Creating crisp, visually striking photos often requires more than just a great shot. Thoughtful Lightroom adjustments can help you refine details, enhance sharpness, and bring out the best in your images.
Coming to you from Christian Möhrle - The Phlog Photography, this straightforward video begins with basic adjustments to set the foundation for later edits. Möhrle starts by changing the profile to Adobe Landscape, boosting the image's base saturation. Next, he manipulates highlights and shadows, carefully balancing contrast while preserving detail in bright and dark areas. Adjustments to whites and blacks add punch to the image, setting the stage for more targeted refinements. The video emphasizes the importance of subtlety when increasing sliders like texture, clarity, and dehaze, ensuring a natural look without over-processing.
Möhrle then moves into masking, a powerful way to enhance specific areas of the image. Using tools like color range masks, he targets blues in the sky to deepen contrast without oversaturating. He also uses gradients to enhance elements like a road leading into the frame, drawing the viewer’s attention. For localized sharpness, Möhrle applies texture and clarity adjustments to tree branches, balancing these with slight temperature changes to align colors with the overall tone of the image.
The video further explores the potential of light manipulation. Möhrle demonstrates how radial gradients can add glow or shadows, giving depth to foreground and background elements. His use of object selection tools ensures precision, enabling him to enhance highlights or shadows on specific parts of the scene without affecting unrelated areas. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.
The best way is to not sharpen in LRc to start with
Use Photolab to do Sharpening Denoise and use clearview...
Export as DNG to LRc
Do your maun adjustments there and finish in Nik Color Efex (Detail Extractor with masks and a bit of Pro contrast works magic)
Ir Photoshop when needed
So many choices and things to play with! It is good to see some uses never seen before! One thing to add to the Detail is one the Denoise selection (another subject) but after you get the updated image and you can also go back and continue editing your masks or even adding more mask as well as just continuing edits. This way you can walk away and come back another day to resee and redo or delete something. Playtime never ends!!!