Everyday edits: Bournemouth Pier, with Lightroom Classic’s Storm Clouds Adaptive Preset

It was a dark, blustery day in May. Bournemouth, on the UK’s southern coastline, was not looking its best. But I didn’t want to try to glamourise it, I wanted to make this place look exactly how it felt on that day – only more so.

So here’s a before and after comparison. The original raw file had lots wrong with it. It was flat, it was shot on a slant and it didn’t give any real feel for the place. My edited version is exaggerated and dramatised by comparison, but secretly that’s what we photographers do, right?

The key Lightroom tool I wanted to pick out here is Lightroom’s Adaptive Presets, specifically the Storm Clouds preset in its Adaptive: Sky category. These Adaptive Presets are rather clever. They work like regular Lightroom Presets, but incorporate automatic AI masking too. This category uses Adobe’s Sky masking tool, and the Adaptive Presets in this group all apply different preset adjustments to any sky areas they find in your photos.

I use lots of other tools in this walkthrough too. I find that almost any image editing needs multiple tools, so I’ve included all the others I’ve used here, just so that the whole process is a bit more authentic. So, let’s get started.

01 Where do we start?

My best tip for any kind of image editing is to take a ‘worst things first’ approach. I always start with the things that most need fixing. This makes it easier to figure out what needs doing next, and how to finesse the settings to bring the whole thing together.

Now I think there’s a lot I need to work on here, but one obvious thing is that the image is not straight. Before I fix that, though, I’m just not happy with the colours. There are lots of ways to fix this manually in Lightroom, but my favourite secret weapon in Lightroom is Profiles, in the Basic panel, so that’s where I’ll head first.

02 Lutify Helvetios profile

Lightroom comes with a lot of very good profiles of its own, but I’m a big fan of Lutify.me and its LUT collection, which also comes as a set of Lightroom Profiles. I’m using one called Helvetios, which is from Lutify’s Contemporary Color Films collection. This gives me some warmth and contrast lacking in the default rendering, and gives me a good starting point to work from.

03 Straightening up

I have a strange tendency to tilt the camera to the left as I press the shutter release, and the easiest place to fix this is in the Transform panel – check the Constrain Crop box and use the Level button (the Vertical button will often work too).

04 Storm Clouds Adaptive Preset

Now it’s time for the key tool in this walkthrough – Lightroom’s Storm Clouds Adaptive Preset. You’ll find this in the Adaptive: Sky category in the Presets panel. With a single click it uses AI to identify and mask the sky area, then applies a set of adjustments to give it a stormy look. These include Dehaze, to add contrast and intensity, a Saturation reduction (Dehaze increases the saturation, often by more than you want) and a strong Noise Reduction (it also increases grain).

05 Lightroom Parametric Curve adjustment

I want to boost the overall contrast of this photo, so back in the Adjust tab I need the Tone Curve panel. Now I could use the regular Point Curve tool where you add and move control points at will, but this time I’m swapping to the Parametric Curve tool, which splits the image up into Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows. If I increase the Lights and reduce the Darks I get a nice contrast-enhancing S-shaped curve.

06 Intersecting the sky mask with a linear gradient

Lightroom’s AI sky masking tool is quick and effective, but it applies a fixed adjustment to the whole sky area with none of the gradation of a real sky. Right now, the sky is as dark on the horizon line as it is higher up, and that just doesn’t look right. The solution is to head over to the Masks panel, select the three dots next to the sky mask and choose Intersect Mask with > Linear Gradient from the menu.

07 Positioning the sky gradient

Now I can drag downwards from the middle of the sky towards the horizon to blend in the sky adjustments more progressively. So how does this work, exactly? Think of it this way – when you ‘intersect’ one mask with another, only those areas within both masks will be adjusted. The Storm Clouds mask is being forced to blend in by the Linear Gradient I’ve added.

08 Relighting the scene with a Radial Gradient

I’m still not quite happy. My image has the dark, stormy, dramatic look I’m aiming for, but it’s all a bit too heavy. There’s no feeling of light and shade, no proper contrast. So to fix this I’m going to use one of my favourite image-editing tricks – using a Radial Gradient to ‘relight’ the scene. First, I drag out a Radial Gradient over the area that I think needs a splash of light, then I simply increase the exposure. I can resize or move the Radial Gradient until I think the lighting effect is just right.

The finished image

Here’s my finished image. I think this might look a little darker than I intended, but that’s because it’s set against a white background. It’s something to think about when editing images, as the apparent brightness of an image is strongly affected by the brightness of the background around it.

I realise there are a lot of steps in this walkthrough, but that’s the reality of photo editing – one tool is almost never enough, and very often you need several to achieve the effect you’re looking for. Instead of trying to replicate all these steps with your own images, why not just pick out the steps and tools that look most useful for your own work.