Our version of this landscape (left) uses all five tips, but you can use any that suit your picture.

Armed with a DSLR, a good lens, a tripod, and perhaps a split neutral-density filter, you can make lovely landscape photographs in the field, many of which won’t need retouching at all. But if somehow, despite your best efforts, you still end up with a skewed horizon line or a so-so sky, Adobe Photoshop can help.

And even in situations where you love what you captured, you can use Photoshop to improve, enhance, or (simply for the heck of it) modify your picture to make it look the way you think it should. Here are five tips for improving your landscape photos, whether they need it badly or not. Use one or all of them on a given picture, and in any order you like.

F.Y.I.
It’s fun to take a few liberties with your nature photos. Unlike a portrait or architectural shot, your viewer will have only a vague sense of how it really looked. So you can go a bit farther with edits: Add more vibrance or saturation than you normally would, make your clouds more dramatic, or make distant mountains more contrasty than they would appear in reality. Experiment with white balance, too. If you don’t go too far, no one will be the wiser.

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