How to make a landscape photo look like a painting?

Saturday 14 December 2019, 13:31 by Leen Koper | 9,440 views | 12 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

This afternoon I saw a scene that reminded me of the work of landscape painters from the mid-19th century, such as Willem Roelofs.

But when I got home, it was terribly difficult to achieve the right tone. I spent more than two hours working on it in Photoshop. In this article, I describe the steps I took.

Cows

Sunday, 8 December, everything came together. I have often photographed at the Maire, a closed-off nature reserve near Oosterland on Schouwen-Duiveland, where there are also a number of cows. But those cows roam across the whole area, never in the place where you want them for a good photo.

But finally I saw them, from my car, walking five hundred metres away from me, exactly in the place where I wanted them.

I quickly put the 100-300mm (200-600mm on full frame) on my Panasonic GX80. It was quite far from the place I could get to, so I hurried to a position where I could capture both a watercourse and the cattle in the photo.

It was quite stormy and the sun was shining brightly, so once I arrived, it was difficult to keep the camera steady by hand in the strong, continuous wind.

I decided to take quite a few shots, making sure that the trees in the distance were fully in the frame at the top. My tripods were in the car, because they were too heavy to quickly carry one along.

Post-processing

Once I got home, it turned out that there were still a few shots I could do something with. RAW processing in Adobe Photoshop Elements set to automatic, plus a few small corrections, mainly to the exposure, where Adobe usually has a different opinion.

The next task was creating a square image, all in Photoshop Elements. To do that, I enlarged the canvas at the top. I then made the blue sky considerably lighter using Nik Viveza, and removed it completely in a second pass.

Replacing the sky

I then searched my stock of “skies” for a suitable photo of a sky with a little more character than the even blue sky in the original photo, and made it considerably lighter towards the bottom using the eraser.

I placed this sky on the top part of the canvas and carefully moved it until it fitted exactly. I adjusted the brightness and finally made the whole thing into a layer. The colour saturation was then reduced slightly, by about 25 percent.

It sounds rather involved, but it is all fairly simple, especially if you already know what you are aiming for. The most difficult part was finding a tone for the entire image. I kept trying different colours until it eventually looked like a painting from around a century and a half ago in terms of its tone.

I eventually spent about two hours on that. One colour over it, then another. After taking a step back, it turned out that one still was not quite the right one, so I tried another tone, and carried on like that. Over and over again, until it finally looked right. And then, of course, you have to correct the brightness slightly again…

Returning regularly

This shot was no coincidence. It is a matter of returning to the same place regularly and absorbing the landscape until you learn its possibilities and limitations. Simply visiting somewhere for the first time usually produces little of photographic quality. Only after spending more time there do you start to see what is essential and what is not.

In hindsight, although that is easy to say afterwards, I was introduced to Luminar on Monday. That would have made it much easier to fit the sky in during the intermediate stage. But that was only a day after I had published this photo.

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