Tutorial 2

Improve your landscape images with these essential edits

every shot requires its own tailor-made edits, but there are a few general edits that we can apply to most, if not all of our landscapes. The subject matter and the camera settings we tend to use for landscapes make some edits essential. So in this tutorial, we’ll go through some of the key edits you can make.

One such edit is lens correction. To some extent every lens we use will have flaws. With landscapes these flaws can be more noticeable because we often shoot with wide angles, and these tend to display greater fringing and barrel distortion. Luckily lens issues can be fixed in Lightroom or Camera Raw. To do this, we make use of the large database of lens profiles to automatically fix the problem.

We also tend to shoot landscapes with a narrow aperture, and this can bring a few more issues. With more of the scene in focus, the higher the chances of recording noticeable flaws. Any dust or marks on the sensor will be more obvious, especially if they appear in otherwise detail-less areas like a sky, and even more so if shooting into the sun. These are simple to fix – but it’s better to have a clean sensor in the first place!

Another eternal problem with landscapes is the question of how to balance land and sky. In this regard we can use a combination of tonal tools to pull detail out of the shadows and rescue it in the highlights, resulting in a balanced, detail-rich landscape.