High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photo Editing with Adobe Photoshop | QE

In this video I’m creating a HDR landscape photo using #Adobe #Photoshop CC 2021 for the post processing.

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0:00 Intro
For this shot my goal was to get a nice balance between the bright sky and the rather dark foreground. To get it nicely balanced I merged differently exposed photos into a single HDR photo. Besides that, I wanted to give the image a slightly colder look and make the mountains in the distance taler. All the editing was done in Adobe Photoshop plus the Nik Collection plug in.

0:30 1. Basic Adjustments
After activating the lens corrections, I switched the camera profile to Adobe Landscape and the white balance to cloudy. To make the photo brighter, I increased the exposure and dropped the highlights to prevent overexposure. For more details, the clarity was increased.

1:28 2. Local Adjustments
First, I dragged a graduated filter over the sky and dropped the exposure to reveal more details in the clouds. Another graduated filter was added over the foreground. Here, I increased the clarity and blacks while I dropped the saturation. I wanted to add subtle glow in the sky by using a radial filter with increased blacks and some negative dehaze. Another radial filter was added over the foreground with increased texture.

3:51 3. Color Grading
Since I didn’t like the green tones, I dropped the green hue first. Then, I boosted the orange saturation, while dropping green, yellow and blue. For the split toning I wanted to apply a warm tone to the mid-tones.

5:28 4. Photoshop
To clean up the photo I used the spot healing brush. Then, I used the perspective warp tool to make the mountains look taler. To smoothen the sky a little, I copied it into a new layer and added some motion blur (this also got rid of the noise in the sky). Finally, I used the Nik Collection plug in to add the polarization, tonal contrast and glamor glow effect.