Welcome to the Premium Light Academy Fall Colors Tutorial! In this course we will travel across Colorado and capture some of the most stunning scenery this nation has to offer. We will discover endless golden aspen forests and towering snow capped mountains. Each lesson will cover best practices in shooting on location, creating beautiful compositions, and editing your images to perfection in both Lightroom and Photoshop. Let the adventure begin!

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Visual Story Telling in the San Juan Mountains

Welcome to Colorado! We kick off our fall color photography adventure in the mighty San Juan Mountains. Snowy peaks tower above beautiful aspen forests which span as far as the eye can see. We begin our journey by examining the power of visual story telling. Every picture is worth 1000 words. . . Landscape photography gives us the chance to share our adventures with our viewers. So let’s get started!

Lightroom | Creating Super RAW Files

In this lesson we will learn how use Lightroom to combine multiple RAW images from a bracketed series. This technique is used to generate Super RAW files which have a vast range of exposure latitude. This essential skill will be used throughout the remainder of the lesson series, so you don’t want to miss it!

Lightroom
Creating an Automated Panoramic Image
In this lesson we will use our Super RAW files from the previous lesson to generate a large format panoramic image in Lightroom. We will take advantage of Lightroom’s powerful automation tools for a quick and easy workflow.

Photoshop
Hand Blending a Panoramic Image
In this lesson we go old school! Photoshop is a fantastic tool for creating panoramic images. We will use layer masks to hand-blend our panoramic image together. It take a little extra work, but the results are much better than any form of automation.

Morning in the San Juan Mountains

Welcome back to the San Juan Mountains for yet another incredible day of fall colors photography! We’ve just had an overnight snow storm. The mountains have a fresh dusting of powder and all of the aspen valleys have been drenched in rain. These conditions create absolutely spectacular color.

Lightroom
Creating High Dynamic Range

In this episode we go back into Lightroom to assemble our Super RAW files from the San Juan Mountains. We will be combining multiple images to give us a huge amount of exposure latitude to work. This technique produces amazing results in our digital workflow.

Photoshop
Automatic Panoramic vs Hand Painting Panoramic

In this lesson we make a few critical comparisons. We’ll be using Photoshop’s Photomerge tool to automatically generate a panoramic image from multiple shots. Next, we’ll compare the automated pano to our very own hand-painted pano. The results may just surprise you.

Shooting the Aspen Forest on Location

In this episode we go deep into the forest in search of more intimate scenes with aspen trees. The colors are in full effect as we discover a beautiful grove of perfect white trunks immersed in brilliant foliage.

Lightroom
Using the Development Module for Aspen Photos

Next we jump into Lightroom to have a look at our first aspen forest. We will use the development module to prepare our RAW files for fine tuning in Photoshop.

Lightroom | The Misty Aspen Forest

In this episode we investigate one of the additional images captured in aspen forest. A beautiful mist fills the morning air, giving our scene a mysterious glow. We use Lightroom to build and develop our latest image.

Photoshop
Creating a Panoramic Aspen Forest

Once our RAW images have been exported from Lightroom, it’s time to open them in Photoshop and create a stunning panoramic aspen forest.

Artistic Aspens on Location

Deep in the aspen forest, we experiment with a creative technique that turns trees into paintings.

Lightroom | Artistic Aspen RAW Image Development

In this lesson we use Lightroom’s powerful RAW editing capabilities to create surrealistic images from our motion blur captures in the forest.

Photoshop Combining
Artistic Aspen Images into a Composite 

With our freshly produced images from Lightroom, we create a surrealistic new image that looks like an abstract painting.

Aspen Reflections Shooting on Location

In our travels, we stumble across a beautiful reflecting pond surrounded by colorful aspen trees. The still waters give us a perfect mirror image filled with the full spectrum of amazing fall colors.

Lightroom | Aspen Reflections

After capturing our reflections images, we use Lightroom’s development module to edit our colorful new photos.

Photoshop | Aspen Reflections

Now that our reflection images have been exported from Lightroom, it’s time to build out a beautiful panoramic image in Photoshop. We will also learn to patch up unwanted eye-sores in our scene.

Photo Shoot at the Waterfall

In this lesson we discover a beautiful cascade surrounded by fall colors. Shooting waterfalls takes careful effort, and we use a series of special techniques for success.

Waterfall Development in Lightroom

In this episode we dive into Lightroom to perform some color toning on our little waterfall scene. We will use the development module to make some creative local edits.

Photoshop
Painting Leaves onto a Dead Tree

In this episode we learn how to paint leaves onto a bare tree! We will capture a set of aspen leaves from a completely different location and ad them into our waterfall scene to help balance our composition.

Roadside Photography
Best Practices for Shooting on Location

In this episode we take a tour of Colorado’s winding country roads. There are a lot of great landscape to be found from the roadside. We will discuss best practices for both safety, and winning compositions.

Roadside Photography Sky Replacement

We’ve all been there: you shoot a beautiful landscape, but the sky it just not cooperating. In this episode, we’ll start with a gloomy, overcast scene and paint in a beautiful blue sky with silky clouds.

On Location at the Old Mill

For the next part of our fall colors journey, we travel half way across the nation, trading our snowy Colorado peaks for the rolling mountains of West Virginia. Here, we discover a whole new version of autumn. Gone are the monochromatic golden forests of the San Juan Range, and in their place, a sprawling palette of green, orange, yellow and red.

Photoshop
Adding Trees to your Scene

In this episode, we jump into Photoshop and do some major reconstructive surgery on our scene. As we discovered from our live shoot, there is a huge compositional gap in the trees. Fortunately, we can tune up our composition with some clever editing by adding extra forest to our location.

Removing People from your Picture

In this lesson, we launch into photoshop and do some creative editing to remove people from our landscape image. It’s more than just cloning. . . If you’ve ever had people wander into your frame, it’s not the end of the world. We can save our images from the dreaded tourists!

Shooting Fall Colors in Your Own Home Town

So maybe you won’t be taking a dedicated fall colors photography trip this year. . . that’s okay, because chances are good that you might just have some really nice fall colors in your own home town. In this episode we examine a series of urban locations which present beautiful fall color photography opportunities right in the middle of the city.

Perfecting our Image in Photoshop

In this episode we use Photoshop to remove houses and telephone lines from our yellow tree. We will take this image from mediocre to spectacular with a few simple edits.