New Zealand lineup Surf Photography Post Processing

Raw Transcript

we’re going to look at a classic lineup shot now so I really like this this photo it’s brings back a lot of happy memories it was taken on my honeymoon in New Zealand so the Maori word for New Zealand is our taiaroa I’m almost certainly not pronouncing that right but one of the popular translations for that one is land of the long white cloud so some non white clouds in this one there’s some rolling hills which are quite characteristic of the area we’ve got a nice sandy beach there’s a little bit of foreground stuff going on and then we’ve got the subject this nice a-frame although lots of clothes out the right look pretty good a couple of guys in the water couple guys over here I think it kind of sets the scene it’s kind of you just rocked up at this spot you would you’d see these guys you see these guys you think well that Peaks for me in the middle all by myself if I grab my stuff and jump in the water now um so let’s see what we can do first of all not sure if that horizon is quite level so one thing you can do is use this straighten tool use the angle tool click on the horizon drag it across and if I let go that’s gonna strain it for you you might not might want to use a slightly different way doing that and I’ll just do that in this case the horizon lines up pretty perfectly with that grid line so that’s just as easy there you go a little bit of a correction there now I’m gonna hit Auto or don’t like that get back our white balance I’m not sure about that so let’s go [Music] and auto-tune I think that’s alright it’s brightened it up quite a bit and I don’t want a bit it to be that brighting thing also I think I want a bit more contrast yeah preferring that the auto section I think this might be a bit distracting these people don’t mind them too much I probably rather they were over here but to be honest that be something that you could do in Photoshop fairly easily but I don’t want to worry about that I’m just going to put this in here I don’t lose my clouds along white clouds and also do I lose my foreground so let’s try that there you go one like that so if i zoom in here I kind of want to bring out some of colors in this wave and it offshore spray a bit so I’m gonna see what I can do there so in order to just effect that bit I’m going to use my adjustment brush make it quite small and I’ll just click this one so I can show where make sure I know which bits I’m affecting then we went to like too much in fact I just want this mean a frame day I don’t even want there on the side of that left-hander to be affected now I’m gonna leave it at that let’s try don’t want to reduce the exposure get rid of that let’s try upping the coyote – munching and easily everyday like I said just a little bit that might help upping the clarity globally is that you start seeing these these like halo effects around the people and around these these high contrast areas which I I think a pretty off-putting so they’re not as pronounced if you don’t do that so I think just actually adding the clarity that little section it helps it stand out a little bit more I like that I think it adds a little bit more to that image so I’m I think on this day I was using the 70 to 200 and I wanted to get like I say the foreground and the background everything in the sharing at 70 I managed to do that a tighter crop my own well if I’d shot with 200 mil just at the wave it’d be quite nice but I think you wouldn’t get this I wouldn’t get there the memories of the day as much I think this is what people talk about when they say there’s pulled back style lineup shots sometimes more preferable to having a longer lens if I’d been I just rocked up with a 150 to 600 mil um telephoto lens to shoot action shots for these surfers then I wouldn’t be able to get this shot I’m I don’t know I’ve had a second camera or perhaps I’d have snapped this photo on my phone on the way down or something but I think this more pullback style is is nice and for me personally I like just being able to put yourself it brings it transports me back to that position I think I’m hopefully it transports other people to that position and they think wow that would have been a good day of surfing there would have been a nice place to be I can imagine if it’s flat the next day I’m gonna go and explore and I’m gonna check out whatever cops of trees on the hill yeah so there could be lots of stories going on behind the scenes of this one which I really like and that kind of helps me relive my honeymoon a little bit but yeah hopefully and show a few other people what the experience was like at least on this day so yeah that was a nice quick easy landscape one again I think it’s easy to overdo these things you can crank up the vibrance you can crank up the clarity you can you you can do kind of a lot more extreme edits if you want to but I think just bring back the view that you saw in person on the day is is better in the lots of ways and and just as good as these more extreme edits that you do see occasionally and and again I mean you might want to do things around in Photoshop if you were to our landscape photographer would be way more fussy about where these foreground elements were positioned and various other things like that but for me my primary focus was was getting the waves and showing that they were looking pretty good this day and I think the other elements aligned pretty well and to give me overall like quite a nice nice image plus non white clouds extra points for that one American


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