Outdoor Photography How To

This quick tutorial with instructor Chris Baitson will get your creative juices flowing by illustrating how to give landscape photos a fine-art look by removing the horizon line. Once you understand this simple Lightroom trick you can go back and give an artistic boost to images you've edited in the past.

Baitson is a notable landscape photographer based in the East Yorkshire region of England who, interestingly, prefers shooting with micro four thirds (MFT) cameras. Today's inspirational episode demonstrates how easy it is to change the mood and impact of an image with a few quick adjustments in Lightroom.

Baitson's sample image, straight out the camera, depicts an iconic rock formation just off the coast of Scotland. The shot isn't particularly compelling until he makes the horizon line disappear. The impact is further enhanced by converting the shot to b&w, and Baitson demonstrates the step-by-step process to accomplish both tasks with ease.

With the b&w conversion complete there's a couple important preliminary steps: One is to straighten the horizon, and the other employs AI to remove two small distractions in the lower corners of the frame. Baitson also uses masks to accentuate the key subject and provide a minimalist appearance to the overall scene that includes plenty of negative space.

Now it's time to say goodbye to the horizon line and doing so is far easier than you may think. The first step is grabbing a large Radial filter. Baitson doesn't want to include the rock formation in the selection, so he chooses Subtract, Select Subject and now the hero of the scene is no longer defined within the mask.

Baitson now scrolls down to Clarity, Texture, and Dehaze and uses these tools to "smudge" the horizon line which is now all but gone, but additional refinements are required. To that end he returns to the Remove tool and draws a line over the remnants of the horizon. As you'll see, there are three options for completing this step.

A few more minor enhancements are all it takes to complete Baitson's artistic transformation. Check out the before/after examples and you'll be very impressed. Then head over to his instructional YouTube channel for more helpful shooting and editing how-to videos.

You'll also find some inspiration in the earlier tutorial we featured with another accomplished outdoor shooter who demonstrates several unconventional techniques for capturing unique landscape photographs with a wide-angle lens.