Lightroom Preset: Warm Forest

I'm not using presets in Lightroom a lot; most of them qualify as "tools", like White Balance, my preferred Split Toning for monochrome edits, that sort of thing.

But every now and then, hand-crafting a photo ends up with a pleasant look that I wish to be able to recreate. Such as this one (and no, it doesn't happen all too often;). It's a preset with a hearty amount of color manipulation and Split Toning on top of it, and I found it works best for forest or at least groups of trees where the dominating colors of the source material are green/yellow and brown/red. Check it out:

The tiny little ZIP archive (right-click, Save Link As) contains two versions: one plain preset, the other one with Lightroom's Auto Toning. Unzip the files and add them to Lightroom: switch to the Develop module, expand the Presets section in the left-hand sidebar, right-click and select Import from the pop-up menu.

As usual, the preset is merely a starting point, you should adjust Tone, Tone Curve etc. to your liking. The majority of tweaks is in the HSL panel and Split Toning. Feel free to tweak and mangle!

If you find it useful and want to buy me ice cream (well, not directly...) just click on one of the friendly ads below this post and/or at the bottom of the blog page. They don't bite. :P

Status Update

First, a belated Happy New Year to all of my readers here! I just wanted to post some quick notes here about what's going on...

Just like in 2010, I compiled My Personal Top 10 photos from 2011, now on my other website/blog - which I intend to turn into my personal photography diary and perhaps also a hiking blog for the San Diego area. Since I make most of my Landscape and Nature photography during our hikes, I might as well combine the results. It gives me a reason to blog more or less regularly too - except perhaps in the Summer months, when it's too hot to hike in Southern California. :) That on the other hand should give me a chance to cull my ever-growing photo library, organize and keyword the images, that sort of thing... I guess that qualifies as a New Year's resolution, no? :)

And since we're officially a business by the name of Daylight Colors now, I will transfer the portfolio part away from my personal website to our new website which I hope to build in the coming days and weeks - it will combine both of our photographic output were it fits (it's kind of funny when we switch cameras for the sake of convenience anyway), and will hopefully be better and easier to maintain my overly enthusiastic combination of Google+ posts, the Picasa Web Albums API, and Blogger. It's safe to say that it is not as charming as I had hoped for, mostly because of my limited competence in doing more customizations to the Blogger templates, but also the shortcomings of the Google+/PWA combination...

Stay tuned. :)

Darker Skies in Black & White

Many black & white edits one can see nowadays contain these really striking, dramatic and dark skies. It is often attributed to the combination of a red filter with a polarizer, but from my tests with a red filter I can assure you that it is not possible to get that effect straight out of the camera - at least not with digital (depending on the time of day, the red filter will have surprisingly little impact to the brightness of the sky). Maybe things are different with film - I don't know.

Anyhow, it's not all too difficult to achieve a similar effect in post processing, and it's not really necessary to use specialized black & white conversion filters/plugins for it - Lightroom alone does the trick pretty well.

I've explained how to achieve an infrared look in post processing with Lightroom before and the technique I described there to get really deep and dark blue tones can be further enhanced with local adjustments. That can be the local adjustment brush, or a graduated filter, like in my example below.

Here's the - otherwise finished - image with a "normal" sky (click to enlarge):

And for your comparison, here's the "more drama" version with a graduated filter to darken the sky (again, click to enlarge):

The "trick" is to combine a decreased Brightness/Exposure* with increased contrast on the local adjustment/graduated filter. More contrast means: dark tones become darker, and bright tones become brighter - by compensating the increase of brightness in the highlights (due to contrast being at +100) with a decrease of Brightness/Exposure, we can get a darker sky while the clouds appear almost unaltered.

Needless to say - the source material is important, just as always. This was late in the afternoon and the sky was not too brightly blue anymore and I used a polarizer to further darken it (I couldn't use full polarization though - at 16mm wide angle on full frame, it would lead to a very uneven darkening of the sky).

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*) Lightroom's Brightness control is a midtone adjustment that has less effect on the highlights and thus is my choice for this type of edits, or brightness adjustments in general. If you need to brighten an image without blowing out the highlights, leave the Exposure setting alone and adjust Brightness instead - it's nicely illustrated in this video on YouTube.