Dawn SUP Surf Photography Post Processing

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Raw Transcript

we’ll look at a totally different shot now this one I was standing on a rock so not technically a water shot I guess this was part of a day-long photo shoot for the red paddle board company and back when they were announced their their new line of paddle boards as a few years ago now so this one stood out to me because it’s a bit different to my normal kind of surf photos and I thought it’d be nice to show you something with a bit of a different composition and but saying that the light in this shot is going to be typical of quite a lot of similar photos that you shoot at dawn this one was very early in the morning it’s probably it was colder than it looks here which is true of most of the photos from the UK I reckon it’s sort of a quick look at the stats here as you can see the histogram in this case it’s going to stacked up on this high end where the highlights are so I’m going to develop now so I could show you that properly so there you get it points highlights lots of highlights in there because of this nice big expanse of morning sky I chose so I think it’s still fairly well exposed when you look at the details there you can still see what’s going on on the board and quite like this this cool reflection down below and obviously live and compose this so that I get the whole of a fraction in and I’ve stuck the horizon right in the middle which is not what you’d normally expect from rule of thirds style composition but and she’s bang in the middle but I quite like the you know the horizontal horizontal vertical vertical quite cool um I think in terms of a composition there’s a few things I want to show you on this one first things first let’s have a look quickly at the white balance let’s see if auto actually quite like the auto on this one it’s kind of made there you’re in G tones come out a bit more not quite like that because it is a shot from dawn so I’ll keep it with that I think if I hit water let’s see what happens let’s darken it down a bit I don’t really like that I’m gonna hit control Zed so everything we do in Lightroom is non-destructive I’m not editing the original file here I’m just literally giving it some instructions so you can feel free to tweak all these as much as you want you’ve still got your region all there if you need it it’s good black I think I don’t don’t mind the highlights being quite high I might know them a little bit just to bring out a bit more of this color in the sky um shadows wise I thought I really liked these these um contrast II contrasting shadows and bright edges I think that’s quite nice and obviously this is shot lends itself to that so I’m gonna leave that pretty much has it here look quite like it clarity I tend you can really easily overdo clarity as you can see that looks pretty okay and you start seeing especially in landscapes like this just not seeing this kind of halo effect when you go up hive of clarity if I double click to get remove that it’s not pronounced so obviously that maybe there was a bit of fog here which means that’s actually that but I’m your if you experiment with the clarity you’ll notice that you probably just want a little tiny bit to bring out some of these textures rather than do anything else let’s see what D haze is gonna do here mmm no I don’t like it way too too much so it’s double click to it remove that vibrance again easy to overdo you can see that it’s just looks bananas but a little bit of it it’s quite nice sometime so let’s try yeah like that all saying morning to me and I think in terms of like leveling this one it’s I quote I think it’s alright I didn’t think I haven’t got like the see on the horizon which is a big feature in a lot of lineup shots or some shooting towards the land which think is a great perspective if you can get it naturally in this case is flat water so it makes a bit easier plus there’s some rocks on this particular Beach enabled that quite well so I think the horizons find this main horizontal it’s nice and level so let’s leave that as it is one thing I notice here is there’s a little boy in the background and it’s it’s kind of messing with my nice symmetrical composition so I’m gonna get rid of this that’s actually really simple to do in Lightroom you just go to this spot removal and it’s called spot removal because it’s that’s Giver don’t undo that I’m scrolling down on my scroll wheel on my mouse to make this a lot smaller just drag it all the way down right there you go now I can position it properly so yeah essentially what this does is this droplets do that and it just automatically selects another part of the image which it can pop into the position and cover up what you want to cover up basically so it’s called spot removal because you’ll often see at and narrow apertures like f/8 and higher numbers you’ll see little dots appearing in the image I’ll show you some examples and and that’s because there’s dust on your sensor and you can’t see a lower apertures like with f6 3 so I might go to see some timer if we look hard enough but I think I think you’ll agree if you didn’t know that was there in the first place we hadn’t seen me just do that edit then you would never know that I’ve been there um and you can if you if you need to do this absolutely forcing then you can do it in Photoshop but I don’t thing I’ve ever ever come across the surfer to where I’ve had to an object Lance delete that um that required Photoshop it was always just Lightroom for me for myself or anyway well you can see here that there’s a reflection of the edge of the boy I’m just going to go back in again when I scroll my mouse mouse wheel down to reduce the size of this and then I’m just going to paint out that just that strip and again it just picks one that looks pretty good to me I think that we can improve that just slightly by if you click there you can move this around a bit there you go sometimes you have to move it around a little bit just if there’s texture like that on the water then you can find some of that lines up a little bit better there we go how pretty Denise to do that but they go that’s gone we’re about that now there’s another thinking of this lens flare there’s Simmons where here which overlaps with the detail in the background so I’m not going to worry about that I can say where it is but this is quite distracting the light part which is a long way away from the subject of the photo so let’s just go in and make our spot removal thing very big click there and gone done you guys got rid of that obviously it’s a lot easier on this nice big and open expanse the sky to get rid of stuff like that I think that’s that for for that photo and if I just click reset right so that’s really like originally not too bad to be honest and that’s pretty good but as you’ve seen a couple of minutes in Lightroom and I think we’ve improved that certainly and and then they obviously the other thing we can do is save this preset again we’re gonna give it a sensible name so let’s call this one mmm land we’ve already got water so let’s do the land dawn orange give it a descriptive name so we can so we can apply this later on if we need to so that’s it great and there we go go out there so now it’s good to me I’m going to leave that one there hopefully you’ve seen that I like to just cry and try and keep these quite authentic despite removing a little thing in the background but in terms of colors and in terms of I’m not doing too much over over editing so that’s that for this one and we move on to our next one


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