Video: Landscape photographer Andy Mumford’s workflow from start to finish in beautiful Tuscany

 

 

Landscape photographer Andy Mumford recently traveled to Tuscany. We've seen a lot of great videos from Andy Mumford, like these (1, 2), that show him working in the field to compose and capture images. What sets the video below apart is how much time Mumford dedicates to showing his entire post-processing workflow, including image editing techniques in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

In addition to the usual excellent compositional tips Mumford offers in many of his videos, he also stresses the importance of planning ahead for your final image. This means having an idea of what you want to do when editing your image later as you capture it. The decisions you make at capture affect what possibilities there will be when you're editing your photos. This is especially true when capturing shadow and highlight data in your raw image. If you'd like to learn more about exposing to the right, a useful technique for capturing a lot of tonality in your raw images, read this tutorial on Photography Life.

In Lightroom, Mumford makes basic global adjustments to tone and contrast in his image. He wants a solid base before moving on to precise, local adjustments. Even with Lightroom, which, while not as sophisticated as Photoshop, is still a very powerful image editor, there are many ways to perform precise local adjustments using different masking and brushing tools.

In Photoshop, Mumford applies "a bit of polish." The first thing he does here is use luminosity masks. It's a massive topic and outside the purview of the video, but Mumford uses Tony Kuyper's action panel to work with luminosity masks in Photoshop. A plugin version built on Adobe's UXP architecture is available now. These tools allow you to make precise selections of specific luminosity values in your image. There is luminosity masking in Lightroom, but Kuyper's panel delivers even better results. Mumford uses it to make selections of specific tones and then make curves adjustments. This allows him to add contrast to specific tonal values in his landscape image. If you'd like to learn more about luminosity masking and the TK panel, read my review of a prior version.

To see more from Andy Mumford, visit his website and YouTube channel. You can also follow him on Instagram.

(Via Andy Mumford)