There are a lot of considerations that go into a successful golden hour shoot. But if you don’t want all your photos to be backlit, learning to correct skin tones by making adjustments helps you avoid this problem while keeping your lighting options open. I like backlit photos to avoid that look,” says Byrne. “Direct sunlight from the golden hour can make skin look quite orange. Learn how to enhance the colors of a sunset by controlling temperature, tint, and saturation in your photos. For Adobe Photoshop, check out this tutorial to learn how to merge HDR photos. “You can blend different exposures to compensate for the much brighter sky in comparison to a darker foreground,” explains Schwindt. ![]() One technique used by landscape photographers is to take multiple photos at different exposures and combine them in Lightroom. “I’m always shooting to edit - always thinking about how the photo’s going to look once I bring all the colors up,” adds Green. That will impact what you do in post-processing,” advises Schwindt. “Have a vision for how you want the photograph to turn out. ![]() If you’re having trouble keeping your highlights from being blown out, you can edit for results you can’t get in-camera. Post-processing tools open up a world of possibilities for photographing the golden hour. It’ll illuminate the person,” says Tryforos. Using fill flash can really make a difference. “It can be hard to include the sky because the exposure of it and the subject are two different things. The best cameras for the job will typically be full-frame DSLRs.įlashes or reflectors help fill in the shadows on your subject’s face for a more evenly lit exposure. For best results, use a camera with a high dynamic range, which measures how many stops of exposure it can capture in a single frame. To pull up deep shadows in post-processing, you need to expose your photo properly, but your camera also needs to capture the necessary information. As the sun sets and less light is available, the ability to recover deep shadows in underexposed parts of your photos becomes increasingly important. “JPEG files make editing and processing photos more difficult because you have less data to work with,” Schwindt explains. Learn how to use shadow and highlight clippings in Adobe Lightroom and how to use adjustment brushes in Lightroom. Pulling up shadows and pulling down highlights can help restore balance between the brightest and darkest parts of an image. Green recommends using an adjustment brush to pull up shadows on individual parts. Raise your shadows and pull down your highlights. There are a number of different ways to combat this: “You don’t have a ton of light on their face, so if you’re not exposing your camera properly, you can lose all of the beautiful highlights on their skin,” explains photographer David Green. Shooting into the sun with your subject’s back to the light will produce a beautiful backlit effect, but it leaves your subject’s face in shadow. Working with directional light can be tricky.įinding a balance between the sky and darker areas of a scene can be hard even during the golden hour. If you’re already out, stick around for a few blue hour photos. Shoot more frames more often to ensure you capture every change this will give you more options to work with afterward.Īfter the sun sets, you’ll be treated to the “blue hour,” the brief window of time following sunset, when the world is bathed in a deep blue color. The light is changing every minute - faster than you’ll realize in the moment. Using these golden hour calculators can take some of the guesswork out of the golden hour. There are apps that list sunset times and tell you exactly where the sun will be at any given time or place. If you can’t get there early, prepare by looking at other photographers’ work in the same spot to see what’s been done. Scout your location beforehand and visualize your compositions so you can maximize your time when the golden hour starts. “You need to have an idea of what you want to shoot beforehand.” Prep work can go a long way to make sure you get the results you want: “It heightens the need to plan ahead,” says landscape photographer Steve Schwindt. ![]() The golden hour is a short window, after which the sun will slip below the horizon or level off into harsher light after sunrise. “What will happen ten minutes from now is going to be radically different than what happened ten minutes before,” photographer Tina Tryforos says of the golden hour. More than any other time of day, the golden hour puts the photographer in a time crunch. The atmosphere filters out blue light when the sun is closer to the horizon, leaving you with a color palette that people associate with feelings of happiness and warmth. On the Kelvin color temperature spectrum, the golden hour light is warmer, with lots of yellows, oranges, and reds.
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