How I make Photography POP (6 step tutorial)
For this shot, I wanted to express the beautiful colors of the yearly cherry blossom in Bisbjerg Cemetery, Copenhagen. This place is often extremely crowded, but because of Covid-19 no one was allowed to walk along the trees, so I fought it was a perfect chance to get a shot at the full avenue without any people. Of course, there was one crime rider standing there for several hours.. but fair, only 1 quick post editing technique was needed.
Continue scrolling down to see my few, but very powerful ways of editing.
My goal:
- 4:5 vertical portrait photo for Instagram
- Simplicity (Few colors, few disturbing elements, hide blue sky)
- Pink-colorful-cherry-spring kinda feel
- Interesting perspective (Wide angle frog view with primary focus on the trees/leaves)
- Highlighted tree branches (Look like an amazing systematic source of life, ish)
- Added foreground element (the path and blurry falling leaves)
- Vertical centered light source (This together with falling leaves should draw your eyes attention from top left down center and create a much more interesting photo)
Shot info:
Location: Bispebjerg Cemetery, Cph.
Shot with: A7ii, 24-105 mm f/4 G
Aperture: 8 (This allowed for best possible photo quality while preserving everything in focus)
Focal: 105 mm (Zoom makes everything feel big and up close (opposite wide angle at e.g. 16 mm))
Exposure: 1/125
ISO: 200Shot: Handheld
Photos: 2 (focus stack)
Tools:
Softwares: Lightroom (Step 2, 5 and 6) & Photoshop (Step 3 and 4)
Great tips and tricks:
Remove elements: Content aware fill (Photoshop
Added falling leaves: Mask out everything in focus from secondary photo. There are many different techniques to do this. (Photoshop)
Hide sky: Clone stamp tool to replicate leaves to cover blue areas and Hue slider to change blur color to pink (Photoshop)
Draw light: It is all about the light. I used Gradients to darken left/right and to highlight center from top-down. I was also lucky to find a composition with a great real foreground shadow.
