Mastering Dynamic Range & Tonal Control
One of my mentors is a truly inspiring landscape photographer named Sean Bagshaw of Outdoor Exposure Photography and Photo Cascadia. Sean has been working as a photographer for years, and pioneered many of the modern techniques for digital image developing including exposure blending using luminosity masks, non-destructive workflow, selective image adjustments, and tonal control to produce distinctive images that fully-realize a photographer's vision and artistic intent.
More recently, Sean partnered with Tony Kuyper to produce a series of tutorials on the Photoshop TKActions Panel — a powerful and efficient way to create self-feathered selections from a particular portion of the tonal range in an image — which enables photographers to do very precise, localized adjustments using Layer Masks on Adjustment Layers in Photoshop.
In my own photography, I use many of these techniques, but sometimes feel like I'm not using the tools and techniques to their full potential. To increase my technical proficiency, I recently purchased the updated editions of Sean's video tutorials on the Complete Guide to Luminosity Masks and Extended Dynamic Range. I'm looking forward to really digging in and further improving my post-processing skills over the next few weeks.
If you're serious about landscape photography and already have a solid foundation in Adobe Photoshop, I highly recommend Sean's videos. His background as a teacher makes him an exceptional photography instructor. These two videos combined are packed with over 10½ hours of step-by-step instruction that is clear and easy to follow.