Painting Light

Hello, everybody! It’s that time of the week again, right here on ScottKelby.com, where the blog moves across the pond to London, UK, where I will share with you another of my pearls of wisdom from the world of travel photography. Thank you all for your comments and feedback from my previous posts, I really appreciate it and love to hear from you on #HybridDaveTuesdays. Today, I’m actually in Germany’s Black Forest looking for castles to shoot—you can keep up with my progress through my social links down at the bottom of the page.

This week’s post draws from a nifty trick I like to use in landscapes, and it’s all because when I travel I often find myself with too many scenes I want to shoot and not enough golden hours to shoot them all! The suggestion of landscape photography casts fear into the minds of a whole host of photographers. The art of landscape photography requires skill, patience, dedication, and usually long and unsocial hours. Composing, selecting the scene, the time of day, the lighting conditions, it can all seem a little too much of an overload for some, but you can improve almost any scene with this little hack.

I like to portray my photos as my vision of what I see at the time in my mind’s eye. The phrase I match to this, which I think represents the idea quite well is “lend me your eyes and I’ll show you what I see.” Essentially, I want people to see my memory of the scene, and I want that memory to be epic! If I see highlights or spots of light in the scene, I want to portray that in the final image.

This quick tip will arm you with the skills to draw the viewer’s eye to exactly the parts of the image you want them to be drawn to, it will add a depth to your image, and it will add somewhat of a romantic element to the lighting in most cases, as well. It’s a technique I use a lot, and it can be applied in Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Lightroom alike.

When you process your photo, consider painting in some extra light with the Adjustment Brush. It’s as simple as selecting the Adjustment Brush, pumping the Exposure slider up from anywhere between 0.5 and 2 over, depending on what fits your shot, and drawing over selective areas of your image. When I use it, I quite often use the Clarity slider, as well, to add a little edge to the retouched areas, drawing the viewer’s eye in further. It’s a technique I use all the time, and if you don’t already, I strongly implore you to consider it and try it out!

Here’s a relatively plain shot, from somewhere in the middle of Arizona, to show the results of just a little tweak with this method in Adobe Camera Raw.

This is straight out of my camera.

This is after the first retouch with sliders.

This is after painting in some light on the cactus and dotting around in the foreground.

For this edit, I had my Adjustment Brush set to +0.95 Exposure and +44 Clarity.

I hope this tip is valuable to you—I posted about it because it’s such a valuable element of my process. Let me know how you get on!

Much love,

Dave