How to boost flat landscapes in Lightroom

If you plan to share your edited photographs online then you don’t need to worry as much about over-saturating the colours, as computer screens can reproduce millions of colours.

However, if you’re planning to print your photos then you need to be more careful about avoiding over-saturated colours at the editing stage, because printers can’t reproduce as many colours as you can see on a monitor.

If you print over-saturated colours, the images may look garish and lack detail when you see them on paper. We’ll look into ways to get more faithful-looking prints in a future issue, but it’s worth being aware of the concept of printable and unprintable colours at an early stage.

As well as helping you get the right saturation for the medium you plan to share your images in, Lightroom also has the tools you need to counteract colour casts. These warm orange or cold blue tints can occur when your camera’s automatic white balance setting fails to get whites looking white in particular lighting scenarios.

For example, tungsten lighting can leave an image looking overly orange.  It will be helpful to get to grips with Lightroom’s colour-correcting tools as soon as possible because you’ll need to use them often.

Every edit that you perform in Lightroom’s Develop module is stored in the History panel. This enables you to perform multiple ‘undoes’ if you need to retrace your steps, or you can jump straight back to a particular stage in the editing process, and discard all subsequent edits, by clicking on the appropriate history state.

You can even record versions  of your edited image as Snapshots, which gives you the freedom to experiment with different looks.

SEE MORE: 55 Photo editing tips and tricks to live by

Step by step: adjust colours selectively

1 Adjust the saturation
Open TYLR13.dng in Lightroom’s Develop module. The photo looks a little desaturated, apart from the bright orange lichen on the rock. Go to the Presence section of the Basic panel. If you decrease the value of the Saturation slider to -100 then all the colours become greyscale.

SEE MORE: 10 camera techniques to master in 2014: how to control the saturation of colours

2 Adjust the vibrance
Restore Saturation to 0. Reduce Vibrance to -100. The weaker colours become grey, while the lichen retains some colour. This demonstrates how the Vibrance slider selectively adjusts colour saturation. It tends to have a stronger influence over typical landscape colours.

SEE MORE: Get vibrant colour in-camera

3 Be more selective
If you increase Saturation, the lichen becomes too saturated and unprintable. To selectively boost the greens and blues without over-saturating the stronger oranges, drag the Vibrance slider right to a value of +74. This gives the blue ocean and the green moss more impact.

SEE MORE: How to make your images more tasteful and sophisticated

04 Create a Snapshot
Before making further adjustments, record this first version as a Snapshot. To do this, go to the Snapshots panel on the left of the workspace. Click on the + icon to create a new Snapshot.
It names the Snapshot using date and time. Relabel it ‘Vibrance Adjustment’. Click on Create.

SEE MORE: Lightroom SOS – how to rescue badly exposed, noisy shots

5 Adjust the white balance
The ‘Vibrance Adjustment’ Snapshot will appear in the Snapshots panel. To enhance the ocean’s blues, drag the Temperature slider to 5066. This makes the green sea look more blue. Counteract the green tint by dragging Tint to +15. Create a new Snapshot called ‘White Balance’.

SEE MORE: 9 photo editing cliches and how to avoid them

6 Compare the versions
You can now click on the Snapshot labels to toggle between the two versions of the photo. The Vibrance Adjustment Snapshot has a greener hue than the White Balance version. You can create as many Snapshots as you like to help you decide which edited version you prefer.

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