It was noon at Heber Down, right in the middle of autumn. The leaves were gold, the path was covered in them, and the sun was sitting right behind my subject.
That is a beautiful problem to have. It is also a problem.
Shoot into the sun at noon and you get two things: a glowing forest, and a person in shadow. Your camera can expose for one or the other, not both. Expose for the leaves and he goes dark. Expose for him and the whole forest blows out to white.
Most people would turn him around, or wait for golden hour. I did neither. I kept the backlight, and I brought my own light to fill in the front.
One flash. That is the whole trick.
The light, and why it works
The sun, behind him. This is the backlight. It does two jobs. It puts a rim of light on his hair and shoulders, which separates him from the trees. And it makes the leaves glow, which is the whole reason to shoot here in autumn. I wanted that light. I just did not want it to be the only light.
The flash, in front. A Godox AD200 Pro, in a 36-inch softbox with a grid, placed in front of him, above him, at 45 degrees. Every part of that sentence matters.
Front, because the sun left his face in shadow, and the flash fills that shadow in.
Above, because light from above looks natural. It is where the sun comes from. It shapes his face and the jacket instead of flattening them.
45 degrees, because a light off to one side has direction. Put a flash straight in front of someone and the photo looks flat, like a passport photo. Move it to 45 degrees and suddenly there are shadows, and shadows are what make a face look three dimensional.
36-inch softbox, because a big light source makes soft light. A bare flash at noon is harsh. A big softbox wraps the light around him, and it is kind to skin and clothes.
Grid, because a grid narrows the light. Without it, the flash spills everywhere, washes out the forest behind him, and kills the separation between him and the background. With the grid, the light lands on him and mostly stops there. The forest stays dark and golden, and he pops out of it.
The lens, 105mm f/1.4. A long lens compresses the scene, and f/1.4 throws the background out of focus. That is why the trees melt into colour while he stays sharp. In a busy forest, that separation is everything.
The camera, Nikon Z6.
One more thing worth knowing. At noon, f/1.4 means a very fast shutter speed, and a normal flash cannot keep up with that. I used high speed sync, which lets the flash fire at that speed. The other option is an ND filter, to bring the shutter speed down. Either way, that is the part of the setup that makes the flash do real work.
The Lightroom edit,
step by step
The edit follows the same idea as the shoot: people first, place second. Keep the gold, but make sure the eye lands on him. Here are the exact numbers, in the order I did them.
1. Cleanup
Before I touch a single slider, I take the light stand out. The RAW frame has the softbox and the tripod in it, and there is no point perfecting the colour on a photo that still has a stand in the shot. Lightroom's Remove tool makes it easy, brush over the stand and it fills in the forest behind it. Cleanup first, always. Then the edit.
2. White balance and tone
Temp 5,144, Tint 0. Exposure +0.52, Contrast 0, Highlights -81, Shadows +77, Whites +11, Blacks -67. Texture +2, Clarity 0, Dehaze +24. Vibrance 0, Saturation 0.
Exposure goes up (+0.52) because the flash-lit subject and the bright background both need room. Highlights come down hard (-81) to hold detail in the sunlit leaves. Shadows come up a lot (+77) so the dark trousers, the bench and the tree trunks do not crush to black. Blacks go down (-67) to keep the deep end deep, so the image still has contrast. Dehaze (+24) cuts the haze and gives the forest definition. Temp 5,144 keeps it warm but honest, the cream jacket stays cream. Vibrance and Saturation stay at 0, the colour work happens in HSL, not here.
The tone curve is untouched, a straight line. The contrast comes from the Highlights, Shadows and Blacks moves, not from the curve.
3. Colour (HSL)
Hue: Yellow -35, everything else 0. Saturation: Orange -7, Yellow -55, Green -100, Aqua -14, Blue -14. Luminance: Orange +2, Yellow +3.
Yellow Hue -35 shifts the yellows toward orange, and that is what makes the forest that deep gold. Yellow Saturation -55 tames the yellow so it does not go neon. Green Saturation -100 takes the green out completely, the green leaves go muted so they do not fight the gold. That is the boldest move in the whole edit. Orange -7, Aqua -14 and Blue -14 quiet the rest, and Luminance Orange +2 and Yellow +3 lift the golds slightly.
4. Color grading
Shadows pushed toward blue. Midtones and Highlights neutral. Blending 60, Balance -1.
The blue in the shadows cools the dark areas and balances all that warm gold, so the image does not go one colour.
5. Calibration
Blue Primary Hue -12, Saturation -10. Red Primary and Green Primary at 0. Shadows Tint 0. Process Version 6.
This quiets the blues, the sky between the trees and the reflection in the sunglasses, so they do not compete with the gold.
6. Masks
Four of them, and this is where the photo really comes together. The global edit gets you most of the way there, but the masks are what make him pop out of the forest instead of sitting in it.
Subject mask: light up the subject. A Select Subject mask, just him and nothing else. Highlights +8, Whites +12, Texture +9. The flash already lit him, but this lifts him a little more. Brighter highlights and whites so the cream jacket and his face read clearly, and a touch more texture so the fabric does not go soft. The point is separation. He is the subject, so he gets the light and the detail, and the forest does not.
Invert subject mask: darken and soften the background. This is the background, everything that is not him. Exposure -0.12, Highlights -7, Shadows +21, Blacks -9, Texture -12, Clarity -6, Dehaze +2. A touch darker overall. Highlights pulled down so the bright leaves do not shout. Shadows lifted so the dark tree trunks do not crush to black. Then softer: less texture, less clarity, a little more dehaze. The forest is still there and still gold, but it stops competing with him.
Radial mask minus subject: soft and warm background. A radial gradient with the subject subtracted, so it only touches the background. Temp +18, Saturation +19, Exposure -0.03, Texture -25, Dehaze -7. The Temp and Saturation warm the forest up and make the gold richer. The Texture and Dehaze soften it and add a little haze, so the trees melt even more. Exposure -0.03 is barely anything, just a nudge to keep it from going too bright. This is the one that makes the background feel like autumn instead of just looking like it.
Radial mask minus subject: centre focus, adding vignette. Another radial gradient with the subject subtracted. Exposure -0.25, and that is all it needs. It darkens the edges of the frame and holds the eye on him in the middle. I did this with a mask instead of the vignette slider, because a radial gradient lets me place the falloff exactly where I want it. The vignette slider stays at 0.
7. Check the details
Zoom in on the sunglasses, the jacket, the skin. If something looks off, it is usually the white balance or the subject mask. Fix that, then export.
That is it. No preset, no fake sky, no over editing.
The philosophy first
1. The camera already did most of the work.
A good photo is made when I press the shutter, not when I open Lightroom. The light, the moment, the expression, the composition, that is the photo. In this one, the light did the heavy lifting before I ever touched a slider. The sun behind him gave me the rim on his hair and the glowing leaves. The flash in front gave me his face. That is the photo. Editing cannot rescue a boring frame, and it should not have to. My job in Lightroom is to finish what the camera started, not to invent something new. If an edit changes the photo into a different photo, I have gone too far.
2. The best edit is the one you don't notice.
There is a name for this among editors now: invisible retouching. The idea is simple. If the first thing you notice is the edit, the edit is too loud. A good edit is felt, not seen. You look at the photo and you feel the moment, you don't think about the sliders. That takes more skill than over-editing ever did, because over-editing is easy. Anybody can push a slider to 100. Knowing when to stop, and what not to touch at all, that is the craft.
3. Enhance what matters, quiet the rest.
Every photo has one thing that matters most. In this photo, it is him. The forest, the gold leaves, the path, all of it is there to support him, not to compete with him. So my whole edit is built around one question: does this make him stand out, or does it distract from him? If a slider helps him, it stays. If it makes the background louder, it goes.
This is what photographers mean by separation. A photo is flat, it has no real depth. So I create depth with three things: light, colour, and sharpness. And in this photo, the separation started before Lightroom, with the off-camera flash. The speedlight put the light on him, and only on him. The sun put the light on the forest. Two different lights doing two different jobs, and that is why he pops out of the trees. In the edit I just finish what the flash started: he gets brighter and sharper, the forest gets softer and quieter. Your eye goes where the light is, and it stays there. Nothing about that is a trick. It is how our eyes already work.
4. People stay people.
I do not smooth skin into plastic. I do not whiten eyes until they glow. I do not slim anybody or reshape anybody. His skin in this photo is exactly as it was. Pores, fine lines, a bit of unevenness, that is what makes a person believable. Clean up a temporary blemish if it distracts, sure. But the person stays the person. The flash lights him, it does not rebuild him.
5. Timeless beats trendy.
Editing styles come and go. A few years ago everything was dark and moody. Before that, everything was washed out and pastel. Right now, somebody is selling a preset that makes every photo look like a film still from 1974. Trends age fast, and a photo edited to a trend looks old within a couple of years. Honest colour and honest light do not age. I would rather your photos still feel right in twenty years than feel fashionable this month.
Client says
We had our photoshoot with Razeeb Chowdhury Photography, and honestly I don't even know where to start. When we sat down to go through the photos we were literally yelling at every single one. Not one bad shot in the whole set. We tried to pick favourites and couldn't, because the next photo kept changing our minds.
Razeeb has a real eye. He caught moments we didn't even know were happening and made us look like the best version of ourselves without anything feeling forced or posed. You can tell he genuinely cares about the work and puts thought into every frame. He's an artist, plain and simple.
What stood out just as much was who he is as a person. He's honest, kind, and patient, and he made us feel comfortable from the first minute. He even took a hard fall on the day and still pushed through to give us his all, which says everything about his character and how much he cares about the people he works with.
These are photos we'll keep forever. If you want someone talented who will actually treat you like people and not just another booking, book Razeeb. We'll be coming back for sure.
Abrar Hossain
toronto, Canada
Want to learn it properly?
I teach this the same way I do it, one on one, in 45 minutes, in person or online. We open your own photos in Lightroom and work through them together, step by step, until you can do it on your own. One class is $125 plus HST, or four classes for $400 plus HST.
Hope this helped. Now open Lightroom and try one mask.