Hello everybody, Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School. And today we’re back in Lightroom. My I just love Lightroom, and I want to sell you guys to it because it’s such a great software for half the price for what you pay for Photoshop. And today I’m going to show you, not a feature that’s in Lightroom, I’m actually going to post process an image. I’ve had a couple of requests from some of our reader’s here at Yanik’s Photo School, to try and do what’s pretty much in fashion right now, and some of the nature stock images which is basically be creating a really warm feeling in the image with an orange sky, but keeping the foreground colors pretty much intact like a green grass, stays green.
So, basically I play around in Lightroom and try to get that effect and it just so happened I went to a place called Chamoisee not too long ago, which is a silent retreat place where you just go there, and think about life in general. And I recommend you do that once in awhile. It’s good for the soul. But now back to Lightroom. Basically, we’re going to take this photo and make it into this. Isn’t that cool, all in Lightroom. So, the only thing that I did in Photoshop, because I’m better at it in Photoshop than in Lightroom, I have more precision, is to remove this tree branch there, but all the other post processing is done directly in Lightroom. I’ve done this image a couple of days back so, let’s hope I remember all the steps but, anyway it’ll look pretty close to that.
The first thing that you need to do before you go and add an orange gradient to the sky is you want to remove as much of the blue as possible. Because blue or orange on top of blue doesn’t make the sky as warm as you would want it too. So what you need to do is bring your white balance up. Heated up a little bit, like so. And that looks good. The next thing you want to do, you see these halos around the sun, you want to remove as much as much as possible, so you’ll order our recovery slider to bring back some of the pixels, the blown up pixels like so. Actually, all the way up to a hundred for this image, it looks perfect. And the next thing you’re going to do is boost the exposure a little bit, not too much. You don’t want it to bring those highlights flat back, little bit of contrast.
All right, now we’re ready to play with the new tool that is only available in Lightroom 2. And the first one is the gradient tool. I’ve just loved this so much. It’s this button here, just click on that. A dialogue box appears. The menu I should say appears there, and the first thing we’re going to do is bring our green grass. Now I’ve already have a green color chosen but if you just click on this, you can go and choose your green color. And that’s the one I chose. It’s all arbitrary, it all depends what your taste are. Then you click on your image, and drag to the horizon, a bit like so, maybe a little bit more because we want it to fade into the orange. And there you go.
Now, what we’ll be doing next, let’s do the orange sky now. So again we’re using the gradient tool, clicking on the color palette and getting ourselves a nice orange color there. This looks about good. And again, click and drag. Blend it in with the some of the green in there, so that it mix as well. And that’s it. Now, the next thing that I did, to bring out some of the highlights in the grass, was to use the adjustment brush and I went into exposure, clicked on the plus sign because I want plus exposure. And I basically went in and brought some of the highlights in the grass up, like so. And make it more lively, and then you can go play with that and adjust the darkening, lighting up to the amount that you want. And about one exposure value point is what I needed for this. And it’s that simple to create this type of effect using only Lightroom. As I mentioned that the tree here I removed after, because it didn’t look really good in Photoshop because I prefer using the healing brush and clone tool in Photoshop for when it’s not just dust spots or what not. All right, so let’s see what I did a few days ago, and what I did today. It’s basically very similar, the only difference is the sky’s a bit more orange and less yellow. And there you go. So, let’s look at the before and after. That was done in just a few clicks using my favorite software in the world, Lightroom. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and we’ll talk to you soon, bye-bye.
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