Photoshop How To

If you want to improve your composition skills when shooting landscape photos, there is one Lightroom tool that can massively help, according to photographer Mark Denney. And if you're not using it already, you're really missing out.

"How many times have you been on location and captured an image that you're super happy with only to get home and suddenly wish you had composed your photo a bit differently?" Denney asks. "This happens to me all the time, but thankfully we have access to a very powerful tool called the Crop Tool. This handy little gadget not only allows you to remove unwanted distractions from the edges of your landscape photos, but it also provides you with a second opportunity to recompose your image."

Watch Denney's video below where he explains the benefits of using the Crop Tool in Lightroom.

"Rarely do I ever get a composition perfect while on location," he admits. "I usually end up having to crop just about every one of my images. And, to take it a step further, Lightroom has something called Crop Grid Overlays that can help you determine a much more refined and focused composition."

In the tutorial below, Denney reviews the five Crop Grid Overlay that he uses "all the time," when editing his landscape photos in Lightroom.

"These overlays are a great way to spark a bit of compositional creativity when the time comes to crop your landscape photos," he notes. "For years the only thing I used the crop tool for was to clean up the edges of my images, which is fine, but there is certainly a lot more this could be used for."

Watch the tutorial below and then go visit and subscribe to Denney's helpful YouTube channel.