Behind the raw | Ep 4 Hidden Beach

Behind The raw | Hidden Beach

In the journey of landscape photography, every image captured tells a story of its own. From the serene tranquillity of a mountain lake at dawn to the fiery hues of a sunset over rolling hills, each scene holds its unique charm waiting to be unveiled through the lens.

In this blog post, I want to delve into the behind-the-scenes of editing images from my recent landscape photography shoot. Join me as we explore the workflow of my editing process, my reflections on each image, and the lessons we can extract together.

This week’s Image: The Hidden Beach

This location surprised me very much, not only because I’d never been before nor knew about it, but also because the conditions were not good but good at the same time, which is a mist that hung around for almost the entire duration of my shoot. The image I chose for this edit is the image I used as the cover for the video on my YouTube channel and it features a few items that I liked. The star of the show for me was the curling wave as it broke just at the shore, coupled with the mist that was at this point catching the slight glow that was attempting to break through. so I was excited to finally get to edit it.

My approach to this one was one of reverse engineering as such, I started as always by straightening my horizon, however, I then added some extra vibrance and saturation to the image to bring out the colours. I purposely added extra here just to see what was possible, and I knew I would dial them down again by the time I had finished the edit.

Next was to look at the sky and bring out some of the detail in the clouds/mist, and for this I opted to use a liner filter, being conscious of the horizon line while doing it. You can use the sky selection feature in Lightroom however it can struggle with getting clean selections of just the sky and this image was one such case. I applied some dehaze to this filter, counter-productive you might think as the mist was one of the elements in the image, however by applying just the right amount I could separate the details and add more contrast to the image. I then also added a radial filter and positioned it right over the star of the image, that curling wave, I made sure that I was going to bring out the colours of the wave while maintaining the integrity of the overall position. Finally, it was now time to dial back down the vibrance and saturation to end up with an image that not only captured the feeling I had while there but also added some mysticism to the finished picture. You don’t know where it is it reminded me of watching videos from Adam Gibbs from Vancouver with the trees that lined the bay, and it also made me want to return later in the year for Autimn to try and catch some of those in full colour

I hope you enjoy my insights and approach to this image and find ways that it can also help you on your editing journey.

You can watch how I took these steps in the accompanying video

Thanks for reading and your continued support

All the best

Darren