Are you making the most of your landscape shots? Sometimes, even with the best gear, we don’t always capture the scene as well as we could.
Coming to you from Brian Matiash, this insightful video offers a detailed look at the process of improving a landscape shot from start to finish. Matiash walks through his decisions at the location and how they translate into his editing workflow. He starts by explaining the limitations of his camera setup, including the Sony a7R Mark III and a 12-24mm lens, and how those choices affected his composition. The lens’s ultra-wide angle gave him plenty of space to work with, but even then, Matiash wasn’t fully satisfied. He chose to stitch together multiple images to create a panorama, a decision that allowed him to include more of the scene without sacrificing quality.
The video shows how using a panoramic approach can open up creative possibilities, especially when you feel limited by your lens. By stitching six vertical images, Matiash captured more of the sky, trees, and waterfall than he could have with a single shot. This technique not only improves the composition but also adds depth and interest to the final image. He also demonstrates the importance of correcting lens distortions and chromatic aberrations, which can significantly affect the overall quality of the image, especially when working with wide-angle lenses.
Matiash takes you through the detailed steps of editing the stitched panorama in Lightroom. He covers crucial adjustments like setting the white balance, applying lens corrections, and selecting an Adobe landscape profile to create a strong base for the edit. These small adjustments set the foundation for more creative edits, like adding contrast and fine-tuning color saturation. The video also introduces useful tools, such as Lightroom's masking features, to selectively edit parts of the image. For example, boosting the brightness of the moving water and enhancing the greens in the foreground adds a level of finesse that brings the image to life.
Lightroom’s panorama merge feature gets significant attention in the video, where Matiash points out how different projections can dramatically affect the look of a panoramic photo. He also goes into options like boundary warp and content-aware fill, showing how these tools can handle areas that didn’t stitch together cleanly. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Matiash.
And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, "Photographing the World: Japan With Elia Locardi!"
