Even when shooting digital, I always try to give my images a more pleasing and timeless "film look". That's why I'm so excited to share with you my thoughts on Dehancer Photo, a plugin for Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Capture One that gives digital images the look and feel of classic, analogue film. Dehancer Photo includes many popular film emulations (Kodak Portra, Fujifilm Acros, Kodak Ektar, etc) as well as effects like halation and bloom to create a more authentic film look.

Download Dehancer Photo free trial:
https://www.dehancer.com/store/photo/pslr

Use promo code LIBASSI for 10% off at checkout

HOW FILM GRAIN WORKS IN DEHANCER:
https://blog.dehancer.com/articles/how-does-film-grain-work-in-dehancer-ofx-plugin

MORE ABOUT PUSH-PULL:
https://blog.dehancer.com/articles/what-is-push-pull-and-how-it-works

GREAT VIDEO ABOUT HOW DEHANCER HANDLES COLOR IMAGES:
https://youtu.be/wqXuTMxDypU

** DISCLAIMER **

Dehancer has not sponsored me or paid for this video. They provided a license for Dehancer Photo for the purpose of creating this video. No money changed hands and all opinions are my own.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

The best way to get the film look is of course to shoot film! But that can be a really long difficult and expensive process, especially if you're just starting out. If you want to get that same film look when shooting with your digital cameras keep watching: this video is for you! Today we're going to be looking at a plugin for Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Capture One called "Dehancer Photo", and this plugin can emulate a lot of different types of film stocks and transform your digital images into more "film-like" analog shots. So without further ado let's jump into it and see how it works.

Ok so here we are inside mi Lightroom catalog. As you can see I have one image here which is straight out of camera, I didn't do any editing to this. If you follow this channel and you know my work, you know that I always work in black and white: so in my usual workflow I would convert this image in black and white inside of Lightroom, do all my global adjustments and then move on to Photoshop to do all my film grain, dodging and burning, vignetting, all that good stuff. I'm not gonna go into detail about my usual workflow, because today we're talking about Dehancer, and to use Dehancer and get the best results, according to the guys at Dehancer, you need to prepare your images in a certain way. I'm going to put all the settings here on the screen, it's really easy they just want you to change the color profile to "Adobe standard" and then lower your exposure to "-1", lower your contrast to "-40", and then up your shadows to about "+60", and then they also want you to go into the detail tab here and get rid of all the sharpening and noise reduction that Lightroom applies by default. That's it, as you can see the image looks really dull this way but this is made in a way so that basically, as you can see here in the histogram, all the data is compressed in the middle of the histogram and we have a really raw file to work with. I'm also I'm gonna do tick these two boxes that I always do just to remove chromatic aberration if there is any and to enable profile Corrections for the lens. And that's basically it! So according to Dehancer in this way we can just jump into the plugin and start editing the picture. One thing to note here is: in order to export this and work with Dehancer this needs to be a TIFF in sRGB color profile 16 bit. So how do you export that? You need to go to the Lightroom preferences, go here into the preferences into external editing, you want to set up your additional external editor as Dehancer with file format TIFF, sRGB, 16 bits and then resolution is basically up to you, I always use 350. Once you have this set up and you save it as a preset you can go in here right click to your image and do "edit in Dehancer Lightroom plugin" and we're gonna need to use this "edit a copy with Lightroom adjustments" so basically Dehancer is not going to edit your raw file directly, but it's going to create a TIFF file, a copy of it, import it into your Lightroom catalog and then just start edit.

So here we are inside the plugin. Here on the left side you have your film emulations and also you have your presets, if you want to change any of these with custom settings you can save them as presents. On the right side you have all your settings here that you can change depending on the image, and we're going to go through all of these later on in the video. Then of course you have your preview here in the middle, and then at the top you have a couple of buttons: you can of course undo and redo, you can reset all the settings to their defaults, you can go to the previous used settings which is pretty useful if you're editing multiple images, you can hide this left tab here if you want to get more real estate for editing your image, and also you have this icon here for the settings, and you can go in here and the great thing that they do here at Dehancer is that they store all these film stock simulations on their server, and once you have an account with them you can just click on this and you can get all the updates or possibly all the new film simulation that they might add to the plugin just by clicking on this, which is really good.

Let's start editing an image. As I said I always work in black and white, so I'm going to choose black and white in here, and you can see all the different types of black and white emulations that you can do inside Dehancer Photo. So my absolute favorite film in the world is Fujifilm Acros, I use it all the time even when I shoot film, so I'm going to select that, as you can see it's one of my favorites. So I'm going to click on that and as you can see the default settings for this film are already applied to my image, and I can see it here. I can of course zoom in to see it at 100% and I can toggle the preview on and off, and as you can see it looks really nice straight out of the bat. The only thing that I would say bothers me a little bit is that, at least in my eyes there is a slight green cast, and you can see it also here in the in the histogram. I did reach out to the guys at Dehancer and asked about that, and the reason for this green cast is that they print and test all their film simulations on this particular paper which has this green cast to it, so basically that's the reason why, it's a really accurate simulation of the film printed on a paper with a slightly green cast. So that's the reason for it, I don't particularly like it but there is a really easy fix for this that I'm going to show you in a second. For now let's stick with the default settings that Dehancer inputs for Acros, so this is the default settings, and then we can of course tweak all these settings here to our liking, and there's a bunch of them and let's just start from the top.

So the top one is called "Source" and this is not really useful for black and white, because of course we are working in black and white, it's more useful for colors but basically you can tweak your color temperature, your tint, defringe a little bit if you didn't apply a chromatic aberration correction in Lightroom. Whatever I do here it doesn't really change my image too much, it might change the overall brightness slightly but it's mainly for color images so I'm gonna skip through this one.

Then we have "Expand" and with this tab what we can do is for example if we think that our blacks are too black or not black enough and we want to give more of a, like a matte feel to them, we can use this black point, we can move it on the left, and as you can see as I move it on the left I get more like open shadows and a more matte-like quality to my image, or I can go the other way around and make it much darker, which of course is too much, for my liking maybe I will just go -2 or something on this one, nothing really crazy, as you can see it's just a slight difference. In the same way you can use the white point to change the way your highlights are affected here in the image, you can brighten up your image by going all the way, of course is too much just to show you, or you can go the other way and make everything more dull. In this particular case I think I want to make it slightly brighter than what it used to be, so I'm gonna go on the left here and as you can see it's just a couple of sliders but they make quite a big difference.

Moving on to the "Print" tab here, and in this tab you can do a lot of different tweaks to your image. I'm not gonna go too much in detail into this one as well but the main thing that I want to talk about about this is: I talked about the green cast for this particular image, one easy fix for it is this saturation tab here, which of course it's really useful when you're working with color images, but even when you have a black and white image with some kind of color cast if you just reduce the saturation here you'll see that you get a more neutral black and white. You're basically removing saturation from the film simulation. So for this particular shot I like it neutral so I think I'm gonna just remove all the saturation and bring it down to 0. As you can see it's really neutral black and white now, and then you can do of course other tweaks here, and there is a tonal contrast here which increases the overall contrast of the image, so you can use this: if you lift it up you see you can get darker blacks and whiter whites of course, and if you put it on the right side - on the left side sorry - you get less contrast overall. In this particular case maybe I'll just lift it up ever so slightly, and as you can see by especially changing the saturation you see that this changes the image quite a bit. And then there is an exposure slider here at the top, which of course changes the exposure, and as you can see here you can brighten up the image or you can darken it up. In this particular case I like the overall exposure, maybe I'll just lift it up slightly like so. Depending on the image of course you can make much more drastic changes here in the print tab.

Okay, moving on to "Color Head", and of course as the name suggests this is more useful for color images of course, but is also another way that you can use to remove color casts for black and white. So let me go back to the print tab and bring back the saturation to 100% so I get my green cast back. When I'm in this color head basically what I can do is add or subtract any of these colors from the image overall. So for example if I move this "yellow-blue" slider on the right I get a bluer tint of course to my image, if I go the other way around you get a yellow tint okay? So that's the way it works. In this particular case since I have a green cast I can subtract a little bit of this green by moving the "magenta-green" slider to the left ever so slightly, and I will probably get almost the same result as removing saturation in this case because the only color cast that I have is green. So let me try that and as you can see if I go on the left the image becomes more neutral. You can also see in the histogram that the colors overlap a little bit more. So if you go too crazy of course you're gonna get everything magenta which you don't want, but I think something really slight like -5 on this slider gives you really good results for this black and white, as you can see here the histogram seems to think the same way as I do. So either way, to remove a color cast you can use the color head for black and white or you can use the saturation on the print. Let's stick with this color head for now. Of course if you're shooting and editing color images this section here has much more functions that are useful for you. For black and white not so much but yeah that's just the way black and white works.

Okay so moving on to my favorite tab here which is "Film Grain". I love film grain, and if you look at this image now it is in black and white of course, and the emulation made something good to it make made it look a little bit more like film, but of course one of the main characteristics of film that digital doesn't have is grain. If I zoom in 100% on this image you see that it's really clinical, really clean, and there is no noise, there is no grain here in the water or in the sky. It's real but it kind of looks fake for lack of a better word. But you see the moment I tick this film grain tab on we are going to get a lot of really nice thin grain on top of our image, and that is going to look much more like film that it would without grain. So there are so many options here, that's one of the reasons why I love this tab so much, and maybe I think it's a better idea to do this at 100%, so we do have "Size" "Amount" "Resolution" "Shadows" "Mid tones" "Highlights" and "Color". Of course for black and white we don't want to go into the color here, but let's look at the others. So grain is different for different types of film, for different type of sensitivity film, and of course there are really fine grains, really big grains, so you can do whatever you want with this tab to make the grain look bigger, smaller, and to add more amount of grain. And you can see when you move these sliders around the algorithm calculates what to put in the shadows, what to put in the highlights, what to put on the mid tones. And it's a digital algorithm according to Dehancer, but it's an algorithm based on scanning lots of different types of films and extrapolating the grain patterns of all these different types of real film, so it really looks not digital, not machine generated, not AI generated, it looks like organic grain which is something I really really like. So as I said the size, you can change the size of the actual grain, so you can make it bigger, you can make it smaller, personally I like fine grain more than really big grain, so I'm usually keeping this at around maybe 2 or something like that. And then you can of course change the actual amount of grain in the image overall. At the moment is 20, which is a good starting point. Depending on the image or the effect that you want to achieve you can go crazy and you can go really high, but as you can see some of the images might become really really grainy, so it might not be the effect that you want to get. I think the default setting of 20 is actually pretty good in this case, so I'm going to keep it that way. The other thing that is really nice about this film grain tab is that you can change how grain affects different parts of the image, so shadows mid tones and highlights, because of course any different type of film apply grain, or let's say grain is applied differently, in the highlights in the shadows and in the mid tones. So for example in this image let's say I want to have less grain here in the shadows, I just need to lower down this slider for the Shadows and it's gonna give me less grain in the shadows overall. This is really really nice, it's something that other plugins don't have so much, it's difficult to emulate and it's something that is really film like. Film works like that, some types of film have less grain in the shadows, some other types have more grain in the shadows, so it's really really nice to be able to edit the different parts of the image. In this case I don't mind a little bit of grain in the shadows. And then let's have a look at the highlights for example 20. So if I want to check the highlights here, the brightest part of the image. I don't mind grain in the highlights, so I can also try and bring this up 70 or something like so. I think it actually looks pretty good. And also you can go in the mid tones, something like the water in this case, and you can decide if you want to have less grain, more grain, and you can see that that really changes the overall look of the image. If the mid tones grain is not that high this kind of looks still a little bit digital, but the moment you bring this up everything looks much more like film. And in this particular case it's because most of the image is actually mid tones, so this slider is the one that makes the biggest changes overall in the image. As I said there is a color slider here in the film grain, which of course doesn't do anything when you're working with black and white. If you're working with a color image you can use that to add some type of color to your grain, but it's not something that I'm really into so I'm gonna undo that. So here we have our image, you can also choose the type of film that you're working on, in this case where we're working with black and white negative film so we're gonna leave it to negative, if you're working with slide film you can use positive, and of course they have this option called "digital" which is I think a different algorithm to process the grain, but I think this "analog" one works pretty well.

The next two Tabs are "Halation" and "Bloom", which are two effects that occur with film when you're taking pictures in color mostly, and also mostly at night with artificial light. So I don't shoot at night, I don't shoot color and I don't shoot artificial lights, and so I can't really show you how these two tabs work. I'm gonna put a link up here to a video that explains that much better than I will ever be able to do, so if you're interested in how to use halation and bloom go and check that video out, after you finish watching this one of course!

And then let's move on to the last step which is the "Vignette", so the vignette one is nothing special, it's like the vignette that you can get in Lightroom or in Photoshop or any other editing software. So you basically have your size, your feather and your aspect ratio, so what you can do to see your vignette better is you can reduce the feather to 0 so you basically see the round shape of the vignette. You can choose how dark you want to make it, for my images I usually put a vignette around at about -1, I'm just gonna type that in, and then I like it round but you can change the aspect ratio and make it more oval either vertical or horizontal. In this case I prefer the normal one so -1. So you can change also the size of the vignette, in this way you can make it smaller, you can make it bigger and you can decide basically where to focus your viewers attention. In this case I think since the main subject is in the middle the standard settings of 50 or something in that ballpark actually works really well, -1 and then we're just gonna up the "feather" so you can see that the vignette gets faded. Again, nothing special about this vignette but it's pretty good to be able to do it together with the film simulation and the grain all in one package. So that's it, once you are happy with your editing, and I am, you just click ok, and as you can see now in our catalog we have a TIFF file here which is a copy of our original raw file with our Dehancer plugin film simulation applied. I think it's really good, it looks really really nice. Let's jump into Photoshop and see how we can do something even better in there!

So using Dehancer Photo in combination with Photoshop has a couple of advantages. First of all you can use this filter on smart objects, which is really really powerful, because you can do an edit and then you can go back if you're not happy with it and you can change and tweak the settings as you want to, which is something you cannot do in Lightroom where everything is baked-in basically in your TIFF files. And another thing that you can do is you can use the plugin in combination with Photoshop layers, so that gives you a lot of flexibility to apply certain types of editing just to certain parts of your image. So let's see how it works! I'm here inside of camera raw, I have the same image opened up, I'm gonna do the same preparation Dehancer wants me to do to edit the image, so I'm going to change this to Adobe standard, I'm gonna bring down the exposures to -1, and bring down the contrast to -40, shadows to +60, go to the detail tab and bring down the sharpening and the color noise reduction, and tick these two boxes as usual. Then in order to open this as a smart object you have to go in here and make sure that this box here is ticked, so "Open in Photoshop as smart object". If this is not selected you cannot open anything as a smart object, so just select that and as you can see this is already set up for Dehancer to work perfectly, so it's sRGB, 16 bits, resolution is 350 like in my previous example in Lightroom. So we just go on and "open object" and this is going to open inside Photoshop. So when I apply Dehancer to my layer it's going to apply to the actual layer I'm working on, so what I like to do is I like to duplicate my layer, which I can do on my keyboard by using "Command+J" on a Mac or "Ctrl+J" on a Windows machine, and then I'm going to do "Filter", "Dehancer", "Dehancer film". And you can see here I'm gonna get the same plugin that we used in Lightroom, so I'm not going to go through all the options again, I just want to make sure that everything looks fairly good and then I'm just gonna say "OK", and as you can see this is going to apply the filter to my image. It's really fast, it's much faster than by using Lightroom in my opinion, so that's it and now let's say I think I did something wrong in this image, and maybe it's too bright which it is actually. If I was in Lightroom there won't be any way to revert this, I would need to re-edit the image from scratch, but since this is a smart object what I need to do is just to go here and double click on "Dehancer film" and then I can change these options. As you can see here I changed something in the print, so if I just reset this, and it's going to look much much better, and I'm just going to bring it up to something that looks a little bit better to my eye, something like this, I'm going to say okay and as you see the plugin is just going to be updated on the fly on my smart object, which is really really powerful. Another thing that you can do is: let's say I want to change how the filter looks just on a part of the image, maybe on this rock. What I can do is I can duplicate this layer again, and then I can go in and do all the type of editing that I want to make this rock look exactly the way I want it. For example I would probably increase the exposure slightly to make it brighter, not too much, and I will probably add a little bit more contrast as well. Then I'm gonna apply this and as you can see this is going to apply the effect to all the image, but what I can do is I can add a mask here by clicking on here, then I can invert it and in this way if I choose a brush by using "B" on my keyboard I can go in and I can just brush in the effect on the part of the image that I want to apply the effect to. In this case the rock, and as you can see if I turn this on and off it is subtle but it's certainly a really nice improvement in the image at least in my opinion, and it is something that I wouldn't be able to do by just using Dehancer in Lightroom but I can do with using Dehancer in combination with layers in Photoshop. So this is the best way in my opinion to use this plugin, in combination with Photoshop, so I went back and re-edited some of my old images by using this technique.

So this was Dehancer Photo, a really nice plugin in my opinion that will help you transform your digital images and give them a really nice film look. Is it perfect? No, because nothing in life is ever perfect, but I think overall it's a pretty solid product that will really help you transform your images and make them better. Particularly I like the way the plugin handles film grain, I think having all those options it's really really powerful, especially in conjunction with smart objects in Photoshop. The one thing that really concerns me is the fact that the plugin at the moment only works with sRGB which is a really small color profile, but I'm sure with future updates the plugin will also support other profiles like Adobe RGB and hopefully maybe even Profoto. Who knows! So if you want to try out the plugin for yourself just go to the Dehancer website and you can download the free trial: try it out and if you like what you see you can use this discount code here to get 10% off at checkout. All right that's gonna be it for today's video, hopefully it was useful. Thank you ever so much for watching, I hope you have a great day and see you in the next one!

I've been doing landscape photography for a really long time. Sometimes it means that some things can feel basic, even obvious, especially when it comes to post processing and when you have a pretty defined workflow. Starting off on YouTube made me realize that sometimes things that seem obvious to us might not be to others, especially for who is just starting out. Over the years, the question I've been asked the most by far is: "Why do your images look like film? And how do you make them look like that?" In this video I try to answer this question, showing you some examples and also talking about the reasons why I edit my images in this way. Hopefully you'll find this tutorial helpful, and as always thanks for watching!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Hi everyone! Welcome back to the channel, hope you're all having a great day today. So I've been doing landscape photography for about 15 years now, it's been a long time, and I get a lot of questions all the time about how do I make my images look a little bit like film, so I thought I'd make a video about the reasons why I do it and also how I do it: so this is that  video.

Alright, so first of all let's talk about the why. Why would you take a really colorful, really detailed and sharp digital image and make it look like film? And of course I cannot tell you why you would do that, but I can tell you why I am doing that. So, as I said I've been shooting landscape photography for about 15 years now, and the first years were like, for me at least, normal photography, normal landscapes, colorful, sharp, detailed, but I find that in the past maybe seven or eight years my photography shifted to a more minimal, intimate type of photography, and I think right now I don't want my images to be too clinical, too detailed, and I don't want them to show everything to the viewer. Rather than that I prefer my images to be mysterious and a little bit timeless, I want to hide the details instead of showing details. So of course there are many ways to do that, and using black and white is my first choice, because of course black and white is timeless, and also I find that using these techniques to make the images look like film a little bit really helps making the images more mysterious, and that kind of suits my type of photography. So these are the reasons why I do it, now let's jump into Lightroom and see how I do it.

All right, here we are inside my Lightroom catalog. I have three images that I want to check with you guys together today, and all these three images were shot during my recent trip to winter Hokkaido. I do have I think five vlogs from the trip on my channel, so I'm going to put a link to the whole playlist in the description below.

So let's start with the first image here, and of course this is the before and this is the after, and this is a really nice tree that we found in the countryside in Biei, out in Hokkaido. It's a really nice tree and it helps me talk to you about the first thing that you need to do to make your images look a little bit more like film, which is of course try and choose conditions that suit film photography. So for example in this particular scene here, as you can see it's already really minimal, and the snow was falling, and it kind of looks like film already so you don't have any super sharp detail in the image and not so many small details apart from the branches in the tree that we're gonna fix a little bit later. So that's the first thing: choose the right conditions basically, and I did a little bit of editing here, I'm not going to go through all the editing that I did because I have a video that goes a little bit more in detail about that, so I'm going to link that in the description below as well. I'm just going to show you how I do and try and make this a little bit more film-like. The first thing that it's really really important, and I do that to all my images when I shoot in black and white, as you can see I'm editing on a white background, and there is a reason for that. The reason is when there is something really white in my image, like in this case the snow, I never want the white parts of my images to be 100% white. Why is that? Well that's because if you shoot film, or even if you print on paper, you will never get something which is 100% white or even 100% black. So there is a really really easy trick to make sure that your whites are never 100% white and your blacks are never 100% black, and if you go here in the curves, and you see you see I have made a kind of an S-curve here to increase the contrast of the image, the only thing that I like to do is: I like to grab this point here which, is the 
top point for the white, and I just bring it down slightly, like five points or something like that, to 250, and I do the same with the blacks, I bring them up about five points or something like that. By doing that I make sure that nothing in the image is completely pure black and nothing in the image is completely pure white. That's a really slight adjustment, but it's really really important to achieve this global film look. So that's the first thing, second thing: let's zoom into the tree here, as you can see the sharpest part of this image, the more detailed part of this image is of course the branches in the tree, and I want to hide those a little bit, I want to make them less sharp. I already did a little bit of that by increasing the contrast, so the shadows got crunched a little bit, but I think they are still a little bit too detailed for my taste. So one really simple way I can decrease the sharpness in this image is by using the clarity slider here, and of course you would normally use it by adding positive values, so if you increase the clarity as you can see the image gets really really sharp, oh my god that looks horrible, so let me undo that, and what I like to do is actually bring this clarity slider a little bit down ever so slightly, maybe I don't know five or ten minus, let's do -10, and as you can see it doesn't make a huge difference but I can definitely see less details in these branches in the in the actual file here on my computer. So this is really important because, as much as we love film, film is never going to be as sharp as a digital camera, especially a high resolution camera, so we always want to bring that down a little bit. And lastly, the only other thing that I will do to this image to make it look like film, you guessed it, is adding a little bit of grain, and I'm not talking about noise like digital noise, I'm talking about film grain. So Lightroom, I'm going to show you how to do that in Lightroom, and it's here in the effects after the vignette you have this "Grain" slider here, and you just bring it up to your taste. I usually don't go too overboard here, but as you can see as I increase this the overall style of the image really really changes, the whites are not so white anymore, there's some kind of gray in it from the grain, and also the overall image just looks much much better to my to my eyes. So of course this is up to taste: to an image like this which is really minimal, it has lots of whites, I'd probably go a little bit higher than usual, so maybe 70 or 80, yeah something like that, and as you can see it really makes the image look timeless, kind of mysterious, and a little bit more like film. This is the whole image, and if you check of course the before and after it's like night and day, right? Look at the difference: on the left side you see a digital image, and on the right side you don't know what you're seeing, you don't know if it's a digital image, you don't know if it's a film image, you're never going to guess when this was shot.

All right image number two here, and this is a really nice seascape that I shot on the coast in Hokkaido. I really like this kind of layers, I like the sky, the water, the sand and the snow here, it was really really nice. So this is the before and this is the after, as you saw I did a little bit of editing on this as well, a little bit more than the previous image, and again you can see how I edit my images in my tutorials, so again I'm gonna try and do the same things that I just did to the previous image, so I'm going to bring down the clarity even if this image doesn't have so many details to start with, then I'm going to make sure that the blacks are not too black and the whites are not too white, so exactly the same thing. And then I want to add grain, and of course I can do that again by using the grain slider here, and that will look fine as you can see, but I want to show you another way to do the same thing, which I prefer actually, and that's the the way I use. Of course this way it's free if you have Lightroom, but I like to use a plugin called SilverFx Pro: so in order to use that I'm going to jump into Photoshop, so I need to export this image, I want to right click here and do "edit in" and "open as smart object in Photoshop". I like to export images as smart objects when I work with Photoshop because I can always go back and edit the raw file if I need to make some extra adjustments. So here we are in Photoshop, and we have our image. In order to use this plugin I want to duplicate this layer, so I'm going to duplicate this layer by doing "command+j" on my keyboard, and then I'm going to apply this filter "Nick collection SilverFx Pro". This is a paid plugin, of course they're not sponsoring this video, but I really like this plugin, I've been using it for, I don't know, I don't know how many years, since version number one. The main advantage of this plugin over the grain filter in Lightroom is that this program also emulates different types of film stock, which is really really important if you want to kind of emulate the film look. So right now this is a black and white conversion that I did myself: I did choose how to make the sky look, how to make the water look, but of course if you ever shot film you would know that every different type of film has a different feel to it. So for example I really like Acros, and Acros it's really contrasty but also kind of lifts the the blacks a little bit compared to, I don't know, T-max or any other Kodak film that I used in the past. So this plugin really emulates Acros well, and that's one of the reasons why I use it. So of course SilverFx Pro has lots of, lots and lots of options which I never use, the only option that I use it's this "film type", and if you go to this drop down here you can choose which film stock to emulate, and of course you can see as I hover on it it changes the preview of my image, and you can see you get really different results depending on the film that you choose. So as I said my favorite is Acros, so I'm going to choose Acros, and you can see the before and after, it gets a little bit more contrasty, it hides a little bit more of details, and the overall look is a little more film-like so to speak. So I kind of leave it as it is, the only thing that I like to change usually is the amount of grain. So as you can see here at 100% Acros grain is kind of fine grain, so you don't see it too much, it's kind of subtle, but I like to make the image a little bit more grainy and gritty, so what I like to do is just go here on the "grain" and lower it down to, I don't know, maybe 350 instead of 450. And as you can see it makes a really huge difference: let me zoom back, okay and then you just apply your effect and this is going to apply this black and white film conversion and the grain to this new layer as a smart object, and of course you can see the before and after. If you zoom in you can see your image looks really nice and film-like. Of course I would go in and get rid of some of these distracting elements, but that's a topic for another video, so I'm not going to touch that today.

All right image number three. I really like this image, and you might not agree with me, I'm perfectly aware of that. We were driving along the road to a shooting location that we had planned for the day, and I saw this mountain tops kind of disappearing in the snow here, because it was snowing a lot, and then it was stopping, and you get some fog and you get really lots of different conditions, and I saw these tree tops on the mountain getting kind of hidden from the fog and from the snow, so I shot this from the car handheld at 400mm as you can see here, and by looking at it like this it doesn't look like a great image, at least to most of the people, but for me this is really what film photography (so to speak) and minimalist photography is all about. So I did the conversion here, and as you can see it looks so much better in black and white because you can see all these layers of fog, the different tones of black and gray up to the white. I really like how simple this image is, and how suggestive this image is, especially this part, look at this part, I kind of love these details that you barely can see in the trees. And of course it's not the sharpest of all images, it's shot handheld, but that's not the matter: the matter is how suggestive this image is, at least for me. I think it's one of my favorite images from this trip to Hokkaido, which is pretty weird because it could have been shot everywhere. All right so again, the edit is really simple on this one, so I'm not gonna go through all of it, I'm just gonna do what I did to the other two images. I'm gonna lower down my clarity -10, and then I want to bring down my whites as usual, and bring up my blacks so nothing is crushed and nothing is too white in the frame. Another thing another two things that you can do to add to this film look in this particular image is, the first one: whenever you have fog or mist in your image, most of the people usually use this "dehaze" slider to cut through the fog and the mist, so if you put this up you can see you start to see the mountains and the trees behind, which is fine, is actually a nice effect, but as you know, and I think I already made a video about the "dehaze" and how I use it on my channel, I like to use the "dehaze" in the totally opposite direction. So I like to bring it down to hide even more, and to make everything more mysterious. So as you can see, as I bring it down it's like making the fog stronger, which creates more separation between the foreground here, the midground and the background there. So of course I don't want to go over the top, because if I go over the top basically everything disappears, and we don't want to do that, but I think something like -10 in this particular image really helps. It's a really subtle editing but when you put all these things together they really make a huge difference. So that's one thing, and another thing that you might want to add to this image, because as you can see the top is really bright, it's the brightest part of the image, and usually your eyes go to the brightest part of your image, so you don't want your eyes to really go up here, you kind of want to focus on this part where you get all the gradations of gray. So one way to focus the attention of the viewer here is to make this part a little bit darker, and it's really easy, you can do that in Lightroom here with the "vignetting", and you just bring it down ever so slightly, maybe -10 or something, and you can always make the feather higher something like +80. Again, it's really really subtle but it makes a huge difference for me. Now my eyes go here instead of going to the top part. So let's add our grain again, and export this as a smart object in Photoshop. Let's duplicate the layer again and go to the "filters", "Nick collection SilverFx Pro". Okay so again, I can go back to my favorite Acros, and sometimes you will find that by using SilverFx Pro sometimes you like the effect, sometimes the effect is a little bit too strong, so in this case if I turn this on and off it's not too bad, but let's say I don't like this effect too much, I only want the grain, because the grain in SilverFx Pro is really organic, really really good. So I want to keep the grain but I don't want this film simulation to be applied: it's really easy, instead of choosing Acros I just choose "Neutral" here, which basically keeps the image as it is when I imported it, and I just add the grain. So for this particular image I think something like 300 would be perfect, let's check at 100%, yeah it really makes a huge difference, and you can see this is the before and this is the after, all the details, all the small parts that you don't like just disappear, and the fog of course really really helps but the grain is also really important, so I'll just apply that and there you have it. Now the only other thing that I might want to do here just to show you is, as I said I want the people to focus here instead of on the top here, so maybe I want to make this a little bit darker than it is, and it's really really easy, I can just add an adjustment layer for exposure, and then I bring down this to, I don't know, -1 stop, then I press "G" on my keyboard to select the gradient tool, and I make sure it's a gradient from white to black, so from visible to invisible, and then I hold my "Shift" key and just drag my mouse like that, and this is going to apply this adjustment layer only to the top part of the image. So you can see the before after: again it's really really subtle, but in this case I think it's worth it.

All right, so these are all the techniques that I use to make my digital images look a little bit more like film. Hopefully you can use these techniques in your own photography and tweak them as you wish. If you did find this video useful remember to give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing to the channel if you're not already, thank you so much for watching and as always I'll see you in the next one. Peace!

There are many different ways to edit images in Photoshop and make them look more minimal, but as far as I'm concerned simple tools and techniques are always the best and most natural looking. In this video I explain how I use the "dehaze" slider in Photoshop to improve minimalisms in my edits, how I remove distracting horizon lines, shadows and objects, and even how I create more separation between foreground and background. Hopefully you can use these same techniques in your own edits. As always, thank you so much for watching!

TRANSCRIPTION

Hi everyone! Welcome back to the channel, thanks for joining me today, and I hope you're all doing great. 
So, in today's video I want to look at three really simple ways that we can utilize one single tool in Photoshop to improve our minimalist photography. 
That simple tool is DEHAZE.
I'm gonna try to keep this video really short and simple, so without further ado let's jump into Photoshop!

All right, so let's get started with this first image, a really nice shot I took of Meoto-iwa down in Mie prefecture. A really nice and minimal place, and of course I did shoot a long exposure of the scene in the morning, but as you can see here there is still some shadows in the water, some movement there, and so I'd like this water to be a little bit more minimal.
So, a good way to achieve this result is by using the DEHAZE filter in the camera raw set of filters. So I have my base layer here, how do I do that, I'm just gonna duplicate this layer with CTRL+J on my keyboard, and whenever I use DEHAZE I like to be able to go back and tweak the effect down the line, so I always try to convert this layer into a smart object, which I can do by going to the layer here in the menu, SMART OBJECTS, CONVERT TO SMART OBJECT, and this might take a while... 
Okay, so now my layer is converted into a smart object, and then after that I'm going to FILTERS, CAMERA RAW FILTER, and I'm not gonna do anything in all these sliders, I'm going to focus into the DEHAZE slider here, and I'm going to use it in this kind of uncommon way, I'm going to bring it down, I'm going gonna bring it down, look at the water, look at the effect it has on the water in the foreground, it makes all these shadows and these ripples here disappear. 
So I'm gonna bring it down a fair amount, maybe something like -65 or something like that, and then I can also see that the highlights are kind of bright at the moment, so I might bring down the highlights just a little bit, and maybe just maybe bring up the whites slightly, and bring up the shadows and the blacks. 
Now, as you can see here, the effect of course is visible also in the rocks here in the foreground, but we we're not going to worry about this at the moment, I'm just going to apply the effect, and this is the before and after.
Pretty dramatic, and then what I can do to apply this effect only in the water is, I can just apply a layer mask on my new layer, I can invert the mask so it's all black, then I can grab my brush tool with the B on my keyboard, select the white with an opacity of 90 and a flow of about 30, a really soft brush as you can see here, hardness is at 0 percent, and then I can just go there and start to brush in my DEHAZE layer on my base layer, and I'm not gonna do this in a really detailed way at the moment, is just to show you basically how you will do that, make this smaller, start to affect also these parts of the image like so. 
And you get the idea, you start doing that until you're happy with the results, and of course if I think the effect is too strong or not strong enough I can always go back since this is a smart object, I can always go back to my filter and tweak it even more.
So, for example if I want to preserve the blacks a little bit more I can go to the curves and bring down the blacks like so and make even more contrast in the image, and if I click OK you will see that the effect is applied and the mask is still there, so as you can see now this is not perfect because I just did it in 30 seconds, just to show you, but if you do it properly it's going to make this part of the image's water much more minimal and more suitable to the scene. 
So, what I did after that is I did my usual vignetting, I added my film grain as usual, a little bit of dodging and burning, and the final result is something like this, which is a pretty dramatic effect if compared to the original image.
So this is the before and this is the after, a really easy way to use DEHAZE to improve the minimum quality of your water in your images.

All right down to image number two. This is an image I shot of Shirahige shrine down at lake Biwa, a really iconic place for minimalist photography here in Japan, even if there was a lot of people shooting this same image at the same, time but that's for another story. 
So, as you can see here I already worked on this image a little bit, it's already in black and white, it's already kind of minimal, but it's still not so much contrasty and I have some kind of artifacts here in the sky from the light leaking from the clouds here, and also I can kind of see the horizon line here, which is what I want to remove in this example. 
So, we can use the same technique that we just used in the previous image, we can use DEHAZE to get rid of this horizon line, which would make for a really really minimalistic image. 
So again, I'm gonna duplicate my base layer convert this to a smart object and then I'm going to add FILTERS, CAMERA RAW FILTER, go back to my basic here and apply my DEHAZE, and I'm gonna go pretty strong on this one, I'm gonna go down all the way until I kind of start to not see the horizon line anymore, and of course I can tweak that later, so let's say -80, and I kind of want to keep the gate a little bit darker, so I'm just going to the blacks and bring that down that so I get more contrast, not too much but enough to get some contrast, and I might want to go up with the whites as well so the image is even more minimal.
Can you see how much of a difference this is making? You can barely see anything in the foreground here in the water, you cannot see the horizon line and you cannot see the sky, which is really dramatic. Look at the before and after. 
So again, a really simple and easy way to use DEHAZE to get rid of all the parts in your image that you don't want to show and to make what you want to show stand out even more, in this case the gate here, so again, after applying DEHAZE I did my usual processing, so my vignetting, my film grain conversion, a little bit of dodging and burning, and at the end the result was this one. 
As you can see huge difference, this is the before this is the after, a really really minimal image that I really like, one of the best images that I shot on that year I think, and actually one of my best sellers, this image sells really well as a print. So yeah, a really a really easy way to use DEHAZE to remove your horizon lines.

All right so here we are with image number three, and here I wanted to use the same tool, the same DEHAZE technique to do something a little bit different, which is create more separation between my main subject here and the background, by creating some kind of realistic fog. So, this is an image I shot from my latest vlog from Aokigahara forest, if you didn't see that vlog I'm going to put a link here at the top right of the screen, so go and check that out, so yeah, not my usual image here. I kind of wanted more fog in the first place here when I shot this image, but I really liked the shape of the tree, and I kind of tried to achieve the effect that I wanted there on location by using the DEHAZE.
So again it's the same technique as before, so I'm not going to show that to you, I'm just going to show you how the before and after looks, so this is without the filter and this is with the DEHAZE applied, you can see there's a kind of haze here that looks like real fog, and the effect is kind of incredibly natural for what it is, so if I recall correctly I went down all the way on the DEHAZE slider here, so yeah, as you can see here is -100, so I couldn't go less than this, but as you can see it looks kind of natural, which is remarkable and it makes this tree really stand out. 
The only thing that I did differently here is that I added a layer mask here, in which I masked out a little bit of that fog on my main subject here so it stands out a little bit more, and just a slight pass of that black brush here on the foreground, because as you know the fog is not the same in all directions, in all positions, so I wanted to recreate a kind of realistic effect where the fog is a little bit thicker here on the background, and you can see a little bit more details here in the foreground.
So yeah, after that I did my usual processing, a little bit of dodging and burning, some vignetting, a film conversion, and this is the final image, which I think is a really huge improvement over the base image here.
So yeah, again a kind of non-conventional use of DEHAZE technique to create a really minimal effect.

All right, that's it, three really simple ways to improve your minimalist photography just by using the DEHAZE in Photoshop.
Hopefully you can use these techniques for your own post-processing.
So thank you so much for watching this video, if you liked it remember to give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing to the channel, and as usual I'll see you in the next video.

Good day minimalists! Hope you're doing great. Time for a new video: in this one I go through the process of editing a couple of the images I took on my latest trip to lake Ashi using Lightroom and Photoshop CC. I show you the way I edit my images with simple tools and techniques to make them look minimal and simple: a perfect combination to make images for print. Hope this video will help you integrate these techniques in your workflow. As always, thanks for watching!

TRANSCRIPTION

Hi everyone! Welcome back to the channel. Hope you're all doing great. Thanks for tuning in! So in today's video I want to edit a couple of images from my latest vlog from lake Ashi together with you in Lightroom and Photoshop, so if you didn't see that video go check that out, I'm gonna put a link up here and yeah let's jump into it!

Alright so here we are in Lightroom. We're gonna look at a couple of images. This is the first one and it's also the reason why I was on this particular location on that day, it was to shoot this gate in the lake. This is the final image after my black and white conversion and after i worked on this in Lightroom and Photoshop, and as you can see there is a lot of contrast between the gate and the background. So the idea that I had in mind originally for this location was a really minimal shot with a lot of fog and mist in the atmosphere, which of course I didn't get because if you saw the vlog you saw the weather was really good, actually was too good and too sunny, so it was difficult to get separation so I had to find other ways, some workarounds to achieve the same or similar result in post-production and also during the shoot itself. So one way I found to achieve that was to shoot wide open on my telephoto lens, so combining the telephoto lens which compresses everything but also helps separating elements that are far from the lens from elements that are closer to the lens, combining that with shooting at f4 so wide open to get more blur. As you can see here I was able to get a really blurry background that contrasts with this really sharp gate here in the foreground. So the actual shooting process wasn't too difficult but I had to fiddle a little bit with the post processing to make it look good, because if you look at the original file here which is this one, if you see this in color it's really dull, there is no light, there is nothing going on, there is nothing interesting in this particular frame, so you have to work a little bit to get this to stand out and to make it a minimal and interesting image. So let's get started and see what I did. Let's go into the develop module and as always the first thing that I do is always applying these two checkbox so remove chromatic aberration and also enable profile corrections. This particular lens that i use, my telephoto is really old and if you shoot wide open the chromatic aberration is pretty severe, so I always recommend to click on this one and I always click on profile correction even if Lightroom doesn't have a profile for this particular lens, so as you can see there is a little bit of barrel distortion here in the horizon line, I'm not going to worry too much about this in Lightroom, I'm going to fix that in Photoshop later on, but I think it's good practice to always keep this open and on for every image. So the next thing that I want to do is I want to convert this to black and white so I can start editing and as usual, I go here into my profiles and I select my favorite one which is the camera monochrome with red filter, which as you can see really helps making this gate stand out, because of course this gate is red and by using the black and white filter with the red filter helps bringing out all those red colors and details. So now it's a black and white image, but of course it's really different from from this image, there is much less contrast so we need to do something to make this more contrasty, so I like to start as usual with a simple s-curve. I'm gonna go here into my tone curves and I'm just gonna take a couple of points, one in the shadows and I'm gonna bring it down so my shadows and my background get darker, and then I'm going to get another point here in the white and I'm going to bring that up until I'm happy with the results on the gate and in the water, so probably something like this, I don't want to go too much not to make it look unnatural by doing something like this you know, so maybe something around this point. Okay, so just a simple s-curve but really helpful to get contrast. By doing this as you can see here the water is getting a little too bright, a little washed out, so I want to preserve the details in the water at this stage, so one way I can do that is by lowering the highlights here. I don't want to lower this too much because otherwise the water gets really dark, so probably something around -14, and by doing this globally as you can see here the gate actually gets a little bit dark, so I want to counterbalance that by bringing up the whites, so I'm gonna go here in the whites and usually I like to counterbalance that roughly in the same amount that I lowered the highlights, so in this case I think I'm gonna go up to something like +50, just so I get a really nice amount of white here in the image without clipping any highlights, as you can see here in the histogram, and then another thing that I might want to do, as you can see here, the blacks are not down to the darkest point of the histogram, so I'll probably go just a little bit down here on the blacks so I make sure that my background here gets a little bit darker. I think probably something like -10 will be good enough, and that's pretty much it. The only other thing that I would probably do here in Lightroom, but I also do in Photoshop afterwards is to remove this really annoying black spot here, so I'm just going to zoom in to 100% and get my spot removal brush, make it a little bit bigger and just paint this out like so, so I get rid of this distraction here. And this is pretty much the amount of work that I did on this image in Lightroom, I'm going to jump into Photoshop by exporting this particular file, as always I export this is a PSD file in the Profoto color space in 16bit with a resolution of 350 pixels per inch, I'm gonna jump into Photoshop. 
All right here we are in Photoshop this is my image and here in Photoshop what I would usually do is add my film grain and do any spot removal, any finishing touch, any vignetting, any sharpening if needed, but in this particular image what I also want to do is correct the perspective. So I tried to shoot this image really centered out, with the gate in the middle of the frame, but of course by not being 100% exactly parallel to the gate there is a little bit of a parallax that you can see here. If I put my rulers on you can see here that this part is not 100% straight and probably this line as well it's a little bit off. Not too much but just enough for me to notice, and also probably here in the water because as I said this is a really old lens, so Lightroom cannot correct for it automatically, so I always get a little bit of barrel distortion, so I want to get this perspective right, and I'm going to do that in a really easy way, just by duplicating this layer, I'm on PC so I'm going to do CTRL+J to duplicate the layer, and I'm going to do CTRL+T to transform, and then I'm going to right click on the image and I'm going to select WARP, and by doing so I can drag any of these points and I can warp the image in any way I want. I can go something really crazy like this, and as you can see it changes the image dramatically, but in this in this case I want to do something really subtle which is just bringing up this part of the gate so it's completely symmetric with the other side, so a really easy way to do that is just to hold SHIFT and then click on this border here in this corner, and bring it up until this line is almost perfectly aligned, and in the same way I can go here hold SHIFT and bring this part a little bit up, not too much, just a little bit so this main line here is straight enough for the eye not to feel weird, then I can also check these vertical lines, but these are usually they should be fine, so if I check here these are basically the same, this line here in the middle is also almost in the middle of the frame if not 100% in the middle, so let's say I'm pretty happy with this, maybe you want to go just a little bit down maybe more down here because the water is getting a little too much distortion here, and maybe you want to go a little bit more up on this one, nothing too crazy but yeah, something like that, and then I'm gonna press ENTER to apply. I can remove all these guides here and my perspective is corrected now. I can see here is not perfect, when I actually did that for my vlog image it took me a little bit more time, but this is just for showing you how to do it, so I'm not gonna spend too much time doing this, but as you can see it's not a huge difference, but the gate definitely looks more symmetric in the frame. So once I do that and I have my perspective all sorted out and fixed, another thing that I want to do from the start is getting rid of this rock in the water because I think the eye goes here a little bit too much, and I would prefer to have just white water here in the foreground. Again, there are many ways to do this, probably the easiest way to do that is just to create a new layer by clicking here, and then selecting the spot healing brush with J on the keyboard. I'm gonna make this a little bit bigger, and I'm also gonna zoom in on the image a little bit more, and then I'm going to try and see if Photoshop does a good job of removing this rock, and as you can see it's not the best job, you can try probably another way, you have to make sure that "content aware" is selected here and "sample all layers" is selected, so the tool looks at all the layers that it has behind this particular layer here. So let's try again, maybe with a smaller brush, trying to get a bigger section of the water, and this time was a little bit better. Again, not perfect but it's just to demonstrate how to do this. Another thing that I want to do while I'm here is removing this distraction, my eyes keep going to this white three here, I think it's a tree in the background, it's a little bit too white so my eyes keep going to this particular place in the frame, which I don't want because: ONE, is out of focus and TWO, is in the background. So I'm gonna also remove this with the same tool, like so, this should be really easy, and again Photoshop did a fairly good job, and I think these are the only two big distractions that I had in my frame.
So let's say I'm happy with this.

Another thing that I want to do to this image, as you can see here the water is a little bit dirty,

if you know what I mean, you can see some of the shadows here because of course the sun was setting behind these trees here so this the scene was backlit a little bit, so you can see some of the shadows here and some of the movement in the water, which I don't particularly like, so I want to try and get this water a little bit more white and more minimal. Again lots of ways to do this,

what I like to do is I like to create a duplicate layer of what i did up to now, and you do this by selecting all the layers that you have, and on Windows you have to click on CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E

and again a duplicate layer, and then on this new created layer I'm going to zoom in a little bit and i'm going to select the dodge tool with an exposure of about 20% and I'm gonna brush in 
like so, to get rid of all the shadows here.

Now, the more you do that
the more distractions you get rid of,

but be careful not to do it too much, otherwise just everything turns into a white kind of a white canvas. So yeah, something like this. It's subtle but if you turn this on and off you can see there's a pretty huge difference between the two, and I think this looks much better than this.

All right so next we have our white water, we'll remove distractions,

the next thing that I want to do is to apply a film curve to this and some film grain, so again I'm going to select all these layers and group them with CTRL+G, I'm going to call this "blend" and then I want to duplicate this as a layer with my usual combination CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E so I get a copy of this group of layers, and on this new layer I'm going to apply my Silver FX PRO and again, I don't need this global adjustment,
I don't need the selective  adjustment,

I don't need this color filters,
what I need is "film types" I did try many of these, and in this particular image I think this one the Agfa APX pro 100 
is the one that looks the best and gives me more contrast, so I went for this one and in this particular case I think the grain on this film simulation is a little bit too too tiny so I went for 350 on the grain here so the grain stands out a little bit more, and I like the effect especially here in the blurred background, as well as in the water. So I'm gonna apply this to my image and here we have the before and after. So we're almost done with this image, the only thing that I want to do is to create even a little bit more of contrast between this gate and the background, and I think the only way to do that at this point is to brighten up the white part of the gate here.
So again, many ways to do it I'd like to do this in a different way this time, which is by creating a new layer by clicking on ALT and click on new layer, and I'm going to select the mode "Overlay" and fill it with 50% gray so I get this gray layer, and then I'm just going to do a simple dodging with the brush, so I'm going to set my brush with B on the keyboard, make sure that white is selected, I'm going to select an opacity of about 20%, make this brush a little bit bigger and I'm going to brush in some white on the gate. As you can see it's really subtle but it really helps making the gate stand out against the black background. I try not to overdo this too much

but I think just a little bit of contrast is good in this situation, like that. As you can see it was really quick really easy and also really effective. If you do a before and after it is subtle so it doesn't stand out so much, but definitely makes a difference. So yeah, we're almost done with this image, the only other thing that I want to do... We already have a vignette here, but I want to increase this vignette, especially here on the bottom, because I think the white here is too white, especially if you think about this image as a print and you have maybe some matte paper here, which is also white, you want to get some kind of separation between the paper and the actual print. So I'm going to add a vignette on the top and also one on the bottom. I'm going to do that by adding a new layer for exposure, an adjustment layer, I'm gonna put this to -1 and let's do the top one first, I'm gonna select my gradient tool, white to black I'm gonna hold SHIFT on my keyboard, click and drag so I get a really nice gradient.

Again, really subtle but it draws your eye
to this gate in the middle, and then I'm gonna do the same for the bottom, so another one, exposure -1 select my gradient, hold SHIFT click and drag, and I really like how this gradient worked out here in the water. If you turn it on and off as you see it's really subtle but again, it draws the eye to the main subject, which is of course the brightest part of the image now, it's brighter than the water itself so your eye is always going to go to this gate here and not to the water. And that's it for this image, this is all I did. Again, it's a little bit more than what I usually like to do to an image, but the conditions were not the best so I had to do it with what I had and I think the final result is actually pretty good. Again, not the best image I ever took but definitely a nice minimal shot of this gate.

All right on to image number two,
this really nice sunset view of mount Fuji from lake Ashi.

You can see mount Fuji here

the red gate of Hakone shrine here on the right and the setting sun here on the left side. A scene like this it's a quite a nice minimal image, but if you look at the original file it's actually pretty different. This is the original file, so as you can see it's a nice picture, nothing great it's a little bit colorful and there is not so much separation between the parts of the image, and you cannot really see the gate here of Hakone shrine very well so I did some trickery in Lightroom to make it look more minimal and more like I wanted to.

Also, I got rid of this floating thing here,
this object, and I tried to make this gate

stand out a little bit more, so let's see how I did that. Let's jump into the develop module and let's start doing our usual stuff, so profile corrections, remove chromatic aberrations and convert the image to monochrome with red filter, and already you see we have a nicer image overall. Next thing, my usual global contrast, which I do with my s-curve, so I'm going to try to bring down a point here in the mid-tone in the shadows, and lift up the whites here to give it a nice contrast.
Then one thing that I noticed here, the highlights are clipping so I'm gonna turn down the highlights globally with -50, and maybe I should probably go slightly down with this slider here. Not too much, something like that and I also want to bring down the exposure slightly, let's say -0.5, half stop, and bring this a little bit higher. It's kind of a balance thing, you move one slider then do something else, you need to go back and move the slider you just changed to make everything perfectly balanced, something like this. I think it gives you a better look in this way. Next thing: before doing anything else I just want to get rid of this really annoying object floating here,

so 100%, get my spot removal tool a little bit
bigger, and just get rid of it. It didn't do a really good job, yeah something like this, and of course you can see there are lots of white spots here, because it's a really long exposure, but I'm not going to go on and delete all of these for the purpose of this video. For the actual image I went in and deleted all these really small white dots. So let's go back: another thing that I want to do is,
I want to make the water a little bit whiter, to create more separation between this line of mountains and the foreground and the water here, so I'm going to do that with a gradient filter. I'm gonna select the exposure and i'm gonna raise that to +1,
and I think I want to counterbalance that exposure with lowering a little bit of the highlights, maybe something like -30. Let's see how that looks. I'm gonna hold SHIFT and create a nice gradient for the water, something like this, and I think it looks really nice, but I don't like all these small waves that I can see in the water, I want to kind of get rid of that and make the water more minimal, and a really nice way to do that is to use the Dehaze slider, basically against its purpose, which is to

remove haze. If you use minus values here you can actually create haze in your image or in parts of your image, which is what I'm going to want to do here in the water. So I'm going to make this Dehaze maybe something like -50 or something like that, and as you can see the water becomes much more ethereal, much more minimal, and it looks very good overall. 
So that's it for this gradient. Next thing that I want to do is, I actually want to make the sky

darker to create even more contrast between the top part of the image, the middle ground and the foreground here, so I'm going to create a new gradient, and this time it's gonna be a negative one on the exposure and, let's see, let's get back to 0 here and see how it looks. I'm gonna hold SHIFT, drag down in my sky like so, and it looks fine but it's definitely not dark enough and not balanced enough, so one thing that I want to do is, I want to bring this white parts in the sky a little bit higher, so maybe +20 on the whites here, something like that, maybe even +10, and I want to get yeah maybe the shadows slightly darker, actually -20 or so, and I want to create a little bit more contrast here in the sky, and and I can do so by using the haze slider, this time for the purpose that it was made for, so if I do a +20 on this one you can see the dark parts of the sky get darker and the whiter parts of the sky gets brighter,

so something like this. It doesn't have to be perfect, it's just to show what I was doing, and I'm probably gonna keep it something like this, so it doesn't touch mount Fuji in the middle,

so mount Fuji stands out a bit more because it's brighter. Alright, so the image already looks much nicer, I think there's a couple of things that I still want to do, and let me zoom out a little bit more, I think I should have a little bit more separation in this middle ground here, because I can see a difference between these two lines of trees, but I cannot really see the gate here, and I kind of want to have this part a little bit brighter overall, so I'm going to do that by using not the gradient filter but by using a radial filter, so I'm going to select that, make sure I reset everything here, and what I want to do here for the horizon is: first of all let's create our filter here and let's put it on our horizon line, like so, and then I kind of want to lift the shadows a little bit more and see how it looks, so i'm going to erase the shadows, maybe about +50 or something like that, and as you can see with just one simple touch you can see much more here of the of the line trees and i really like how there's different different gradations of gray here between the of trees and mount Fuji, and also I can see the gate a little bit more, so I'm gonna play around with this a little bit more, maybe the darks are not dark enough so I'm just gonna lower these blacks just a touch, like -3 or -2 or something like that, -2 so I don't clip anything and yeah, probably I can lower these highlights here, so if I do a -20 or -30 on the highlights I still get separation here but I don't get any bright highlights, so this is really good. Let's say done. And then I think I just want to
make this gate stand out even more, so I'm going to try with another radial filter here, and I'm going to draw it around the gate like so, a really small one, and most of this part is in the shadows, so I want to be kind of subtle, but I think if we just lift the shadows by maybe +10 or +20, something like this, you can see the difference, it's not huge of a difference but you can definitely see the gate much better, and it looks quite natural like that. So yeah, this is everything I did to this image in Lightroom. Let's jump into Photoshop to finish it up.
Okay, so here we are in Photoshop, the image I think already looks really nice the way it is, but I just want to do my usual film grain black and white film conversion, and also get rid of some details that I don't like in this image and make it look even more minimal. So the first thing that I want to do, and if you look at this image by zooming out and zooming in maybe for you it's different, but for me the only thing my eyes go to is this really annoying small white cloud, so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to delete this cloud. I'm going to create a new layer and select my spot healing brush by hitting J on my keyboard, make sure that again I can sample all layers, make it slightly bigger and let's try and delete this thing. Perfect. So, it's really subtle but, see? No one would ever know there was a cloud there, but if you remove it your eyes definitely stop going there and focus on this part of the image which is brighter. So, a small touch but really really important. 
Another thing that I want to do is to create more contrast, so I'm going to do my usual s-curve here, and I think overall this image is quite dark so I'm going to try and lift it up a little bit, so I can click on this icon here so whatever I click on the image I'm going to select that range of brightness, so I can go where the image is quite bright like here and get a point and brighten it up like so, and I don't want to overdo this, so I'm going to get a point in the shadows here, and I'm going to bring that back just a little bit, so overall the image is lifted but it still maintains a nice contrast. If you see a before and after you see it's a pretty dramatic difference, so that's good for contrast. Another thing that I want to do is add a top vignette and a bottom vignette to focus the eye in the middle of the image, so I'm gonna make an exposure adjustment layer with my usual -1 on the exposure, select my gradient with G,

hold SHIFT, drag down like so, and I'm gonna create my top vignette, and again same thing for the bottom of the image, so -1 on the exposure, gradient, hold SHIFT, drag, BOOM! Much much better. So now that I have my let's say my basic edit, I think I want to focus a little bit more on brightening this part of the image slightly, because I think it should stand out a little bit more, so I'm going to do that by zooming in, creating a new layer by holding ALT on my keyboard and clicking on the new layer, and then selecting "overlay" in the mode and "fill with 50% gray". In this way I'm going to have my dodge and burn layer. Then I'm going to select my brush, with white, opacity I'm gonna stay at around 10% with a flow of 30% so my edits are not so strong, and then I'm just gonna go in and gently paint white over my gate, and it might not seem much, but even with just a 10% increase this is the difference. So I'm gonna do that a couple of times, just to make sure I can see this gate, like so, and if you turn this off and on again, you can see it's a pretty huge difference, 
and I can now really see this gate even from far away. I really like the balance between this and mount Fuji, and the light here on this side. All right so maybe if I was doing this for my portfolio, I would go on and just delete all this part and make it darker, just by simply getting the black color instead of the white, with an opacity of maybe 30%, and just painting in a little bit of a dark color here, because this part is not really interesting. I kind of like the fact that it fades away, it's black.

I'm not gonna do that for this demonstration, but it's definitely something you can play around with,

it makes a really huge difference in this case, because it's a big distraction to have stuff here. Okay, the image looks really nice so I'm gonna do my film grain by selecting everything that I have and doing my
CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E 
to duplicate everything into a
new layer, and then I'm going to apply my Silver FX PRO filter on this new layer. All right and as usual I'm going to go into my film types, and I think for this particular image Acros looks really good, you can see a before and after here, this is without this is with the filter, I really like how it brings everything together,

I really like this light here on mount Fuji,
and I think the grain is slightly too small for my taste, you can't really see the grain very much, so I'm going to bring the grain down to 400, which I think looks much better. So this is the before, this is after, it looks more organic, it's much much better overall.
So let's apply this. Okay, so here we have the image before and after. Everything looks good, the only thing that I noticed is that by applying the filter here I kind of lost my bottom vignette, so I'm going to do another one. It's the same concept as before, so I'm going to create a new layer for exposure, with a -1, get a gradient with G on my keyboard,
hold SHIFT and drag up

to get my vignette, and that's it.
Really simple. As you saw we just went from this I think average black and white kind of interesting shot to a much much better and more minimal shot, just by doing simple things. No layer masks, nothing really complicated, and I think it's really nice the balance between the elements, and how the gate and mount Fuji stand out with this sunset light.

Alright, that was my edit, nothing really difficult
but hopefully you found this video somehow useful,

and you can use those techniques in your edits.

That's gonna be it for today's video,
thank you so much for watching, as always.

Consider subscribing to the channel, I have a couple of photo trips planned for the next three or four weeks, so I'd really love you to see those. So if you click on SUBSCRIBE, remember to ring on the bell, so you get notified every time I upload a new video. Alright, so that's gonna to be it for today. Enjoy your day everyone, and I'll see you in the next one.

In this video I share how I edit my minimal landscape photos in Lightroom and Photoshop going from a simple RAW file to the final image, ready to be printed. My workflow is quite simple and usually doesn't involve blending multiple exposures or working with luminosity masks. A good edit starts in the field, choosing the right settings and composition, and then enhancing the image potential in the editing phase.
This is NOT a super in-depth tutorial on how to use Lightroom or Photoshop, but my way to share my thought process behind black and white conversion, cropping and image development in general. I hope you'll like the video and stick with it until the end even if it's a little bit longer than usual, and as always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it in the comment section!