Banish the Blues: Removing Color Casts From Your Landscapes
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Is your landscape photo looking too blue and cold? In this video, I’ll show you how to remove that unwanted blue color cast in ON1 Effects using just the Curves and Edit Color filters. You’ll learn how to precisely control your blue tones in the Curves filter and then dial in natural, clean color with Edit Color, bringing warmth back to your scene without losing the mood you captured in the field.
This isn’t about cranking sliders and hoping for the best; it’s about understanding why that blue cast appears and using precise adjustments to correct it without harming the mood of your photo. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know how to identify, control, and remove color casts in your landscapes while preserving the story your photo is meant to tell.
Not using ON1? Nearly every photo editor has curves and most have an adjustment for precise color control (ex: Color Mixer in Lightroom). Substitute those tools in and you’re good to go!
An Ushuaia View
Contact Scott to commission a print or license this image.
Tell compelling stories. Become a better photographer.
Story And Vision will help you be a stronger visual storyteller and a better photographer. This 12 chapter video course guides you on how to examine your unprocessed photos more critically and understand the story the subjects tell. Then, pivot your post-processing approach to accentuate, emphasize, and reinforce that story.
11th Edition - Revised for ON1 Photo RAW 2024
Organize, edit, and share your photos with ON1 Photo RAW. This well-illustrated, no-nonsense book explains everything you need to learn ON1 Photo RAW. It is the most comprehensive book on Photo RAW out there.
ON1 Photo RAW Essentials: The Photographer’s Guide To Learning ON1 Photo RAW 2024
ON1 Effects and its 30+ filters make it easy to add style and create the mood you want for your images. The 10 learn-by-example tutorials show you how to get more pop with contrast, audition and blend LUTs, correct color casts, and more.
Adding Style With ON1 Effects will help you craft your signature style and tell your story.
A cityscape can have plenty of bright lamps and still feel a little flat. Luminar Magic Light tool can bring more atmosphere to those artificial light sources, but applying the same glow everywhere may pull attention away from the parts of the photograph that matter most.
The useful decision is where to let the light shine and where to hold it back. A modest starting adjustment, followed by a few selective changes, can give the scene more life while keeping its lighting believable.
A Lightroom folder structure doesn't need to account for every date, location, subject, or shoot with another level of folders. Organizing photographs into dated folders is especially common, but unless dates are how you naturally look for your photographs, that extra structure may not be helping you. Too much structure can make a photo library harder to understand rather than easier.
I keep all of my photographs beneath one top-level folder, then use a relatively shallow hierarchy underneath it. Different types of photography can follow different organizational logic. The important thing is that the structure matches how you naturally think about and look for your photographs.
A Lightroom folder structure doesn't need to account for every date, location, subject, or shoot with another level of folders. Organizing photographs into dated folders is especially common, but unless dates are how you naturally look for your photographs, that extra structure may not be helping you. Too much structure can make a photo library harder to understand rather than easier.
I keep all of my photographs beneath one top-level folder, then use a relatively shallow hierarchy underneath it. Different types of photography can follow different organizational logic. The important thing is that the structure matches how you naturally think about and look for your photographs.
Tack Sharp can correct camera shake remarkably well, but applying it across an entire photograph can sharpen areas you intentionally want to keep soft. Water, reflections, and moving subjects can quickly lose their natural character.
By combining Tack Sharp with layers and masks in ON1 Photo RAW, you can correct softness selectively. This approach preserves intentional motion while sharpening the stationary parts of the scene that need help.
For me, one catalog works best because I want a single place for all of my photography, both personal and professional. I can still organize those parts of my library differently without separating them into completely different catalogs.
Organizing a Lightroom catalog can quickly become an exercise in folders, keywords, ratings, and metadata. Before deciding how to use those tools, step back and ask a more important question: What do you eventually want to do with your photographs?
A useful workflow begins with those goals. Once you understand how you want to find, revisit, and share your photographs, you can build a Lightroom system that supports the way you actually think and work.
A dreamy, soft look can be a beautiful way to finish a landscape photograph, but applying that softness everywhere can work against the image. The challenge is deciding where you want the viewer to feel softness and where you want them to see texture and detail.
In this article, I look at a practical way to use Luminar's Mystical tool selectively, keeping the mist and sky soft while preserving the crisp, textured character of the mountains. The result is more than a softer photograph—it creates another kind of contrast that can help direct attention through the image.
Snow in shadow often picks up a strong blue color cast. Some blue belongs there—the area is in shadow, after all—but too much can overwhelm the photograph.
In this video, I’ll show you how I use a targeted Lightroom mask to reduce that blue cast while preserving the depth and shadow in the mountains. The same approach can help with many other color-cast problems in landscape photography.
Sometimes you commit to a landscape composition, but the moving elements never come together perfectly in a single frame. The best wave might be in one photo, while another has better texture or movement elsewhere in the scene.
In this video, I’ll show you how I selected three seascape photos and blended their strongest elements using simple layers and masks in Photoshop. The masking is straightforward, and the same idea works in any editing software that supports layers.
Have you ever subtracted an object from a Lightroom mask, only to find a thin ridge left behind around the selection? Cleaning that up usually means reaching for the Brush tool and carefully painting along the edge.
Lightroom Classic’s new Feather and Edge controls give you a faster way to soften, expand, or contract many AI-generated masks. In this video, I’ll explain how the controls work, which masking tools support them, and where Edge is already saving me cleanup time.
Scott Davenport
Scott Davenport is a landscape photographer and photo educator and based in San Diego, California. He leads photo workshops, writes photo books, hosts podcasts, makes tutorial videos, and feels weird referring to himself in the 3rd person.
He also can't help getting his feet wet photographing at the beach.
Shape The Light – Tell Your Story
Light shapes your story, and Lightroom gives you the tools to mold it. In Mastering Light & Shadow, we’ll dive into how to read the light in your photos, control it with intention, and shape it to match the story you want to tell. You’ll walk away with practical techniques, clear workflows, and the confidence to interpret your photos and bring your creative vision to life.