ROC curve. Then, then try to explore the other interesting elements
because we have a few, we have demand team, we have these mountain range. We have a nice green
something here. We have really nice colors. We have color contrast, which is really cool. You need to focus
on color contrast. If you are planning to take photos on a professional
level, which is, let, let's say warm
and cold here, like blue and orange. So you need to, need
to be conscious about what people do and look
at the picture because dad, hundreds and thousands of images taken of this volcano
every single day and many of them are
really professionals or good-quality, really
nice composition. But 95% of them take and
read the same spots. So what do you need to do to
stand out from the crowd? You need to find the
nice foreground. So this is, of course, this is just one way to
stand out with your images. But I think the coolest
and actually the easiest way you need to
find the cool foreground. You need to go there and walk around and find a
cool foreground, not just any
foreground, a cool one, which looks good with
ads to the picture. I was walking around
a lot to find this. I didn't no branches or
I don't know why this is the other thing is timing. So we got some snow on
the top of the mountain. I had to wait for this
for months actually, to be able to photograph the tie the
volcano with snow on the top. I came here at Sunrise. So these are the first sunlight on the top of the mountains. And as you can see, we have really nice
soft colors on the sky. And we have a frozen foreground that's where which is
absolutely unique here. So you need a timing, you need a nice composition
and foreground. That's how you can stand
out from the crowd. I hope these thoughts
will help you to make and take better
photos in the future. Let's get started in Photoshop.
3. Exposure Bracketing: We have our images and
we have 18 images. We will use only six and you can download six of them and
follow all the steps. In this way, you will
learn so much quicker. But we have 18 images
and let me explain why. I open it in Photoshop. Because they are raw images. Photoshop opens it
in camera roll. And if you prefer Lightroom, adobe Lightroom, you
can use that as well. It's not a problem at all. First look at the left side, we have our raw images here, and we have 18 of them. As you can see, we have
a medium exposure, a dark exposure, and
the bright exposure, then we have the
same bracketing, so a medium exposure, but I looked with a
little bit to the right and the dark and the
bright and so on, so on. We have these free
images six times. So why did I do this? Because I wasn't sure I can capture everything
on one picture. Because if something
is too dark like here, if I expose to the highlights, if everything is too dark, I can brighten my image, but probably it will
be noisy and not maybe lose some really
nice details if it's, let me reset it. If we have a two
bright exposure, which is cool for the
dark part of the image, there is a risk we lose the sky. That's why I always do these
free image bracketing. But as you can see, the captured really nice details on this guy, even if it looks like
it's blown out, it's not. That's why you need to test them and understand your camera. So always take overexposed
images than the dark and Lynn, Dan, and USC, not your
camera are capable of.
4. Camera Settings: Now have a look on the
right hand side on the top. This is our histogram and we
can see the settings here. So the camera was
in manual mode. I put it on the tripod and I turned off
image stabilization. It's super important. Turn off image stabilization. If you have a tripod, I said ISO 200 because
that's the lowest I can use. And then the lower the ISO, the better the qualities or
less noise in the picture. Let's say the focal
length is 12 millimeter. And this is the equivalent of February meter on a full frame. It's 24 millimeters, so it's a fairly by then go but it's
not ultra wide angle. F1. F1 was more than enough
for me to capture the horse seen in
sharp in focus. But if you have a full frame
or even an APS-C camera, maybe you should experience with the higher f-number,
the unit what? Google it, hyper focal distance. If you look up hyper focal
distance on the internet, you will understand how
to take and how to set up your camera if you want
everything in focus. Okay, So the trick that
the securities for a really sharp image is
hyper focal distance. And I have a shutter speed. I just mentioned you, it
was early in the morning, so we haven't got so much light. And of course f Taney's are really, really
small aperture. So I used von third of a second shutter speed because
it was in manual mode. All my bright images have
the same same settings.
5. How to Stitch Panoramas in Camera RAW: I highlight the bright exporters here on the left-hand side. One more thing. If, for example, if the sky was blown out here, I would highlight all of them. And I would press on
these three dots. And here is the merge
to HDR panorama. In this way, you can
manage all 18 images and blend all the
images to one panorama, but you will have all the
data of all 18 images, okay? But we don't need it. It
would be a really huge file to work with them and we
just don't need that. So I just married to a panorama. When this popup window show up, just check out these settings. So usually you need to
choose one of these here. And sometimes the spherical, sometimes they're cylindrical, sometimes the
perspective is better. So you should check
always all of them. I think on this scene I like the cylindrical the most and
I think it doesn't work. Perspective. Yes, it doesn't work. So cylinder, curious, fine. The other thing here
is this boundary. If you don't have any straight lines like
horizon and buildings, so vertical lines,
you should just, you can just warp image
and voila, It looks great. But because we have actually a straight almost trade
line here at the horizon, it hasn't looked dead good. We could fix it later, but actually we can crop
it so it doesn't matter. I don't use this warp. I just leave it on 0
and we can merge it. If you press on Merge
will ask you where to save it and I save
it on my desktop.
6. Editing in Camera RAW: When you're panorama image shows up the bottom of the list here, the first thing we need to
look at is the profile. I prefer landscape,
Adobe Landscape profile because
it's just a little bit more saturated
and less contrasty. So when I take landscape photo, I usually choose Oliver
landscape profile. Then the second thing we
need to do is just bounce the light because it's for two, it's overexposed the pillars. So I reduce exporter by 0.35 exposure because it roughly looks good
on the foreground. And as you can see, this guy is still blown out. If I was to reduce it
until this guy looks good, everything else in the
foreground is just too dark, it's just boring, it
doesn't look good. So that's why I don't do that may be a reduced,
a little bit more, let's say minus,
minus 0.5 exporter. Okay, so in the foreground
looks great like this. So how do we fix this guy? We can use actually
a mosque for that. So here you can just
press Select Sky. Usually does a really good job. Select this guy. And now I can reduce the
exposure separately on the sky, let's say minus 1.2. It looks good on the sky, but we have one problem, which is here on the
top of the mountain. It's a little bit Dole, as you can see, so we just reduce the exposure
there as well. So here is a button,
it's called substract. Just press, press brush. Just a little bit. You can up, sorry, flow and everything to 100%. Just be careful
with the horizon. It looks good. Like this. Okay, cool. Before we carry on
with the other mask, just go back to the basic steps. So most of the people
would just play, read all these sliders, I teach you another way. So when you balance the lights, which usually only you, only you need to use
maybe some exposure, a little bit of highlights,
shadows and everything. So usually with two
or three sliders, you can just balance the light. You need to work with
the color temperature. I think it's a
little bit too cold. So let us say 7 thousand and it's a bit
maybe too purple for me. Let's say. Yeah, it looks, actually
it looks so good. When the vendor white balance is good and the lights
are imbalanced, the next thing, just
skip everything here. Don't, don't touch
anything here. Go to the details
filled on the details are sharpening is
on 40 on the fault. And the problem with this, we usually need the
sharpening anyway, but the problem with this, it sharpens
everything, even the, even then the noise. So if I zoom in
like, I don't know, 400%, I sharpen the image. You can see we sharpen
everything, even the noise. But if I just move them mosque
slider, Let's zoom out. Just press and hold
Option or Alt, move the mask Slider. And as you can see where
the mask is black, you want sharpen anything
where it's white, you will sharpen the image. So I think here maybe
3035, it's perfect. We don't want to sharpen too much this point of the editing. It looks so much better
than other thing here. Have a look at the histogram. We have a gap on
the right that has asked probably these
should a little bit brighten the brightest part of the images instead
of just brighten the exposure because
everything gets me a bit too overexposed. Or we can just move the
white because that's the right or even better
work with the curve. I think the curve is the
best solution for that. So just grab and hold the
top-right and move it until you see that the red
shows if blowers blowing out, and actually the blue
shows where it's too dark, there is no information anymore. So you can turn on
and off these here. So this is for the dark part, this is for the bright parts, or they should be on
almost all the time. So I think we are good here. We stretched. It says more to the right. It's perfect. The next thing, optics, I don't want to explain now, try to keep this
tutorial as simple, but show you some advanced
techniques at the same time, if you don't understand what's chromatic aberration
or profile correction, you should look it up there. Usually you just need to check both and let
it I don't check the second loan
because it doesn't do anything with my image. The next calibration,
this is the part but less photographer use and this is really, really powerful. You remember I mentioned you don't touch, don't
touch anything, don't touch the colors
here because this is the, this is that part,
the last part, the calibration value, you
should touch the color first. Usually, you should play
around with all the sliders. But whether I use
most of the time is blue primary saturation slider and just move it to the right. First, you should focus
on the warm colors, the yellows and the warm colors. And they just the difference. It's just the looks
so much better. So you can use a higher
number on this image. I set it to 770, usually comes with
a negative effect, which is the blue. We'll be over a saturated, but it's fine, I think here, but a little bit over saturated. But after that they
usually comes here. He just sell saturation
and they just reduce the blues until
it looks natural, let's say minus 25 here. Yeah, that's good for me. After that, you can
come back here to the basics and you can
play with these sliders, play with the colors. And I think on a plus
ten vibrance, It's fine. It looks good for me. Okay, So this is the moment when most of the
photographers would say, okay, I'm done, It looks great. You see, this is
the starting point. This is where we are right now. But I don't think it's done. It's far from done. Let's go back to the mosques. I need a new mosque, so
create new radial gradient. And the first question is, what's our main subject? And I think it's the volcano. So the wonky know, should be somehow
emphasized or highlighted. So just draw her
relatively big radio here. And instead of brightening up our volcano because I think it's bright
enough already. Dark and everything gets, we could draw, darken
everything gas. So come here to the
right on this icon, which inverts the masks. So we will, we will
affect everything. But the volcano can be a
little bit bigger, like so. I just reduce the exposure
here by half a stop. As you can see now, we emphasized the volcano because it's brighter
than everything, yes. But what S We would like
to highlight a little bit. I think the foreground here, it should be a
little bit brighter. So again, we need a new mask. Radial gradient. Now, I just want to brighten, go and increase the
exposure back to buy a half extra exposure
and maybe the whites, because if you just
raise the whites, you will increase the contrast and bright them
at the same time. So it's cool for us. It looks, it actually great. We have this anchor point. Small rock may be, I would like to emphasize
or highlight that as well. So another mask can be smaller and a little
bit of exposure. And the whites, Let's say 2525. Cool. It looks good though we have too much dark
here and here. And if you have a look
on the histogram again, we a little bit underexposed. So come here again. The left until it
looks great here. And this is the dark bark. So what it happens? So this part is a 100%
black, this is the, a 100% white and
everything in between. So if I raise this bar
just a little bit, we will have a nice smooth
dark parts of the image, so shadows, it looks much, much better in my opinion. Go back to the mosques,
create another mask. Radial gradient here
to our volcano again. And I think we need
more contrast. But instead of using
the contrast slider, which is okay, I think it's
totally okay to use that. We should increase. We are actually at just experience with
the Dehaze slider. It usually looks
much better for me. So let's say on 20, it's fine. Okay. So this is the before. This is the after. It's so much better. I think. Let's open it in Photoshop and I show you
some other tricks there. So breast and open.
7. Stretch and Crop Our Image: Here we are in Photoshop. First of all, I just
make a copy and I call it row, and I turned it off. So just just to have a
Becker before we cut the part you don't like on this image, I
showed you a trick. I think the foreground
is a little bit too big and our mountains are
a little bit small. I mean, it's because the wide-angle and
the panorama and it's far so it looks a little bit
smaller than I would prefer. So I assure you a
really cool trick. Select these rectangular tool somewhere here at the horizon. Let's say here I
select everything. And we just selected the
top part of the image. If you press Control
or Command T, you can change the just the
top part of this image. But if you press and hold Shift, then move the slider. You can play with the size. I want this mountane
a little bit bigger. I press enter. Then I select the bottom
part of this image, com wonder Control T. And I
press and hold shift again, the name make the bottom
part a little bit smaller. I think nine just looks
much, much better. I move my images and image on
the top, the middle, sorry. Now let's Copic. I press on the crop tool. 16 by ten. I prefer 16 by ten over
the 16 by nine because taller the image
better it looks on any kind of social media. For example, on Instagram, four by five is the best,
that's the tallest, that's the image that the
occupies the biggest, biggest surface of
the screen and on Instagram and similar
in Facebook as well. If you cut the 16 by 10.5
right in the middle, here in the middle, you end
up with 24 by five images. And that's a perfect
swipeable post on Instagram. So it was just a long, steep, That's what I usually do. Let's crop our image. I don't need so much on
the left side for sure. I don't need some parts. May be here on the
right as well. I think it looks good here. When you crop. If you think these box delete,
delete cropped pixels, if you take it and press
OK or breast and enter, then you crop
everything forever. I think it's fine. We don't need those
parts anymore.
8. Fixing Sky: But as you can see, we may need more sky, so I don't want an even bigger mountain
because that looks unnatural. But we can do some other things. The easiest way, again, if you just select the sky, Control T or Command T, press and hold Shift
and you can stretch it, but sometimes it sometimes
it doesn't look so good. Sometimes it's okay. Let's say we don't
want to do that. There is an other ways. Polygonal lasso tool. Select these parts. Just roughly. Don't need to be very precise. Then Shift F5 or
you can come here, the edit and fill. It does the same. Choose
Content-Aware and press. Okay. Wait for the magic
and install on, and it looks great. Okay, So let's call
it stretch the image. All right, It's already
looks really great. The next one is, I don't like these
clouds, so let's fix it. I choose this Patch Tool, select it and fix it. That's it. It looks perfect.
9. Adjustments in Photoshop: At this point, the best
thing you can ask yourself, what would make
this image better? So I, what I wouldn't do is
just talk in a little bit more in the sky
and brighten This. Maintain top or at least
just increase the contrast. First of all, I need, even though you can
use level or curves, I prefer curves or level. So if I just grabbed the mid, middle part of the curve, you can see if I
decrease the exposure, we have really nice
colors on the sky. But again, we dark
and everything else. But we don't want to do that. So how can we fix that? But what can we do about it? Silicon? This guy here is this
Quick Selection Tool. I just scale it a
setback the sky roughly. And as you can see,
it's not perfect. So try again. If, for example, you end up selecting the mountain as
valid few press and hold Alt, you can just deselect
those parts. It looks okay for me, but it's not perfect. Now been either mosque
with the selection. So I delete this mask with
an active selection and the curve layer selected
if you press on this mask, and now if I click here twice and decrease the
exposure, as you can see, we can darken our sky, but anything else is untouched, and that's what we aim for. But usually if we do that, we end up with a
really strange edges sometimes because our
selection is just not perfect. What I usually do is
soften this edge. So you can select
this mask again. I can delete it. Then go to Select
Modify, Expand. Let's say we expanded
by five pixels. So now if I zoom in, you can see we selected the
five pixels in the mountains. So now we need a new mosque. So press again, we
have a new mask. So it's still bad because now
we have a dark edge here, which I don't like at all. But we can soften this
edge because we know we have five pixels inside
to the maintain. We can just press
twice on this mask. On the Federal. You can increase the
it either by three, maybe even four pixels. And now we soften these edges, and now it looks
much more natural. So this is how we can
darken the sky and leave really nice
bright mountain top. And if you want to increase the mountaintops and brightness, you can create another
layer to do that. So let's start, let's
make another curve layer. And on the mask, I just come here. So there are many, many ways I can show you much complicated and
much more precise ways, but really don't want
you to overwhelm. I show you an easier way. Just go here, image, apply image and press. Okay. Now we created the mosque.
We need to do it again. So go to the mosque,
image, apply image. So what we want to
see here is a mask where the mountain
top is more selected. I think it looks okay. What do I want to
do now is increase. So I just grab it and move it up a little so it will
be a little bit brighter. But as you can see, again, we brightened many other
things we probably don't want. So I just moved this curved
layer two or folder and I can give a mask to
default or just press it. If you remember, we have a
mosque could be the sky. Press and hold Command, and click on the mask. We have an active
selection of the sky. Come here, delete it. And we need a mosque
like this, but inverse. So if I press the mosque here I have and
Moscow in the sky, but I have them mosque off
everything S Bob, this guy. So what, how can we do that? If you have these active
selection press and hold option and press
this mask again. And we have an inverted mask. As you can see, we have masked out our sky
because that's black. So everything I do read this with this layer
doesn't affect our sky, but it affects everything else. Which is, which is
really cool for us. Let's say, looks great. This. So I put these two in a group
and I call it adjustments. There are so many
other techniques and the tricks are probably
would do with this image, but I really try
to keep it simple. So just a couple of more adjustments are in
this group or directory. And just create an,
again a curve layer. Now I just move this slider to the left because in this
way, as you can see, I can brighten the image and brighten the brightest
part more than, than the other parts. So I just brighten it a
little, then I mask it. So we already have a mask here. So I don't want this
adjustment anywhere. Mainly here on the
foreground maybe, and less on the sky. So for example, here
is this gradient tool. It's really important
the mask is selected. And from the bottom to the, let's say half of the mountain. Just draw, draw a mask. And as you can see,
our mask looks really, really nice and probably
really natural. We affect the foreground. We lay sorry, it
much more alive. It looks great in my opinion. And we can create another
adjustment like curve again. Brighten it again,
change it to black, just inverse the mosque. So press and hold
Command or Control. And I brush, brush tool, white color, let's say 45%. I can bright and some part of this image here, that's fine. That's okay. I just
wanted to brighten this these bush there. It looks much better. In my opinion. I would probably play with the
channel and mosques more, but I really tried
to keep it simple, as I mentioned before. Just one more thing and go
to the adjustment again. Curves. And now a
simple S-curve, that's a more traditional curve. So this lower part, I, I just darken it, and maybe in the
middle, I brighten it. This way. We have a little
bit more of a contrast. Just looks more
professional in my opinion.
10. Sharpening (FREE version): Let's sharpen our image. We need a copy of everything. The easiest way to do
that is press and hold Shift option and command or on a PC Shift Alt Control and press E. And now we have
a copy of everything. I call it sharpen. I open the filter, other and high-pass filter. If you press on high-pass, everything goes to gray. It doesn't matter if
do this, this is good. Choose the one big
cell I usually go for, go with one pixel. So I'll just press. Okay. Now we need to change
the blending mode. The blending mode, do
we need this overlay? So in this way,
the gray is gone, but we sharpened our image. So let's have a look. For example, on
the mountane here. If I turn off this layer, you can see two
little bit blurry. If I turn this on, it's really nice and sharp. And if you need more sharpening, instead of increasing
that number, the number one I
just showed you. Instead of that, just, you can just copy this, copy this layer multiple times and it will
be super sharp. Let's see here. Turn these off. You see it's probably
over sharpen now. Whereas you can see
it's super sharp. Let's say we need
to. So I did it. One of them. I put them in a group
and I call it sharpen. This is the before. This is the after It's
super sharp, It's cool. But as you remember, if you sharpen an image, you will sharpen
the noise as well. And we really don't want
any noise on the sky. So what we're gonna do about it, of course, we create a mask. So let's go to our image. Here. Select sky. We have an active
selection of the sky. So we need an inverted mask because we don't want
to sharpen the sky, we want us to sharpen
everything else. So press and hold
option and press Mask. And in this way we have a
Mosque of the foreground, which is cool, looks
super nice and sharp.
11. Save for Web (sRGB): The last thing we need to
do is to save our image. Just go to File, export and Save for Web. And this is really important. So if you save
this image and you don't import or export for web, all the colors will change when you upload it to the
web or further on. Upload it to any kind of website or social media
site or anything. These nice colors and
contrasts will be gone this way or be probably
an awful image. This is a really important
part. So come here. Export, save for web in my
usual settings are JPEG 85, personal quality, optimized embedded color
profile and convert to sRGB. The Internet is SRGB, so it's really
important to convert it to sRGB, Internet standard, sRGB, I usually say all the metadata I
have and that's it. I usually save it, but
this is a huge image. I don't need this big, so let's decrease or resize it. Save.
12. Summary: Okay, so let's summarize
what we did together. So we had a stitch panorama and before any editing
it looked like this. Then we edited this image, and of course it's a little
bit cropped already. Then we stretch this image. We changed a little bit
of perspective here and made the mountains
higher than in a bit. Then we have some adjustments. One curve for the sky actually, I think it's a
little bit too much, but doesn't matter,
so I just fix it. We darken the sky a little bit. Then we brightened, be brightened up the
top of the volcano. And we'll give some life to the foreground,
as you can see. Then for the bush here and a little bit of
this mountain range. Then a little bit more contrast. All the adjustments
together from here to here. Then we sharpened our images. And this is the before. And this is the after. So this is the before. This is the after. So that's it. I hope you
liked this video and you learned some new
tricks and techniques.
13. Other Courses / Good Bye: Hey everyone, thanks for watching my tutorial
until the end. I hope you've learned
some new techniques. Now, I want to ask you a favor. Please download the raw files, follow the steps in the course
if you haven't already. And the end result,
the image you just edited upload here as a project, I promise you, if you
follow the steps, you will learn
much, much quicker. Also, don't forget to
subscribe here on Skillshare. I already have some
other courses may be you are interested
in doors as well, and I will upload a few
more in the near future. Thanks for watching again and
see you in another course.
Zoltán Nagy, Olympus and Manfrotto ambassador
