How I composed, shot and edited: The old mill

With the Covid-19 Pandemic going on, it’s not so easy and probably not the best idea to travel to other countries.

So I spent a week in Styria, the green county of Austria, and chose a remote location with just a few people.

During one of the hikes along a small creek, I suddenly spotted something about 80 feet from the marked trail. Being curious by design, I left the trail and discovered an abandoned, old, mill. Later it turned out, that this mill was almost a century old.

In this iPhone photo editing tutorial I’ll outline the steps I took to compose, shoot and edit the photo of the old mill in Styria.

How I composed the frame

After I stomping through the high grass and the muddy ground, I reached the front of the old mill.

First, I tried a symmetrical composition with the edge of the two walls in the middle of the frame. The problem with that composition was that the window of the front would hardly be visible.

So I chose a classic rule-of-thirds composition and placed the edge of the two walls on the left line of the grid. This composition made the window more visible.

Additionally, the two trees provided natural framing for the main subject.

How I shot the photo of the old mill

As I wan’t hiking alone, I took a quick snapshot of the mill using the built in camera app. Maybe I’ve mentioned it a few times, but the shutter release button on the Apple smart battery case is just perfect for that. Slightly tap it and the built in camera app launches. Press it to take the photo.

I hope that Apple will allow other Camera Apps to use the shutter release button some day, too.

How I edited the photo of the old mill

For reference, here’s the unedited photo again

Looking at the photo, I wanted to fix a few things:

1. I wanted more contrast between the building and the plants surrounding it
2. I wanted the rocks of the mill to be more greyish instead of the slightly yellowish and greenish ting.
3. Finally, I wanted to increase the saturation of the plants.

I experimented a bit with contrast and a few other settings in Lightroom, but I couldn’t get the result I had in mind. Thanks to the versions feature in Lightroom Mobile, trying out different edits for a photo is really convenient.

So instead, I decided to use local adjustments to get the results I wanted. With local adjustments, you can apply any adjustments to only a selected part of your photo. Just use a brush to select an area and apply the adjustment. For all of the following adjustments, I used a brush with a slightly soft edge.

I applied the first local adjustment to the old mill. First, I used a brush with a little soft edge and painted over the rocks of the building. Next, I decreased the saturation of the selected area. The result is exactly the greyish look of the stones I had in mind.

Next, let’s deal with the green stuff using the same method. Again, I used a brush with a soft edge to select the plants. Then, in the colors adjustment group, I shifted the tint towards the greens, increase the saturation and slightly adjusted the hue

Finally, I made the trunks a bit darker by repeating the process: I selected the trunks and decreased the exposure a bit.

The last step was to minimally use some overall image adjustments. I increased the contrast a bit, brought down the highlights and decreased the black point minimally. I also added little amount of clarity. Finally, I sharpened the image with a mask of 100 to apply sharpening mainly to the edges.

And that’s it. Once again, here’s the final edit:

Be sure to check out all the other iPhone Photo Workflow Tutorials I’ve published in the blog or head to the list of recommended iPhone Photo Apps and iPhone Photo Accessories I rely on.