Photoshop skills for Landscape Photographers should know

Our goal as landscape photographers should be to always try and get the best possible image in camera…the exposure, composition, sharpness and lighting. Trying to fix a bad landscape photo is frustrating and usually does not end well.  While capturing a great photograph straight out of the camera is a good habit to get into, processing can then take these great photos to the next level. I tell my workshop clients that Photoshop (or any other editing tool) should not be a crutch, but fine tuned photo editing is a basic necessity in digital photography.

Below, I have added my favorite Photoshop adjustments that I think every landscape photographer should master:

#1: Understanding the Histogram

The histogram is important both while taking the photograph as well as in editing.  It is a graph that shows the tonal range of your image. This will help you judge the exposure of your image, so that you will know if you have highlights or shadows with no detail. There is no such thing as the perfect histogram since different subjects will produce different results. One such example is if you photograph a silhouette of a tree. Your histogram will have peaks at each end and very little in the middle. I tend to expose for the highlights and edit for the shadows. This way my highlights are not blown out.

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  This is a nicely balanced histogram. There is not clipping at the highlights or in the shadows.

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  This histogram shows a underexposed image. The shadows are being clipped meaning that the shadows have no detail.

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  This histogram represents an over-exposed image where the highlights are blown out. Blown out highlights can not be recovered in editing.

#2: Cropping and Leveling

The crop and leveling tool is one of the first steps I take in my processing. If for some reason I did not get a level horizon in camera, I can easily fix this with Photoshop and then crop accordingly. Nothing is worse than working on an image, adding a vignette and then noticing it has a crooked horizon. 

Photoshop crop tool to both crop or rotate an image for Landscape Photography

#3: Color Correction

Images right out of the camera may not evoke the same feelings you had while taking the photograph. Even if your camera is custom or auto white balanced, you can utilize custom white balance within photoshop to create the look you want from a warm tone to a cool tone photograph.

#4: Adjustment Layers

With Adjustment Layers you can make non-destructive edits to your image without affecting original image pixels. This allows you greater control over your edits. And then if you are not happy with the adjustments you made, you can easily delete or hide that layer. Since each layer contains data, you can determine how much of that data is visible in the final image with the use of blending modes or individual layer opacity.

#5: Brightness and Contrast

Brightness and Contrast adjustments is a handy tool in fine tuning slight exposure flaws. It is important to be careful with these adjustments and not overdo it.

#6: Levels and Curves Adjustment in Photoshop

While the brightness and contrast apply to the global (whole) image, the curves and levels allow you to make more finely tuned adjustments. This option allows you to pick the exact black, white and grey points in the image and adjust them.  The Curves panel is a bit harder to perfect, but once you do, you may end up liking it better that using just the levels adjustment.  

Photoshop Curves Adjustment for Landscape Photography

#6: Saturation and Hue

Saturation is an adjustment that can really take your image from good to bad. In the control panel, you can make adjustments to different colors independently of each other. This can result in a more natural effect then if you use the Master selection which controls all the colors at once. 

#7: Color Balance

Color Balance adjustments help to slightly tweak the colors in a selected portion of the image. It is different from the other adjustments in that you can make small adjustments to the various tones in the shadows, midtones or highlights. This comes in handy when you have color shifts due to the color of the light at a particular time of day or if you forgot to change your custom white balance in the camera. 

#8: Sharpening

This is one of those Photoshop techniques where less is more. Too much sharpening will cause artifacts within your final print that can ruin the entire image. Look closely for halo lines and pixelation.  So, I prefer to use a three part sharpening process. The first is Capture Sharpening. I do this to address the slight blurring that happens within digital camera captures. Next, during processing and editing, I do slight creative sharpening. I can be selective in sharpening just the areas that I want more detail within without affecting the whole image. And lastly, I apply sharpening right before printing so that I can customize the amount based on the resize and/or the medium I am printing onto.

These are skills that every photographer should know. Luckily as photographers, we develop our own workflow for the style we want to create, so how you use these are up to you.  You may find that you will use some more than others. And all can be done in pretty much any other editing software you chose to use.

About Author Christine Hauber

The current that underlies Christine Hauber's work is the concept of serenity in a world of chaos. With 25 years of professional photography experience, she continues to be attracted to the simplicity of the minimal and thus makes every effort to be a faithful visual recorder of the world around her. She wishes for her images to distill scenes ranging from the ephemeral to the eternal, from the abstruse to the symbolic. As a dedicated artist, she strives constantly to explore and expand her definition of the splendor and mysterious in life and nature. Her images have an ethereal and enduring quality.

Christine's work is published in various books, magazines and websites and has been printed and hangs in homes and offices worldwide. She teaches private photography workshops worldwide focusing on the needs of each unique client.

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