Landscape photography from the field

Raw Processing

How to Edit a High-Contrast Landscape Photo from Raw to Finished: A Full Walkthrough
Video Tutorials

How to Edit a High-Contrast Landscape Photo from Raw to Finished: A Full Walkthrough

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from standing in front of a scene that stops your breath, making the exposure, and then opening the raw file later to find something flat and unconvincing. The sky is blown. The foreground is a mudhole. The horizon tilts just enough to bother you. After twenty years of doing this, I still run into it constantly, especially with wide-angle shots taken in high-contrast morning light.

Stop Undoing Your Field Work: A Landscape Photographer's Guide to Smarter Raw Editing
Video Tutorials

Stop Undoing Your Field Work: A Landscape Photographer's Guide to Smarter Raw Editing

There is a particular kind of defeat that every landscape photographer knows. You wake before the alarm, drive out in the dark, stand in cold water or on a frozen ridge, and you wait. The light does something extraordinary. You feel it in your chest. You drive home believing you’ve got something real. Then you open the raw file and it looks flat, murky, or blown out, and you start pushing sliders around hoping something sticks.

Light as a Leash: How to Edit Landscape Photos That Guide the Eye
Video Tutorials

Light as a Leash: How to Edit Landscape Photos That Guide the Eye

There’s a moment every photographer hits, usually sometime in the second year, where the gear starts feeling comfortable and then the bottom drops out. You’ve got good RAW files sitting on your hard drive and no real idea what to do with them. I remember that feeling clearly, even after two decades of doing this professionally. The technical side of post-processing has a way of looking far more complicated than it actually is.