Ethereal Pictures: Roman Fox’s Lightroom Settings

Getting that gentle, misty look in your panorama and journey pictures is not about one secret trick. It’s a mix of taking pictures circumstances, gentle route, and a handful of particular modifying strikes that most individuals both skip or do not know to attempt.

Coming to you from Roman Fox, this sensible video breaks down precisely how Fox builds that signature hazy, ethereal high quality throughout his journey and panorama work. He begins the place it really issues: the scene itself. Shooting into the sunshine, not away from it, is among the most constant instruments he makes use of. Backlit or side-lit scenes wrap gentle round your topic and naturally suppress element in a method that no modifying trick can totally replicate. Fox additionally factors to environmental parts like mist, smoke, sea spray, and reflections as issues to actively search out reasonably than look forward to by chance.

From there, the video strikes into modifying. Fox walks by way of how he handles white steadiness and publicity first, earlier than making use of any preset, as a result of these two changes change how all the pieces else seems to be downstream. He then covers his strategy to the masking slider in Lightroom, retaining it between 80 and 90 so sharpening solely hits the high-contrast edges reasonably than the entire picture. Clarity will get pulled right down to round -20 on each single edit as a place to begin. Grain is added intentionally, with a measurement of fifty and an quantity someplace between 20 and 50 relying on the picture. Together, these changes stack up quick.

The tone curve part is value paying shut consideration to. Fox fades each the blacks and the whites by pulling the corners of the curve inward, so pure black turns into barely grey and pure white shifts to off-white. It sounds delicate, however on display, the distinction is apparent. He makes the case that this one adjustment, mixed with the readability discount, grain, and white steadiness tweaks, will get you 90% of the best way to the look with out doing something difficult. He additionally explains methods to save these settings as a preset and the place the workflow differs between Lightroom and Capture One, which is genuinely helpful in case you’ve been questioning methods to apply a appear like this with out re-doing it from scratch each time. The video was shot utilizing footage from areas together with Venice, Richmond Park, Porto, and Sicily, so you possibly can see how the modifying holds up throughout very several types of photos, not only one fastidiously chosen instance.

Check out the complete video above for the whole walkthrough from Fox, together with the tone curve demo and the way he applies the look regionally versus globally relying on the software program.