When photographing landscapes, two major issues usually pop up:
The sky and the lighting.
Unlike studio shots (and most other types of photos, really), with landscapes, we can't choose or set up the sky or lighting to our liking. We have to work with whatever we get. Yet, the sky is absolutely crucial for landscape photos, and the same goes for the lighting.
Sure, there are enthusiasts who might visit their favorite spot for years just to nail that perfect lighting, that ideal atmosphere. But most of us don't have that kind of time or patience.
However, we do have tools that can help us out.
The first image shows a castle photo, taken from one of its towers. It was shot in the late morning, and as you can see, the results speak for themselves. The low clouds at the top, illuminated by the sun, are very bright and luminous, while the castle at the bottom of the frame is practically in deep shadow. Plus, the distant landscape is obscured by a rather intense haze or fog. The unedited shot is pretty uninteresting, and you might even wonder if it's worth keeping.
But as I mentioned, we have tools for this. For example, the Luminar Neo editor by Skylum.
I used a few simple steps. The first is the Enhance tool, which balances the lighting by darkening overexposed parts of the image and brightening underexposed areas. This tool also includes Sky Enhancer, which improves an overexposed sky.
That takes care of the top part of the image, but what about the castle? We have two options: either grab the entire hill with the castle and rotate it towards the sun, or get a set of film lights with tens of kilowatts of power and light up that shadow.
Or a third option: use the Light Depth tool in Luminar Neo, which works similarly to those film lights, but without all the annoying cables, generators, and electricians.
And here's the result after about five or ten minutes of work. Please compare it to the photo above. Is it worth spending a little time editing a photo?
The next shot was taken a little later, but from the same spot and under similar conditions. Again, the classic problem: an overexposed sky and the subject in shadow. But we already know how to handle it; the editing in Luminar Neo followed a similar process.
Luminar Neo from https://www.skylum.com is a pretty powerful tool that can pull surprisingly good results from even seemingly hopeless photos. It's true I might have slightly overdone some edits, but the goal was to showcase the software's capabilities, and I hope I've achieved that.
Previous parts of the series:
Edit photo with Luminar Neo #1
Edit photo with Luminar Neo #2
Edit photo with Luminar Neo #3 ‒ sharpening
Edit photo with Luminar Neo #4 ‒ portrait
