The best way to get a good landscape photo is to go to the right place at the right time. However, sometimes, you can be there and still struggle to get a different photo than what was already there, or the weather just doesn’t cooperate, and that’s where the magic of editing comes in.
Coming to you from photographer and YouTuber Mark Denney is a guide on how to really get the most out of your landscape photos. While I always do basic global edits to everything I shoot, I rarely dive into the adjustment brushes to really change specific parts of a photo. Maybe in me is the photojournalist who prefers light hands, but that’s not the case with landscape photography.
Denney shows you how you can go crazy (with restraint) and not only really perfect the perfect sunrise with radial and linear gradient brushes, but also edit photos to appear light. the sun hits the image from a specific angle or direction.
There are also a lot of fairly new uses of Adobe’s dehaze slider these days as it’s popularized in Photoshop and Lightroom, and as a longtime user it’s hard for me to find a use case. works for it, but Denney shows a few perfect examples here. Likewise, I’m always counter-intuitive when adding noise or grain to an image, but Denney shows how powerful those settings can be for the look and feel of an image, when he compares it to doing for an image that looks more like a film and a little less like a digital photograph.
Some of the tools Denney uses in this video didn’t even exist a few years ago, and so this opens up the possibility of retouching old photos in new and exciting ways. If you’re like me and have a huge catalog of landscape photos that have been worn down for years on your hard drive, watch the video for the full story on these techniques and turning your images from -hum into something a little more interesting than that.
