STEP BY STEP / Essential edits for landscapes

1 Crop and straighten

If your in-camera framing is perfect, well done – you can skip this step. But more often than not, a crop might be necessary. Import the image into Lightroom, then head to the Develop module and grab the Crop tool. Drag the crop box and rotate, if necessary, to fix wonky horizons.

2 Correct lens flaws

Colour fringing may occur where the bright sky meets dark land. Here there’s a green/magenta fringe. To fix it, head to the Lens Correction panel in Lightroom’s Develop module, click Profile, then tick Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections.

3 Retouch marks

When shooting at the narrower apertures often used for landscapes, any sensor marks are more obvious. Grab the Spot Removal tool and tick Visualize Spots. Paint over any marks, then manually move the source point if you need to. Remove other small distractions, too.

4 Enhance tones

Head to the tonal sliders in the Basic panel. Hold Alt and drag the white and black point sliders. Using Alt means you can see clipped pixels. In general, drag to a point just before clipped pixels appear. If the sky is too bright, lower the Highlights slider, and tweak Clarity and Vibrance.

5 Selective tweaks

Grab the Adjustment brush from the toolbar and paint roughly over dark areas, such as rocks. Next, increase Exposure and Shadows to lift the area. Go to the Range Mask controls and set Luminance, then hold Alt and drag the white point inwards to restrict the effect to the rocks.

6 Sharpening and noise

If you want to make any other local adjustments (we lightened the central rock), hit N and start painting again. Finally, head to the Detail panel. Increase the Sharpening Amount to around 120, then hold Alt and drag the Masking slider to restrict sharpening to the fine details.