How to choose camera settings for landscape photography.

Learn to use camera settings like aperture and white balance to help you take incredible landscape photos.

Landscapes are big, colorful, and typically backlit, which makes them difficult to photograph. If you want to capture all the natural beauty of a landscape correctly, you’ll need to use the right camera settings.

Best camera settings for landscape photography.

The main challenges to landscape photography are lighting and the wide angle of the shot. To set yourself up for success, stabilize your camera with a tripod and use these settings:

• Manual camera mode
• Aperture around f/11
• Low ISO of 100
• White balance be set to “daylight,” “shade,” or “cloudy”
• Use RAW picture format

The high aperture keeps the entire landscape in focus without blurring details, while the white balance lets the camera capture the entire color spectrum. Remember, the balance setting is important when shooting colorful landscapes like sunrises and sunsets.

Shutter speed is equally important when you’re shooting moving landscapes like running water or if you’re photographing without a tripod. Without a tripod, use a high shutter speed of 1/100 or more, so the camera shake doesn’t show in the picture. With a tripod, for a truly unique shot, use a long shutter speed to capture movement in waterfalls, waves, or even star trails.

Use a photo editor to process landscape shots.

Although using the right camera settings for landscape photography will help you capture stunning images, processing your pictures using a photo editor like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom will help take them to the next level. With the color adjustmenttool, you can adjust everything from exposure and contrast to color and clarity to really make your landscape photos pop.

Explore what more you can do with Photoshop and Lightroom to create stunning landscape photos.