Outdoor Photography How To

Remember last July 4 while watching the Independence Day festivities, and you thought to yourself, "I wish I had taken time to figure out how to photograph fireworks because I really could make some great images tonight?" That turns out to be a common refrain, so we're go to help you prepare for next week in advance.

What if an experienced pro told you that one simple shooting technique can instantly improve every image you capture in the great outdoors? This may sound implausible, at least until you watch the following video from the Gary W YouTube channel.

Let’s say you open an image on the computer, the focus is perfect, you nailed the exposure, and composition is fine. But wait: the colors look awful. So you trash it, right? Not so fast.

Sometimes the light just does not cooperate when you’re shooting photos. There are, of course, many ways to fix dark or unbalanced lighting in an image during post-processing but some methods work better than others.

If you've been following our image-processing tutorials you likely understand that this task often comprises a number of small, simple enhancements. But when taken as a whole, these seemingly minor adjustments can have a huge effect on the look of your work.

It’s impossible to capture great images if your photos are consistently unsharp. There are several fixable issues that can result in soft photos, from faulty technique, incorrect camera settings, gear malfunction and more.

So you sit down behind the computer, open what you thought was a great shot, and the image quality is unexpectedly really bad. Time to move it to the trash and try again, right? Well, not so fast.