Video: Simple Lightroom techniques for compelling landscapes

In an era of heavily-processed landscape images it can be easy to forget that sometimes the best kind of editing is that which is done with a light touch, and if your editing is beginning to overwhelm your subject, it may be worth reassessing what you want your end result to look like.

In this 25-minute video from Alister Benn of Expressive Photography, he looks at how you can use some of Lightroom's simple and powerful editing tools to improve your images, while not getting overly deep and resorting to using Photoshop. After all, there's something pretty satisfying about using simple, straightforward techniques to finish a photo.

One of Benn's useful tips is to first analyse your images by looking at the full tonal range across the frame, and if necessary, pulling the exposure down to draw attention to the highlights/bright areas in the image. From here, it will give you a better sense of the areas in the frame where you may want to brighten to emphasise.

We also like his reminder that if you want to create mood in your images you can't do this by revealing everything in the frame. Instead, it comes from a strategic aproach to managing shadow and highlight areas to draw your viewer in. 

There's many more useful tips too, from understanding when the panoramic format can be beneficial, to using radial tools, graduated filters and the luminosity sliders.

You can see more of Alister Benn's great videos on YouTube.