Sometimes you come across a breathtaking scene that’s so expansive that it’s impossible to fit everything into the frame, even with your widest lens. The solution to this challenge is creating a panoramic image that captures the stunning view.

Instructor Alex White is an accomplished British outdoor photographer, and he walks you through everything you need to understand in barely nine minutes. As he says, “I’ll go through the camera settings and techniques you need to get perfect panoramic shots, and then demonstrate how to merge the final images together in Lightroom.”

White illustrates his straightforward methods with inspirational real-world examples captured in England’s beautiful Lake District. The first step in mounting your camera in portrait orientation atop a sturdy tripod. He explains that this approach “gives you extra cropping ability, whether you want more sky or land, when stitching your multiple shots together later on in Lightroom.”

Gear recommendation are also part of the discussion, and White explains the virtues of an affordable L-Bracket and an indexed, rotating tripod head with a bubble level. White then illustrates an interesting exposure trick to employ prior to pressing the shutter button, and it goes like this: “spin your camera around before you start shooting.”

What you’re doing as you spin from far left to far right is making sure that the entire scene falls within the dynamic range of your camera. Keeping an eye on the histogram or camera’s Peaking display helps assure that clipping won’t occur in any of the multiple shots you make.

Focus is another key consideration, because some areas of the expansive view may have important elements in the foreground or the midrange, while others do not. White continues with several important shooting techniques, and he explains why he prefers working in Manual mode.

The final half of the lesson occurs in Lightroom where White demonstrates how her puts everything together and adds a few straightforward enhancements to refine and finalize his spectacular image. One you’re done head over to his instructional YouTube channel where’s there’s much more to learn for beginners and experienced shooters alike.

And don’t miss our earlier tutorial in which another landscape photography expert demonstrates how to use Exposure (EV) Compensation to capture perfectly exposed outdoor photographs without switching your camera’s mode dial to Manual.

Very few experienced landscape photographers head out in the field without a polarizing filter in their bag. That’s because these affordable accessories can be used to darken pale skies, enhance saturation, and remove unwanted reflections that spoil a shot.

But all these benefits come with a potential cost; namely, harsh transitions, ugly dark blotches in blue skies, and other unwanted artifacts. Today’s nine-minute tutorial with nature photographer Mike Wardynski demonstrates how to fix these distractions in Lightroom and Photoshop.

You may recognize Wardynski by his YouTube handle “Nature Mike,” and here’s his promise for this episode: “Whether you’re dealing with splotchy blues, gradient banding, or awkward vignetting this video has you covered.” This way you can take advantage of your polarizing filter without worrying about the possibility of unsightly drawbacks.

Mike’s goal is all about “neutralizing” the problem sky in his nicely composed landscape photograph for an enhanced look that still appears natural. He says that the easiest method for getting the job done in Lightroom is to use local adjustments in combination with Radial Gradients.

He navigates to the masking panel and scrolls down to Radial Gradient, using the keyboard shortcut Shift M. Then he demonstrates how to blend in a bit of darkness into two portions of the sky. You’ll learn how to feather the effect, adjust exposure, add a warm glow, create a natural gradient, and match color temperature to the rest of the sky.

After completing the very impressive Lightroom transformation, Mike turns his attention Photoshop and illustrates how to achieve the same results with an inviting and even appearance.

There are many more post-processing tricks on Nature Mike’s instructional YouTube channel, so be sure to take a look.

And don’t miss our earlier tutorial featuring another post-processing expert who demonstrates how to customize your Photoshop toolbar by removing features you never use and rearranging the others for a clean and disciplined workflow.

There’s a lot going on in Photoshop’s toolbar, including features you never need, and this makes in inconvenient to quickly find the tools you use most. The video below demonstrates how easy it is to customize your workflow to match your personal post-processing style and clear out the mess.

Instructor Aron Nace is an expert at all things Adobe, and his PHLEARN YouTube channel is among the best Photoshop and Lightroom resources on the web. He introduces today’s very helpful episode like this: “We’ll show you how to add, remove and rearrange tools to display only what you need.”

In less  10 minutes you’ll also discover how to access hidden tools, utilize keyboard shortcuts to speed things up, and save your personalized tool bar as a preset. Nace makes his tips easy to follow with a link to the sample image in the description beneath the video so you can mimic the steps as you watch.

Nace begins with the toolbar on the left side of the workspace and he explains how to make it visible if it doesn’t appear on your screen. He then demonstrates an unfamiliar trick whereby you can drag Photoshop’s toolbar anywhere you want in an image. In other words, it’s only on the left by default.

The tools can also be compacted into a single row if you desire more space. You may have noticed that some tool icons have a little arrow in the corner. If you click and hold on this arrow, a number of related “sub tools” appear in the dropdown menu.

The foregoing is just the beginning, with the bulk of the lesson devoted to streamlining the toolbar to get rid of tools you never use and rearranging those that remain for peak efficiency.

Once you’re done watching head over to the popular PHLEARN YouTube channel where you’ll find simple solutions to just about any image-editing problem that you confront.

We also recommend watching an earlier tutorial featuring another post-processing expert who demonstrates how a hidden Adobe profile will rehabilitate difficult-to-edit photographs—especially those with bright highlights and very deep shadows.

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