Outdoor Photography How To

Cropping is a controversial topic when it comes to landscape photography but it's also a misunderstood one. Whether to crop or not to crop during post-shoot editing for landscape photos is really a matter of preference but there are a few mistakes you want to avoid.

Beginning Lightroom and Photoshop users tend to become so enamored with all the transformative tools that they often go overboard with post-processing effects, which is a sure way to ruin an otherwise nice shot. As you'll see in this tutorial from instructor Johny Spencer, there are six warning signs that your edits are overcooked.

Sooner or later we all fall into a rut and run out of fresh ideas. This tutorial will definitely get your creative juices flowing again the next time this happens to you, with what one pro calls "a totally underrated landscape photography editing trick."

This eye-opening tutorial begins with a provocative question: "Have you ever found yourself, camera in hand in hand, staring at some incredible lighting hitting a scene, only to waste so much time trying to configure your settings that you miss the light altogether?" Unfortunately this dilemma is rather common, but we're going to make it a thing of the past in video below.

But here's the rub: When we turn to post processing to rehabilitate a problem image, here too there are several preventable mistakes that compromise the enhancements you make. This eight minute video from instructor Jalen Oban identifies nine of the most common errors made by Lightroom users, and then he demonstrates a better way.

Whether you process images in Lightroom, Photoshop, or another full-featured editor, it's difficult not to get carried away by all the capabilities available. But sometimes you'll achieve much better results by restraining yourself and taking a subtle approach so that you don't ruin photos by giving them an "over-cooked" look.

This post-processing tutorial explores some of the most useful (and underutilized) sliders in both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. If you're in the habit of skipping over Lightroom's Classic's Basic panel, or Lightroom's Light and Color panels in search of more advanced tools you'll want to pay close attention to this tutorial with pro Forest Chaput de Saintonge.