For this quickedit video I‘m creating a car-light-trails photo from a famous spot in the German alps. For the #PostProcessing I will be using Adobe #Lightroom Classic and Adobe #Photoshop CC 2019. If you'd like to support me, Patreon:
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My goal for this photo was not only to blend the car-light-trails with the base image but also create a nice sunset / blue hour mood using vibrant red, magenta and blue colour tones while still having some details left in the darker spots of the picture. Since there will be some merging involved, I’m using Lightroom for the basic raw adjustments of all the images I’m using and Photoshop to do the merging later.
I started with the base image by activating the lens corrections and changing the camera profile to Adobe Standard which will already restore some details from the darker areas of the photo. I didn’t change the white balance, but I increased the vibrance to get a nicely saturated image. Also, for this shot I wanted to reduce global adjustments and went straight to the local adjustments. That means I have created a few graduated filters for the upper area and a radial filter for the centre part. To darken the sky, I applied a graduated filter with a reduced luminance range, so only the highlights are affected by the dropped exposure (so the mountains stay bright). Next, since there were heavy highlights on the right side, I dragged a graduated filter over them and dropped the highlights. Finally, I wanted to add more structure to the mountains. Here I created a graduated filter with increased clarity and used a colour range mask to specifically target the mountains in the back. The last local adjustment was the radial filter in the centre over the forest on the right side. Since this area was a bit chaotic, I wanted to fix that by dropping the clarity and making everything smoother this way.
Of course, there also was a bit of colour grading involved. I started I the HSL tab where I dropped the hue of the green tones (making them warmer) and increasing the saturation of the blue colour tones. For the split toning I simply applied a warm colour tone for the highlights which mainly affected the sky in the back.
Once I made all the adjustments in Lightroom for the base image I selected the remaining images I needed for the merging (car lights + a darker exposure for a sky replacement later) and synchronized the settings I just applied on the base image.
After opening all the images as layers in Photoshop (in one Photoshop file) the first thing I wanted to do is to do a little sky replacement, since the sky of the base image is rather bright. As I’m working with a cloudless sky with good contrast to the landscape, I can simply use the quick selection tool to make the selection. Then, I placed a darker exposed base image and used the selection to add the darker sky. To blend in the car light trails photos I simply switched their blending modes to screen.
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