Photoshop for Landscape Photographers

Best Photo Editing Software for Beginners

It has to be Lightroom, right? Well, yes and no. Lightroom uses the same engine under the hood as Adobe Camera Raw does. And Camera Raw is only a tiny fraction of what Photoshop can do. If Lightroom is a car, Photoshop is a factory that let’s you design your dream car from scratch.

The best photo editing software for beginners is Photoshop. Let me explain why it’s not that difficult to learn. You are going in with a clear goal: you want your photos to look a certain way. The photo editing techniques to get you there will follow. Don’t worry about finding Gaussian Blur, gradients, merging layers…

This tutorial is for absolute beginners with that goal in mind. If you’re dreaming of making moody, atmospheric landscapes that look like they’re from the movies you grew up with, but have never opened Photoshop in your life because you think it’s too difficult for you, this tutorial is what you need.

We will not post-process any photo from start to finish in this video tutorial. That’s for another video once you know what I’m about to teach you. Instead, we will cover what most tutorials do not.

Think of this as a manual, but I’ve ripped out 90% of the pages that are written in languages you don’t understand and are about topics you don’t care about. No text no pen tool, no vectors or swatches, but how you start with a non-destructive workflow.

Photoshop non-destructive workflow

Photoshop’s main advantage is that you can (and should) work in layers. Imagine making multiple edits of your photo in Lightroom. The power of Photoshop lies in the fact that you can show or hide any of those edits down to a pixel in size. So you can have you dark skies, your bright flower and your incredibly sharp mountain peaks, while at the same time prevent the eye from wandering all over the place. And with the techniques shown here, you can come back to your edits just as you’re used to in Lightroom. To be able to come back, I’ll introduce you to smart objects, masks, and the Camera Raw Filter method of post-processing, where you essentially post-process your photo a few times to get the best results from each attempt and mix them together. This is what I do and have done for more than 20 years of using Photoshop. The non-destructive workflow is a fancy way of saying that you can undo and redo all your stuff.

This tutorial is full of photography tips for beginners, who have seen those pictures on Instagram, but are afraid that it’s going to take years to get at that skill level. Believe me, I’ve walked that route myself. I’ve learned too much and forgotten all the crap I never use.

Primer for start-to-finish tutorials

This video tutorial is the product of a few conversations I had among students who never used Photoshop, but were familiar with Lightroom. It’s definitely not a formal education in all things Adobe. This tutorial is what gives you wings to pursue those amazing images you’ve always dreamed of.