Essential photo editing tricks for landscapes: 14 Raw tonal control
Most landscapes display a varied range of tones from light to dark, so it's important to know how to control and enhance these tones.
The Camera Raw plug-in (or Lightroom 4's Develop Module) is ideal for this. Begin at the top of the Basic Panel and work down through the sliders.
Set White Balance first, either by choosing a preset or with the sliders. Alternatively, grab the White Balance tool and click over a tone that you know should be neutral.
Move on to the six Exposure sliders. Exposure controls overall brightness, while the others target different tonal areas.
You can hold down Alt and drag any (except Contrast) to see clipped pixels. The Highlights and Shadows sliders can help to reveal detail, and the Whites and Blacks sliders enable you to set the points at which pixels go black or white.
The Targeted Adjustment tool can also be useful for tonal control. Grab it from the Toolbar then right-click to choose from a variety of adjustments such as Saturation and Luminance.
Then you can simply drag over points within the image to alter colours and tones. For example, we can boost the bluebells in the image above by targeting Saturation then dragging over a blue tone.
