Photo Editing

From Flat to Cinematic: What Peter McKinnon's Landscape Editing Workflow Actually Teaches You
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From Flat to Cinematic: What Peter McKinnon's Landscape Editing Workflow Actually Teaches You

Every time I open a folder of RAW landscape shots, there’s that split second of either excitement or disappointment before I’ve touched a single slider. The difference between those two feelings almost never comes down to the location or the camera. It comes down to whether I’ve built a reliable editing process or whether I’m just winging it again. In this Peter McKinnon tutorial on editing landscape photos with Lightroom and Photoshop, McKinnon lays out a workflow that’s worth paying attention to because it starts way before you open the develop module.

Adobe's Surprise AI Integration: Prompt to Edit is Changing How We Work in Lightroom
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Adobe's Surprise AI Integration: Prompt to Edit is Changing How We Work in Lightroom

Adobe’s Surprise AI Integration: Prompt to Edit is Changing How We Work in Lightroom I’ll admit it—I did a double-take when I discovered Adobe had quietly slipped a new experimental feature into Lightroom. Not only is there a fresh generative AI tool inside the platform we use daily, but it’s powered by Google’s Nano Banana technology. This isn’t just an incremental update; it’s a fundamental shift in how we might approach image editing.

How to Control Where the Viewer's Eye Goes (And Why It Changes Everything)
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How to Control Where the Viewer's Eye Goes (And Why It Changes Everything)

There’s a specific frustration I kept running into early in my editing workflow. I’d spend an hour on a landscape photo, get the tones looking clean, the colors feeling right, and then show it to someone who immediately looked at the wrong part of the frame. Not because the subject was unclear. Because the edit wasn’t doing its job. A technically correct photo and a visually directed photo are two completely different things, and for a long time I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain the gap between them.

Stop Using Lightroom's Built-In Vignette Tool (Do This Instead)
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Stop Using Lightroom's Built-In Vignette Tool (Do This Instead)

Every few months I’ll open a photo I edited a year ago and cringe at something I thought was clever at the time. The vignette is almost always the culprit. Too heavy, too symmetrical, darkening a sky that didn’t need any help looking dramatic. I kept reaching for the Effects panel out of habit, the same way you autopilot your coffee order at 7am, and getting the same mediocre results.

How Lightroom's Enhance Feature Rescues an Aggressive Crop (And Why You're Probably Not Using It)
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How Lightroom's Enhance Feature Rescues an Aggressive Crop (And Why You're Probably Not Using It)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you get home from a shoot, pull up your images, and realize the composition needs a serious crop. Maybe there was a distracting element along the edge, or your subject was just a little too far away. Either way, you drag those crop handles inward, and suddenly your 26-megapixel file is looking like something off a 2009 phone camera. Pixelated, soft, unusable.

How HSL Adjustments Actually Work (And Why You're Probably Using Them Wrong)
Color Grading

How HSL Adjustments Actually Work (And Why You're Probably Using Them Wrong)

I spent three hours last month trying to fix a portrait where the model’s jacket was this aggressive, almost neon coral. Global adjustments weren’t touching it the way I needed. I’d pulled the vibrance down, nudged the HSL orange slider, and the jacket looked better, but her skin had gone muddy and flat in the process. It’s one of those situations that makes you realize how much overlap exists between colors that look completely distinct to the human eye.

Lightroom's April 2023 Update Has One Feature That Actually Changes How I Edit
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Lightroom's April 2023 Update Has One Feature That Actually Changes How I Edit

Noise has always been the tax you pay for shooting in low light. You get the shot, you get the grain, and then you spend an uncomfortable amount of time in the Detail panel trying to recover something that looks like a photograph and not a bowl of oatmeal. I’ve tried every third-party plugin, every slider combination, every “just add a little luminance reduction and pray” workaround. Some of them work okay.

Split Toning Is the Reason Your Photos Look Flat (And How to Fix It in Lightroom)
Color Grading

Split Toning Is the Reason Your Photos Look Flat (And How to Fix It in Lightroom)

I was editing press shots for my band at 1 a.m., vinyl copy of Rumours spinning in the background, when I realized something was wrong with every single photo. They were sharp, exposed correctly, white balance was fine. But they looked like nothing. Like stock photos of a band rather than an actual band. I spent an hour dragging sliders I didn’t understand before I accidentally landed on something that changed the whole image.

Work Smarter in Lightroom: How Batch Editing Saves Hours on Every Shoot
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Work Smarter in Lightroom: How Batch Editing Saves Hours on Every Shoot

There’s a version of me from about six years ago who spent three hours editing forty-seven press photos one by one. Same lighting conditions, same camera, same location — and I manually adjusted every single frame like some kind of masochist. If I’d known then what I know now about batch editing in Lightroom Classic, I could have wrapped that job before the record finished spinning. That’s not an exaggeration. Batch editing is genuinely one of those techniques that changes how you think about post-processing.

How to Shift an Entire Photo's Tone in Photoshop Using Five Adjustment Layers
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How to Shift an Entire Photo's Tone in Photoshop Using Five Adjustment Layers

There’s a specific frustration every portrait photographer knows: you nail the shot, the subject looks great, but the background is working against you. The sky is flat, the leaves are the wrong shade, and the overall color story feels like it belongs to a different image. You can push sliders in Lightroom all afternoon and still not get the nuanced control you actually want. That’s the gap this technique fills.

From Crop to Color Grade: A Working Walkthrough of Lightroom's Develop Module
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From Crop to Color Grade: A Working Walkthrough of Lightroom's Develop Module

Every so often I come across a tutorial that cuts through the noise and just shows the work. No fluff, no five-minute intro, no sponsor reads before you’ve learned anything useful. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube from CreativeLive, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a rapid-fire recap of the Develop Module — one photo, start to finish — and it covers more ground in a few minutes than most hour-long courses do.

The Fill Light Slider Isn't Gone — You Just Have to Know Where Lightroom Hid It
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The Fill Light Slider Isn't Gone — You Just Have to Know Where Lightroom Hid It

Every few months I get a version of the same message: “What happened to the Fill Light slider?” Usually it comes from someone who learned Lightroom years ago, took a break, came back, and found the panel rearranged like someone moved the furniture while they were away. I’ve sent the same explanation so many times I practically have it memorized. So when I came across this KelbyOne tutorial from Matt Kloskowski covering exactly this topic, I felt both seen and a little relieved that someone had put it on camera so I could stop typing it out.