Seeing the Snow with Lightroom and Photoshop

So far this has been a great winter for photographing the snow. We have been hit by several storms, creating a nice clean cover of white, and the fridge temperatures have allowed the snow and ice to stick to the trees creating a classic “Winter Wonderland”.  

I love shooting in the snow.  The dark trees, stone walls and buildings stand in stark contrast to the brilliant white of the snow.  It creates scenes of near pure black and white, but the few remaining colors can stand apart in subtle relief.  It is all crisp and beautiful, but too often the snow can appear washed out without showing any detail.  Happily, there are several post-processing tools that can bring out enough highlight contrast to show the interesting detail in the white cover.  I discussed some of these techniques in the past, but with all the winter wonderland outside, it seems like a good time to review the wonders of snow photography.

• Celebratingthe Snow

First, Get it Right in the Camera

Left alone, your camera’s light meter will do what it has been taught to do, it will adjust the exposure to average everything, including your brilliant white snow, to a muddy middle gray.  Like when shooting on a bright sandy beach,  you will need to increase the exposure by a stop or two.  

The important thing is to avoid overdoing the adjustments and blowing out the highlights.  It is great to shoot to the right, but use your histogram to assure that detail is left in the highlights.  The picture in your camera’s LED screen may look overexposed but the right shifted image will give you the best control over contrast in the final edited image.  Trust the Histogram!!

Now that you have the perfect image from the camera you can start working to increase the contrast in the snow.  The goal is to see the detail that was visible in the field.

Lightroom

Unedited RAW Image in Lightroom

Let’s start with the dramatic image of the dog howling against the storm.  Actually,  he may have been howling against the photographer, but I prefer my story of the noble beast opposing the bitter elements.  The picture showed the dog in nice detail, but the snow was washed out.  No detail was apparent.

The goal is post-processing is to slightly reduce the brightness and

Highlight Adjustment in Lightroom

enhance the contrast in the snow, without excessive darkening of the mid-tones and shadows.  You never want to make the snow appear a muddy gray.  These days, my first approach is to use Lightroom’s highlight slider.  A combination of a decrease of the highlights, darkening of  the shadows and a subtle increase in the brightness can often be enough to make the snow texture more visible.  As with all of these tools, the important thing is to avoid is over-doing the adjustments.  The goal is to show the snow as you remember seeing it in the field.

I should mention that I work almost entirely in Lightroom CC Classic, but similar adjustments of the highlights can be made in the new, cloud-based, Lightroom CC.

Into Photoshop

After making my adjustments in Lightroom, I always bring my images into Photoshop for final tweaking.  This often means working further on the appearance of the snow.

Curve Adjustments

Curves Adjustment 

Detail in the snow may be enhance with a selective adjustment with the Curves tool – a reduction in the highlights while protecting the darker tones.  Here I used a mask to limit the effect to the foreground snow area.

Shadow/Highlights

Shadow/Highlight Tool in the Image Drop-down

The Shadow/Highlights tool is a remarkable instrument for selectively controlling the highlights and shadows in an image.  Its effects are applied over the entire image, but I always apply the tool on a separate image layer to allow better control of the effect through masking and adjustment in opacity.  The tool is found in the Image drop down menu under Adjustments.  Separate controls are available to brighten shadows and darken highlights, with the Tone sliders controlling the tonal range over which the adjustments are applied. 

Shadow/Highlights Tool

Limiting the Effect to the Snow with a Layer Mask

The Highlights adjustment does a great job bringing out the detail in snow, but again the key is to avoid overdoing the change.  In the howler image I pushed the adjustment slightly beyond the level that I thought was optimal and then made a final adjustment by pulling back on the opacity of the layer, and limiting the area of the change with a mask.  By masking the background, I was able to protect the soft appearance of the distant trees.

Pushing too far on the highlight adjustment can result in unnatural appearing edges, especially in areas of high contrast, but, by making preliminary highlight adjustments in Lightroom or with curves in Photoshop, the final Shadow/Highlight modification need not be as strong.

Howl Against the Storm, Dummerston Vermont

Any of these tools can be effective at bringing out the natural detail and interest in fresh snow.  Give them a try, after all, tis the season.

Now stay warm out there!!

Jeffrey Newcomer

www.partridgebrookreflections.com