One of the biggest challenges in photography is balancing the exposure when shooting outside – often you can end up with nice dramatic-looking skies but chronically underexposed foregrounds, and vice versa.
Serious landscape photographers haul around a clanking collection of lens filters and adapters in their bag, and while they work very well in the right hands, it’s yet more fragile gear to lug around and worry about in bad weather.
An easier option is to use the Graduated Filter in Lightroom. While it’s not a panacea for every exposure problem, it’s a great quick fix, particularly for bland-looking skies and underexposed foregrounds.
The Graduated Filter can also work on areas in the middle of the image or to the side, so it’s well worth getting to grips with.
01 Getting started with the Graduated Filter
The Graduated Filter is not the most intuitive tool in Lightroom, so you need to be patient and get used to manipulating it. It’s found under the Tools menu when you are in Develop mode, or just hit M on your keyboard.
You will see your cursor change into a + sign, which you can then drag around the image. So with this image there are a couple of issues – the sky is pretty bland looking, with lost cloud details and blown-out blue sky, while the foreground is a tad unexposed.
Let’s start with the foreground. With the Graduated Filter selected, we just drag up from the bottom of the frame until we reach the temple steps.
02 Making adjustments
It looks a bit weird, but don’t worry about that now. Look over to the right of the screen and you can see a long rectangular box labelled Effect: Custom.
From the Custom pull-down menu, select Exposure and you can instantly lighten the foreground.
Less is often more with Lightroom, so do this incrementally; remember also that lightening a very underexposed foreground will generate noise, which you may need to reduce later with the noise sliders.
You can also adjust other key settings from here, from ‘Temp’ to ‘Warmer.’ Watch the histogram, and turn on the highlights and shadows warning to guide your editing.
03 Working on the sky
The image is looking a bit punchier but the sky is a bit bland, as it was shot in the afternoon of a very sunny day.
So this time, we create another Graduated Filter by slowly dragging down from the top edge of the frame to the temple roof. We could also drag in from each corner, or from the side, but let’s keep things simple.
To get a bit of detail back in the sky we need to pull the exposure slider down. We don’t go too far however as it starts to look artificial and ‘Photoshopped,’ with very dramatic blues and strong clouds that don’t quite fit with the rest of the image.
Using the Graduated Filter is about balance as much as creating ‘dramatic’ skies.
04 Boosting the colours
To the right of ‘Custom’ there is another arrow, which reveals more editing tools when you click on it. This is typical of Lightroom – the interface looks quite plain but clicking on an arrow usually reveals more great tools.
So you can use Saturation to boost the blue of the sky and fine-tune it even further by clicking ‘Color’ at the bottom of the box. You can specify the exact hue of the sky via a dropper, and the full colour range is represented.
This Color dropper can be used with every Graduated Filter you create on an image. Once that is sorted we can concentrate on other aspects of the image, but you can hopefully see how quick and powerful the Graduated Filter is – and we’ve not even had to screw on a lens filter.
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