Video: Improving your landscape photos in Adobe Lightroom
posted Sunday, April 3, 2022 at 5:00 PM EDT
For most digital photographers, capturing a nice landscape image is only a part of the overall photographic process. After going out in the field and getting your image, it's then time to open your RAW files up in your favorite photo editor and bring your creative vision to life. Photographer Nigel Danson's latest video should prove very helpful in improving your photography after the initial shot is captured. In the video below, Danson edits photos with Adobe Lightroom Classic, one of the most popular photo editing apps. Danson discusses luminosity, correcting wide-angle lens distortion and much more. He also opens Photoshop to perform some specialized editing. Unlike many of Danson's other editing videos, he's editing photos that viewers submitted rather than his own images.
Let's start with luminosity. The first image Danson works on is very dark because the photographer, Tom Poundall, needed to protect the highlights in the sky at the expense of the exposure in the rest of the scene. Fortunately, if you shoot RAW, you can recover many shadow details in Lightroom. Nearly every modern digital camera offers impressive dynamic range and lets you pull out a lot of shadow/highlight detail. Danson starts by balancing the image by reducing its overall contrast and bringing out some shadow detail. Lightroom Classic has many different masking tools, such as a brush, luminosity masks, and gradients, that allow you to make precise, selective edits to specific parts of a photo. You can use these tools to bring out shadow detail and brighten the image without increasing the highlights. Poundall's image was really nice straight from the camera, and with some careful selective editing, the brilliant composition is nicely accentuated.
The second photo comes from Cliff Sun. It's a nice wide-angle landscape image that needs just a bit of touching up with distortion. Even high-quality wide-angle lenses can require lens corrections during editing. Many lenses have corresponding built-in lens correction profiles in Lightroom and Photoshop. If those profiles either don't exist or don't work, there are also manual correction tools you can use to fix distortion quickly and easily. Danson takes it a step further in Adobe Photoshop to perform additional corrections using the warp tool. It's a useful tool, but it requires a subtle touch.
To see the rest of the featured images, watch the full video above. Danson discusses compositional positioning, being careful of objects near the edge of the frame, converting images to black and white, showing how a simple crop can dramatically change a photo, and using selective editing techniques to guide the viewer's eye through the frame.
To see more of Nigel Danson's landscape photography videos, subscribe to his YouTube channel. You can see more of his images by visiting his website and following him on Instagram.
(Via Nigel Danson)