Landscape photography from the field

Photo Editing

Three Plugins That Do the Heavy Lifting After Lightroom Is Done
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Three Plugins That Do the Heavy Lifting After Lightroom Is Done

There’s a moment in post-processing that every landscape photographer knows. You’ve done everything right in Lightroom. White balance is dialed in, the tone curve feels honest to what you saw at the scene, and the shadows in the foreground are finally holding detail. And yet something is still missing. The image is technically correct but not quite finished. That gap is where a handful of well-chosen plugins earn their keep, and it’s something I’ve spent years figuring out through trial and error.

Keep It, Move It, or Kill It: The Element Removal Decision Every Landscape Photographer Faces
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Keep It, Move It, or Kill It: The Element Removal Decision Every Landscape Photographer Faces

There’s a particular kind of paralysis that hits me when I’m sitting at my editing desk at 5am, coffee going cold, staring at a frame I know is almost right. Something in the image is pulling at my eye. A stray branch in the lower left. A utility pole ghosting through a ridgeline. A farmhouse sitting right in the middle of an otherwise clean sweep of desert light. I’ve been shooting landscapes full-time for two decades and that moment still stops me cold: do I take it out, leave it alone, or try to move it somewhere less damaging?

What 30 Landscape Photos Taught Me About the Mistakes We All Keep Making
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What 30 Landscape Photos Taught Me About the Mistakes We All Keep Making

There’s a particular kind of clarity that comes from watching someone else’s work get reviewed. Your defenses drop. You’re not protecting anything. And suddenly the feedback lands differently than it ever does when it’s your own image on the screen. I’ve been shooting landscape and nature work for two decades, and I still find these critique sessions more instructive than most technical tutorials, because the problems that show up in other people’s photographs are almost always problems I’ve made myself, sometimes last week.

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

iPad Pro vs. Wacom Tablet for Landscape Photo Editing: What a Working Photographer Actually Thinks
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iPad Pro vs. Wacom Tablet for Landscape Photo Editing: What a Working Photographer Actually Thinks

There’s a particular kind of restlessness that sets in during editing season. You’ve done the hard part, the 4am wake-up, the frozen fingers, the three-mile hike to a ridgeline that may or may not deliver. Now you’re at your desk, and the work of translating what you felt out there into something a viewer can feel too begins. After twenty years of doing this, I still find that the tools I use for editing shape not just my efficiency, but my mood.

From 1,000 Raw Files to 8 Keepers: The Culling System That Changed How I Work
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From 1,000 Raw Files to 8 Keepers: The Culling System That Changed How I Work

Every time I come home from a shoot, the same quiet dread settles in. The boots are still muddy, the thermos is still cold, and sitting on my desk is an SD card with somewhere between 600 and 1,200 images on it. I’ve been doing this for twenty years and I still feel it. The problem was never the editing itself. I actually love sitting down with a strong cup of coffee and working through a file I believe in.

The LCL Framework: A Simple Editing Order That Stopped Me From Wrecking My Landscape Photos
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The LCL Framework: A Simple Editing Order That Stopped Me From Wrecking My Landscape Photos

I spent the better part of my first two years as a photographer treating editing like a chore I could outrun. I was convinced that if I just nailed the exposure in the field, the image would mostly take care of itself. It didn’t. I’d come home from a pre-dawn shoot in the Cascades, crack open Photoshop, push a few sliders around with no particular logic, and wonder why my images looked muddy or over-cooked or simply flat.

Lightroom's New Landscape Masking Tool Changes How I Edit in the Field
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Lightroom's New Landscape Masking Tool Changes How I Edit in the Field

I have spent twenty years building masks by hand. Sky selections, foreground separations, water isolations, rock faces pulled out with luminosity ranges stacked on top of each other like geological layers. Some of my most-used Lightroom sessions have more masks than most photographers apply in a month. That is not a brag. It is a confession. Local adjustments are the engine of a finished landscape photograph, but the time they demand is real, and after two decades I have learned to budget for it the way I budget for golden hour.

Rescuing a Flat Sunset Shot: iPhone Editing Techniques Worth Stealing from Sean Tucker
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Rescuing a Flat Sunset Shot: iPhone Editing Techniques Worth Stealing from Sean Tucker

There’s a particular kind of frustration I know well: you’re standing in golden light, the sky is doing something genuinely beautiful, you raise your phone and take the shot, and the result looks like a postcard from a gas station. The light was there. The scene was there. The phone just didn’t see what your eyes saw. After two decades of shooting landscapes, mostly with full-frame cameras and more glass than I care to admit to owning, I still reach for my iPhone on evening walks when I don’t want to haul gear.

9 Frames, One Shot: How to Combine HDR Bracketing and Panorama Stitching in Lightroom
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9 Frames, One Shot: How to Combine HDR Bracketing and Panorama Stitching in Lightroom

There’s a specific frustration I’ve felt on nearly every dawn shoot I’ve done in the high desert outside Bend: the scene in front of me holds about three times more tonal range than my sensor can capture in a single frame. The shadows under the juniper trees go pure black. The clouds blow out to white. My eye reads the whole thing effortlessly, but the camera has to pick a lane.

Chasing the Right Light: A Full Sunset Workflow From Forecast to Final Edit
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Chasing the Right Light: A Full Sunset Workflow From Forecast to Final Edit

I have stood in the dark next to my truck more times than I can count, thermos in one hand, phone in the other, watching a sky that was supposed to deliver something extraordinary do absolutely nothing. And I have also stood in places so lit up with color that my hands were shaking on the tripod. The difference between those two experiences almost never comes down to fortune. It comes down to whether I read the conditions correctly before I left the house.