Many of use would love to pursue a career as a professional photographer, but lack the necessary skills, means, experience and gear to make that dream a reality. But that doesn’t mean we can’t aspire to create pro-quality images.

There’s no secret sauce, other than years of practice, knowledge and dedication, that will enable us to quit our day jobs, but the tutorial below offers a method for giving your images a more professional look with a little help from Lightroom.

Instructor David Johnston is an accomplished landscape pro who says, “My passion s to provide the best tips and tools to level up the success of your photography,” and the amazing Lightroom trick he demonstrates in this episode is a great place to begin.” He insists your photos will look better in minutes and save you tons of time.

The episode begins with a traditional landscape shot of a rather impressive scene, but the Raw file itself is rather uninspiring. That’s intentional, of course, because Johnston is a very adept photographer and his goal is to demonstrate a dramatic transformation that’s very easy to accomplish.

Johnston opens a Lightroom panel containing a number of Adjust Point tools, that “enable you to make fast edits without even knowing what you’re doing.” That sounds a bit weird until he explains how they work. He begins by selecting an Adjust Point for a Tone Curve and the magic begins.

As you’ll see, you can now hover over any part of the photo and make whatever adjustments you desire. So let’s say you want to bump up the highlights in a specific portion of the image. The task is immediately accomplished with a quick click and drag up. Similarly, if you want to darken the sky, clicking and dragging down will drop the sky tones for a more dramatic look.

As you’ll see, there are a bunch of other adjustments you can make with this surprising technique. For example, darkening a shadow area of the scene is accomplished with a click and another downward drag.

So what exactly is going on under the hood when using this method to adjust tones or colors? Johnston’s response is somewhat along the lines of  ”don’t sweat the small stuff; just do it!”

You can find more intriguing shooting and editing tips on Johnston’s YouTube channel, so pay a visit and see what he has to offer. We also suggest you watch an earlier tutorial we posted, explaining how fix poorly exposed photos with a five-minute Lightroom masking technique.

Right about now you’re probably saying to yourself, “No experienced landscape photographer would be out on the field shooting with a smartphone.” And with a few exceptions you’d be right—unless the camera’s battery died and there’s nary a spare in sight.

But the tutorial below from New Zealand-based landscape pro William Patino isn’t intended for accomplished landscape photographers, but rather for those who are out and about in the great outdoors without what some would call a “real” camera.

In less than five minutes Patino breaks down four essential pillars of landscape photography—finding the perfect location, creating captivating compositions, working with natural light, and editing the results. He does this in the context of unlocking the power of a smartphone to create “jaw-dropping” landscape images.

While Patino’s top tips won’t represent more than a quick refresher for advanced landscape shooters, they’ll be a revelation for most phone photographers. And the techniques he describes work equally well for iPhone and Android owners alike.

Location is everything when it comes to landscape photography, and Patino has several great tips for the uninitiated. As he says, it’s important to not just be in a scenic place, but to take time soaking up the surroundings and narrowing down that grand view into a smaller slice that makes a great photograph.

Similarly, when it comes to composition, Patino explains that, “First and foremost it’s important to narrow down your subject matter and base your composition around that.” He demonstrates several powerful techniques, including the use of leading lines to guide the viewer’s eyes through the image. A strong foreground object also really helps add depth to the shot.

Patino’s advice for using light to advantage is equally powerful, whether you’re shooting at Blue Hour in the morning, Golden Hour at the end of the day, or even when the sun is high in the sky. He wraps up the lesson with some simple tips for editing the images on your phone.

There’s much more to learn about landscape photography on Patino’s instructional YouTube channel, so be sure to pay a visit when you have time.

And check out another tutorial we posted recently (for photographers using a camera), with several more tips for those new to landscape photography.

It’s not uncommon for photographers to adopt a “set-it-and-forget it” mentality when configuring their cameras, thereby ending up with photographs that aren’t as good as possible. Whether you call this habit lazy or uninformed, there are times when the choice of a custom setting results in more creative images.

Your camera’s Auto White Balance setting is a prime example. Admit it: how often have you chosen one of the other options instead? Congratulations if you do that frequently and pick a setting that best matches the quality of the light source at hand. Otherwise, pay close attention to the video below from the Photo Genius YouTube channel.

This episode is a follow-up to our earlier post with a basic overview of Color Temperature. That quick video explained the big difference in color values between bright daylight, shade, light from incandescent household lamps, and other forms of illumination—and the significant effect these have on your images.

The Auto White Balance setting in many modern cameras does a pretty good job under most situations, but “pretty good” sometimes isn’t good enough. In today’s lesson Australian pro Paul Farris explains the type of conditions under which you’ll achieve much better results by forsaking Auto and choosing another settings instead.

As you’ll see, being more thoughtful in this respect doesn’t involve any complicated calculations; all that’s necessary is the press of a button or a quick trip to your camera’s menu. Just don’t forget it after you set it because the quality of light is ever changing.

It’s even possible to create and add Custom White Balance Settings to many cameras, when the built-in options aren’t quite right for conditions you often encounter. There’s also a link in the description beneath this video for downloading a very helpful White Balance chart.

Be sure to pay a visit to Farris’ YouTube channel, where you’ll find a wide variety of helpful explainers like this one.

And don’t miss the tutorial mentioned above, with a brief overview of Color Temperature and White Balance