Create The Perfect Glow For Your Landscape Photos - ON1 Photo RAW 2021
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The Glow filter in ON1 Effects adds a diffused, soft look to your photos. It can bring a bright airy glow for portraits. For landscape photographers like me, a richer, darker glow adds ambiance and mood to my images. For landscapes, there is one important adjustment to make for natural looking glows. I’ll explain it in this article. First, let’s review the controls for the Glow Filter.
The Glow Filter In ON1 Effects
The Glow filter has three controls to shape and craft the look.
Amount: The overall strength of the glow
Halo: Control the diffusion or “spread” of the glow
Mode: Set the blending mode, or how the glow interacts and fuses with your image
The Amount control is intuitive. Halo needs a little more explaining. A good analogy is a street lamp in the fog. The bulb in the lamp is the light source, and around the lamp is a halo of light. The halo diffuses and fades the farther away from the light source it gets. Think of the Halo slider in the Glow filter as controlling the “reach” or “spread” of the halo. Larger numbers let the diffused light bleed farther from its point of origin. The Mode is a subset of the blending modes available for all ON1 filters via the gear menu. The modes that work well with Glow are readily available in the Mode popup menu.
A good way to begin crafting your look is to open the styles More menu and hover over the built-in looks. A preview of the look is given. Some of these looks can be strong. Remember though, you do not have to take a style as-is. The style is your starting point and you can (and should!) customize it from there. For my landscape scenes, I like Deep Forest, Radiance Glow, and Rich Glow as starting points. The Hollywood Glow is useful for portraits. There is also the ever popular Orton Clean style to mimic the Orton Look, and it’s stronger cousin, Orton Hears a Who. You can also hover over the various Mode choices to audition them. Although, often times the Mode set by the style is the best match for the style.
After selecting a style, adjust the Amount and Halo sliders to best suit your image. In my example photo, I like the richness and warmth added to the yellow grasses, although I find the treatment of the dark greens of the scrub brush and trees too strong. That brings me to the one important adjustment to make for landscape glows.
The Glow filter in ON1 Photo RAW
Select one of the built-in Glow styles as the starting point to crafting your signature glow look.
Dark Things Don’t Glow!
Remember that street lamp analogy I was using to explain the Halo slider? Well, there’s another lesson to be had in that example. It’s the bright things, the objects that emit and reflect light, that glow. Dark things don’t glow.
So … with my landscape images, there is one adjustment I always make. I add a luminosity mask. By default, a luminosity mask will remove the glow from the darker areas of a scene and keep it on the brighter areas. Just like in nature, the bright things will glow and the dark things won’t. The luminosity mask creates an intricate balance and blend of the glow look across a scene - and it’s with the click of the button.
The recipe is simple:
Add a Glow filter and adjust it as you like
Open the masking area
Click the Lumen button
Lower the Density slider to taste
The Density slider is like a volume button for the luminosity mask. Dialing it down some means some amount of glow is added universally across the photo. Adjusting Density helps to smooth the glow look for the scene overall. And, artistically speaking, sometimes a bit of glow in the darker areas just feels nice.
Adjusting a Glow filter in ON1 Effects with a luminosity mask creates a natural looking glow for landscape photos.
Express Yourself
Of course, you can create other surreal or impressionistic look with the Glow filter. Where I choose to create glows that err on the side of realism, you don’t have to do that. Experiment with the Amount and Halo sliders and try more of the blending modes in the gear menu. If you like a painterly look or other-worldly vibe for your imagery - go for it. Have fun with the Glow filter.
Soft Hills Of Santa Ysabel
Contact Scott to commission a print or license this image.
