Landscape technique and processing

mattwalkerncl

mattwalkerncl

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Matt
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I'm really looking to up my game, learn a bit more and try to develop more of a personal style.

Pretty much all of what I shoot is landscapes and I've recently been looking at Luminosity Masks to help me draw more detail out from my
Images.

The fundamental problem is that I'm not really sure about how subjective I'm being, which I will outline below.

My 'go-to' settings (shooting on a 6D) are ISO 100 and f/11. I will stop down to f/16 if I'm looking to draw out bursts from light sources
Or open up to f/1.8-4 if I'm looking to draw the viewers eye.

When I'm out and about I almost always have an ND Grad filter in use, as I prefer to slightly underexpose my skies.
I will also bracket the shot by a minimum of +/- 2 stops either side at 1 stop intervals.

Here's a question though - would it be useful to employ Expose To The Right (or 'ETTR') in order to further improve perceived quality?
I shoot on a 6D, which is perfect for what I do - but I've noticed there seems to be an inherent granular look to the image.

I feel my editing is a bit heavy-handed anyway, with too much contrast. I'm hoping someone may be able to share their approaches and any findings they may have had in regards to luminosity masks/ ETTR and tips on landscape editing.

Thanks for reading!!
 
Some samples will help us identify the problem but I suspect it might be down to over-processing which will make any camera look "inherently granular". You are inherently ETTR by bracketing anyway.
 
Matt, some samples or a link to flickr or something would help. I also don't know how some photographers, usually on the fred miranda forums for example can get such a clean glass like look to their files.

My advice with brackets etc and luminosity masks is this though; with the bracketing on 'normal' scenes you will probably find that you can make your darkest exposure the ETTR file and easily pull it back at RAW conversion stage to recover detail to make it look like it was one under anyway. All you have done is maximised SNR and put as much colour information into the file as possible, the advantage is when you pull that shot back and push the shadows, you are not actually pushing them, just returning them to their exposed state so you won't create shadow noise. Now, I know you are blending but it you make a mistake or want to blend more softly then you will not reveal noise like you would with a darker pushed file underneath. The advantage of shooting the 1 extra bracket that is darker is your safety net. You will not need 2 under though with highlight recovery on a 'normal' landscape scene. The only time I take additional underexposed shots is when shooting into a setting sun, or twilight cityscapes where there are very bright sections that I want to save the colour in.

So, when bracketing 5 for example I will actually make my middle exposure one stop above ETTR, so I end up with 1 under ETTR, ETTR, and 3 over ETTR. With a Canon the last thing you want to do is push shadows (although 7d2 and 5ds is an improvement in this area).

The thing to do in your head is to break your processing down into 2 clear stages. One is your blending which you need to treat as digitally increasing the dynamic range of the file to match what the human eye could have taken in. The way we see is quite different to the way our cameras see so it will never look the same, glancing at a 1024px image and judging its dynamic range is not really fair. Our eyes move around a scene and our aperture constantly adjusts, building up a memory of the different elements. That is what your picture needs to become, acceptable detail in the shadows and highlights as if your eye was concentrating on them as parts of the scene.

The blended file if done correctly will be very mid tone/highlight heavy, but without excessive clipped areas. (Sometimes people over recover highlights, if you glanced straight at the sun 2 hours before sunset, or some car headlights after dark they would be blown out, so things like this in photography should also be very hot/blown out, it looks wrong to recover those highlights). It will effectively look like an exposed to the right file, that has decent detail in the necessary highlights. This blending step gives you a bright file with as much information to work with as possible, but because it was blended, not shadow pushed it will be very clean and have lots of colour information. (Currently washed out though).

The second stage of your processing is the editing. From this stage on you will be only darkening midtowns and shadows, considerably in some cases, do not be afraid to take the midpoint to the right a lot, and to pull the shadows down in curves. I find it ok to push highlights mid lights because that does not increase noise but in the editing, once you have flattened your blend you only want to darken mids and shadows if you don't want to bring noise into the photo.

When I get round to it I will do a tutorial for on here with blending using screenshots, you probably won't see the benefits on web files, but when you want to print large it gives you the utmost quality to work with.

Sorry for the ramblings, hope it makes some sense, some of your shots will help to judge, any questions just ask.
 
mattwalkerncl said:
I'm really looking to up my game, learn a bit more and try to develop more of a personal style.

Pretty much all of what I shoot is landscapes and I've recently been looking at Luminosity Masks to help me draw more detail out from my
Images.

The fundamental problem is that I'm not really sure about how subjective I'm being, which I will outline below.

My 'go-to' settings (shooting on a 6D) are ISO 100 and f/11. I will stop down to f/16 if I'm looking to draw out bursts from light sources
Or open up to f/1.8-4 if I'm looking to draw the viewers eye.

When I'm out and about I almost always have an ND Grad filter in use, as I prefer to slightly underexpose my skies.
I will also bracket the shot by a minimum of +/- 2 stops either side at 1 stop intervals.

Here's a question though - would it be useful to employ Expose To The Right (or 'ETTR') in order to further improve perceived quality?
I shoot on a 6D, which is perfect for what I do - but I've noticed there seems to be an inherent granular look to the image.

I feel my editing is a bit heavy-handed anyway, with too much contrast. I'm hoping someone may be able to share their approaches and any findings they may have had in regards to luminosity masks/ ETTR and tips on landscape editing.

Thanks for reading!!
Click to expand...
There's no such thing as go to settings with imaging, every scene is different, it really depends on what your trying to achieve, if your not sure whack it into manual and try a few different apertures/shutter speeds/filters etc.
 
The main part of developing a style is the subjects you shoot and how you shoot them - some landscape photographers become well known for using wide apertures, shooting intimate views in gentle misty morning light etc. Editing style is additional to that and it's usually the quality of light and how you shot the scene that determines your edit.

I can't see the advantage of luminosity masks to be honest, they seem far too complicated when there's the easy to use Shadow/Highlights tool in Photoshop (or sliders in Camera Raw) to recover detail (only use S/H tool with a large radius or you'll end up with a disgusting sketch/HDR effect). I often use a blur layer to smooth out deep contrast which stops it looking ugly.

Do you have any examples you could show us? It would be much easier to help that way.
 
Hi all,

Sorry for the slow reply - didn't get any notifications of replies, my bad!

A link to my flickr is https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattwalkerncl/? - hopefully you can see a little here from what I mean.

I fully understand there's no 'go-to' settings, now that I've posted a link to my Flickr, perhaps someone may be able to give CC and tell me what's up.

Cheers
 
It's probably more the lighting at the time of shooting, some are a bit flat because of midday light and maybe you've overcompensated a bit, but you have some nice stuff there from looking on my phone. Will have a proper look hopefully tomorrow
 
Hi Matt, I'm not sure what you think is "up" - there are some very strong photos in your collection.

I can sort of see what you mean by luminosity masks being able to add something though - take your 30th birthday sunset (which is a lovely image btw), you could draw out a little more detail from the shadows if you wanted. LMs are one way of doing this quite subtly - using a second or third degree mask on the darks. When I was playing with LMs, I'd create nested groups - the Top group with the LM mask applied, then a Middle group underneath and inside that top group that with no mask and then inside that group a reasonably strong dodge curve (for darks) and perhaps a hue shift/sat boost. By creating it that way, I could see the maximum impact the LM and adjustments would have across the whole image. Once I'm happy with that maximum, I'd then apply a black/empty mask (Alt click mask to create a black mask) to Middle group which would remove those adjustments. Using a soft white brush on that empty mask I'd then brush on the effect where i wanted it.

Unfortunately my photography isn't of the standard yet for it to be worth doing, but I did have a good play once upon a time and it's powerful.

For what it's worth, I don't see much shadow noise in your images so I wouldn't be too worried about pushing exposure to the right although one or two look a touch under to my eye (the lambs for example) unless you're printing. Do you bracket and combine exposures in post? A lot of your shots have very wide dynamic range, so I guess it's something to watch out for.

In terms of developing a style, I'm not the right person to comment as I'm still looking for one. I'd assume it's about deciding how you want your photos to look, how much of that can be achieved in camera in terms of composition and lighting and then worrying about a consistent treatment in post. The latter is easier if your starting point SOOC is more consistent in terms of exposure range and quality of light.
 
The thing is there really isn't a right or wrong way, there's just the way that YOU prefer so I'm not sure how useful answers to your question will be but here goes anyway.

My personal preference is minimum time spent editing, if I need to spend more than 20 minutes or so editing the raw file then my view is that I didn't get it right in the field so I just plan another visit to try and capture it in better light. More time on location and less time behind a PC is my own preferred method. I use grads which I find help with this most of the time. There's no real "one size fits all" technique I use, sometimes ETTR is the best option and other times I'll deliberately underexpose by 3 or 4 stops to keep the highlights, it's just dependant on the scene in front of me.

Simon
 
I think you have a good eye and some decent stuff, but you could benefit from learning how to use light more effectively as quite a few of your landscapes are flatly lit. For example compare your Loughrigg Fell picture to this one that I saw on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/28189469@N06/26353348725/in/datetaken/

It's the same view but the light brings it to life. Yours might have a more pleasing composition but without the nice morning light (mist optional but usually great) it lacks impact. You've warmed it up too when you'd expect the light to be bluer. It looks like you might have added a bit too much clarity and definitely a bit too much contrast. The light isn't really working for colour but I reckon this could make a very nice black and white, something along these lines (could do with more dodging and burning (the bottom's too bright for the top left sky), probably softening a bit but you get the idea):



It's worth buying a few books such as Landscape Photographer of the Year and particularly Outdoor Photographer of the Year to get an idea of how the top landscape photographers make use of light and process their images. OnLandscape have a few editing videos with Joe Cornish, some are a bit boring, but there was one where he used the Shadow and Highlights tool which I found quite an insight, I'd never used it before but couldn't be without it now - you can use it to soften contrasts realistically and probably use that to get similar results to the more complex luminosity masks. Here's a link to OnLandscape's Youtube channel anyway:

https://www.youtube.com/user/onlandscape1/videos

Seeing your current pictures and with your drive to improve I'm sure you'll get to the level you want to be, some things can only be learned with practice and experience though
 
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HI Matt

I think they're all very good. However some seem to need a bit more bite and others could do with a re-crop. Take Rydal reflections, I feel there's to much drawing the eye - crop both sides, lose the fence right hand side, to the reeds on the left and some off the bottom losing the dark reflection bottom left.
Loughrigg looks over processed which seems to have lost detail?

Thats my opinion.
 
I agree i had a look and can't see anything wrong with the way you are doing things now. You have a number of very good photographs in your photostream and the ones that are both successful and not as successful are due to the light rather than the processing I thought. Personally I prefer a little less contrast, but do my pp in Lightroom only, so I am not going to be much use.
 
mattwalkerncl said:
Hi all,

Sorry for the slow reply - didn't get any notifications of replies, my bad!

A link to my flickr is https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattwalkerncl/? - hopefully you can see a little here from what I mean.

I fully understand there's no 'go-to' settings, now that I've posted a link to my Flickr, perhaps someone may be able to give CC and tell me what's up.

Cheers
Click to expand...
Hi Matt you have yes marked in your "edit my images" but your flickr set to do not allow download. if you could adjust that i'd like to have a play with one of your photos see if there is something there to improve in pp cheers Mike.:)
 
Sorry - I've still not been receiving notifications about replies, I've not been ignoring!

Thanks for all the feedback, plenty of things to consider and work through. I'd definitely agree that there is a bit too much contrast going on - I've tried to edge away from this at times but feel i loose impact so have tried to tweak with the HSL sliders in camera raw.

Composition and light - for sure, there's a lot of those when I've made journeys out and not had the light as I'd like - I guess it may be a case of developing and not posting just because I've been out. I have a fair problem with that!
I'm going through a few books (Photographers Eye/ Misc Joe Cornish ) and picking up some things there so will hopefully absorb some of that into my own work.

I find myself using a mixture of grads or bracketing so get a fair coverage through the s/m/h's too. Really appreciate all the suggestions and comments - thanks! :-)
 
mattwalkerncl said:
I find myself using a mixture of grads or bracketing so get a fair coverage through the s/m/h's too. Really appreciate all the suggestions and comments - thanks! :)
Click to expand...

Just checked out your flickr, you have some really nice stuff. I'm probably not really in a position to criticise but I was just looking at them and feeling that some of the skies are too dark in the mid tones, then I read the above comment. The grads are actually your problem here in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with grads and blending but I would really not exceed a 2 stop grad, and if you are going to blend anyway I actually would not bother with the grads, just shoot 2 more brackets...
 
mattwalkerncl said:
I'm really looking to up my game, learn a bit more and try to develop more of a personal style.

Pretty much all of what I shoot is landscapes and I've recently been looking at Luminosity Masks to help me draw more detail out from my
Images.

The fundamental problem is that I'm not really sure about how subjective I'm being, which I will outline below.

My 'go-to' settings (shooting on a 6D) are ISO 100 and f/11. I will stop down to f/16 if I'm looking to draw out bursts from light sources
Or open up to f/1.8-4 if I'm looking to draw the viewers eye.
Click to expand...


Hi Matt, I gave a look to your Flickr portfolio and I suggest that you could use more aperture to make your photographs less "flat" and to catch more natural light :)
 
80% of the detail is captured in the highlights so ETTR is always a good idea, even with the advances in sensors these days.....I guess it depends what you're trying to achieve with your photography but for me it's 90% about what I capture when I'm out and about, 10% is more than enough on the processing. My thinking is if I'm spending hours processing then I didn't really take a great shot in the first place. Of course it's personal choice though, there's some great images produced by digital manipulation so go with what you think produces your desired end result

Simon
 
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