Software How To

There’s nothing more distracting that a beautiful photo with distorted vertical or horizon lines, or a crooked horizon. Fortunately, there’s a simple method for straightening everything out during the editing process in Photoshop or Lightroom.

One challenge with all forms of outdoor photography is that we're always at the mercy of the weather and prevailing lighting conditions. That fact is particularly evident when you wake up on a nice day, pack your gear, and travel to a favorite location—only to confront a pretty scene with a rather boring sky.

Outdoor photographers often encounter lighting situations with such a wide range of tones that it’s difficult or impossible to capture a properly exposed image in just one shot. Under such conditions, if you expose for the highlights, shadows are crushed. Conversely, if you expose for the shadows, highlights are blown out.

Even if your landscape photo has a lot of things going for it, an overcast or flat sky can make the image look dull. Fortunately, there are a few tricks you can do in Lightroom to make a boring sky in a landscape photo go from drab to fab in no time.

When shooting portraits, nature, or other types of outdoor images, one of the best ways to accentuate a key foreground subject is to create shallow depth of field with an out-of-focus background. You can often do that in the camera by selecting the proper focal length and aperture setting, and positioning your subject close to the camera.

Most of you know that processing b&w images requires a much different approach than dealing with color, and in both cases there are a number of ways to achieve optimum results.