The best way to get a good landscape photo is to be at the right place at the right time. Sometimes, though, you can be there and still struggle to get a photo that's different from what's already out there or the weather isn't cooperating, and that's where the magic of editing comes in.
Coming to you from photographer and YouTuber Mark Denney is a tutorial on how to really pull the most out of your landscape photos. While I've always done basic global edits to everything I shoot, I've seldom delved into the adjustment brushes to truly change up specific parts of a photo. Perhaps it's the photojournalist in me that prefers a light hand, but that's not the case in landscape photography.
Denney shows you how you can go nuts (with restraint) and not only really perfect the perfect sunrises with linear and radial gradient brushes, but also edit the photos so that it appears that the light from the sun is coming at the photo from a specific angle or direction.
There's also copious use of Adobe's fairly new dehaze slider now that it's spread across Photoshop and Lightroom, and as a longtime user, it's been hard for me to find an effective use case for it, but Denney shows a few perfect examples here. Likewise, it's always been counterintuitive for me to add noise or grain to an image, but Denney shows just how much power those settings have over the look of an image, as he compares it to making an image look more like a film photo and a bit less like a digital photo.
Some of these tools that Denney uses in this video didn't even exist a few years ago, and so, this opens up the possibility of editing old photos in new and interesting ways. If you're like me and have a large back catalog of landscape photos that have been languishing for years on your hard drive, check out the video for the full story on these techniques and turn your images from ho-hum to something a bit more exciting than that.
