Take your best scenic images further using natural editing techniques
Very few photographic genres offer the same range of lighting, colour and detail that can be found in a landscape. Changing weather, the shifting position of the sun in the sky, and the steady progress of the seasons afford us the opportunity to capture familiar locations in new ways almost every day, which goes some way to explaining why landscape photography is such a popular genre.
The downside of so many photographers shooting landscape images is that it has become almost impossible to capture a truly unique shot of a well-known landmark. Instagram is awash with photos of places such as Durdle Door in Dorset, Yosemite National Park in the USA, Lake Louise in Banff National Park, Canada, and, more recently, the misty skeletal forests of Madeira or the wild shores of the Faroe Islands. It doesn’t take long for content creators to flock to even the remotest of locations in search of ‘the shot’.
The solution is not to try and produce images that could be taken by anybody else, but rather to find new combinations of styles and techniques – and while you can do this in camera to an extent, the editing stage is where you can quickly and easily achieve a distinct ‘look’.
Modern image editing software offers a wide range of professional features to play with, both AI and conventional, and although AI hits the headlines regularly these days, there are plenty of manual filters and colour-grading tools that you can use to realise your vision.
Over the next few pages we’ll take a look at the key steps favoured by two professional landscape photographers, and how they use these to craft a signature look for their images. We’ll then progress onto high-level landscape processing tricks that you can use today to get the maximum drama out of all your scenic shots.
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Liam Willis explains how you can process your raw files to provide the best opportunities for later creative editing
One of the aspects you come to appreciate as an experienced digital photographer is that editing is a multi-step process. It’s not simply a case of taking the images from a camera, applying a standard set of adjustments and then sending the files to print or archive.
To create the best possible results, it’s almost always necessary to ‘pre-cook’ images in raw processing software, before applying more complex local edits, and, finally, retouching in applications such as Photoshop or Affinity. Landscape photographer Liam Willis keeps his editing process refined and targeted, integrating his shooting and editing workflows.
“Like thousands of others, I travel the
