Software How To

OK, be honest: How often have you skipped past the Color Calibration tool when processing images in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw (ACR)? If you’re like most photographers, the answer is something along the lines of “quite often.”

Unless you shoot in black-and-white, the effective use of color can make or break a photo. Having a good eye certainly helps, but a basic understanding of color theory can make all the difference.

Dealing with ever-changing light and maximizing depth of field are two of the biggest challenges when making landscape photographs. Tonal values often range from dark shadows to bright sunlit areas, and some scenes call for sharply rendered areas from foreground to background.

Earlier this week we featured an easy five-minute fix for poorly exposed photos using Layer Masks in Lightroom. But that simple task provided just a taste of what these powerful tools can do.

Unless you’re shooting in black and white, the effective use of color can make or break a photo. And that typically means striking a balance between tones that are vibrant and realistic.

Ask a bunch of experienced Lightroom users to name their most essential editing technique and most will respond with one word: "Masking." This is particularly true among landscape shooters who frequently encounter scenes with a wide range of tones that exceed the density range of their camera.

A few days ago we posted a tutorial for making simple cutouts of hair in portrait photos using a “futuristic” Photoshop tool. Today we’re taking things a bit further, with two tricks for making more difficult clip outs in Photoshop.