Software How To

We're all at the mercy of Mother Nature When shooting in the field, and that leaves us three options when arriving at a beautiful location and are faced with flat, uninspiring light. We can sit around and wait until conditions improve, give up and return another day, or capture the best images possible and enhance them during the editing process when we return home.

A couple weeks ago we posted a tutorial explaining how to use Lightroom's AI Denoise to rehabilitate underexposed photos. As it turns out, there are a few issues with this new tool that you really must understand to avoid potential problems with your edits while using this powerful technique.

So you just spent a day photographing birds or other forms of wildlife and returned home expecting to be impressed by the images you made. But low and behold, the photos you see on the computer aren't nearly as compelling as you thought.

Some landscape scenes look far more compelling when rendered in b&w, whether you captured the shot using your camera's monochrome mode or do a conversion later during the editing process. In either case, some thoughtful processing is required for optimum results.

This tutorial begins with a surprising self-effacing admission for someone who has been teaching and using Lightroom for years: "I'm so stupid I thought this was a Lightroom bug; but it's actually an obscure tool." We encourage you to watch the four-minute explanation, just in case you've made the same mistake.

There are numerous reasons for poorly exposed photos when shooting in the field under difficult lighting conditions, including harsh light, dark foregrounds, and bright washed-out skies to name a few. When you're faced with challenges like these, photos often  turn out to be a compete mess.

Nighttime photography can be a real challenge for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is arriving at a correct exposure. Other problems include specular highlights, color casts caused by streets lamps of varying temperature, and important subjects lurking in the shadows.