Let’s assume you captured a difficult-to-edit landscape photo with super bright highlights in the sky and very deep shadows in the foreground, and you simply can’t balance these divergent tones with one shot in the camera.

In other words, an image like the example in today’s tutorial from the PHLOG Photography YouTube channel that you can download with a link in the description beneath today’s how-to video. The remedy is easier than you might assume and it involves taking advantage of Lightroom’s oft-ignored Adobe Neutral profile.

Christian Mohrle is a superb German landscape photographer and post processing instructor, and he begins by showing you how to find this overlooked profile and then making several basic global adjustments to prepare his image for the masking magic, color grading, and sharpening enhancements that follow.

As you’ll see, the Neutral profile creates a flatter image with less contrast that provides more control over all your modifications. The next step is recovering more details in the shadows and Mohrle’s preliminary enhancements include raising exposure, dropping highlights, and adjusting the shadows and blacks with simple sliders.

Now all the image-killing clipping is gone and there is far more detail in every area within the frame. On the downside, however, the aforementioned process takes an obvious toll on contrast, but Mohrle quickly remedies this problem in Lightroom’s Presence tab by using sliders to increase texture, clarity and dehaze.

He also significantly bumps up saturation and vibrance, modifies color balance for a cooler look to accentuate the waterfalls on the far right of the scene. With his base image looking as good as possible, Mohrle turns to simple masks that selectively enhance various portions of the scene in different ways. All that’s left to conclude the impressive transformation is a bit of thoughtful color grading, judicious sharpening, and a simple cleanup in Photoshop. A quick glance at the before/after examples will convince you that this approach really works.

There’s much more to learn on the PHLOG Photography YouTube channel about shooting in the field and editing your images for maximum impact .

We also suggest watching an earlier tutorial we featured with another post-processing expert who reveals a tiny easy-to-miss Lightroom icon that can be a huge timesaver when editing multiple photographs and keeping them organized so they’re easy to find.