Improve your landscape photography with post-production

- I find there's an odd paradox to landscape photography. Landscape photography usually takes place in the more wild parts of the world, and the process begins when you are so taken by your surroundings that you feel compelled to photograph them. In my experience, what makes some wild places so compelling is the profound sense of presence that you feel while you're in those places. We tend to engage with wilderness in a more visceral, connected way than we do with the environment that we usually live in. I find it paradoxical, then, that after feeling that sense of connectedness I raise my camera to my eye and begin a process that disconnects me from that place. I'm actually placing a camera between me and the world. I'm reducing my experience to only visual. And if the wilderness experience is going well, I'm leaving a simpler, calmer mental state and going into one filled with thoughts of technical concerns and paper choice and printing inks and storage and so on. Yet, as photographers, light is our medium. And some of the most spectacular light that you'll find is in those more wild parts of the world. Whatever your reason for shooting landscapes, one thing is constant. Most landscape photos need post production and it's always been that way. No one was a greater post production master than landscape photographer Ansel Adams. Arguably the best known photographer in the world. My name is Ben Long, and in this course we're going to discuss how to use Photoshop and Lightroom when working with landscape photos. But as much as we're going to talk about how to make particular edits, we're going to spend as much or more time talking about why to make a particular edit. Because when you're working on a landscape photo, part of your job is to try to remember the feelings that you were having when you were shooting in that wild place. You need to remember those feelings and then try to use your photographic vocabulary to translate those feelings into a final image that might help convey some of what you were feeling about that landscape to the viewer of a two-dimensional photograph. That's no easy task, and it's one that you can spend your lifetime trying to perfect. The good news is, if you spend a lifetime doing that you're going to get to spend a lot of time outside in those cool, wild places. So join me now as we dive into Photoshop and Lightroom for landscape photographers.