The Secret To Creating Natural Looking Photos

🌅 White Balance: If your white balance is off, there is no chance your image is going to look realistic. A common mistake landscape photographers make is trying to warm up the white balance in order to provide more of a “golden light” look and feel to their image. Consider the white balance to be like the foundation of a house. If it isn’t set up correctly, the whole rest of your edit is never going to work. Do not try to use your white balance to make up for average light in the field.

👨‍💻 Don’t Overdo the Edit: Nailing the edit is crucial to creating realistic looking images. Most importantly, don’t overdo the edit. When you try to make your photo into something that it’s not, you’ll run into trouble. Faking amazing clouds or light is so incredibly difficult that I wouldn’t even try. Sadly, there is no shortcut to great photos. On the other hand, you need to make sure to apply enough editing. If you’re shooting in RAW (you should be), your photos will lack contrast and look dull right out of the camera. Unfortunately, taking a photo straight out of the camera isn’t going to give you a “realistic” look until you do a little processing.

🎨 Nailing the Colors: Every camera brand captures color slightly different, and each image needs to be specifically tuned for each color. My favorite way to do this is to use the HSL sliders in Lightroom or Photoshop to individually adjust each color. Often times, you’ll want to slightly change the hue of a color to better match how that color actually looks in real life. It is crucial that you wait to do this until AFTER you adjust the white balance, since this effects all of the colors in your scene. Often times, I find myself adjusting the blues and greens to make them look more like what I remember seeing in the field.

📷 Avoid HDR: Never never never use HDR if you want realistic looking photos. While HDR is great to show off details in both the highlights and the shadows, it doesn’t look realistic. Your shadows should be dark, and your highlights should be bright. I’ve only used HDR once in my whole photography career, and I promise that you don’t need it either.