Outdoor Photography How To

Nailing exposure can be be difficult once the the sun drops below the horizon, and one of the biggest challenges is controlling highlights for proper tonal balance throughout a low-light scene. This quick tutorial from the My Photo Journey YouTube channel describes the necessary in-camera adjustments in barely nine minutes.

Panorama photos are a lot of fun to make and can really grab attention. Some cameras can automate the process by merging successive shots to achieve a pretty good result. Doing it this way may require a tripod for absolutely precise merging, and you'll still need some post-processing to finish up  the job.

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.