1. Shoot raw You can’t recover detail in an overexposed sky if it’s been clipped and lost forever in the original image. With a JPEG, what you see is what you get, but with raw files you’ve generally got an extra 1EV of ‘invisible’ highlight detail which can be recovered with a good raw converter. […]
Graduated filters
Graduated filters are used most for outdoor shots where there's a bright sky and a much darker landscape beneath it. This is why landscape photographers often use grads on their lenses when they capture images.
But adding a graduated filter digitally gives you a lot more control. You can experiment with the strength, colour and position of the effect at your leisure rather than having to decide irreversibly on the spot. And with a 'digital' grad you can mask out tall objects so that they aren't darkened along with the sky.
There are two things to keep in mind. The first is that you have to judge the exposure so that you keep highlight details in the brightest parts of the picture – shooting RAW will help preserve highlights. If these details are blown out, you can't bring them back.
The second is to remember that grads aren't just for skies. There are many pictures that will benefit from a shaded darkening effect down one edge, across the base or diagonally across the image.
That's not all. Physical graduated filters can only darken, but a digital grad can also be used to lighten up an area of a picture that needs a 'lift'.
Black and white in Capture One Pro
Maybe you wouldn’t normally think of Capture One Pro as an image-editor. It’s a superb RAW converter and general image enhancement tool, but most of the time you’d probably swap to a plug-in or an external editor for really detailed effects work – especially any that required localised adjustments. But I’ve been spending some time with Capture One […]
Budapest parliament
It’s all very well giving advice about how to achieve certain effects using this software or that software, but it always strikes me that no-one ever talks about WHY you should use a particular effect with a particular subject. Books and magazines are very tied up with the mechanics of photography but rarely stray into […]
Graduated filters can go up as well as down!
Here’s a technique I use quite often to add a little extra drama and contrast to a scene. I use a graduated filter effect to darken the sky, and then a second graduated filter to darken the foreground. Using two graduated filters creates a powerful lighting effect and increases the tonal contrast of the picture […]
Pimp your pictures with the Color Efex Pro Bi-Colour filter
Color Efex Pro‘s Bi-Colour filter adds a colour gradient to your pictures, adding a subtle wash of one colour to the base and one to the top. It’s not an effect you’ll use every day, but don’t dismiss it straight away because there is a type of shot where it really comes to life, and […]
Boost your landscapes with HDR Efex Pro
HDR Efex Pro isn’t just for special effects. It can enhance your images in much more straightforward ways, improving the tonal balance, sky detail and colour saturation. I like to use it on landscapes, where professionals can wait for hours for the right lighting, but the rest of us have to grab shots when we […]
Try out the Lightroom Graduated Filter color effect
The Graduated Filter tool is one of Lightroom’s most useful features. It can darken overexposed skies, working directly with the RAW data to recover blown highlights at the same time. But it’s easy to overlook the Lightroom Graduated Filter Color effect. Normally, you might just darken the sky and stop there, but the small Color […]
Use Color Efex Pro control points to mask your graduated filters
Graduated filters are perfect for toning down bright skies, but they have a problem. Any object sticking up into the sky gets ‘graduated’ too! But Color Efex Pro control points are the answer… All the filters in Color Efex Pro have opacity control points. You can use them to hide the filter effect in areas […]
How to use gradient masks in Capture One to improve outdoor shots
Capture One provides a system of internal adjustment layers so that you can make localised adjustments to your pictures. These aren’t directly compatible with the adjustment layers in Photoshop and Elements – they just share the same name – but they are saved with your images in the Capture One library, so you can go […]
Lightroom’s Graduated Filter tool in action
Lightroom’s Graduated Filter tool is great. It’s designed to replicate the effect of real-life graduated filters in landscape photography, reducing the brightness of skies so that there’s less of a contrast difference with the landscape itself. It’s not much good if the sky is so overexposed that there’s no detail left, but if you shoot […]