Editing Success Stories: Part 2

This is a continuation of my last post, explorations of pictures rescued through Lightroom editing. The first was from RAW; the second from a JPEG because I took it before I started using RAW.

#3) Secret View

This one obviously went horribly wrong. It was almost unsalveagable. As you can see, everything except the mountain in the background is far too dark; the sky and the snow on the mountain are almost too bright. What to do?

I had to edit this one in two phases, because the first ended up not being enough.

Round 1: I boosted the Brightness beyond its default settings, also using Fill Light to create more light. I used the Curves tool to brighten the Darks and Shadows. To keep the sky and mountain from getting too bright, I used Highlight Recovery, darkened the Light tones through Curves, and turned down the Aqua and Blue luminance a bit. I upped the contrast slightly, and added a bit of saturation, to compensate for the underexposed portions' lack of these attributes. I also adjusted the White Balance in a similar fashion as I did the waterfall picture in the last post - I moved the sliders toward the blue and magenta positions, to both accentuate the blue sky and to bring out the contrasts between greens as before.

Round 2: I used some Graduated Filters to move the lighting along further. I used one along each edge except the top, and adjusted the Exposure sliders up until the picture looked nice. I didn't want to make them too bright - this was early morning, after all - but I also wanted them and the branch shapes to stand out. As a final touch, I did some Highlight Recovery because the mountain and the sky seemed a bit too bright.

Here it is. It actually looks a bit better in Lightroom, but it's pretty good here:

#4) Foggy Mountain

This one is probably the least overtly problematic of the four I have reviewed thus far. Still, it needed work before it could be useable.

Using the curves tool, I boosted all the levels of lighting except the highlights. I boosted the blue luminance to get the fog and sky brighter. Then, I used three graduated filters (see previous post). One slightly darkened the top half and added some contrast to keep the mountains from getting washed out. The second I put just in the right-hand corner to brighten that part of the sky and bring it in line with the rest of the sky. The third I used to brighten the dark foliage at the bottom; in this third graduated filter, I also added some saturation and sharpness to replaced for that which was lost due to underexposure.

Here is the finished product. There's still a bit of unevenness in the sky, but it's a lot less noticeable; with a little more work I could get even that taken care of perhaps. The greens don't come out as saturated here as they do in Lightroom. There are a few other little imperfections, but I generally like the result.