Outdoor Photography How To

If you’re serious about landscape photography and want to blow a few minds, pull up a chair and watch the 15-minute tutorial below, as one of our favorite outdoor photographers demonstrates how to create absolutely amazing HDR panorama images in either Photoshop or Lightroom.

The term HDR stands for "high dynamic range" and describes a powerful method for capturing details in the lightest and darkest elements in a scene while maintaining accurate midtones. Some cameras (even compacts) offer a built-in function that captures multiple images of the same scene at slightly different exposures and automatically combines them into one balanced shot.

Lightroom's powerful Curves panel offers far more versatility than the limited global adjustments many photographers use to adjust the brightness and contrast of an image and balance out tonal values. These include selective enhancements for targeting and enhancing different areas within a scene.

Many photographers think of cropping as a simple and incidental task. But if you want to create images with maximum impact, the act of cropping an image requires careful and thoughtful techniques.

If you're a regular Shutterbug reader you know that we constantly preach the value of developing a unique photographic style, and this is true for beginners and advanced shooters alike. In the tutorial below from the Street View YouTube channel, you'll learn how to get started today.

If you always limit yourself to one specific genre of photography your editing workflow may be pretty well defined. But most shooters have a more eclectic approach to our craft, requiring different processing methods depending up the type of image at hand.

Most so-called "experts" capture images in the Raw file format because this approach provides far more control during post processing. Jpeg images, on the other hand, are a "lossy" compressed format that often results in image degradation that's particularly noticeable in areas with sharp edges and fine details.