Fixing a Wide Angle Landscape When 14mm Is All You Have

Shooting a landscape with only a 14mm lens can leave you stuck with too much foreground and not enough subject. When the light is right but the lens is wrong, the choices you make in editing decide whether the photo survives at all.

Coming to you from Gareth Evans Park Cameras, this practical video walks through a real edit using the Canon RF 14mm f/1.4 L VCM on a Canon EOS R6 Mark II. The starting frame is exactly what you would expect from an ultra-wide lens in a landscape that really wanted tighter framing. The foreground dominates, the horizon feels distant, and the sun pushes parts of the image too far. Instead of giving up on the file, the edit begins with exposure balance before any cropping happens. Highlights come down first, shadows come up just enough, and the white balance shifts warmer without turning the scene artificial. The tone stays grounded, with small moves that let you actually see what the file contains.

The crop becomes the biggest decision, and it is aggressive. A 16×9 frame pulls the hills closer and removes most of the empty foreground, relying on the resolution headroom to hold detail. Auto transform straightens the horizon without manual fiddling. From there, the edit shifts into Lightroom Classic masking, starting with a linear gradient that darkens the bottom of the frame to push attention upward. Radial masks lift exposure over the hills and soften haze to bring back atmosphere that got lost in the global adjustments. Another mask around the sun increases warmth and reduces clarity, shaping the light instead of trying to recover blown highlights that are already gone.

The video then moves into more selective shaping using brush masks with low flow, building contrast gradually instead of in one heavy pass. Some areas get brighter to guide the eye, while others are held back to keep depth in the landscape. An adaptive sky preset is tested, rejected in stronger versions, and then dialed back to a restrained sunrise look. Additional gradients darken the top of the sky to anchor the cloud structure. Color work stays subtle, nudging yellows toward orange, pulling back saturation where it creeps too far, and keeping greens from competing with the main light. A gentle tone curve adds contrast without crushing shadows, and haze control around the sun finishes the scene without turning it theatrical. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Evans.