I have received several questions and requests related to the way I get these rich colours on my images. If you are a regular visitor on my blog you might have noticed that I usually write something along the lines of "I did some adjustments in Lightroom and some finishing touches in Photoshop in LAB mode". Here I try to demonstrate what I usually do. Not always, but often.

This post was originally written in german as a guest post for the "Fotoholiker" blog and this one is now the english version.

In this little video I show you my workflow within Lightroom and Photoshop. The actual workflow though starts naturally in camera. I always have an eye on the cameras histogram and try to get a decent exposure capturing all the shadow and highlight details, if possible of course. In my landscape photography I almost always use graduated neutral density (GND) filters which help me achieving that. If it's possible I sometimes try to underexpose slightly to get some richer colours already in camera. Also I try to have in mind, that the camera's meter might be fooled by too bright or too dark scenes, meaning it sometimes over- or underexposes depending on the lightness of the scene. A little exposure compensation helps in this case.

The colour adjustments in LAB mode is of course no secret. I ran into some tutorials a while ago on Brian Auer's blog, where he provides a tutorial and a Photoshop action for that and I also did once one of the tutorials by David Nightingale of Chromasia. And just the other night I saw David Cross doing a little tutorial on this in Photoshop User TV ep.180 (I guess).

The LAB colour space is a fairly complex thing and I would be a bad, bad liar would I say I understand it. Truth to be told, I know that what I'm doing here, but not much more. I'm planning to learn more about this powerful colour space, but time is limited and I think it has to wait a little.

After my german video, I got a email asking why I do it this way since the adjustment doesn't look so much different and whether or not I could have done it in Lightroom alone. I have to say that I tried to get the same adjustment in Lightroom and somehow didn't manage to. I'm not saying that it's not possible, but at least I couldn't. The effect isn't that big in this example because that's what I intended to do. It is of course possible to go way over the top with this method. Another benefit of adjusting the colours this way, is that by using the LAB colour space, the adjustments affect only the colour channels and not the Lightness channel. Something you can't achieve otherwise.

I excuse myself already now for some "noises" that I do on this clip, I had a little flu behind me and wasn't still totally fine.

Since it is not clearly visible in the clip you can see the before and after versions of the images here.

If you have any questions, remarks or did find any crucial errors in here I encourage you to leave a comment.

I hope you like it and thanks for watching.

• Creating a Poster Like Print

A little more serious clip today than the last one ;-)

After my little contest here I received a question from a long time reader/visitor of this blog asking how I did get a print layout like the one for my give-away print of "Where The Rainbows Are At Home".

Since there's absolutely nothing secret about this I quickly decided to put together a little screencast to demonstrate what I've done there. I once read a tutorial by Scott Kelby on how to do this, but I'm not sure anymore is my workflow the same or different. Either way the credit belongs to him.

I don't claim this is the best or only way to do, but it's the way I do it and if you find some crucial errors or have ideas on how create one easier you're welcome to leave a note in the comments.

I hope you like it and thanks for viewing.

In the previous two posts on using the GND filters, I wrote about what is needed, what they look like and how they are actually attached to the lens. In this post I will try to explain how they are actually used.

So, let's have a look at my image "Being There" first and I then try to explain what I did there.

I took this image just before sunset with the last bit of the sun still being around the horizon. The dynamic range of the scene was naturally rather big and as almost always I used my filters to hold back the exposure on the sky. But how to decide, which filters to use? Here comes in the metering.

How to meter the scene?

1. I switch to "Center Weighted" metering mode and set the camera to TV mode (not sure right now what's that on Nikon right now, I think S)
2. Then I point the camera/lens to the darker part of the scene (usually the foreground) and adjust the shutter speed so, that it equals for example f4. I prefer to set it to f4 since from there it's at least for me easier to count the f-stops (4; 5.6; 8;11;16;22).
3. Then I point the camera to the brighter part of the scene (usually, and in this case the sky) and count the difference in stops compared to f4 and there you go. If the camera now shows now for example f16, there is a difference of 4 stops. So a four stop filter should be best to use. Of course I could do the same in AV-mode but in that case the shutter speed and not the aperture is changing, and that somehow is too much math for me ;-)

After that I switch back to AV or M mode and attach the filters and frame the shot. When I then take the image, I usually switch back to Evaluation Metering mode, and most of the time that works fine. In case of doubt, I do a meter reading from the foreground before attaching the filters and shoot manual then.

Where to place which filters:

Which filters to choose is a little dependent on the scene. A scene with an uneven horizon, such as mountains or hills, tree tops etc. ideally requires graduated soft filters, whereas a straight horizon, like in this example, it's better to use GND hard filters. (If these doesn't mean anything to you, please check back on my previous post here).

Application in practice:

In this particular image I used two GND hard filters with together 5 stops to compensate for the bright sky (Disclaimer: I took this image quiet a while ago but I think it was something like this) and moved them down around to the horizon, then focused manually (I usually do), checked the DOF preview and took the shot. Checked the histogram and bracketed a little and took another image. And that's it.

I tried to demonstrate how I place the filter in the following image:

On my way home I already knew there was a nice image waiting for me on the memory card, which is a very good feeling to have.

Of course the filters don't have to be placed horizontally like in this image. On the image "Autumn Rocks" I placed a GND soft filter diagonally across the frame like you can see in the following image:

Resume

With filters it is possible to achieve amazing results and to get the shot in the camera, which is something that I prefer. There are of course situations where it's more useful to blend multiple exposures together in Photoshop, or do a HDR. But for me, the use filters has improved my photography a lot. I will definitely invest in some more filters. This time though ND filters. But I think that should then complete my set.

If you have any questions or comments about these posts, feel free to leave a not in the comments.

In the first post in this series I wrote a little introduction to Graduated Neutral Density filters what they do and how they look like. In this post, I’m going to show you what you actually will need in order to use them.

My biggest confusion when ordering my first filter set, was, what I would actually need, or what I will get and/or how it looks like. So here I have put together what all is necessary hoping to make it a little easier for others.

What do you need?

The filter set consists of three parts:

a) The filter holder:

This filter holder is equipped with filter slots for two filters.

b) The adaptor ring:

The wide angle version of a 77mm ring:

And this a 67mm version:

The difference between the wide angle and the basic version is the thickness. The wide angle one is smaller in order to prevent vignetting on wide angle lenses.

c) The filters, well obviously:

The GND filters come in strengths from 1 to 3 stops in both hard and soft transitions. 4 stop filters are available as a special order. For anything stronger it’s recommended to use two filters together.

I’m using the Lee Filter System, which you also see here. Things might be a little different in different systems.

So, whether you get the Starter Kit  or the Foundation Kit for the Lee Filter system you always will need an adaptor ring, suitable for the lens or lenses that you plan to use it with.

How does this come together?

Attaching the filter system is very easy. First you screw the adaptor ring to the lens:

Then you clip on the filter holder to the adaptor ring:

And finally you can slide in the filter(s):

This is basically all that you need in order to use them.

It is possible to upgrade this filter holder via the “Upgrade Kit”. Using that, you can use 4 filters together.

Are there other filters available?

The benefit of this filter system is, that you can also get all kinds of filters for it. There are Neutral Density filters available, warming filters, graduated colored filters, black and white filters and so on.

Also there are special Polarizer Filters available which can be attached to filter holder via an adaptor. I don’t have any of these yet, but I’m looking forward to expand my filter collection a bit in the future.

I think that’s it for this post. I hope it has shown clearly what is needed in order to use these filters. In the next post I will try to show some examples on how I used them of several of my images.

If you have any further questions or if something is wrong or unclear, you’re welcome to leave a comment.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Lee Filters in any way, I just use it and I hope everything I wrote here is correct. Just to make sure.

I have received several questions on my blog about the use of Graduated Neutral Density (GND) filters, or better what these actually are. So I decided to come up with a little series of posts in three parts, trying to explain what these actually are, and what is required and how I use them.

Why do I use them?

From the moment I started to become more seriously interested in photography I was fascinated about the technical aspect of getting a “proper” exposure. Since landscapes had been my main interest from the beginning, I quickly learned about the limitations of digital sensors. Whatever I tried to achieve, my images were never nowhere near (besides a few exceptions of course) to those images that I saw and liked in magazines, books or one the web.

It was frankly a little frustrating, but I tried to figure out the reason why my images looked so much different. Besides the amount of Photoshop, the most significant difference was that I realized that all my favorite images captured the whole, or at least a wider dynamic range of the scene than my images did. No blown out skies, dark foregrounds or just overall boring exposures.

I learned about HDR then and experimented with that for a while and came much closer to the look that I wanted to achieve. Also I learned about the possibilities to blend two or more exposures in Photoshop. Whereas these techniques are great and actually provide more flexibility it didn’t feel right for me, since the first time I could then see the final image was after the post-processing. For me it feels just better if I would get the shot right in camera first.

The more I investigated in this, it did strike me was that a lot of my favorite photographers used all kinds of filters, most notably so called Graduated Neutral Density Filters, which at least at that time felt a little old fashioned to me in this digital age. But the more I learned about the purpose, benefits and also weaknesses of these filters the more interested I became. I looked up information everywhere on the web and I decided to get some.

As easy as that may sound, it’s a little confusing if you have no store nearby where you can go an have a look at them, or check out what you actually need to start with. There are holders, slots, adaptor rings and so on. And even though I did some research, what to get first and so on, I was still a little confused by all the possibilities. Most of the time I just read a description, but I never saw an image of what I actually would get and need.

I thought that this might occur to other people as well and want to bring a little clarity into this by writing a little series of blog posts related to this.

Sounds cool, but how do they look like and what do they do?

On this image you see a 3 stop hard Graduated Neutral Density filter from Lee Filters. As you can see the upper part of the filter is dark, while the lower part is clear. That means the dark part is exactly three stops darker and the transition from is hard. These filters are also available with a soft graduation, where the graduation process encompasses a wider area, like you can see in the following example:

The purpose is to make one part of the image a certain amount darker than the other part in order to take away the exposure from the brighter part of the image. This usually is the sky, but can also be another part of course like bright reflections in a lake/river, snow etc. In a upcoming post I will then explain why there are hard and soft filters.

The color used on these particular filters is neutral gray, which will be invisible on the image and should not create any color cast, which are said to be created by filters which are just using a gray tone.

Assuming you attach the filter to the lens, whatever you will shoot, the top part will be three stops darker than the lower part. In other words, if the sky in your image is three stops brighter than the foreground, and you use this filter, the whole dynamic range of the scene should be correctly exposed. So the foreground wouldn’t be too dark, or the sky just a blown-out white all done in camera. Isn’t that great!

In part two of the series I will post, what you will need to have, in order to attach these filters to the lens.

If anything in here is wrong, or if you have any questions or further comments you’re welcome to leave me a comment.