Today I'm taking you along as I edit one of my photos to discuss my thought process and my workflow inside Lightroom. And because I don't want this to be just another one of these videos where some guy tells you to drag this slider to this percent, I'm mostly gonna narrate what's happening on the screen as this is a pre-recorded editing session and I do just want to explain my logic and the techniques that I'm using. This photo was taken on a Sony pocket camera that's around 7 years old but it d
oes capture a ton of details. And first thing first, I'm gonna start removing the distractions in the shot. The day that I took the photo the snow was big but not big enough to cover all the grass and because I want a clear foreground in the shot, I'm gonna start removing all the grass blades one by one. I'm doing this using the content award version of the healing brush inside of Lightroom so no need to take the photo in Photoshop for the small things. Now the second thing to do is to take the
photo to a neutral starting point. And while you might think this photo looks rather neutral, if I bump up the vibrance and the saturation, you're gonna see that it's all blue and because I'm going for an anime sunset kind of vibe with this edit, it's not something that I wanna have to deal with later on. So right now I'm manually tweaking the white balance in order to get something that's somewhat in the middle and at the same time I'm going to go with Adobe neutral as a color profile. What I w
ant is a starting point that's both neutral in terms of colors and that has very little contrast so I can add mine afterwards. Now I'm resetting, vibrance and saturation and bringing back some of the details from the highlights and the shadows in order to have as much information available to me as possible. And before I start to do any color work, I'm gonna apply my grain preset and my saturation falloff preset. You can find both of them in the link below as a brief description. The grain prese
t applies 3 masks based on luminosity so your photos will have more grain in the midtones and highlights as they should on film and my saturation falloff preset is gonna take care that I don't oversaturate either my highlights or my blacks. And I'm applying them now at the beginning of the edit because I do know that I want them in the end so why not do the rest of the edits with them already applied to the image so I have a real time feedback on how my image will look at the end of the edit. An
d there are links in the description and you're gonna support me to make more videos like this one. Let's get back to the editing. Now that I do have a good starting point for my edit, I'm gonna start using masks in order to direct the viewer's attention where I want it in the frame. First I'm using a linear gradient on the foreground to darken it so it won't distract that much and now I'm using a radial gradient around the tree to simulate kind of a vignette that will only affect the sky becaus
e I intersected the radial gradient with a sky mask. Next up I'm using one more mask in order to bring back the contrast and get more details in the middle section of the photo. Now that I have a general idea of where my exposure is throughout the image, I'm using the tone curve in order to add back the contrast that I removed in the beginning of the edit. Going back to the white balance sliders for a bit because I wasn't happy with the tonal contrast between the blue skies and the orangey sunse
t and some more tweaking of the mask before it finally starts to color grade the image. First off I'm going to the calibration tab where I'm starting to play with the sliders clicking both ways and see what I like and what I don't like but mostly because the image is almost all blue, the most impact has the blue slider so that's where I started to create the color. Now I'm playing with the color wheels in order to give that anime look that I'm going for. It's gonna be an overall cast that's a bi
t magenta with orange highlights and also magenta blue tones in the shadow area of the image. Now that I do have some colors let's go back and play with the masks again in order to create the details and the layering that I want in the final shot. I'm starting with the foreground that I've darkened a bit more and now I'm tweaking the radial gradient up top because I don't want such a harsh transition between the sky and the foliage of the tree. One more radial gradient in the mid zone of the ima
ge because there is the zone that I want more contrast and more details and now is that part of the edit where I'm gonna start going back and forth tweaking the color some more and trying to find a sweet spot for them and then going back and tweaking the mask some more in order to add some more contrast or bring out details exactly where I want them to be. Back on your past decision and tweaking them is part of the editing process so you are seeing me going back and forth and that's something th
at I do with almost all my images. It's never something that comes naturally and I know exactly where to drag a slider or what mask to apply in the beginning. It's a process with many layers that I'm building up on one another in order to get the final look that I really want for the image. And at this point in the edit I was pretty much happy with the general color look but there were two things bothering me. Firstly the foreground had a pretty straight line because I was using a linear gradien
t to darken it down and didn't have enough details and then in the middle ground I wanted more suns to reflect off the snow in order to give more warmth to the entire image. So that's what I'm working on right now and I'm doing this by subtracting a linear gradient from another linear gradient. A trick that is really good if you just want to select a thin part of the image in the middle. And because I was playing so much with luminance mask and adjusting the contrast in the middle zone of the ph
oto I eliminated any trace of a shadow that the three might have casted on the snow. But right now I'm trying to bring that back and give a more natural overall light to the image. To achieve this I'm firstly gonna add a few radials on the sky in order to give that warm sun glow and then I'm going to raise the shadows in the foreground, create some shadows using a radial gradient mixed up with a few brush strokes and now I have something that looks a lot more natural even though it's not necessa
rily a reflection of the reality at the moment, it looks good to my eye and that's what's important to me. And while I did finish the image for roughly half an hour more, I'm not gonna bore you showing you all the little masking that I've done and all the details so I'm gonna play it on fast forward while I tell you what I was trying to achieve in the meanwhile. I wanted a nice gradient of colors over the entire image that would start from indigo tones and go to bright orangey tones of the sunse
t and then go back to the dark tones on the top of the image. This is called a reflected gradient in the design world and it's something that you often see used in anime movies. So naturally at the end of the day I had around 20 masks on the image and now let's show you from where I started and how my final image looks like. My goal was to transform this pretty plain winter photo that I took on a very cold day into a colorful shot that you'll see on an anime movie poster. And I hope I did a good
job. Here you can see the final color palette that I ended up using and I really hope you enjoyed this walkthrough and learned something along the way. If you did, drop a like, it helps me a lot and I'll see you in the next video.
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