Outdoor Photography How To

Curves is a very powerful and sometimes misunderstood ingredient for processing photos, and it’s not limited to Photoshop and Lightroom. In fact, just about any image-editing application you use likely includes a Curves tool.

Landscape photography is challenging enough, with ever-changing light, weather concerns, and complex scenes, that the last thing you want to do is to spoil your effort by making unnecessary mistakes. In the tutorial below you’ll learn how to confront errors that limit your chance of success.

As one of our favorite pros insists, “Lightroom’s histogram is one of the most important things to understand in photography.” If you’re new to this powerful tool, the beginners guide below from our friends at The Phlog Photography will get you up to speed in barely eight minutes.

One question I’m frequently asked is, “Are you a natural-light photographer or do you use flash?” All too often that query stems from a popular misconception that using supplemental light is too difficult or confusing for mere mortals. As you’ll see in the basic tutorial below, nothing could be further from the truth.

The photography essayist, critic, and historian A.D. Coleman once said that the biggest mistake photographers make was “thinking that what they’re experiencing is what they’re capturing in the photograph.”

Many landscape photographers never leave home without a polarizing filter, and consider this simple accessory almost mandatory for everything they do. But as you see in the eye-opening tutorial below, one pro says polarizers may detract from an image in certain situations—depending on the specific scene at hand and the mood you want to create.

Sooner or later all photographers hit the doldrums, and completely run out of fresh ideas. The next time that happens to you, try shooting abstract images using the tips and tricks you’ll learn in the tutorial below.