How to relight a scene for drama and contrast with the simplest of masking techniques
So many of the advances in photo editing software right now use AI, principally AI noise reduction (good), AI upscaling (if you need it) and AI subject masking – ESPECIALLY AI subject masking. Sometimes it’s useful, sometimes it’s not. I’ve used it a lot, on all sorts of images, but for most of the edits I do, most of the time, I use a much simpler approach based around carefully positioned radial masks.
You get these in Capture One, which I’m using here, in Lightroom, DxO PhotoLab and other programs. It’s a local adjustment tool that works very simply. You use it to drag out a circular or elliptical mask which you can then resize, rotate and position at will.
The radial mask gadget has concentric rings. The inner ring encloses the area that’s fully masked, the outer ring encloses the whole mask and the region in between is where the mask is ‘feathered’ to blend your adjustment in with its surroundings. You can drag the inner and outer rings separately to adjust this feathering effect.
What I like to do is use a global adjustment to get the image looking broadly how I want it, then use a radial mask to adjust and bring out areas I want to highlight.
So here’s an example of how I would relight a landscape scene. As you can see, the original image, straight from the camera, is pretty flat and boring.
Step 1: Ambient global adjustments
My first step is to get the overall ambient, or background how I want it with some global adjustments. I’ve reduced the Exposure value to make the tones of the sky and the overall scene much deeper and richer. Yes, it is too dark right now, but my second step is to add a radial mask to ‘relight’ the key areas.
Step 2: ‘Relighting’ with a radial mask
The second step is to add a radial gradient. You’ll see I’ve created an elliptical shape on the left side of the image, and increased the exposure and the saturation to pick out the buildings and the clifftop grass. What I’ve tried to do is mimic the natural fall of the light – or, since I’m adding light, to be honest, I try to make it look like it’s falling naturally, following the contours and the shapes of the hillside.
This is a somewhat exaggerated example, but that’s just to show the dramatic difference this simple two-step technique can achieve.
