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Lightroom and Photoshop for Landscape Photography

Lesson 1 of 8

Class Introduction


Lightroom and Photoshop for Landscape Photography

Lesson 1 of 8

Class Introduction


Lesson Info

Class Introduction

Hi, I'm Randy Van Duinen. I'm an architectural photographer in St. Petersburg, Florida. But I also lead workshops around the country doing landscape photography. and I've really enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it since being a kid with Ansel Adams. This class, we're gonna do a bunch of different things. We're gonna do some black-and-white conversions. We're gonna use a luminosity mask. We're even gonna use some smart objects in a couple different places. Um this is a great class, so enjoy it and let's get going. So, the first thing we wanna do is work on just doing the adjustments in Lightroom. It's where I always start when I'm working on an image, so let's to the Develop module, and just start there. And when I do this, I'm always coming down first thing and working on texture, clarity, and dehaze and luminosity. I mean, not luminosity, I'm sorry. vibrance and saturation. So, what texture does, it really works in the fine detail. It adds contrast and kinda sharpening into that area. Um clar...

ity does it more in the mid-tone areas, which is really hard for Photoshop. So using clarity really helps. And dehaze works a little bit more on bigger areas and adding a lot of contrast. So what we're gonna do, is we're gonna start on this, and we're gonna add some texture, and we're gonna go ahead and ya know bring it up a little bit probably right around here. We're gonna add some clarity, and I usually like clarity ya know about 35 or so, but we're gonna bring it up just a little bit a little bit more because this is a very cloudy scene. Dehaze, we're not gonna touch here. But Vibrance, we're definitely gonna bring it up, and we're probably gonna bring it up to about or something like that. And we're not gonna use um um saturation at all, just because it can change the color tones a bit when you do it, and we don't need it in this shot. So that's where we're gonna start there. Color temperature, I am gonna leave that right where it is. It looks really good. Our whites are white, and I like what's happening there. Then we're gonna come down to Exposure, and go ahead and take a look at it. Oh wait, I'm sorry yeah we wanna go to our exposure and go up about a half a stop on that. Just bring it a little bit. We then wanna set our black point and our white point. The way we do that is hold to the option or alt key down and just click on our black slider and we can bring it up until we can see where it's starting to clip. And this we just want a little bit, so we're just gonna go right about there. We also wanna do the same thing with our white point. So we're gonna go ahead and hold the option or alt key and bring this up till where right when it starts to clip and since we got a lot of white here I'm gonna bring that down just a little bit more than what it says, something like that. I wanna make sure I keep my detail in my whites. After that I wanna go ahead and you know bring up our our slider for shadows. This has a bunch of detail in the shadow area and I wanna make sure it all comes out. So there we go with that. And contrast, we need a little bit more contrast. So, we're gonna start out with that. Alright, now something else I like to do with landscape photographs is to crop it. Um I like the 16 by 9 crop so we're gonna do that right away Let me just come up here and choose the 16 by 9 format and just bring this up. I find on my landscapes that I like this, it looks better than ya know usually the big ya know the full frame shot. So this is what I usually will do a lot of my landscape shots will be this way. Now, we still have a really really bright sky. So, let's see if we can tone that down just a little bit by using the graduate tool. And if you double click on effects that will go ahead and zero everything out, and we're just gonna come down here with exposure, and drag our cursor down like this and see if we can get some of that detail back in the sky, and mountains a little bit. Now that's probably too much, so let's bring it back a little bit ya know we just want a little bit darker and I like how that's looking. So now we can say okay or done And now I want to bring a little bit more detail into this tree line right here. So, let's go ahead and use the brush tool this time double click on effects to zero everything out. And let's just bring up our slider and the shadows and just go ahead and start painting right where the trees are. We can how that all starts to help out a little bit. If you think a little bit more we can pop it up a little bit but I think that's nice. The next thing I wanna work on is the sky. So, I'm gonna come down here and close out of my brush. If you notice here I'm in solo mode. Which means that when I click one window the other ones all close. And just to let you know how you get there is hold the control key, or right click on the grey area. And you can set it right there to solo mode. So, that's a nice thing to do instead of having a whole bunch of windows open. It will keep just one window that you're working on. So, we're gonna come down here to hue saturation and luminance. And we're gonna go to our luminance slider. And all I wanna do is go ahead and start taking down the blue here. You can see how it's starting to come down. And that's nice, I don't wanna go too crazy with it but that's about right. What I find out when I do that a lot of times though, I need to change the hue. And I just need to go towards the purple or just add a little bit more to it and that starts to make our blue look a lot lot more normal. Now, next after doing this is to come down here to detail. We need to add some sharpening to it. I mean these are raw files, and there not sharp enough. We need to do that. So, come up here and let me just kinda zoom in here a little bit. So, I wanna take a mount up here and I wanna start about eh something like that. I think that's looking you know about 69, that's good. But I wanna do now is add some masking. And what masking will do will just kinda define where it's sharpening instead of everything. And you can actually see how much it's gonna do it. Just by holding on the masking and bringing that up. And you can start to tell where it's gonna start to sh um sharpening. And I think I wanna bring that up to about eh 45. And so now we can kinda see we got some nice sharpened image, and it's ready to go. Let's get out of here, and do our last step. We're gonna start with the effects, and we're gonna go to um post crop vignetting. And what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna bring this down so you can see a few things. So, this is it's gonna darken up our edges and that really keeps everyone looking at your image, keeps them in the frame. So, I wanna darken that down but this is way too much. But I wanna show you a couple things. The other thing I always do on these is to bring my mid-point in a little bit, and all that does is you can see it brings how much vignetting your gonna do ya know from a little bit to a lot. And I always do that. So, I'm gonna click that and I'm gonna bring that just a little bit and then I'm gonna do feathering. So, feathering is how fast it's gonna go from ya know light to dark. So, when no place it just be that right there, but by feathering, and I always feather ya know right up about here 63 something like that. It'll make it so you don't want it don't notice it as much. And that's our best thing, we want to ya know we want some vignetting in there but we don't want it to be too much where it's noticeable. And you can always go ahead and click on here to see how much you've done and that's too much so we're gonna bring it down a little bit more. And there we go, I mean this is the way I start. I'm always going to start in Lightroom before I do any other process, and get the image as far as I can inside Lightroom. Ya know it's easy to do it and then I'll take it into Photoshop and work on the image in any way that I think it needs.

Class Description


  • The best ways to process in Adobe Lightroom.
  • Different ways to convert your images to black and white.
  • Use the Luminosity Mask to enhance your images.
  • Color correct using Luminosity Mask
  • Process HDR images the right way.
  • Processing light painting images.
  • Assemble and panoramas.


In this class, you will learn how to make your landscape images go from just OK to fantastic! We will start the process in Adobe Lightroom for fast processing and then take the images into Adobe Photoshop to push them to the next level. Randy will show you to how to convert your photos to B&W, use luminosity mask for color correction and image enhancements, process HDR images the right way, work with panoramas and put together a light painting image. If you are looking to improve your post-processing on your landscape photography this is the class for you.


  • Landscape photographers
  • Anyone looking to improve the post-processing of landscape images


Adobe Photoshop CC 2019, Adobe Lightroom CC 2019


Randy Van Duien is a nationally and internationally award-winning architectural photographer, speaker, and trainer. His art photography is in private collections around the country and in the permanent collection at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Randy is recognized for his digital imaging skills that he uses with his architectural and art photography. Randy received his Bachelor of Science degree in Photography from Grand Valley State University.


Tim Cooper

Fast paced but excellent demonstration of enhancement techniques

Kristopher Maier

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