Many of us (mostly me) will shoot many of those great “possibility” photographs when we are out and about, not shooting on assignments.  These images have great potential deep inside your brain, but they will never see the light of day until you act upon them and discover what you were really looking at…

Case in point:  a while ago I took my family on a vacation to see the Potter attraction in Fla.  Crazy crowds, and an amazing little world that the Universal designers and engineers created.  I shot some “great possibility photos” of the Hogwarts castle during my visit with the intent of getting back and doing some post-production work.  I finally finished the image more than 6 months later.

Here’s the finished image:

Finished Cinematic Look

Straight out of camera view.  Nice, but it’s missing something…

Using the tools within Lightroom, I created a few main goals for the image:  Cool the image of the castle down, add contrast and shadows to improve the 3-Dimensionality of the towers, open up minor areas that were too dark and finally darken down the rocks in the foreground.

Lightroom has been a revelation for me – it’s power lies in the immediate feedback you can get via it’s clean and modern interface.  Let’s take a look at how I enhanced the 3-D nature of the image using the Adjustment Brush:

Adding in contrast and + exposure via the Exposure Brush in Lightroom

Controlling Color temperature thru the use of the Hue, Saturation and Luminance Tool and Split Toning Sliders.

I hope you enjoyed this brief behind the scenes view of Creating a Cinematic Look using Lightroom.