Photoshop How To

The tutorial below is short, sweet, and easy, but it will pay big dividends—as you’ll learn a simple Lightroom maintenance trick that will prevent against inconvenient glitches when editing images in the future.

There are a bunch of new features in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) that make editing images faster and easier than ever. The video below demonstrates how to use one of these powerful tools to vastly improve your results.

What’s the first thing you do after opening an image in Photoshop to begin the editing process? For many photographers it’s messing with the Shadow/Highlight sliders to arrive at what you consider a good exposure.

We recently featured a tutorial demonstrating how to create jaw-dropping landscape photos with Lightroom’s oft-ignored Calibration tool. That lesson got a lot of attention, and we have an equally great one for you below.

Sometimes the photos we capture don’t appear as vibrant as they did through the viewfinder. That could be because of flat light, incorrect exposure settings, or a passing cloud blocking the sun.

In basic terms, Luminosity masks are selections based upon the brightness (or darkness) of various portions of a scene. As you’ll see in the quick tutorial below, they enable you to discretely select the bright, dark, or midtone pixels in an image and then make whatever adjustments you desire.

As the great Ansel Adams once said, “Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationship.” And that holds true whether you’re working with film in the darkroom or editing digital images on the computer.