Enhance landscape pics

Make selective adjustments to reveal more color and detail

- GEORGE CAIRNS

REQUIRES Lightroom, iOS 14 or later

YOU WILL LEARN How to make tonal adjustments to enhance parts of a landscape 

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes

THANKS TO YOUR iPhone's Deep Fusion processing powers, the Camera app can capture a series of different exposures for brighter and darker parts of the scene and then combine them in a single, correctly exposed shot. This should result in a photo that features detail and color in the shadows, midtones and highlights.

However, sometimes you might need to make some manual tweaks to reveal more detail and color in underexposed shadows or overexposed highlights. Take the shot in step 1 here for example. This was snapped on an iPhone 12 and while the sky looks fine, the building's details are lost in shadow.

We'll show you how to use a range of Lightroom iOS's powerful and versatile selective adjustment tools to help you target problem areas without changing the colors and tones in the image as a whole. As you'll see, by shooting in Raw, you can reveal missing detail even in overexposed white skies. 

HOW TO Reveal more shadow detail

1 Lost in shadow

Here our camera has exposed for the sky correctly but the backlit buildings lack detail. If we increase the Exposure value the buildings will brighten up but the sky will become overexposed (also known as clipped).

2 Lighten shadows