Editing Landscapes
This weekend we did a very short walk along the Reaveley Farm Family Stroll, starting from Ingram Bridge. The what3words of choice from the car park would be ///configure.technical.cringes.
As this was a short route, and several of the photos I wanted to take from along the river would have had campervans in them, I don’t have as images as I would normally to create the blog post. Instead I thought I would give an insight into how I approach editing my landscape images, especially those shot on my Fujifilm X-T3 instead of a commentary of the hiking route.
I do have another camera, my Sony, the files from which I would edit very differently. Though that is generally not used for hiking. The editing of those files is something I may cover at a later date.
Whilst I am doing this, I may refer to my presets during the blog, but don’t worry, this isn’t me starting to plug or sell them, they are just part of my workflow for these types of images. Rather than giving specific numbers, as the numbers will change from image to image I will give a statement of intent, for example rather than stating +70 shadows I would say significantly increased shadows or something along those lines as editing shouldn’t really be a case of following numbers as each image will have different requirements. Presets are just a starting point.
So this is the file I am editing through the blog, or at least the JPG rendering of the RAW file captured.
In truth, I probably have better images from the walk, but the ones I thought would be more stand out I wasn’t as happy with on the computer screen as I thought I would be in the field. This one caught my eye when making a selection because I liked the central barn building, along with the farm house tucked off in the trees to the left, with the river and the hedge both leading you towards the barn. There is also going to be plenty of sky detail as it was overcast at that point in the day.
To give you a rough idea of what I could see in camera, this is the same RAW file with the Eterna simulation applied. I will normally shoot in Eterna as it is relatively flat so will give me a good indication of when highlights are blowing. As you can see, this reveals some of texture in the sky.
When shooting portraits I will normally shoot in black and white instead of something like Eterna to get an understanding of what the light is doing and how it will represent those tones in the image. I sometimes do this for landscapes, but normally only when I’m trying to balance very harsh light.
The first edit I make is on import. I have an import preset that sets sharpening to zero, rather than applying Adobe’s standard 40% (or whatever it sits at these days, I’ve had it set to 0 for so long I may have got that percentage wrong).
Following this I have my presets laid out to cover 5 key areas of the editing process. I work through them in numerical order, starting with the basics.
I don’t have any exposure or white balance changes in these presets. I will normally crop the image to how I want it to look using the guides in the crop tool, and then set the white balance and exposure levels. With the X-T3 I am normally quite happy with its choices for white balance so actually find myself rarely changing this. In this instance I am also pretty happy with framing in camera, and don’t intend to crop in further.
I will then set my profile. I will normally choose between 3, Adobe Colour is probably my most used one, followed by Classic Chrome and Eterna which are camera specific. As we’ve seen above, Eterna is quite flat, and it adds a bit of fade. Classic Chrome has much more contrast than Eterna, and can give quite a specific look to certain colours. I will sometimes edit to Adobe and change to Classic Chrome later in the process when I get to the colour section, though if I do this it will normally require a little bit of rework with what I’ve done already.
Then I look at my presets.
I mainly only use two from here, but it’s nice having more in case my normal go-to options don’t work for that image. This goes for all of my sections, along with the fact that these are starting points, and are there to be tweaked to the image. The two I use are mainly are either the ‘Cheviots’ or the ‘For Filmic’ options.
Both of these reduce the contrast in readiness for Tone Curve adjustments. The Cheviots one then drops highlights moderately and blacks slightly, whilst pushing up the shadows moderately and whites slightly. The For Filmic preset instead drops highlights and whites slightly, whilst boosting shadows significantly and leaves blacks relatively untouched.
Choosing to leave the standard Adobe Colour as my base, and the Cheviots option from my Basics, it leaves me with a file looking something like this.
As you can probably tell, the file is now lacking a little bit of contrast, but this is about to be reintroduced through the Tone Curves section. Using the Curves allows more control over how the contrast is applied than a linear slider would, as well as allowing the addition of other elements such as fade.
As the above naming conventions probably imply, my most used curve has been through several iterations, the ‘Balanced RGB’ curve. This curve has an s-curve in each colour channel which all match each other, with the main channel used to balance this out and control fade to the whites and blacks. An s-curve would push the highlights up and bring the shadows down. This adds the contrast back into the image, but it can be too strong at times, in those instance I would fall back to using the ‘Light Fade’ or ‘Med Fade’ options. These use the main channel without any colour channels to add a slight s-curve and fade.
The below has my iteration 1 of the Balanced RGB curve, but the less fade version applied. This brings contrast and a slight fade over the previous image.
The next section in the my list of preset starting points is Colour, though I normally do this section in tandem with the Grading section, rather than having them as distinctly separate sections.
My most used preset here is the one titled ‘Cheviots’ probably followed by its other versions with modifiers. Whilst I haven’t used a standard orange & teal preset for a long time (noting there are two there) the Cheviots option has its beginnings within the orange & teal ones. I had created the Cheviot options in each section as one preset following the first time we hiked in the Cheviots, which was in early Autumn 2020. I loved the orange and yellows of the summer slowly fading in autumn, but didn’t like the effect a full orange and teal had. My option here creates an orange and teal using calibration, but very much subdues the teal in the HSL section. The result I feel is bolder greens than an orange and teal but with warm tones that can still pop.
The ‘ST’ in the naming from this section stems from the old ‘Split Toning’ tab that was replaced by colour grading. My most used option (in fact I can’t remember when I used a different preset as a starting point for landscapes)is again the one entitled ‘Cheviots’. This warms the shadows with orange, and cools the highlights with a blue (alright, its hue is 190 so it could probably be called a teal…). For the midtones I have a greeny yellow colour, though at a very low saturation with a balance near the centre and blending near 100%.
The V3 version flips the shadows and highlights which is probably more traditional, having cooler shadows and warmer highlights, whilst the classic is similar to the V3 but without any midtones. I know these are more the ‘done’ thing, but I tend to feel if I warm the highlights and cool the shadows at the same time it ends up not feeling like something I’ve edited.
If I didn’t cool the highlights and warm the shadows I’d probably prefer to grade in photoshop using Colour Balance and Selective Colour together, as I tend to with portraits.
These colour choices leave us at this image:
The application of the Colour and Grading sections gives probably the biggest single change from one image to the next in this process.
This leaves one section of my preset starting points, Effect. Unlike the other sections, I can choose multiple options here.
I will normally use this section to add my level of grain, I add grain to all of my images, even if it done subtly so. I also have two options for vignette strength, though I don’t always use a vignette. The most important sections however are the top row ‘-ve clar’ etc and the ‘Presence’ section.
Both of these sections do roughly the same thing, but the one labelled ‘Presence’ is an updated version and my go-to for this function. By selecting this it runs negative clarity, negative texture and negative dehaze across the full image. This gives a feeling of desharpening from the original file. I don’t tend to sharpen my landscapes anymore. Instead if there are elements I want to appear sharper, I will use a local adjustment to add back the negative texture and clarity from this section.
In a way I hope this makes my files feel a little less digital, although I know and very much acknowledge there is no replacing film. I just don’t like the clinical sharpness that a lot of manufacturers are chasing with their newer cameras and lenses and hope this takes that clinically sharp feeling away from my images.
One additional thing to note, is that if I need to do any cleaning up in Photoshop, I will wait until after this to add the grain, as sometimes the tools don’t replicate the grain naturally and it can make the adjustments stand out.
The image below has a vignette applied, though removed from highlights, a light grain and the negative clarity, texture and dehaze applied.
The last thing to consider is local adjustments. In this image I want to still have the buildings as a focal point, so I start by brushing back clarity and texture to the buildings.
Next, I want slightly more contrast in the sky. I drag a linear gradient from off screen above, and then intersect with select sky. By using these two functions together it prevents a hard crisp line around the hill tops. I then adjust the whites, highlights and shadows to bring back some details. I know a lot of people crank clarity and dehaze to get cloud details, but this is something I’ve never done, even as a beginner, as I think it is easy to push too far and leave an unnatural feel.
The next thing I look to do is brighten the building to the centre of the image. I drag a radial gradient large over the image, with the feather at 100% and put it over the central building. I then intersect with sky and invert to remove the sky from the selection. This means that as I increase the white and highlights slightly over the centre, the sky is not affected. I then drop the black slightly to balance.
I then use a brush on the foliage where I want to brighten where the sun is catching, this is mainly the trees and gorse to the left of the frame. Again, I increase the whites whilst dropping the blacks slightly to balance.
Lastly, I darken the bottom corners by dropping the shadows with a linear gradient. This is to push the eye up along the river to the central building. I tend to do this on a lot of my landscapes, especially so when I’ve shot from underneath a tree line and have shadow or around foliage and have a naturally dark bottom to the frame, as we have here with the gorse.
Although I have to say, I do like doing this in camera, like having a natural vignette and just exaggerating it in post.
So as a reminder, the before looked like this:
And after all of our adjustments, including the local adjustments, we end at this:
If you would like to see more of me breaking down a shot like this, rather than just posting photos from along a hike, please let me know and I may do another in future where I edit from scratch or maybe do a portrait edit, rather than talking rough approximate edits from a preset base.
If you would like to see more of my landscape work, moving forward most of the images will be here in blog format, but I will notify of new entries on my Instagram page for landscapes - @photog.righ
If you are interested in following my portrait and product work, links to my instagram and twitter for those accounts are just below at the bottom of this page. Unlike in a normal post, there is no added gallery below today.