So you photographed a gorgeous landscape scene with a great sky and beautiful colors throughout the frame, only to return home, view your “money shot” on the computer, and discover that the tones in the photo only vaguely resemble what you saw through the viewfinder.

There can be several reasons for this mishap. Perhaps you forgot to reset Color Balance after a previous shoot the took place under different lighting conditions. Or you missed exposure and the scene is grossly under- or overexposed.

Whatever the reason, it’ time to open Photoshop or Lightroom and get to work. The task of restoring color in Raw files is actually pretty easy if you follow the steps in the tutorial below from the popular PHLOG photography YouTube channel. This effective Photoshop method takes less than a dozen minutes to explain.

German landscape photographer Christian Mohrle provides a link to his demonstration image in the description beneath the video, so you can follow along and make the necessary adjustments as they are explained. As always, he begins with a few basic global enhancements to prepare the image for the selective masking and color grading that complete the impressive transformation.

In this case Mohrle’s image is rather dark and colorless, so he begins the preliminary steps by changing the profile from Adobe Color to Adobe Landscape which immediately results in a much more saturated image. He then opens Photoshop’s Basic panel and increases overall exposure while slightly dropping the highlights so they’re not too bright—all the time keeping a close eye on the lightning strike in the shot.

After raising the blacks and increasing contrast, it’s time to push things further with selective  masking to different areas in the scene. Mohrle first concentrates on the sky to accentuate the dramatic clouds. He adds a Linear Gradient covering most of the sky, and then uses the Subtract Color Range command to exclude a prominent tree from the mask.

The next step is adding Clarity to bring out even more details in the clouds. Multiple Linear Gradients over the top right portion of the sky further refines the effect to Mohrle’s satisfaction without biasing the highlights. Once the masking is complete, Mohrle turns to color grading, careful sharpening, and a few final tweaks to complete the job.

You can find more great advice on shooting and editing landscape photos by visiting Mohrle’s YouTube channel at your convenience

We also recommend watching  a tutorial we posted earlier that will help you determine if you’re using your tripod correctly for wildlife, landscape and nature photos. Hint: There’s more to it that you think.

There’s no better way to improve your skills than by borrowing wisdom from an accomplished photographer with years of professional experience. The tutorial below provides several “pro secrets” for doing just that when you’re shooting outdoors.

Instructor Steve Perry specializes in nature, wildlife and landscape photography, and the popularity of his Backcountry Gallery YouTube channel attests to his success as an educator. He introduces today’s episode like this: “We’ll explore how to use depth of field to improve your photography, then I’ll show you some killer tips for background control using lens magnification of field of view.”

Perry provides a “hodge podge” of advice in barely 13 minutes that he says is rarely discussed and ” will really give you an edge in the field.” It’s all about using depth of field, field of view, and lens magnification to capture the best images possible with all sorts of outdoor scenes.

The lesson begins with an overview of how depth of filed works, so you’ll fully understand this critical concept and the tips Perry provides. Simply put, depth of field is the area or zone of acceptable sharpness in an image— i.e. the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp.”

With that in mind, Perry demonstrates why depth of field remains roughly the same for any given focal length if you keep the subject the same size in the frame and shoot with the same aperture setting. For those of you who find this confusing, Perry adds this: ‘I’m going to show you how depth of field at 600mm at f/5.6 is the same at 24mm at f/5.6 when the subject in the two images is the same size in the frame.”

Get ready to have your mind blown as the lesson continues and Perry explains how all this applies in the field. One mistake Perry says he notices regularly has to do with macro images that lack sufficient depth of field. Some photographers think that using a wider macro lens and approaching the subject more closely will solve the problem. Nope, that doesn’t work.

The same misconception occurs among some wildlife photographers, and Perry explains why this approach fails here too. On a more positive note, Perry takes a look at what happens to the background of these images shot with different lenses, and the practical use of these observations.

The takeaway is that as you reduce focal length there’re much more detail in the background—even if depth of field remains the same with his controlled setup. Perry offers two explanations for this interesting phenomenon: “First you have more magnification and secondly there are varying fields of view.

Perry then wraps all this up into a nice, tight ball so you’ll know how to put this knowledge to work the next time you head out in the field. There’s more useful shooting advice on this instructional YouTube channel, so head over there and see what’s available.

And don’t miss the tutorial we posted earlier from another pro, demonstrating five tips for shooting & editing epic b&w nature and wildlife photographs.

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