Advice Wanted Tips for Editting Pictures with Snow?

[hazwing]

I've just come back from a trip in Japan with winter scenery with snow.

Just starting to go through sorting my photos now and processing some that include photos of friends that I want to share with them. Any suggestions for starting points with exposure, highlights, whites, and other sliders in LR?

I'm finding I need to boost the exposure up, but then often it can become a lot of white and lose some of the detail in the snow. I'll play around a bit more for now, but would be interested to hear if anyone has some 'starting recipes' for winter photography

 

[John King]

I've just come back from a trip in Japan with winter scenery with snow.

Just starting to go through sorting my photos now and processing some that include photos of friends that I want to share with them. Any suggestions for starting points with exposure, highlights, whites, and other sliders in LR?

I'm finding I need to boost the exposure up, but then often it can become a lot of white and lose some of the detail in the snow. I'll play around a bit more for now, but would be interested to hear if anyone has some 'starting recipes' for winter photography

Snow isn't white, but chances are your camera thinks it is.
Worth keeping in mind.

 

[Richard]

Traditionally, the approach for snow photography is to overexpose by a stop or more. If you leave the camera on auto exposure it will see all that brilliant white landscape and try to reduce it to a mid-grey tone, like it was taught to in the factory. Result - grey snow.

A modern digital camera can often detect snow as one of its program modes and adjust the exposure to suit, but you need a camera with that sort of intelligence and to have it switched on.

As for processing after the event, I guess I would start by looking at the white level - check with a histogram display how much you can afford to clip off at the white end before losing detail in the snow, and if there's not much happening over there on the right hand side of the histogram you can bring the white level down to make your snow look like snow.

-R

 

[tonyturley]

One thing I've learned from landscape painting is I like shadow areas in snow to have a bit of a blue tint. Sometimes I do that by tweaking curves and sometimes I do it with a Snapseed preset - just depends on what looks good to me. YMMV

 

[wee-pics]

In my first photo book I read that each camera has problems with snow and underexposes it, making it grey instead of white. So you have to correct this. If the snow-programs give you the white snow you want ... that's OK, but you'll have to test them. For years now my solution therefore is manual mode. Even taking this into account there is the color cast you have to consider due to the time of the day.

 

[Drdul]

Agree that overexposing is necessary for snowy scenes. As for processing, I usually find that there is little detail in the bright snow, but fortunately much detail can be recovered by slamming the highlights slider to –100 (in Lightroom Classic, may be different in other software).

 

[John King]

Agree that overexposing is necessary for snowy scenes. As for processing, I usually find that there is little detail in the bright snow, but fortunately much detail can be recovered by slamming the highlights slider to –100 (in Lightroom Classic, may be different in other software).

And/or the whites slider to -100.

Same goes for ACR and Photoshop.

 

[hazwing]

Yes I agree that the camera tends to underexpose to create a 'grey' white. And I generally have my camera set to -0.7EV to preserve the highlights during my shooting as well.

After playing around with some photos, my gut feelings are
-I like snow appearing white. And tend to push exposure to be brighter, doing so I loose some details in the snow
-A decision needs to be made whether I want to see the detail and textures in the snow and whether to snow looks too 'burnt out'
-Reduce highlights and whites, until I can start seeing some of the detail (don't normally need to go full -100). Reducing highlights and whites too much will end up making the snow look less white again.
-Clarity and texture sliders also bring in more detail in the snow as well.

Work in progress and I play around with these photos more but here are some initial edits.
Critique and comments welcome.

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[John King]

Have you tried adjusting the white balance first?
This can often fix the problem, without the necessity for exquisitely fine adjustments of multiple other items.

 

[e-light]

I like the 0976 along the river most ; the light in nature and the warm light in the house, an unexpected contrast

 

[ShipleyNW]

Keep in mind that when you clip the highlights on the raw file, there's no recovering that in post. You can dial back the exposure to add some density, but there's no color or saturation information for the software to blend it in with its surroundings.

So, on site, you really need to pay special attention to bright scenes or the bright parts of otherwise not-bright scenes. Blown highlights are the hardest thing to fix in post. Underexpose snow shots, keep an eye on the histogram, or do what I do and bracket the heck out of the scene and pick the easiest raw file to work with when you get home.

 

[hazwing]

Have you tried adjusting the white balance first?
This can often fix the problem, without the necessity for exquisitely fine adjustments of multiple other items.

I have adjust WB in some photos but not actually these ones. When I look at them again, they are slightly warm.
What are you seeing?

 

[hazwing]

Keep in mind that when you clip the highlights on the raw file, there's no recovering that in post. You can dial back the exposure to add some density, but there's no color or saturation information for the software to blend it in with its surroundings.

So, on site, you really need to pay special attention to bright scenes or the bright parts of otherwise not-bright scenes. Blown highlights are the hardest thing to fix in post. Underexpose snow shots, keep an eye on the histogram, or do what I do and bracket the heck out of the scene and pick the easiest raw file to work with when you get home.

View attachment 526226

Yeah I'm often shooting bracketing when travelling, and keep a eye on the zebras for over exposure.

 

[John King]

I have adjust WB in some photos but not actually these ones. When I look at them again, they are slightly warm.
What are you seeing?

What editing software are you using?
Which camera?
Can you upload any RAW files to anywhere?

 

[hazwing]

What editing software are you using?
Which camera?
Can you upload any RAW files to anywhere?

hmm... not sure how that is relevant. The software and camera should affect how the image displays on your screen. I'm just interested to know if you feel the white balance is off. But FYI, lightroom and sony a7cii.

I'll upload some RAWs a bit later. Any suggestions on filehost that would be good for that?

 

[ShipleyNW]

Yeah I'm often shooting bracketing when travelling, and keep a eye on the zebras for over exposure.

You're more advanced than your original question let on. Sounds like you've made good raw files. You're veering a little bit from technique to taste, or at least asking about technique to achieve your taste. That's always a tricky question to answer.

I can show you some settings that I used to achieve my taste in a snow picture. Maybe that will help.

The first picture is the SOOC raw file as metered by the camera and rendered by Adobe. As others have noted, you get muddy-gray snow. I love that. Just look at that histogram. It's all bunched in the middle. A big blob of clay that I can kneed out in both directions using the sliders. It's an ideal starting histogram.


(Click to enlarge images)

The first thing I do when I start editing a picture is to click the 'Auto' button in the Basic panel, see what Adobe thinks it should look like. For this picture, Adobe took the highlights down and the whiles up, the blacks down and the shadows up.

That almost sounds counterintuitive, but if you think about it, it makes sense. You want to recover shadow detail, but you don't want to loose your blacks. You want to push the snow and the sky towards white, but you want to maintain your highlight detail. Looking at the histogram, we've got some contrast separation.



After a long list of adjustments made for reasons of taste only, this was my final effort. I warmed it up and added saturation to the few things with color in the scene. But mainly I added contrast at the dark end. I left the highlights pretty gray. It was socked-in fog that day and I didn't want to lose that softness. Even still, there's no confusion about this being white snow. That's a pretty handsome histogram for a snow shot.

 

[OCBeyer]

When shooting snow under bright sun I set my WB to 'cloudy' or 'shade' even though I'm only using RAW.

 

[John King]

hmm... not sure how that is relevant. The software and camera should affect how the image displays on your screen. I'm just interested to know if you feel the white balance is off. But FYI, lightroom and sony a7cii.

This information always helps those who are trying to help you (or anyone else), as it tells everyone what idiosyncrasies might be caused by a specific camera/model, and what tools that you have to work with.

Someone with the same gear, software and experience can often give you more appropriate advice than someone using different gear and software.

I'll upload some RAWs a bit later. Any suggestions on filehost that would be good for that?

Dropbox, perhaps?

 

[John King]

One of the things that I like about Adobe is that the editors always do things in the 'correct' order, regardless of the order in which you do things.

 

[hazwing]

You're more advanced than your original question let on. Sounds like you've made good raw files. You're veering a little bit from technique to taste, or at least asking about technique to achieve your taste. That's always a tricky question to answer.

I can show you some settings that I used to achieve my taste in a snow picture. Maybe that will help.

The first picture is the SOOC raw file as metered by the camera and rendered by Adobe. As others have noted, you get muddy-gray snow. I love that. Just look at that histogram. It's all bunched in the middle. A big blob of clay that I can kneed out in both directions using the sliders. It's an ideal starting histogram.

View attachment 526376
(Click to enlarge images)

The first thing I do when I start editing a picture is to click the 'Auto' button in the Basic panel, see what Adobe thinks it should look like. For this picture, Adobe took the highlights down and the whiles up, the blacks down and the shadows up.

That almost sounds counterintuitive, but if you think about it, it makes sense. You want to recover shadow detail, but you don't want to loose your blacks. You want to push the snow and the sky towards white, but you want to maintain your highlight detail. Looking at the histogram, we've got some contrast separation.

View attachment 526377

After a long list of adjustments made for reasons of taste only, this was my final effort. I warmed it up and added saturation to the few things with color in the scene. But mainly I added contrast at the dark end. I left the highlights pretty gray. It was socked-in fog that day and I didn't want to lose that softness. Even still, there's no confusion about this being white snow. That's a pretty handsome histogram for a snow shot.

View attachment 526378

Thanks for the detailed workflow. It's interesting that you used negative dehaze in your photo. I tried it with some of my edits, and it's an interesting effect. It's these sort of tips that I was looking for with my initial question.