Three advanced techniques to make your wildlife photography stand out.

Introduction

Many photographers understand how to do basic Lightroom edits to make their photos look better, but often don’t understand some of the more advanced techniques which can really help take basic images to a whole new level. In this post i’m going to share three Lightroom techniques which you can use to help add drama and visual appeal to your wildlife photography.

This tutorial will cover 3 key concepts:

1. Unlocking the power of Lightroom masks.

2. Mastering Lightroom color mixer

3. Color grading secrets to improve dynamic range

Before I get to those tips; let’s get some basic edits out of the way. This tutorial will walk you through step by step for each adjustment to show how I went from the raw file of this image of a Pine Siskin in flight to the finished image above.

Original Raw File

Basic Lightroom Adjustments

After downloading onto the computer, I will always start with basic adjustments first. Because this image was backlit, it’s slightly under exposed and very flat so I brought up the exposure a little and added contrast, vibrance and a little saturation to bring out the greens and yellows. The image was also slightly cropped to remove the tail feathers from the bird in the lower left hand side of the original.

Lightroom Mask: Creating Compound Masks

My next step of the edit is creating masks in Lightroom. Masking is basically a way to apply selective edits to part of the image without impact other areas. Many people understand the fundamentals of masking, but for me one of the most powerful tools with masking is using what I call compound masks. This is a process where you create a mask and then use a second mask to either add or subtract to/from the original mask. The original image was backlit with a pretty clean background, so I want to play up backlighting and add some contrast in the background.

For this image I ended up creating four masks; two basic and two “compound” masks. I’ll walk through each below:

Mask 1 - Isolate the bird

This is a basic mask on the bird itself (Select Subject).

How to create a mask:

After we create the mask, we can then apply basic setting changes to the area selected by the mask. You can see, we added some more contrast and raised the shadows on the bird so that it’s more evenly and properly exposed. We also tweaked a few other settings as you can see in the edit panel.

Mask 2 - Isolate the background

The second mask starts the same as first one. I select subject and then select the invert checkbox. This basically creates a mask that omits the bird and selects just the background. I do this frequently as it can be useful to adjust the background and subject separately. You can see from the adjustment panel below that I darkened the exposure on the background but raised the contrast, highlights and shadows. I also adjusted the temp and saturation a bit as well. You can see in the image below by doing so i’m starting to bring some highlighting behind the bird from the back light. The next steps will really start to bring that light into focus.

Mask 3 - Compound mask to create highlights

Mask 3 will be the first compound mask I create. Before showing the steps it’s important to understand what i’m trying to accomplish. As mentioned in the last section, you’re starting to see the backlight behind the bird coming through. I want to highlight that in a way that does not affect the exposure of the bird itself. To do so I need to create a mask behind the bird, but exclude the bird from the mask. I do so by following the steps below:

Create a radial gradient mask, dragging the mask from the top right corner, overtop the bird towards the bottom center of the image. You should see the area highlighted in red like the above image.

As you can see below, the mask excludes the bird. I have added exposure to this mask and it’s brightened the background, but has not changed the bird.

Mask 4 - Compound mask to darken left side

The final mask will be used to add some drama and contrast to the image. For this, i’m going to darken the left side of the image and make it appear the bird is flying into the darkness.

As you can see on the mask tool above, I created a linear gradient starting from the left side and moving right. Then subtracted the bird from that mask. Next, I drop the exposure, saturation and blacks and add contrast to create more dramatic lighting effect. Now that I’m done with the masks, let’s move on to the next set of tips.

Lightroom Color Mixer

Lightroom color mixer allows you to adjust the Hue, Saturation and Luminance of each color channel individually. It’s a very powerful tool, but requires a bit of understanding of color science or you can really get off course in a hurry. However, there is a sampler type tool that is incredibly helpful if you want to ensure you’re making these adjustments in a way that maintains image/color integrity.

Below you can see the results. On the saturation setting, I opened the tool tip and selected a section of the background of the image. I then scrolled up to bump the saturation up and it automatically adjusted both the yellow and green channels based upon the area sampled. This added saturation in a way that maintained the basic color of the background.

Next, let’s do the same with luminance which will affect the brightness/darkness of the color channels.

One thing you may notice, is that I didn’t adjust the luminance as much as saturation and that the ratio of adjustment is slightly different. This is because I selected a slightly different area of the photo to base the sampling upon. You can see this adjust brightened the brightest areas behind the bird.

Lightroom Color Grading

The last tip I want to give is related to the color grading area in Lightroom. This tool is used often to adjust the color of the lights, midtones and shadows of an image and can be very useful for certain types of color correction. However, even when i’m not doing color correction I find this tool incredibly useful helping to create more dynamic range in an image. Let’s first start with adjusting the luminance of the shadows.

Now you’ll see I adjusted the shadows down, essentially darkening the shadows. You can also see this on the histogram as well in that it’s moved slightly to the left. Next, let’s adjust our highlights.

You can see from this adjustment, i’ve brightened the highlights helping the lighter parts of the background to really shine through. Finally, let’s adjust the midtones

That takes us to the final edit and the end of the tutorial. I hope you found this helpful and informative and that you use some of these techniques to help improve your image editing.