Magical Mushroom Light Painting with Lightroom & Photoshop | QE

In this quickedit video I‘m creating another magical Mushroom light painting using Adobe #Lightroom Classic and Adobe #Photoshop CC 2019 for the #PostProcessing.
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I had a pretty clear colour style in mind when taking the picture: I wanted the mushroom to emit a vibrant, orange glow while the surrounding area has a strong, blue colour cast. In my mind this would work excellent for a magic, mysterious mood and the orange and blue tones would fit perfectly.
As most of the times for the basic raw adjustments of the photos (one base image, two images for the glowing mushroom effect) I used Adobe Lightroom. Here I wanted to finish the base image and then paste the settings onto the glow-images, so they all have the same colour style and general sharpness / softness. To start the editing, I first checked the lens correction settings to remove chromatic aberrations and lens distortion. Next, I switched the camera profile to Adobe Standard which makes the darker parts of the picture slightly brighter. To start working on the blue colour cast I dropped the white balance temperature quite a lot until I found a good-looking spot. Further working on the global settings, I dropped the highlights slightly and increased the shadows. Of course, this results in a lot less contrast, so I added some back.
For this photo there also are some local adjustments applied. First, I created a graduated filter for the top part of the picture. Since this area isn’t the main subject, I wanted to make it darker and thus bringing the attention more on the mushroom. But instead of dropping the exposure (which would also darken the highlights) I simply dropped the shadows so the brighter weren’t affected that much. Next, I created a radial filter for the top of the mushroom which I wanted to sharpen and give some more structure by increasing the texture and clarity. Finally, I created another radial filter for everything around the mushroom. I wanted to make this area a lot softer so here I decreased the texture and clarity.
There was a little bit of colour grading involved. First, I increased the blue saturation since I love the blue tones for this image. Then I used the split toning to further boost the blues by applying a cold tone to the highlights and a different cold tone to the shadows. Then, after sharpening the picture I applied a little bit of vignetting and copied all of those setting onto the two glow images.
After opening the pictures in Photoshop (Select the all the photos in Lightroom, right click on the thumbnail and got to ‘edit in’ and choose ‘open as layers in Photoshop’) I had to align them first since I didn’t shot from a stable tripod. Therefore, I simply went to ‘edit’ and ‘Auto-Align Layers’ and let Photoshop do the aligning automatically.
The next step was to blend in the glow effect. I applied a layer mask on the first glow image and filled the layer mask black, so the photo isn’t visible anymore. Then I picked a brush with the foreground colour set to white and carefully painted over the glowing part of the mushroom, and this way making this area of the glow layer visible again. Then I simply repeated this for the second glow photo.
Since the image stilly was rather dark, I added a brightness/contrast adjustment layer and increased the brightness slightly. Then, I wanted to work on the glow of the mushroom for a bit more. I created a new layer and set it’s blending mode to hard light. Then I picked the brush again with a warm colour and reduced the brush opacity to around 10% and carefully started to paint in some glowing spots on the mushroom itself.

[@charrski2918]

Beautiful - I think some pale glow on the ground would have been cool too!

[@remusmoise8836]

Thanks for sharing!!!! Lovely work-great tutorial.

[@ThePhlogPhotography]

Very glad you like it!! :-)

[@AndreasNapravnik]

Wieder ein schöner Hingucker

[@ThePhlogPhotography]

Danke dir vielmals!

[@mariomifsud1302]

As always very helpful. Thanks *****

[@ThePhlogPhotography]

Thank you for the comment! Really happy this video is helpful for you Mario!

[@josieoliver4305]

So beautiful! I’m no photographer, what I do know is how amazing the end result is. Do you sell the your photos? I would love to frame a few and hang them in my home. Please let me know know.

[@ThePhlogPhotography]

Thank you for the comment! I actually do sell this image on my website www.the-phlog.com

[@zoaybk]

Very good work

[@ThePhlogPhotography]

Thank you so much!

[@FrankDelargy]

Could you share what specific light you used to get the warm color? Thanks!

[@ThePhlogPhotography]

Of course, I used the flashlight of my smartphone to light up the mushroom :-)

[@khoatrananh6649]

the video image is too poor, you need to fix it more