Assistance with editing photo

[CallMeBob]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic version: 7.4

Operating System

1. Windows 10

Hi,
I have been taking photos and using Lightroom for a while, but often I feel that I am unable to extract the full potential of my images. For example in this picture:

Here I have tried to edit it to the best of my ability, but I do not feel that I manage to "hit the spot":

So my question is, can one of the more experienced members show me what they would do to edit this picture? I think it would be useful and interesting to see someone else's take.
The original DNG can be found here:
Sunset house
Thank you for any assistance.
Regards,
Adrian

 

[Johan Elzenga]

The trick here is to set Highlights to -100 and Whites to something like -50. That gives you plenty of room to increase the Exposure to about +1.45 to brighten up the whole image without blowing the highlights. Then set the Temperature (6800) higher to remove the blue from the shadows. You could do other things like adding some Dehaze to make the sky a bit more blue, or to use HSL for that, but I didn't do anything else because I just wanted to show the basics.

 

[CallMeBob]

Yes, I see what you mean. The colors are indeed much better in your edit. I think the sky made a big difference.
Thanks a lot!

 

[Tony Jay]

There are only two issues that need addressing here:
White balance could do with a tweak; and
Overall tonality needs help.

However, overall exposure is about right.
If I felt that the overall exposure needed adjustment I would have done it upfront...
What I did with your DNG image was to pull down highlights to -100 and increase shadows to +100.
Now the shadowed areas of the image are nice and bright (and still look natural).
I used the white 1st floor railings to alter white balance the image immediately became much warmer consistent with sunset.

I did pull the blacks down very slightly.
There was some scope to pull up the whites but I noticed some patches of sunlight in the 1st floor room that blow when the whites are pushed at all. In the overall context of the image it would be up to the photographer to decide how important those small patches of sunlight were and whether allowing them to blow mattered.

Why did I do what I did is probably a more important question!
Firstly, this is an outdoor (read landscape image).
Both the highlights and the shadows represent important parts of this image and preserving detail in those areas will set apart a well developed image from a so-so effort!
Manipulating both the highlights and shadows sliders in the manner explained is the first step in achieving this goal.
When you do this you will notice the sky darkens slightly and more detail becomes evident.
(If there were clouds on the sky the effect would be much more obvious.)
However, with this image anyway, the effects are much more noticeable in the shadow regions where all the foliage and the dark shadows cast by the house suddenly become replete with detail and colour.
Fixing the bluish cast (by altering the white balance) of the image also helps the colours to find a more natural expression fairly dramatically.

Frankly the image looks really good at this stage as far as overall tonality and colour go.
Nevertheless I pulled the blacks down slightly to boost overall colour rendition.
Apart from the issues with the sunlit patches in the 1st floor room there is scope for pulling up the whites fairly significantly.
It may seem counterintuitive to raise the shadows and drop the blacks and pull down the highlights only to raise the whites but it is not.
Doing this in combination has the effect of increasing local tonal contrast in both the highlights and the shadows.
For the moment this had the effect of reducing local contrast in the mid-zones - that will be dealt with a bit later.
Obviously increasing whites and dropping blacks also increases global contrast as well.
When increasing the whites one wants to stop short of blowing important highlights - in the case of your image there are several possible white points depending on artistic intent.
With respect to the black point one wants somewhere in the image (usually) to be a true black. However, one does not want to go so far as to crush the details of important shadow detail to black. Apart from issues with white balance (or even tint) most problems with colour can be traced to the lack of a true black in the image.
(Sometimes an image like yours might look better without the extreme treatment described above but it is well worth doing just to see what pops out the woodwork - only once one knows what is actually hidden in those highlights and shadows it is possible to decide how important they really are to the overall image and the effect you are after.)

While this treatment does wonders for both highlight and shadow detail, as mentioned before, it leaves the mid-tones looking a bit flat. However, we have just the tonic for this!
It is called the clarity slider!
Its sole job is to boost mid-zone contrast - which is does very well....
How high to go is somewhat of a matter for taste, and in your image I experimented at several levels.
Above about +40 the image starts to look way garish.
Your tastes may well be more conservative...

I only boosted the vibrance a wee bit in this image - less than 10. The reason why is that with appropriate tonal edits and white balance adjustments colour looked pretty good without needing much of a boost.

The advice given here would be appropriate for a lot of outdoor landscape shots where the scene is a high contrast one, such as your image shot at sunset.
If one is shooting in fog and wishes to maintain that mystical ethereal look in images so shot then the above treatment would be wholly inappropriate.
The same would go for almost every portrait shot unless one was going for an unusually craggy realistic look...

I have not mentioned sharpening or noise reduction (lets leave that for another time!).
Nor have I mentioned doing a duotone treatment to alter the colours of the shadows and highlights separately - that would just be adding adding icing to a cake that tastes pretty good already.

Perhaps the best advice that can be given is to experiment - none of those sliders can actually hurt image - the wonders of parametric editing!
If the result is not to your liking then just press reset and start again...
Trial-and-error is largely the way that I learned - and I can assure you that there was plenty of error along the way....
Obviously many large books have been written on how to use the Develop module to its true limit - one post can't cover everything.
I would recommend George Jardine and his tutorials dealing with Lightroom's Develop module for a deeper treatment on what all the sliders in that module are actually doing to the image. Everything is explained in the context of actually editing real images.

Tony Jay

 

[CallMeBob]

I am impressed with the amount of feedback that I get: much more than I dared to hope for.

First of all, Tony, I can't see your images: did you attach them? It would be great to see your end product

 

[Tony Jay]

I am impressed with the amount of feedback that I get: much more than I dared to hope for.

First of all, Tony, I can't see your images: did you attach them? It would be great to see your end product

Yes, you are right - I didn't post an image.
If you want to see what I was seeing (hopefully your monitor is calibrated) then just get the DNG up in Develop and do this:
Highlights -100
Shadows +100
Whites +32
Blacks - 14
Clarity +36
Vibrance +6
Correct white balance by using the eyedropper on the white horizontal beam of the railing on the 1st floor of the house.
That all there is to it!

Tony Jay

 

[Johan Elzenga]

The interesting thing here is that this clearly shows that different approaches can all lead the good results. Tony doesn't think the overall image is underexposed, so he uses Shadows at maximum. I do think the overall image is underexposed, so I prefer to go for Exposure. Have you tried to simply press the 'Auto' button? That will give you a kind of combination of our approaches. It does increase the Exposure (but not as much as I did), and it adds Shadows (but not as much as Tony does).

 

[Tony Jay]

The interesting thing here is that this clearly shows that different approaches can all lead the good results. Tony doesn't think the overall image is underexposed, so he uses Shadows at maximum. I do think the overall image is underexposed, so I prefer to go for Exposure. Have you tried to simply press the 'Auto' button? That will give you a kind of combination of our approaches. It does increase the Exposure (but not as much as I did), and it adds Shadows (but not as much as Tony does).

Interesting thoughts Johann.
Actually, if I had thought that the image was underexposed I would have adjusted exposure but then still upped the shadows to +100 and dropped the highlights -100!
(And, even with my current cameras with such amazing dynamic range I still will often shoot landscapes using ETTR and, in this case normalising exposure often actually means dropping overall exposure so mid-tones in the scene actually become mid-tones in the image being edited.)
In a high contrast landscape-type image these edits would be a standard approach for me - I want to see what is really lurking in those almost blown highlights and in the deep shadows....
And, pulling the whites up and blacks down not only maximises global contrast but maximises the local contrast in both the shadows and the highlights. In landscapes I will cease increasing the whites just shy of clipping any important highlights (specular highlights I ignore). Blacks are manipulated down to get the colour intensity just right, with a prudent eye being kept on not crushing any important shadow detail.
Obviously, after this sorting out the mid-tones is a synch with the clarity slider....

I will often do this kind of thing even on low contrast images just to see what is there. But, if the images needs to be a low contrast image then it will be edited accordingly in the final output....

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I have a "+Shadows,-Highlights" preset, except not at +100 en -100. In fact I have two of these presets, one is +80,-80 and the other one is +60,-60. I used them a lot on my landscape images, but I have to admit that simply using an Auto Tone preset on import gives pretty good results on almost every image, so nowadays I tend to do that and then tweak from there.

 

[CallMeBob]

Ok, thanks for all advice, guys! It is also nice to see that my image created a small discussion on this topic.

Just a small background story to the image:
We were exploring the local forest, and this view grabbed my attention. I wondered who lives in that house, and it actually took me a couple of seconds to realize that I live there! We moved in to the house this monday, and it really suprised me how nice it looks in the sunset.

Anyway, these are a couple of results. I tried to nudge dehaze, vibrance and saturation up to +5, which I think made a subtle but good difference. In addition, luminance was increased to 17.

Both of these images are nice, with kind of different feels. If there is anything I would like to keep on exploring, it would be to see if I could make the foliage (especially center and right) to be more detailed, but without taking attention or looking unnatural. Perhaps a better camera would be necessary

BTW: my monitor is for sure pretty uncalibrated: its a C24FG70, not made for photo editing, but I will look into it.

I have made a bunch of presets, and will use these for inspiration for other landscape images, so thanks a lot for your advice!

 

[Tony Jay]

Ok, thanks for all advice, guys! It is also nice to see that my image created a small discussion on this topic.
........
BTW: my monitor is for sure pretty uncalibrated: its a C24FG70, not made for photo editing, but I will look into it.

Just that you know: a monitor never comes from the factory in a calibrated state - whether it is designed for image editing or not.
This is a task that the user has to do.

If you are serious about photography then you will need to calibrate the monitor.
How else are you to know whether what you are viewing on that monitor reflects reality or not?
Monitor luminance needs to be adjusted for the environment in which you edit (in other words depending on how bright or dim that room is).
The white balance of that monitor may not be correct and therefore could be making any image viewed either warmer or cooler than it is in reality. Editing an image in order to accomodate the eccentricities of an uncalibrated monitor is not a good idea...
The same goes for a monitor that is too bright (luminance set too high - most monitors come from the factory with luminance settings far too high), or much more rarely too dim.
And then we come to colours that are not correctly represented by the monitor, even if white balance is not a problem....

Bottom line: monitor calibration fixes all these issues!

Tony Jay

 

[CallMeBob]

Yep, it is better now. Thanks for the tip

 

[MarkNicholas]

Perhaps the best advice that can be given is to experiment - none of those sliders can actually hurt image - the wonders of parametric editing!
If the result is not to your liking then just press reset and start again...
Trial-and-error is largely the way that I learned - and I can assure you that there was plenty of error along the way....
Tony Jay

Agree. That is the way I learned. What I did was copy a selection of photos and put them in a folder called "Play" and then imported them and experimented. Knowing that they were just extra copies seemed to free my natural inhibitions.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Agree. That is the way I learned. What I did was copy a selection of photos and put them in a folder called "Play" and then imported them and experimented. Knowing that they were just extra copies seemed to free my natural inhibitions.

The good thing about Lightroom is that you don’t even need copies, because you can ‘undo’ anything at anytime. And if you do prefer to play with a copy, then you can create virtual copies rather than real ones.