Crafting the Landscape Photograph with Lightroom Classic and Photoshop: Techniques for Realizing the Full Potential of Your Photography

By Ben Willmore

Realize the full potential of your photography and produce breathtaking landscape images using Lightroom Classic and Photoshop!

You can follow all the tried-and-true rules of great landscape photography—shooting in great light, making sure to have a clear subject in the scene, and maximizing sharpness throughout the image—and yet your photos can still somehow fall flat. Compared to others’ work you see online or in print, there just seems to be something missing: your images are a bit bland, while others’ work is often inspiring, lively, and beautiful. What gives?

The difference can often be found in the photographer’s post-processing techniques in Lightroom Classic and Photoshop that they use to help direct the viewer’s eye and make their images come alive. This kind of post-processing is not about “fixing mistakes” but is an essential part of the successful landscape photographer's contemporary workflow. Photographer and author Ben Willmore has spent over 30 years refining his own images and workflow, written more than a dozen books, and led photo workshops around the world. All in all, he has taught more than 100,000 photographers in person, so he knows the questions, concerns, and frustrations that landscape photographers have.

In this book, you’ll learn how to use Lightroom Classic and Photoshop in order to transform your captures into something you can truly be proud of. From shooting techniques that help you capture the most robust RAW file at the highest quality possible to developing your images in Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, Ben covers global and local adjustments, masking, selections, layers, color, luminance, sharpness, multi-image composites, focus stacking, and much more.

Topics include:

•  Idealized color and color grading

•  Detail and sharpness

•  Separation and depth

•  Establishing balance

•  Creating compelling contrast

•  Leading the eye

•  Dodging and burning

•  Black and white

•  Eliminating artifacts and distractions

•  Adding emotion

•  Producing a coherent body of work

•  Panoramas and HDR

Ben teaches you not only about “learning the tools” but about applying these tools to your work in such a way that you can direct the viewer’s eye through your photograph via the use of contrast, brightness, color, tone, framing, and detail. By learning how to use and apply these techniques to your own work in an intentional, expressive way, you’ll be equipped to elevate your work and finally make the kinds of landscape photographs you’ve always wanted to make.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part 1: Accumulate Expertise
Chapter 1: Develop a Lightroom + Photoshop Mindset
Chapter 2: Working in Lightroom Classic
Chapter 3: Working in Photoshop

Part 2: Quality Considerations
Chapter 4: Eliminate Shooting Artifacts
Chapter 5: Extend Potential with Multiple Exposures
Chapter 6: Eliminate Processing Artifacts

Part 3: Essential Techniques
Chapter 7: Lead the Eye
Chapter 8: Add Dimensi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rocky Nook
• Release date: Jun 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781681989914

Ben Willmore

Ben Willmore’s passion for photography has taken him to all 50 states in the USA and over 80 countries on all seven continents. He has been using Photoshop since the first day it was released, wrote his first book on the topic over 20 years ago, and was one of the first dozen people to be inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame. Ben has taught well over 100,000 people in person at events in 17 countries and his writing has been translated into 9 languages. Ben enjoys sharing his knowledge of photography and leads groups of photographers on workshops to remote areas in the Galapagos Islands, Africa, Iceland, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as somewhat less exotic places across the USA.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

LET ME BE honest. I am not the greatest photographer out there. Yet my images have somehow made their way onto the covers of multiple magazines, they have been used in photography-related advertisements, and have received regular praise from the photographic community. What’s my secret? Well, my true superpower lies in my ability to transform an average image into something that will knock your socks off. It all comes down to truly understanding and knowing how to fully harness the power of Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. If you want to realize the full potential of your photographs, then you’ve come to the right place. I’ve been pushing Photoshop to its limits for over thirty years and have used Lightroom since the first day it was available. In the pages that follow, I will show you how to transform the images you capture into stunning works of art.

We’ll start by ensuring you have a firm foundation of knowledge on the most essential concepts in working with Lightroom and Photoshop. It’s only once you understand how those programs take fundamentally different approaches to working with images that you can develop a strategy to maximize your effectiveness and take full advantage of both.

You’ll then learn how to fix all the issues that are inherent in the image your camera produced. You’ll learn how to compensate for under- and overexposed images, reduce noise, fix optical issues, and much more. After that, you’ll discover how to go beyond the limitations of your camera by combining multiple exposures. This will allow you to extend the dynamic range and depth of field in order to produce images that could never be achieved with a single shot.

Once you have developed an ideal image to serve as the base for further enhancement, you’ll learn how to craft that image into something truly amazing. It will feature engaging color, a heightened sense of dimension, a captivating focal point, and a path that seems to magnetically lead your eye through the image. Then, just when you think you’re finished, we’ll become critical, zooming up and eliminating any undesirable artifacts that were caused by all the enhancements you’ve performed. The result will be a breathtaking image that you can be proud of.

Develop a Critical Eye

Along the way, I will also help you develop an eye for recognizing unrealized potential in your images. You may find that the images you thought were hopeless just needed some simple tweaks to transform them into something special. That way, fewer images will end up in the trash and your percentage of keepers will increase.

I feel it’s also my job to show you how to recognize when you’ve gone overboard and compromised the quality of your results through over-processing. That can happen any time you learn a new technique and then push it a bit too far. The novelty of learning a new skill makes it impossible to see your results from the perspective of someone who has used the technique for years. But revisit images that you processed years ago and compare them to what you’re producing today, and you’ll usually see more subtlety and refinement in your results once that novelty wears off. I’ll show you how to recognize over-processing, teach you what causes it, and, more importantly, show you how to prevent it from compromising the quality of your images.

Producing an image that looks amazing on your screen is one thing, but delivering such an image will place your work before the critical eye of others. For that reason, we’ll need look behind the magic curtain and learn a bit about how images are constructed behind the scenes. This will ensure you know how to maintain quality when exporting and sharing your images.

Efficient Use of Your Time

Throughout the nine chapters that follow, I promise to be concise and focus exclusively on techniques that are useful for landscape photographers. The idea is to make the time you spend with this book a concentrated learning experience that is jam-packed with useful information and zero fluff.

To prevent fluff from creeping onto these pages, I’m going to assume that you’ve at least installed both Lightroom Classic and Photoshop and spent some time fumbling around with them. Therefore, I’m not going to show you how to do things like open or save a file, but I will teach you about what matters most. The vast majority of basic stuff that I don’t cover can be learned with a simple Google search or a quick visit to YouTube.

By confining the subject matter to landscapes, I am able to keep the concepts as focused as possible. Also, the settings used for optimizing a landscape image will be different than those used to optimize a portrait or sports image. Therefore, a more generalized approach would lead to more generic advice. That’s not what I want for your photography.

Conventions Used in the Book

There are multiple versions of Lightroom available from Adobe. I’ll be using the one that has the official name of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic. That’s the version that expects you to store your images locally, on normal hard drives. There is another version called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which is designed for storing your images on Adobe’s servers. Just be aware that anytime I mention Lightroom, I’m always referring to Lightroom Classic.

As you’re working your way through the book, you’ll notice that many passages of text will be in bold. These terms represent the names of the actual tools, menu commands, and adjustment sliders you’ll be interacting with and the settings that I’d like you to dial into each one. I do that to make it easier for you to scan a paragraph and determine exactly what you should be doing in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Getting Help when You Get Stuck

If you get stuck when working through a technique, consider joining my free Facebook group. Here, you’ll get responses from others who have read the book or have attended one of my seminars. Just be aware that, just like this book, my group does not contain any fluff, so be sure to get to the point and ask or answer a question. The group is not designed for showing off your images, for asking overly vague questions, or for asking questions that could be answered with a simple Google search. You can join the group at www.facebook.com/groups/BenWillmore

Also visit www.craftingthelandscape.com where I may post associated information, such as corrections or updates to the techniques found in this book.

Let’s Get Started

Capturing a moment in time is not just about pressing the camera’s shutter button. The resulting photograph’s success is determined by a series of intentional decisions made by the photographer. Those decisions start well before the shutter is released and continue until the resulting image is displayed for others to see. The pages that follow aim to equip you with the necessary skills to truly realize the full potential of your photography.

Section I

Fundamental Concepts

BEFORE WE GET into techniques that are specific to optimizing landscape images, I need to make sure you understand the fundamental concepts that we’ll rely on to enhance our images. This section attempts to do that in the fewest number of pages possible. I find that the majority of Lightroom and Photoshop users have gaping holes in their knowledge, even at the most basic level. This makes it difficult to dive deep into learning how to make your landscapes look their best, as you risk compromising the quality of your images or misusing key tools. So, let’s jump in and skim the most essential concepts to make sure you have a good foundation to build upon.

Chapter 1

Develop a Lightroom + Photoshop Mindset

THE GOAL OF this chapter is to ensure that you understand that Lightroom Classic and Photoshop take fundamentally different approaches to working with images.

We’ll start by looking at the processing pipeline all images must go through between the moment they are captured and the stage at which they can be worked on in Lightroom or Photoshop. In the process, you should realize that Lightroom has a distinct advantage when working on raw files.

We’ll then look at specific strengths and weaknesses of each program so you can develop an idealized workflow that utilizes the best of both programs.

In-Camera versus Post-Processing

All images captured digitally must go through a complex pipeline of adjustments before they can be viewed on a screen or saved in a universally accepted file format.

In-camera processing pipeline from capture to final image.

Capturing Color

Camera sensors are made up of a grid of squares, one for each pixel that will make up the resulting image. Each square contains a sensor that measures the brightness of the light falling on the square.

To capture color, a mosaic of red, green, and blue filters is added above the squares so only one of those three colors is allowed to pass through to each sensor. A full range of colors can be captured using only three colors because your eye contains just three types of color receptors: one type is most sensitive to red light, a second type is most sensitive to green light, and the third type is most sensitive to blue light.

Color-absorbing filters limit the color of light being measured.

Essential Processing Steps

After you press the shutter button, the information captured goes through the following adjustments to compensate for issues that were discovered when that specific camera was manufactured:

False-Pixel Removal: It is rare for a camera sensor to be manufactured that is completely free of defects. A few of the squares that make up the sensor will likely fail to react to changes in brightness and will instead output a fixed brightness value. To avoid rejecting the entire sensor due to a few stuck squares, the location of those pixels are noted in the camera’s firmware and the camera conceals the defect by substituting an average of the readings of the surrounding squares that were measuring the same color.

Linearization: Camera sensors do not react proportionally to changes in light. A 10% increase in light would ideally cause a corresponding 10% increase in the measurement produced by the sensor. If it instead only causes an 8% increase, then this must be compensated for to produce a linear response to the amount of light falling on the sensor.

At this point, all adjustments that are unique to your exact camera have been performed. Any further steps do not require information that is stored in the camera firmware, and therefore do not have to be performed by the camera.

Save Raw or Continue to Rendered JPEG

The image hasn’t had enough processing to be viewable at this stage and the steps listed below will need to be applied before a usable image is produced. For raw files, those steps will be performed in Lightroom where the user can move around adjustment sliders to influence the results. For JPEG files, all the steps below will be applied in-camera based on the settings in the camera’s menu system at the time of capture.

White Balance: You may have noticed that photographs taken indoors under artificial light often appear more yellow/orange than what you remember experiencing with your own eyes at the time the photo was taken. That’s because your brain adjusts to the color of the light sources you experience throughout the day in an attempt to maintain consistency in how you perceive the color of recognizable objects. Your brain adjusts to make it appear as if your surroundings are being lit by the white light of the midday sun.

When you view a photograph, your brain is adjusted to the environment where the photo is being viewed. For that reason, photos tend to be preceived as natural when the scene appears to be lit by white light, and that’s why someone came up with the idea of adjusting white balance.

The brightness of the red, green, and blue light that was captured can be adjusted to make a scene appear to be lit by white light regardless of the color of light that it was actually captured under. That’s due to the fact that areas containing a perfectly balanced amount of red, green, and blue light will always be rendered as a neutral shade of gray when an image is displayed or printed. White balance can alternatively be used to make an image feel warm or cool.

Top: The same scene lit by two different light sources.

Bottom: Result of neutralizing color cast with white balance.

A wider brightness range is captured by the sensor than is rendered in the resulting image to leave some headway for white balance adjustments. This ensures that the brightest area in the image will have proper information for red, green, and blue without encountering clipping. That extra headroom is discarded before the image-processing pipeline is complete.

Demosaicing: To display an image in color, each square that makes up the image needs to contain brightness measurements for all three colors: red, green, and blue. Since the camera only recorded a single color reading for each square, the missing colors will be created by averaging surrounding squares that were measuring the needed color.

Each pixel must contain red, green, AND blue before the image can be saved in a universally accepted file format.

Noise Reduction: The process of capturing a digital image always generates noise, so noise reduction is necessary to produce a usable image. This is why Lightroom’s default setting for noise reduction varies, with raw files receiving a good amount and JPEG files defaulting to zero since they were likely processed in-camera.

Color Transforms: The exact colors of red, green, and blue filters used varies between camera manufacturers, so a color conversion is applied to convert the colors into a more standard color space such as sRGB or Adobe RGB.

Tone Reproduction: The brightness of the captured scene is adjusted, which brightens the dark areas of the image and lowers the contrast of the bright areas. This process was originally done to compensate for how old-school vacuum-tube-based displays caused images to appear overly dark. It is still applied today because it causes adjustments to better align with how our brains perceive differences in brightness levels (doubling the amount of light does not make something look twice as bright to a human), and it helps to increase the amount of detail stored in the dark regions of an image when saved at a lower bit depth than the raw capture. Any processing steps that are based on how the physics of light works in the real world need to be applied before this step. Otherwise, they will produce unnatural-looking results.

Compression: Modern digital cameras capture a minimum of 4,096 brightness levels (also known as 12 bits), and some can capture as many as 16,384 levels (16 bits), which allows for radical image adjustments while maintaining a smooth transition across all brightness levels. To reduce file size, the number of brightness levels is reduced to only 256 (8 bits), which is just enough to produce a smooth-looking image for display and printing, but not enough to allow for future adjustments without producing banding. As a final step, the image is separated into brightness and color components. Then the color information is degraded in such a way that further reduces the file size.

Ultimately, choosing to capture raw images is deciding to retain as much of the data the camera captured as possible, with absolute minimal processing so you can have the most control when those steps are applied later in Lightroom. For instance, consider how many adjustments come after the white balance stage in the in-camera adjustment pipeline. This should give you a sense for why adjusting white balance on JPEG files is not as effective as it is on raw files. The in-camera white balance adjustment and all the subsequent adjustments have been baked into the image and cannot be reversed.

Pixels versus Parameters

Photoshop and Lightroom Classic take radically different approaches to working with images. Photoshop takes an old-school approach because it was originally designed back when everyone was still shooting film. Lightroom, on the other hand, was designed about a decade after Photoshop, when digital photography was becoming the norm and raw files were becoming the preferred way to capture images.

What Makes Raw Different?

The following qualities define what it means to work with a raw file:

■Setting a digital camera to capture raw files signals the camera to retain as much of the information that the sensor captures as possible with absolute minimal processing.

■Each camera manufacturer has invented their own proprietary file format that they save raw data into. For that reason, different brands of cameras produce files with different file extensions that are collectively referred to as raw files. For instance, Canon cameras produce .crw or .cr2 files, while Nikon cameras produce .nef files and Sony makes .arw files, etc.

■A raw file, by definition, cannot be modified by Lightroom, Photoshop, or any other program. There is an option to change the capture time, but the data that makes up the actual image that was captured is locked.

■Raw files require extensive processing before they can be viewed, printed, or saved into a common file format.

■The in-camera previews, histograms and the initial view you may see in some programs are all based on a camera-generated JPEG image, which makes it only an approximation of what is contained in the raw file.

■By shooting raw, you will be forced to take the time to send your images through Lightroom or a similar raw processing program before you’ll be able to produce a file that can be saved in a standard file format such as JPEG or TIFF.

Now that you understand some of the unique qualities of a raw file, let’s look at how Photoshop and Lightroom approach them differently.

Photoshop Is a Pixel Editor

Photoshop is known as a pixel editor because it is limited to either directly modifying the pixels that make up an image, or stacking pixel-based changes (such as retouching) onto layers above the image. Sure, it has some fancy features that try to act like that’s not the case (such as adjustment layers and smart objects), but in the end, everything you do will end up adding or altering pixels inside the file Photoshop produces.

Photoshop requires red, green, and blue (RGB) information for every pixel that makes up a color image. Raw files only contain a single color value for each pixel and must go through a process called demosaicing to end up with RGB pixels. That’s why Photoshop always forces you into the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in (ACR for short) whenever it encounters a raw file. ACR handles all the processing necessary to get the image into a state that Photoshop can work with. The result can no longer be considered raw since it has been extensively processed and no longer resembles the original raw data the camera captured.

Raw=single color per pixel, which becomes RGB in Photoshop.

Pixel editors are notorious for producing massive files. For example, opening a 27.5MB raw file in Photoshop, adding a single empty layer, and then saving the result produced a 235.1MB file (TIFF or PSD)! Why is it so big? Well, the raw file contained a single brightness value for each pixel, and sending it through ACR resulted in three values (RGB) per pixel, which is 3x as much information. Then, when I added the layer, it forced Photoshop to include a second version of the image that had all the layers merged together (flattened) to make the file compatible with programs that are not designed to work with layers (like Lightroom), which doubled the file size again. Had I not added a layer, then the result would have been 126.2MB.

Using Photoshop is the old-school way of editing an image, which is sometimes necessary, but I’m sure glad it’s not our only choice.

Lightroom Is a Parametric Editor

Lightroom Classic was designed from the ground up to be optimized for working on raw files. That’s not the only type of image it can handle, but the fundamental concepts on which it is based are centered on the unique qualities of raw images.

When you adjust an image in Lightroom’s Develop module, it keeps track of each change you make as a list of simple text instructions, such as Contrast= +30, Saturation= +23, and saves that information along with a screen-sized JPEG preview that reflects what the changes look like. That text description would only take up 8 kilobytes of space on a hard drive, which is about the size of a text email message. It’s so small that it can be saved in real time as you move adjustment sliders, which is why there is no save button in Lightroom. The JPEG preview adds maybe a megabyte of additional space.

This is known as parametric editing since the adjustments could collectively be called parameters (contrast, exposure, saturation, etc.). Some people also refer to this approach as editing metadata. Metadata is information about a file that is not part of the actual image data that is contained within the file. Typical metadata would be capture date and time, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, camera model, etc.

It’s only when you ask Lightroom to print, edit the image in Photoshop, or export to a standard file format that it looks for the original raw file, opens the image like a pixel editor would, applies the changes, and then delivers only what’s requested without retaining a copy of the resulting image.

A more fundamental advantage of this approach is that Lightroom can take advantage of all the information contained within a raw file, which makes many adjustments more effective. For instance, noise reduction is much more effective if it’s applied before demosaicing, and merging multiple exposures into a high dynamic range image will produce a more natural-looking result if done on linearized data before standard tone-reproduction processing is applied.

To fully grasp the difference between parametric and pixel editing, consider these two examples:

Retouching

Imagine that you performed time-consuming retouching, then discovered you had worked on an image that was over-sharpened and part of the sky was blown out to pure white.

Parametric Retouching: If you’re working in Lightroom, this isn’t a problem since all your edits were stored as a series of instructions that did not change the original raw file. All you’d need to do is change the sharpening setting in the Detail panel and lower the Highlights slider in the Basic panel and the image (as well as the retouching) would update to reflect the change.

Retouching Pixels: Performing the retouching in Photoshop would be a different story. First, any sharpening that was applied to the raw file would have been baked into the file the moment it was opened in Photoshop, and there would be no ability to recover blown-out highlight detail because Photoshop would not have access to all the info the camera captured. Sure, you could find the original raw file, make the needed adjustments, and use the results to replace the bottom layer of the Photoshop file, but that would not change the retouching, which would still be over-sharpened with blown-out highlights and not match the updated base image. You’d have to pretty much start over.

Multiple Adjustments

Next, think about how adjustments work. What if you make an initial adjustment that causes a large area to become solid black, and later try to lighten up the area with an additional adjustment?

Parametric Adjustments: In Lightroom, you can apply Blacks -20 to the entire image via the Basic panel and then switch to a masked adjustment and brush in a Black +20 adjustment just to the area where you don’t like the results of the initial adjustment. The result is simple math: negative 20 combined with positive 20 equals zero, which cancels out the initial adjustment.

Adjusting Pixels: Adjustment layers in Photoshop do not work that way. Each adjustment can only work on the end result of previous adjustments and therefore the moment an area becomes solid black, any subsequent adjustments will be unable to bring back detail that was lost due to an earlier adjustment.

Browsing versus Cataloging

If you’re accustomed to working with Photoshop, you might be thinking that Lightroom’s approach to working with images sounds like how Adobe Camera Raw works… and you’d be right. But there are important differences that have to do with working with a file browser, such as Adobe Bridge, versus a cataloging program like Lightroom Classic.

Camera Raw Came before Lightroom

Adobe Camera Raw debuted four years before Lightroom and was Adobe’s first attempt at parametric editing of raw files. In fact, the Develop module in Lightroom Classic shares the same base code as the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in. That means the adjustment choices are identical.

ACR + Bridge = Unmanaged File Browsing

The combination of Bridge for browsing images and ACR for adjusting them was a powerful one. But there were also many issues related to saving adjustments as metadata while allowing users to freely move their files around between programs without strict file management.

Since raw files cannot be modified, any changes made to such files in Adobe Camera Raw need to be saved separately in .xmp files that share a common base name with the original raw file.

What if you decide to rename a raw file using your computer’s operating system and forget to rename the matching .xmp sidecar file? That would cause the image to revert to its original, unadjusted state when viewed in Bridge or ACR.

Adjustments made to non-raw files in ACR are saved directly into the metadata of the file and do not change the appearance of the original image.

So, what will happen if you adjust and crop a JPEG file and then post it on Facebook? The changes you make will be recorded as text attached to the image in the same way as the aperture and shutter speed was from the camera. Facebook would consider that unessential extra information that should be stripped out of the file to save space and you’d end up seeing the image as it looked before it was ever changed in ACR. That means it’s up to you to remember if the JPEG file sitting on your desktop has been modified in ACR. If it was, then you need save out a fresh JPEG file from ACR or Photoshop to get the changes to be baked in and hope you don’t accidentally save over the original file in the process.

Then, what if you need four versions of an image, one cropped square, one rectangular, and each with both black-and-white and color versions because you need to experiment to see what works best for the image. With ACR, it’s not going to be an elegant experience with either duplicate files, or snapshots that cannot be viewed side by side for comparison, etc.

Finally, what if you are like me and have over 200,000 photos and you want to find all the photos that were shot with an aperture setting of f/2.8 in an attempt to find an image that has shallow depth of field? Bridge can’t even show the contents of more than one folder at a time (although they recently added the ability to show the contents of sub-folders). Bridge only keeps preview images for the last few hundred images you’ve browsed. If I want to search my whole photo archive, then it’s going to take many hours to find those images shot at f/2.8.

That’s because Bridge can only work with images that it can actively locate on a connected hard drive. That’s what puts it into the category of being a file browser. It has the same limitation as a web browser, which requires an active internet connection to function. That means you cannot see images that are on a drive you left at home while you’re traveling. Bridge only retains a small cache of previews for files you’ve recently browsed, which means it will need to open and produce new