Photo How To

If you're continually amazed by how pros achieve such spectacular results when processing images  in Lightroom, we're going to let you in on a little secret: Sometimes these remarkable enhancements are less about advanced skills than knowing the best tool to use for the task at hand.

Experienced Photoshop and Lightroom users understand the difference between enhancing images in a realistic way and ruining an otherwise nice shot by creating an "overcooked" effect. This quick tutorial from the Yorkshire Photo Walks YouTube channel explains where to draw the line.

Bright sun-filled days are great for a trips to the beach but when it comes to outdoor photography, well, not so much. These high-contrast situations make it very difficult to capture impressive images, whether you're shooting nature scenes, landscapes, sports photos, or even environmental portraits without supplemental light.

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.

Let's say you capture a nice image, and you want to bring out a bit more detail during the editing process. It doesn't matter whether the photo is a portrait, macro shot, a landscape scene, or something else. What's your strategy?

We've all heard the blather from so-called "purists" who insist that images should be presented straight out of the camera without any post processing at all. Not only are we told to avoid adjusting exposure, color, sharpness and the like, but creative cropping is verboten as well.

A common practice among nature and wildlife photographers is to shoot at maximum aperture to separate the primary subject from a soft out-of-focus background. This tutorial, however, explains when this can be a bad habit and actually spoil an otherwise great image.