I found this tree last Saturday on a morning bike-ride. I didn’t go out to explore or to have an elaborate photo-session, I just needed the exercise 😉 . However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t put a camera in your bag…

When I passed this tree I had to stop to make a few photos. And today I decided to use this tree as a case study for my Lightroom workflow. The view in the photo above is more or less the same view as I had from the cycle track. I immediately loved the shape of the tree and the light through the leaves. One thing that I didn’t like was the sculpture/ornament next to the tree. Below you can see the raw photo, including this sculpture.

The first thing I did was eliminating the sculpture, as it distracts too much from the tree. I use the spot-removal tool for this. In order to get a smooth result I use different sizes and overlapping spots. You can see the result below.

The next step is to adjust the white balance. In this case I used the ‘daylight’ preset to bring out more of the warmth of the morning sun. After that it is just playing with tone to get the desired image. In this case bringing out a bit of the shadows and bringing down the highlights. In circumstances like these I often use the HSL section to bring down the luminance of blue to bring out more blue in the sky. In landscape photography graduated filters are often used to do this, but I find this works really well. Added bonus is that you don’t affect the tree. Lastly, and not to forget (I sometimes do!), is the removal of sensor-spots. I only do this for my top-selection of photo’s as it isn’t my favourite part of post-processing.

The workflow described above is the standard workflow, aimed at a natural/realistic result. Sometimes I like to play around to get a different atmosphere. There are a lot of presets in Lightroom that can get you started. As an example I show you the same photo with the Preset ‘Video cross process 2’.

The same tree had more interesting angles to shoot from. Seen from the left side, the tree looks like this:

I decided to take a closer look, and got ‘inside’ the curtains of branches and leaves. This viewpoint turned out to be my favourite. Although I like the shape of the ‘over-all’ tree, I love the shape of the trunk from this closer position. And the outside world gets excluded from this small room shielded by the leaves. It feels more intimate.

This image also lends itself for a more poetic post processing. One other preset that I’d like to demonstrate here is ‘Creamtone’. I use it when I like a monochrome finish, but want a bit of extra warmth. A lot of people use sepia, but I find that a bit too much for my taste, the creamtone gives a nice subtle amount of color.

For this photo I didn’t need any extra fine-tuning after applying this preset. I believe I can thank the Summicron (with its excellent micro-contrast) for that.

Thanks for reading!