Add Depth and Drama to Landscape Photos Using Lightroom

Here’s a 24-minute video from Andrew Marr that looks at how he adds depth and drama to landscape photos during post-processing in Adobe Lightroom.

The first thing Marr does is to look at the areas of the image where dark edges mean brighter parts of the image. This allows him to spot any chromatic aberration within the image and remove it using Lightroom’s “Lens Calibration” window. Cropping is then done to line up the horizon and compose the shot, giving Marr a good starting point for the rest of his adjustments.

As he’s shooting in raw format, the image comes out of the camera looking pretty flat. Thus, it’s important that Marr makes good raw adjustments, playing with the typical adjustment sliders and achieving a good white balance, before making more advanced edits.

Moving away from raw adjustments, he then heads for the “HSL” window, using the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance sliders to cause the colors to pop in the photo. After giving the oranges, greens, and yellows some extra saturation to bring out the details in the grass, Marr uses Luminance to add further punch and brightness into these tones.

Marr’s editing skills emphasize the light in the scene, causing the mountain to become imposing and dramatic, with dark tones in the sky contrasting the landscape beautifully.

(via Andrew Marr via Fstoppers)