This personal approach to Northern Ireland landscape photography comes to you from landscape photographer Jim Graham. This article and tutorial originally featured in Issue 5 of Light & Landscape.
The Northern Ireland Landscape
Mention Northern Ireland, and for many people it will conjure up images of terrorism, sectarian strife and unrest. While those problems are now mainly consigned to history many people still view my country in a negative light.
The truth is, these days, Northern Ireland is a very different place to the land once blighted by more than 30 years of violent political conflict. While some of the old issues still remain as a stubborn thorn in our side, we have turned a corner. A great deal of progress has been made towards creating a peaceful shared future for our people.
I have lived in Northern Ireland for all of my life. As a keen amateur photographer it has been a privilege to do so. We have a rich and diverse landscape. The North Antrim area has some of the most beautiful and dramatic coastline anywhere in Europe. Just a mile inland from the coast are the stunning unspoilt Glens of Antrim with their green valleys and raging waterfalls. South Down has the rugged Mourne Mountains which overlook some great beaches and the Murlough Nature Reserve.
North Down has Strangford Lough, a sea lough of outstanding beauty and an enormous diversity and abundance of wildlife, it is full of curved sheltered inlets. Country Fermanagh boasts the Upper and Lower Lough Erne Waterways which are studded with hundreds of accessible islands. Lough Neagh sits in the center of Northern Ireland. It is the largest inland Lough in the United Kingdom. Each of the six counties which make up the province of Northern Ireland has much to offer the landscape photographer.
My Photographic Journey
Travel in Northern Ireland is unchallenging. The country is small and the road, rail and bus networks are good. A journey across the province is little more than a 2 hour trip by road. My own photographic journey started around 25 years ago. My interest developed quickly and I set up a well equipped home darkroom. I spent many happy hours in that darkroom dipping prints in and out of chemical baths.
Initially I resisted the move to digital imaging. However once I made the move across I immediately saw the creative potential offered by powerful image editing programmes such as Photoshop. I was hooked and there was no going back. Unlike many photographers who view time spent in front of a computer as time wasted, I see it as an integral, fascinating and challenging extension to my love of capturing images in the field. However, I do fully subscribe to the old adage that “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sows ear”. Photoshop is not a remedy for sloppy practice or thoughtless application at the picture taking stage.
Because of the immense power of modern image editing programmes, imagination is now the only real limiting factor in the creative process. Many of the fundamental and time consuming techniques I practiced in my old analogue darkroom I am now able to carry out in a fraction of the time and with much greater precision in my ‘Digital Darkroom’ Photoshop and the other programmes I now use have been a real learning curve. But without doubt it has been a fascinating and thoroughly worthwhile journey.
Northern Ireland Landscape Photography Editing
Like most photographers I have developed a personal approach to image editing. Workflow is important to me. I need to know that my processes are consistent and therefore repeatable. Simply foraging around and dipping in and out of the myriad tools in Photoshop doesn’t work for me. I have developed a trusted sequence in my workflow which is based on a great deal of trial and error. It works for me. Along the way I have stumbled across a few tricks which are central to the creation of my images.
My workflow, and I stress, it is ‘my’ workflow and not necessarily the ‘right’ workflow is as outlined hereunder:
- Open the image in Camera RAW (Lightroom steps are more or less the same).
- Always shoot in RAW and at the lowest ISO achievable.
- Use the lens correction tab for profile correction and removal of any chromatic aberration present. Both are simple auto steps.
- Set the white and black points of the image in the basic tab. Holding down alt/option key (depending on whether you are a MAC or PC user) drag the white and black sliders to the point where the first pixels become visible from a pure black screen.
- Begin colour adjustment in the basic tab using the auto option as a starting point. From there I adjust the temp and tint sliders to suit my eye. I do not get hung up on finding the ‘correct’ colour. My personal preference is for rich warm tones in my landscape images.
- Add clarity to the image, usually in the range +30 to +60. I won’t go higher than this because of a trick I use as the penultimate process in my workflow which adds a final boost to midtone contrast. Vibrance and saturation usually also get a small boost at this stage.
- Although I invariably use Lee ND filters at the capture stage, I still like to use Camera RAW’s graduated filter to tweak exposure, temp and tint on the sky in order to add a little drama.
- Final adjustments in Camera RAW are made with a careful eye on the histogram. They are adjustments to overall exposure, contrast highlights and shadows.
- Open the image in Photoshop and immediately make a copy using cmd/cntrl and J. I always work on a copy and not on the original as a matter of insurance.
- I like to get basic corrections out of the way first. Using the healing brush/patch tool set to content aware, I remove dust spots, rain or sea spray spots and any distracting elements within the scene. At this point I make an assessment on the composition of the image. If the shape, size or scale of the image would benefit from a minor tweak here and there that is done with the free transform tool.
- Just as was the case in my old darkroom days, I find that careful dodging and burning are indispensible tools in the enhancement of almost every image. I have tried many different methods for dodging and burning. All worked, but for me the most useful and most easily controlled method involves using two levels adjustment layers. I create levels adjust layer one and rename it ‘dodge’. I then set the preset for the layer to ‘lighten RGB’. Now click on the mask attached to the layer and invert it using cmd/cntrl and i.Create levels adjustment layer two and rename ‘burn’. Set the preset for that layer to ‘darken RGB’. Invert to attached mask as for the dodge layer. Now select the brush tool with the foreground colour set to white, opacity set to 100% and flow at 15%. Click on the inverted mask to select it and then paint directly onto the image to dodge or burn. The beauty of this method is the ultimate control it affords. If you make a mistake, simply switch the foreground colour to black and paint over the offending area. Because this technique is carried out on a separate layer you can even tone down the overall effect by using the layers opacity setting.
- I am a big fan of the NIK Software plugins for Photoshop. I use NIK COLOR Efex PRO4 on all of my images for subtle tweaks to colour and contrast. The polarization and tonal contrast controls are particularly useful.
- Although my images generally do not suffer badly from noise. I still find value in running NIKS Dfine plugin to eliminate any small amounts of noise which may be present.
- The penultimate step in my workflow involves using NIK’S Silver Efex PRO 2 black and white converter. I do use this great plugin as a black and white converter but this step is all about boosting midtone colour contrast. I run silver efex, selecting the ‘Neutral’ preset. I add +30% structure under the global adjustments tab and that is all I do. Click OK and the image opens up once more in Photoshop on its own layer. Now change the blend mode between the layers to luminosity and the black and white image on screen pops back to colour with some great punchy midtones. If the effect is too strong use the opacity slider to tone things down before flattening the layers.
- My final step is simply to size the image for print and sharpen using the unsharp mask filter.
Final Thoughts
I have no doubt that over time this workflow will develop and change. Each time play around with image editing software I seem to find something new and worthwhile. This current processing method produces an image with an extensive range of tones similar to that produced by HDR software but without the ‘artificial’ look. Each of the following images have been created using this technique.
Jim Graham Profile
I am a retired 61 year old married with 3 children. I live on the east coast of Northern Ireland and my hobbies include Northern Ireland landscape photography, golf, gardening, music, boating and swimming.
