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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We repeatedly discuss the concept of sharpness because it’s such a critical component of all really good images. But there’s an oft-ignored concept that you may not have heard until now; revealing why some sharp images appear soft to you and the viewer .

This important consideration is known as “perceived sharpness” and it differentiates between images that are truly sharp but appears soft, and those where accurate focus wasn’t obtained. The tutorial below deals with the first problem and demonstrates what to do, both in the camera and during post-processing to avoid this issue in the future.

Jan Wegener is a noted German wildlife photographer and a very adept instructor. He illustrates the problem with several examples of sharp photos that appear soft and provides straightforward methods for a quick rehabilitation that make a big difference.

Wegener says sometimes the culprit is a cluttered background, unusual light falling on the subject, or clashing colors. In the latter case he demonstrates how eliminating an unwanted color cast makes an image appear much sharper without any sharpening adjustments during the editing process. In fact, he says he typically avoids adding any sharpness when editing his work.

One in-camera trick for conveying the precise focus of a shot is to photograph the subject against a plain or soft background, whether that’s a featureless sky or a scene devoid of distracting elements like bushes, tree branches and the like.

Much of what Wegener discusses has to do with simple adjustments in post-processing to rectify various problems, including how to eliminate the aforementioned color casts. This is particularly helpful when photographing at Golden Hour when warm light will bias tones in white birds and in any water within the scene.

Simply fixing these inaccurate colors reveals the true sharpness of his image of a bird in the water. For this task Wegener improved color balance by adding a bit pf blue and cyan. He also used HSL tools to drop saturation and increased brightness with the Lightness slider. Then Wegener selected the background and employed Selective Color to restore the water to its natural blue tones.

The resulting image is a huge improvement over the muddy original. It now looks really sharp with realistic colors in the bird and the background. And all this was accomplished without any adjustments to sharpness itself.

Wegener runs through a similar process for bringing out the sharpness captured in other photos. There are a few other techniques of note that are worthy of attention. You can find more straightforward lessons like this on Wegener’s YouTube channel, so be sure to pay a visit.

We also urge you to watch the very important tutorial we posted earlier this month, explaining why another pro says: “change these settings now on every camera you own.”