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Lacking Clarity

This Article Features Photo Zoom

It's fall in New England, and I've been out shooting quite a bit, which is great because it's my favorite time of year. My goal this fall was to capture some big New England landscapes with brilliant color and colorful skies. Unfortunately, about the time the leaves started to change, we developed a weather pattern that has resulted in gray, rainy skies about 90% of the time during the last three weeks. Not what I wanted for the big scenic shots, but the overcast and wet conditions are actually great for shooting fall colors in the woods.

For forest scenes, I usually shoot with a polarizer to reduce glare on the leaves. The polarizer, combined with dark light means I am often shooting with shutter speeds of one second or longer.

On a recent stormy day in Vermont, I almost packed it in, as 20-mph winds were making it close to impossible to shoot in the woods and get images where the leaves weren’t blurred by the wind and long exposures. But I stuck it out and decided to take advantage of the wind and let the leaves blur on purpose for images with a more surreal look. This shot of the dirt road was one I liked.

However, even with a 15-second exposure, I didn’t feel that the leaves were quite blurred enough for what I had in mind. A popular post processing technique is to use Gaussian Blur in Photoshop to add some blur to an image to get the look I was going for. I gave it a try, creating a duplicate layer, blurring that layer, and then using a layer mask so I could paint away the blur on the road that I wanted to keep sharp. Here’s the result of that technique:

It’s close to what I wanted, but the tree trunks are a little too blurred for my liking. I could fine-tune my mask to bring back some sharpness to the tree trunks, but instead I decided to try a different technique—adding negative clarity to the image in Lightroom. If you use Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, you're probably familiar with the clarity slider, which is located above the vibrance and saturation sliders.

Final Image

Adding clarity to an image increases local contrast and apparent sharpness, which can work great when you want to highlight images with a lot of texture and details. Moving the clarity slider in the negative direction has the opposite effect, blurring fine detail and sharp edges.

Portrait photographers love this feature when touching up skin details (it will take 10 years off your apparent age!) For this image, instead of applying negative clarity to the entire image, I used the adjustment brush set to a clarity of -100 and painted the effect only where I wanted it. This seemed to blur the trees the way I wanted without blurring the tree trunks too much, and it was much quicker than having to go the Photoshop route.

Here’s the final image (above). Now all I need is a little red convertible on the road and the picture would be perfect!

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