In this article I’ll show you how to edit a photo from a nighttime portrait, and I’ll give you a RAW file on which you can try out the whole approach for yourself. This time around, you’ll be concentrating on work in the Develop module. You’ll learn how to rescue night photos that turned out too dark, improve their colors, and give them some spark using effects and local edits.

When you’re photographing outdoors—and especially in the city—you can often end up with chaotic colors in your pictures. And someday you might end up for example photographing an athlete for a sponsor… and their uniform shows other sponsors’ logos. What’s the solution?

Just about all of us shoot when we’re on the road. But the pictures that experienced photographers post on the Internet look a little different. Their exceptional shot locations definitely help, but their final looks actually owe a lot overall to computer edits. And meanwhile, these are rarely complicated tricks. In this article, you’ll find several common workflows that you too can use on your photos.

Power users view keyboard shortcuts as a necessity. Maybe that’s putting it too strongly, but the shortcuts below will save you time and make you more efficient. We’ll focus on shortcuts that you’ll appreciate practically every time you go to edit a picture.

If you’ve ever done landscape photography, then you know the situation where your sensor’s dynamic range isn’t big enough for the dynamic range of the scene. In plain English: you can only get detail in the dark tones if you’re willing to sacrifice it in the light tones—in other words, to accept a washed-out sky—or vice versa: detailed bright tones at the cost of dark tones that all blend into pure black. There’s a solution: HDR.

In this photograph—which was taken and then retouched over the course of my last few articles—there are only a few editing steps left to take. In today’s article, I’ll show you how to emphasize airbrushing you’ve performed, add contrast to a photo, and make a face stand out better from its surroundings.