Outdoor Photography How To

Here's a tutorial from one of the world foremost post-processing experts who demonstrates how easy it is to use Photo Merge in Lightroom Classic to combine bracketed exposures into a High Dynamic Range (HDR) DNG file that contains all of the quality and flexibility of a Raw file. If you've avoided this editing method, thinking it was beyond your skills, that's going to change in the next six minutes.

If you’re serious about landscape photography and want to blow a few minds, pull up a chair and watch the 15-minute tutorial below, as one of our favorite outdoor photographers demonstrates how to create absolutely amazing HDR panorama images in either Photoshop or Lightroom.

The term HDR stands for "high dynamic range" and describes a powerful method for capturing details in the lightest and darkest elements in a scene while maintaining accurate midtones. Some cameras (even compacts) offer a built-in function that captures multiple images of the same scene at slightly different exposures and automatically combines them into one balanced shot.

Lightroom's powerful Curves panel offers far more versatility than the limited global adjustments many photographers use to adjust the brightness and contrast of an image and balance out tonal values. These include selective enhancements for targeting and enhancing different areas within a scene.

Many photographers think of cropping as a simple and incidental task. But if you want to create images with maximum impact, the act of cropping an image requires careful and thoughtful techniques.

If you're a regular Shutterbug reader you know that we constantly preach the value of developing a unique photographic style, and this is true for beginners and advanced shooters alike. In the tutorial below from the Street View YouTube channel, you'll learn how to get started today.