In landscape photography, we often compose our scenes with the sun or moon off camera. Side lighting can accentuate textures and create more contrast. Sometimes the off-camera light sources can’t reach into all the areas of a the frame we want. It could also just be a little weaker than we’d like. I’ll show you a simple technique - two of them actually - for accentuating the side lighting sources in our photos.

You need two things for this technique: a masking tool and a range mask. Lightroom has both, and other tools like ON1 Photo RAW have similar capabilities. I’ll show Lightroom examples in this article. The steps translate easily enough to other photo editors.

Prep Work - Add A Range Mask

The first step is to use a masking tool and cover the area you want to add accent light into. In this photo of La Jolla, California, the sun is setting off to camera right. The sky and some of the Midground is picking up hints of the late afternoon warm sunlight, but most of the foreground remans cool. I added a graduated filter to the scene, dragging upward from the midground and angled it slightly.

Next, open the Range Mask area and choose Luminance. Adjusting the range can downplay the extra light on the shadow areas. This keeps the shadows less affected by any adjustments made. For my scene, I chose to bias the mask to affect the midtones and highlights.

You’ll also notice the sky on the right side is affected by the mask. For areas that you do not want affected, reach for the Brush portion of the graduated filter and use the Erase mode to paint them away. I suggest using a brush with a moderate Flow and wide Feather to create a gentle fade so your accent blends well with the natural lighting in the scene.

Technique 1 - The Temperature Slider

Once you have the range mask in place, reach for the Temperature slider. For sunlight, increase the temperature to addd warmth to your photo. In my example, the crests of the wave and the other natural highlights get a kiss of warmth. For a moonlit scene, a cooler temperature might be in order. The goal here is to supplement the temperature of light that’s lacking in your photo.

If your image needs a different tone of light, something that the Temperature slider cannot provide, read on! The second technique is for you.

Technique 2 - Adding A Color Tint

A second technique is to use add a color tint. In the lower right corner of Lightroom’s masking tools is a color swatch. Open it and select any color in the rainbow. I prefer to use tones with a lower saturation, to add a hint of the color, an accent. In this photo, I chose a moderate orange tone, one that closely matches the tones in the clouds. The color tints happen live, so it is easy to experiment and fine tune the selection.

Unfortunately, Lightroom’s color picker doesn’t let you choose a color from the photo. If you need exact color matching, you can use other color picking applications on your computer (macOS has a Digital Color Meter) to sample the colors and then translate those to Lightroom’s color picker.

Don’t be shy about returning to the range mask and tweaking it as well. Photo editing is rarely a linear path. Also, don't forget about any post-mask cleanup. Recall in my scene, the gradient mask affected the sky too much. I used the erase brush to remove some of the color adjustment from the sky to avoid doubling-down on the orange color cast in the sky.

There you go! For your next photo where the off-camera light doesn’t quite reach all the areas of your scene, you now know how to supplement it with masking tools, color tints, and range masks.