TIPS & TECHNIQUES

Photo Editing Tips

Mixing White Balance

When developing your digital photos, don’t feel constrained to a global white balance setting

One of the first adjustments I make when developing a RAW file is to set white balance. It’s a good idea to start there before making lots of other adjustments—sometimes a tweak to white balance is all an image really needs, especially if your exposure was correct in-camera.

But what if a global white balance setting doesn’t result in an image that matches your interpretation of the scene?

The original RAW file, with the white balance temperature set to “As Shot.”

With Lightroom’s Graduated Filter tool, it’s easy to apply different white balance settings to specific areas of an image, especially when you have a clean, straight horizons like in this example.

My unprocessed RAW file, taken with a Canon EOS R, is a nice sunset scene, but the ocean foreground feels flat compared to the dramatic sky.

Setting the white balance to “Daylight” added a little extra pop to the sky, but didn’t have much of an effect on the water; for that area, I actually preferred the look of a cooler white balance temperature.

That’s where Lightroom’s Graduated Filter tool comes in.

Applying the Graduated Filter tool. — The Graduated Filter tool is accessed by clicking on the rectangular icon just below the histogram display (outlined in red).

To use this tool in Lightroom’s Develop module, click on its icon in the toolbar just below the Histogram, then click and drag up or down on a point in the image along the transition where you want the the effect to take place. The greater distance you drag, the more graduated the transition will be. In this example, I clicked on the horizon line and dragged upward only very slightly, as I wanted the transition to be hard. Holding down the Shift key when you do this will keep the transition line straight.

You can toggle a Mask Overlay to see which areas will be affected by the Graduated Filter (Tools > Adjustment Mask Overlay > Show Overlay, or use keyboard shortcut “O”).

Wildlife Photography Techniques

Photographing Bald Eagles Of The Adirondack

Techniques and insights for photographing bald eagles, the beautiful but often unpredictable birds of preyText & Photography By Howard Arndt

Photographing bald eagles at their nest is always challenging. Over the course of a recent summer, I was privileged to observe a pair of bald eagles as they raised two chicks on a lakeshore in Adirondack Park in upstate New York.

Photographing bald eagles: Eagle father returns with fish for dinner — Bald eagle father, who is responsible for most of the fishing, arrives at the nest with a catch for the chicks’ dinner.

Finding Perspective When Photographing Bald Eagles

Apparently eagles, like humans, prefer high-rise waterfront views and pick their nesting tree accordingly. Since their nest, 100 feet up in an eastern white pine, was mostly visible from the water, I developed (after some experimentation) a shooting approach using a canoe. A friend made me a “legless” chair for the bottom of the canoe so I could sit in comfort and use the canoe like a kayak. This gave me an easily maneuverable and stable platform—most of the time. The biggest problem was drifting due to current or wind, countered on occasion by tying up on the opposite shore, though my view of the nest was somewhat reduced. I was typically shooting at a distance of 100 yards or more from the nest to have the best possible view of the nest as well as the eagles’ ingress and egress routes. The eagles were unperturbed by the presence of my canoe as they were accustomed to seeing kayaks, canoes and small engine power boats on the lake.