Enhance outdoor shots with toning and exposure blending

Discover how to enhance your outdoor photography with simple tricks for selective toning and exposure blending in Photoshop Elements

These days landscape photography isn’t just about the great outdoors, and the shoot is only half the process. If you want your landscapes to truly shine, you need to know how to bring out the best of them in post-processing.

Aside from the usual essential edits, when it comes to landscapes the fine art of dodging and burning plays a major role. In the traditional sense, ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’ a print would refer to the darkroom process of holding back light from certain areas of a print, while allowing more light to reach other areas of the lightsensitive paper. These days we use the terms more loosely to encompass various editing techniques for lightening and darkening parts of an image.

As a viewer, when we look at a photo our eyes are naturally drawn to the lighter areas first. So with subtle lightening and darkening we can take the eye on a journey around the frame. We can also pull out forms and textures, add drama to skies and de-emphasize distracting details. Photoshop Elements has all the tools we need – not only can we use the Dodge and Burn tools, we can also blend exposures, add selective contrast and more.

We’ll begin here by blending two exposures of our scene – one exposed for the foreground, the other for the sky. After this, we’ll make two distinct dodge and burn layers – one for general lightening and darkening, the other to pull out the textures of the rocks. Finally, we’ll boost contrast selectively across the frame.