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🔥 Finally! Lightroom Just Made Landscape Editing Way Smarter!
Published about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hello, my friend!
2025 is flying by—it’s hard to believe June is nearly here! I hope you’ve had a chance to enjoy the beauty of spring wherever you are in the world. Below is a new photo from the Smokies—a quiet moment that really resonated with me.
I hope you find some useful information in this edition of The Morning Blaze and as always thanks so much for reading & sharing. Have a great weekend! - Mark D.
Smoky Mountains, TN
📺 MY NEW VIDEOS
Finally! Lightroom Just Made Landscape Editing Way Smarter!
Lightroom just released it's newest version 14.3 and it includes one of the most powerful tools they've ever developed for landscape photographers! In this video, I’ll show you how the new Landscape Masking feature works, how it automatically detects certain landscape elements in your scene and why it could save you tons of manual editing time. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, this tool will change the way you edit your landscape photos. No more building dozens of masks by hand, this new update does all the heavy lifting for you.
Fixing My Worst Beginner Edit with New Skills & Tools
Have you ever looked back at one of your old photos and thought… what was I thinking? In this video, I’m doing exactly that. I dug deep into my archives and pulled out one of my earliest RAW files—the kind of edit that makes me cringe now. Back then, I thought it looked amazing. But after nearly a decade of editing experience, I can finally see all the rookie mistakes I made. So today, I’m giving it a second chance with fresh eyes, new skills, and way better editing tools. Let’s see if this old photo can actually be saved—or if it’s as hopeless as it felt back then.
We’re down to the final two spots for the 2025 Edit Flow Retreat in beautiful Sedona, Arizona—a focused, hands-on experience designed to transform the way you approach photo editing. This isn’t just another workshop—it’s a chance to refine your creative process, master your editing flow, and gain personalized feedback in an inspiring group setting. If you’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to take your editing to the next level, this is it👉 https://geni.us/editflow
Composition Mistakes to Avoid in Landscape Photography
In this video, I review my favorite landscape photos from when I was a beginner and discuss the compositional mistakes that impacted them. The funny thing about these mistakes is that not only are they very avoidable, but I would have been able to resolve them much sooner had I known about them at the time. The three issues I noticed in my older photos are all compositional mistakes that generally impact most beginners at one point or another, but once you know about them they're easy to fix.
The Best Tool for Improving Landscape Compositions
How many times have you returned from what you felt was a productive landscape photography trip only to find that some of the compositions of your favorite images aren’t exactly what you expected. This happens to me rather frequently, but fortunately for us we have access to one of the best tools for improving composition in our landscape photos, the Crop Tool! In this article, we'll discuss not only the crop tool, but perhaps the greatest aspect related to the Crop tool within Lightroom and that’s the Crop Overlay’s.
For years I only used the crop tool as a means of cleaning up the edges of my images by removing overlooked distractions. But, when the crop tool is used most effectively, it’s as if you’ve accessed a time machine that enables you to go back and recompose your composition to something that’s more pleasing. In order to access the crop overlays within Lightroom, open the crop tool and simply press the shortcut key O to cycle through the various crop overlays. There’s a total of 7 available, but I typically only use 5 of them.
Rule of Thirds
This is perhaps one of the more common compositional techniques used today. The rule of thirds overlay divides your image into equal thirds. It’s great for ensuring that you don’t place your subject in the dead center of the frame and also assists you when it comes to the placement of the horizon. The basic premise here is to place areas of visual interest on the intersecting points of the grid.
Diagonal
This crop overlay is fantastic for images that have diagonal qualities associated with it. This technique will apply multiple 45 degree lines from the corners and is helpful for aligning diagonal subjects within your photograph. >> Read More
🤓 PHOTO NERDS
🌖 Did you know there are 12 Hasselblad cameras sitting on the moon.
📸 The worlds largest camera collection is owned by Dilish Parekh, a photo journalist from Mumbai, consisting of 4,425 antique cameras.
✨ INSPO
"Actually, it's nature itself that creates the most beautiful pictures, I'm only choosing the perspective." - Katja Michael
“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” - Karl Lagerfeld
🌳 FINAL WORD
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📨 Join 56,000+ Photographers enjoying The Morning Blaze - my free, online photography publication where I share photo tips, tutorials, & inspiration I’ve gained throughout my journey from beginner to professional Landscape Photographer.
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