so it started in camera really. i knew that i was going to have a hard time saving details in the clouds, so i shot it really dark with the intent of brightening it in post.
when i got back i saw i still managed to blow a little off the highlights, but the shadows were perfect. nothing clipped, so i cranked the hell out of them, but added back a lot of black contrast with the dehaze slider. cropped it long and narrow, brushed some detail out of the flair on the barn, masked out the background to treat the clouds as much as o could to save the highlight detail without screwing the rest of it. uhhh warmed it slightly, maybe pushed the barn more red if i remember correctly...
i was pretty sleepy when i did this one lol. I'd have to check the lightroom history to tell you more.
Very cool! Thanks for the details. It's fun to hear about others' workflows. Good call to underexpose it.
A lot of the videos I've watched, they will bracket exposures and treat them separately.. but honestly I've found if I shoot raw I don't need to most of the time.
Is LR pretty good at masking? I left the Adobe suite a few years ago and have been on Affinity Photo (basically the same as PS). I use a lot of luminosity masks, which I don't remember if LR has some "smart" way to do that (e.g. "select all the bright stuff").
Anyway.. nice work!
lightroom's masking tools have recently gotten a hell of a lot better. it's a proper good implementation of modern ai. it's scary how well it will mask people now. you can even select by section, so like "teeth" "face" "clothes" etc. it will also separate them by person. for this one i just used the ai quick select on the sky and it worked perfectly. the barn on the other hand i just did a soft edge brush. the new ai Denoise also feels like magic. it straight up made me reconsider what i think of as a usable iso on my camera.