11.19.2017

One Photo: A Single Oak Leaf with Lightroom's New Masking Tool


Yesterday I went for a long walk, leaving the house with my new (for me) small camera and lens.  Last month I bought a used Panasonic GM5 from eBay and I already had the mini (about 3 ounces) 12-32 zoom. 

This is a mFT camera so all my lenses for my Panasonic and Olympus gear fit the GM5, though the camera is so small I haven’t yet determined which lenses will be comfortable to use on it.  I am also hoping it will weather the winter enough to go with me skiing, as I want something with better image quality than my old but trusty Panasonic TS3 point and shoot weather-proof camera.

The camera and lens fit wonderfully in my jacket pocket.  It is a sturdy little camera, but the total weight of body, lens, cap, battery and memory card is only 10 ounces.

What you see below hardly needed me to carry the camera very far.  It’s actually the only photo I took on my 45 minutes walk, and it was only 10 feet from our front door.  We had had an overnight frost and there were a few oak leaves that had blown down overnight and were residing on the lawn.  (The maple leaves had fallen and been removed a while ago.)  Usually, fall oak leaves are not exactly “pretty”, certainly when compared with the reds and yellows and oranges of maple leaves.  Fallen oak leaves are usually shades of brown.  But add a bit of frost to their undersides and they take on new life.

The leaf I chose to photograph was a near-perfect specimen.  Since I have the before and after images below you can see that I did nevertheless boost the colors to what I believe is the upper end of the range of normal oak leaf color variation, while at the same time darkening the background.  Which image is “better” is indeed a matter of personal preference.  What I enjoyed in creating the “after” image is playing with Lightroom Classic’s new masking range tool.  Basically, this is what I did:


  1. Darkened the entire exposure by about 1.5 stops in the basic panel
  2. Used the selection brush to paint over the leaf.  I usually hit the “o” key (I believe it stands for overlay in this case) which shows the painted areas as red.
  3. From here I only worked in the “mask” and  “brush” panels
  4. Turned on the mask to “color” 
  5. Turned off the overlay (hit the "o" button again)
  6. Used the dropper to define a rectangle of the leaf with the color I wished to work with
  7. Added 1.5 stops of exposure to the masked leaf, and played with all the rest of the sliders to taste.


Frosted Oak Leaf
Panasonic GM5 plus 12-32mm zoom @ 32mm (64mm equiv)
1/100, aperture priority F5.6, autoISO200
Processed in Lightroom Classic CC




Frosted Oak Leaf
SOOC



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