Lightroom tips for wildlife photographers (Part two)

By Steve and Ann Toon | 21 August 2023

This is part two of a two part series on editing wildlife images. You can see part one, from last week, here.

White balance

For most of our wildlife photography we set our cameras to Auto White Balance. We might occasionally go off-piste with something funky like a tungsten setting to create a blue hour effect, but generally AWB gives us a good starting point.

Shooting in RAW means we can then adjust the white balance in Lightroom without damaging the image quality.

AWB often needs a little tweaking with the Temp slider. Animals shot in shadow, for example, might benefit from some gentle warming to remove excessive blueness. As always restraint is the key to a natural looking image here. You’re never going to generate a convincing golden hour effect just by cranking up the white balance to eleven.

So too with Tint, which we use occasionally, for example if an image looks a little too magenta, although never more than +/- 10 and usually less. We rarely use the White Balance Selector (eyedropper) to neutralise our tones, it works very well with many photographic genres, but with nature images it can remove precisely the warmth of light we’re trying to capture.

Exposure

We tend to do our exposure adjustments in the Basic tab, rarely using the Tone Curve tab. Generally, we’d hope to have made a reasonable exposure in-camera, so the Exposure slider will need only a little adjustment, if any – certainly no more than 0.25 stops either way.

The exceptions are where we’re looking for a high or low- key effect when a more radical exposure adjustment is called for.

We’d hope to get this about right in-camera, but with challenging subjects like, for example, white swans on a misty lake, judging the right amount of over-exposure to achieve the required effect is tricky in the field when you don’t always have time to bracket your shots.

If we’re subtle with the Exposure slider, we’re much more assertive with the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. Whites and highlights work in tandem, we’ll often increase whites significantly to punch up the Raw file, but decrease the highlights to avoid them burning out.

Many animals and birds have bright tones that can easily blow out – white feathers and fur, shiny horns or muzzles. So while we might add +50 or more to the whites, we’ll sometimes drop the highlights by as much as -100.

Shadows and blacks similarly operate in tandem, so opening up the shadows by moving the slider to the right often demands a slight decrease in the black, to maintain sufficient contrast.

With wildlife we’re often seeking to photograph in that beautiful golden light at the ends of the day, but sometimes warm light can work against the image, as with these zebra, where the image was a little muddy. Pulling the white balance temp slider hard left produced a much punchier image, further enhanced with some tonal manipulation to bring up the whites. Cooling the white balance also produces a bluer sky. An inverted subject selection in masks allowed the background to be lightened, making the animals stand out even more.
Canon EOS 1Ds II, 500mm f/4 L lens, 1/2500 sec, f/5, ISO 200 — With wildlife we’re often seeking to photograph in that beautiful golden light at the ends of the day, but sometimes warm light can work against the image, as with these zebra, where the image was a little muddy. Pulling the white balance temp slider hard left produced a much punchier image, further enhanced with some tonal manipulation to bring up the whites. Cooling the white balance also produces a bluer sky. An inverted subject selection in masks allowed the background to be lightened, making the animals stand out even more. Canon EOS 1Ds II, 500mm f/4 L lens, 1/2500 sec, f/5, ISO 200

Our shadows and blacks adjustments tend to be more restrained than our whites and highlights, not least because brightening the dark tones too much can add substantial noise. We’d rarely adjust either by more than +/- 15.

All the while we’re adjusting tones we keep an eye on the clipping warning triangles in the top corners of the histogram. For publishing purposes it’s inadvisable for the tonal range to extend right to the limits in most cases, so if we see a clipping warning we’ll pull the sliders back in a little.

We rarely use the Contrast slider – it’s a bit too rough and ready. We much prefer to target our adjustments .

Presence

The presence sliders are a big temptation, offering enticing image ‘enhancements’ but flirting with the danger of excess. Who wouldn’t want more clarity in their subject, more texture in fur and feathers? But this is where it’s very easy to make the real world appear unreal.

We’ll often add a little Clarity, perhaps +10, but rarely more than +15. And if we’re adding clarity, we’ll often use masking to apply it just to the animal, preferring to leave the background softer.

The Texture slider isn’t something we generally tend to adjust, to our taste it rarely enhances natural subjects. Dehaze we also rarely use, though applied locally through masking it can sometimes help reduce the softening effect of an out of focus foreground object like a leaf across the subject.

This was shot with +1.3 stops exposure compensation, with a view to turning it into a high-key monochrome image. In Lightroom a little experimentation soon showed that it worked better with darker tones, and what we’d usually consider to be excessive application of the clarity slider. Mostly with post-processing we’re attempting to output an image that we’d visualised at the time of capture, but there’s always room to change tack and come up with something new.
Canon EOS 1Dx II, 500mm f/4 L lens, 1/1000 sec, f/5.6. ISO 500 — This was shot with +1.3 stops exposure compensation, with a view to turning it into a high-key monochrome image. In Lightroom a little experimentation soon showed that it worked better with darker tones, and what we’d usually consider to be excessive application of the clarity slider. Mostly with post-processing we’re attempting to output an image that we’d visualised at the time of capture, but there’s always room to change tack and come up with something new. Canon EOS 1Dx II, 500mm f/4 L lens, 1/1000 sec, f/5.6. ISO 500

RAW files often need the colour enhancing a little, but be wary with natural subjects not to overdo it. Vibrance is another of those sliders that’s often abused, making green grass too emerald, water too blue.

We’ll often apply a little positive Vibrance, but generally no more than +10. And we’re tentative with the Saturation slider, which, like the Contrast slider, can be a bit too broad brush for most things.

Selective adjustments to make your subject pop

Lightroom has powerful masking tools which allow for selective adjustments within the image and used carefully can really make your subject sing.

In masks, the Brush tool is probably the most useful, allowing us to ‘dodge and burn’ our image by applying tonal adjustments to specific areas. It can also be good for applying a little extra sharpening to key areas such as eyes, though as we’ll discuss later, we prefer sharpening outside of Lightroom.

Generally, we use the brush with a lot of feathering, only using a hard-edged brush for small, well-defined details like eyes. As well as enhancing the overall balance of tones in different parts of the image, the brush tool is also useful for dulling down distracting highlights, such as bright rocks, branches or glimmers of sky among foliage.

The Select Subject function works very well but rather than use it to enhance the subject, we’ll often invert the selection (click on the three dots for this option) and adjust the background instead.

Subtle changes to subdue the background, such as reducing Clarity a little, making it a little darker or lighter and dampening distracting highlights, all can help make the subject animal ‘pop’.

We’ll further refine this technique occasionally by not only inverting the subject selection to select the background, but also intersecting this selection with a linear gradient, dropped down from the top of the image.

By then applying a Clarity reduction, it’s possible to emulate focus drop-off, reducing the clarity most at distance, but progressively less as you get nearer the subject’s plane of focus.

It was dusk when we spotted this leopard with her freshly caught ground squirrel, so light levels were very low, with little contrast. We brightened the image mainly by increasing whites and adding some clarity, and we warmed the cool tones a little, by increased white balance from 5700 to 6254. With an image like this it’s tempting to boost warmth and contrast significantly, to ratchet up the instant impact, but we preferred to retain the subtlety of the evening light, true to what we saw. A little noise reduction was applied with Topaz Denoise AI.
Canon EOS 1Dx, 500mm f/4 L lens with 1.4x extender, 1/200 sec, f/8. ISO 1250 — It was dusk when we spotted this leopard with her freshly caught ground squirrel, so light levels were very low, with little contrast. We brightened the image mainly by increasing whites and adding some clarity, and we warmed the cool tones a little, by increased white balance from 5700 to 6254. With an image like this it’s tempting to boost warmth and contrast significantly, to ratchet up the instant impact, but we preferred to retain the subtlety of the evening light, true to what we saw. A little noise reduction was applied with Topaz Denoise AI. Canon EOS 1Dx, 500mm f/4 L lens with 1.4x extender, 1/200 sec, f/8. ISO 1250

This can be a powerful way of making the animal stand-out in situations where you perhaps needed quite a lot of depth of field to make your subject sharp throughout, but in doing so rendered the background intrusively in-focus.

The degree to which you apply these selective adjustments to enhance your image will depend on your end use – you may need to be less bold with an image destined for competition, for example.

But whatever the end use, try to exercise restraint and as a guide ask yourself whether someone would be surprised if they saw the RAW file of your processed image.

Look out for the final part next week.