Landscape photography from the field

Camera Raw

How I Use Camera Raw to Rescue Underexposed Landscape RAWs (A Step-by-Step Breakdown)
Video Tutorials

How I Use Camera Raw to Rescue Underexposed Landscape RAWs (A Step-by-Step Breakdown)

There’s a specific kind of RAW file that sits in every landscape photographer’s catalog. It’s the one that looks nearly unusable on first glance - deeply shadowed, murky in the midtones, shot that way on purpose because the sky was on the edge of blowing out and you had no choice. I have hundreds of them. For years I treated files like that as near-losses, something to fix with a shrug and a heavy hand on the exposure slider.

Start With a Game Plan: How I Edit Sunrise and Sunset RAW Files in Camera Raw
Video Tutorials

Start With a Game Plan: How I Edit Sunrise and Sunset RAW Files in Camera Raw

There’s a particular kind of flat, lifeless RAW file that every landscape photographer knows. You’ve dragged yourself out of a warm bed at 4am, driven a dark road to a location you’ve been thinking about for weeks, and you caught the light. You know you caught it. But when you open that file on your screen, it looks like a mistake. The colors are muddy, the highlights are blown, and the whole thing feels like a betrayal.