Photoshop How To

Color grading may seem like a daunting task, especially if you're an inexperienced Lightroom user. But it's important to achieve accurate tones because unnatural colors can quickly kill an otherwise great shot.

Today's tutorial from nature photographer Jan Wegener falls into the category of "I wished I had known about all this sooner." But now is better than never—especially when you can take advantages of the mistakes made early on by an accomplished pro so you don't make them yourself.

Adobe's new Adaptive Color Profile is an amazing AI-based tool that analyses an image and adjusts tones and colors to make them "look just right." The experts at Adobe put it like this: "The effect is as if the AI has changed exposure, shadows, highlights, Color Mixer, Curves, and other key controls for you."

Lightroom is so full of powerful tools and capabilities that it's understandable when inexperienced users overlook some very powerful features that not only provide more effective  results but can streamline their post-processing workflow. Today's Lightroom Classic tutorial from instructor Brian Matiash falls into the latter category and it's all about what you can accomplish in Lightroom's Versions panel.

Bird photography is both fun and accessible because it's a genre that anyone than pursue at a nearby park, wildlife refuge, or even in the comfort of their own backyard. Even newbies can get in on the action with dynamic results, as you'll see in this quick tutorial from the popular Flying Parrot instructional YouTube channel.

Time blending is one of the most powerful post-processing techniques for making sense out of complicated landscape scenes with a wide range brightness values throughout the frame. Today's instructor Austin James Jackson explains the concept like this: "Capturing stunning wide-angle scenes can be easy when you're willing to do a time blend," and this is what you'll learn how to do in the next 15 minutes.

Photoshop's Gradient tools serve a wide variety of purposes for bringing outdoor photos to life by gradually blending colors or opacity. There are various options available for better colors, smoothing transitions and applying creative effects. The rub is that it takes a bit of time to get the adjustments just right.