I have revisited a spot I shot a few months ago since the conditions were much better (lots of fresh snow) so this image might seem familiar to some of you. This is another time-blend, meaning I shot the base image during sunset, waited for the light to vanish, then shot a few extra photos to capture the car lights going up and down the road. All these photos are later combined in Photoshop.

You can see the whole workflow for this timeblending effect here: https://youtu.be/BjU_a-log7c

1. Basic Adjustments

For the base image I brought up the exposure, dropped the highlights, slightly raised the shadows and blacks. I still wanted to keep the base image rather dark, since I will be adding light later on, so having a darker foreground makes the car lights pop.

The white balance was slightly raised to recover some of the warmer sunset colors and the vibrance and saturation was pushed to make the image more colorful.

For sharpness, I added texture and to add some subtle glow the dehaze and clarity sliders were dropped slightly.

2. Masking

Using the landscape mask, I targeted all the snow and made it slightly brighter by increasing the whites and exposure. I also created a mask for the sky introducing some more warmth by bringing up the temperature and the saturation. Finally, I also targeted the vegetation, again using the landscape mask feature, and raised the shadows to have some more details in those very dark spots in the foreground.

3. Color Grading

To push the sunset colors even further, in the HSL panel the red, orange, yellow and magenta saturation was increased. Then, I used split toning to add a warmer color to the highlights and the colder color to the mid tones and shadows

4. Blending the Photos

The raw images for the car light trails were slightly edited , mainly making the car light trails warmer by increasing the temperature and adding some saturation. Once that was done, I opened everything up in Photoshop and placed all images ontop of each other with the base image being at the bottom.

To blend the layers, I used the lighten blending mode which does most of the work. Since parts of the sky will also be blended on top of the base layer, I grouped all car light layers and added a layer mask on top, then masked out the sky.

I also applied a tone curve specifically to the car lights adding some more contrast.

Shot with a Ricoh GR3 HDF

full guide here

camera used: sony a7r iii + sigma 24-70mm f2.8

Had this bear photo sitting on my computer for a while but never wanted to touch the raw file since it looked so hazy (shot through a fence). A few days ago, I tried to restore it in Lightroom and this is the outcome. It could be better, but I’m happy with this!

1. Basic Adjustments

First, I made sure to remove the grass blades and apply AI Denoising to prevent any noise issues later on, especially with heavier adjustments like for this image that’s super helpful.

Then, the first thing I did was to push the dehaze slider heavily. That worked quite well, but I wanted to make the image clearer. I added a bit of texture for sharpness and clarity to boost midtones contrast. Also, the tonal adjustments in the basic panel can be used to further push contrast and thus dehaze the image. I brought down the blacks and increased the whites.

Heavily altering contrast like this results in super ugly colors. To fix that, I adjusted the white balance sliders to get a more natural color (aimed for brown fur). I also brought down the saturation to keep the colors a bit more natural

2. Masking

There was still a bit of haze going on in the center, so I used a few different radial gradients over different spots and further added just a hint of dehaze to try and fix that. I also used a brush mask to make the eyes of the bear shine a little more. Therefore, I simply brought up the exposure, the white, clarity, contrast and the shadows.

Finally, I added a bit of light coming down from the top using another radial gradient and increasing whites and exposure. For some vignetting, I used one more radial gradient covering the whole image, inverting it and dropping the exposure and the whites.

Featuring a turtle photo I really like. I was lucky to have these beautiful corals around this turtle. I shot this at 20mm (30mm ffs equivalence) and the gentle compression gives a pretty soothing look to it.

You're probably wondering why I made the water tealish just to make it bluer again. The answer is I was probably just autopiloting. There may be multiple ways of getting the same result so don't overthink it.