There's a profound challenge that many landscape photographers face when photographing a sunrise or sunset: they often find that their golden hour images rarely represent the scene they observed. Not only is the sky blown out and the foreground deep in shadow, but compositions tend to weaken when distracted by the mesmerizing light and texture of this time.
When you want to adjust your colors in Lightroom or ACR, most will typically go straight for the HSL panel....which will get you satisfactory results "most" of the time. Eventually, you'll come across an outlier image that just doesn't seem to play nice with the HSL panel.
Here's the real power of the curves tool...being able to easily control how feathered your adjustment is by manipulating the "curve" of your line. This is my preferred tool for processing tones in both Photoshop and Lightroom because the result is more natural...and is especially useful for enhancing the mood and atmosphere of your image.
ISO is one of the most important concepts to understand if you want to create better photographs, and ESPECIALLY if you want greater manual control over your camera. Adjusting your ISO speed can save an otherwise unobtainable image...or completely destroy your detail if you don't know what you're doing.
Here’s an in-depth tutorial that I’ve been wanting to create for quite some time…my complete, step-by-step Lightroom workflow for processing black and white landscapes. I love to help other photographers achieve their creative goals, which is why I’ve spent some extra time to make sure this guide is super helpful and easy to follow. NOTE: You can achieve the same exact result in Photoshop using ACR…same tools, just in different places than Lightroom. Many photographers find black and white format to be a bit of a challenge to master in Lightroom, and understandably so. When you convert your image to black and white, the results are usually lackluster and disappointing: flat, uninteresting tones which elicit a low-impact, boring reaction (like in the before image below). More: https://creativeraw.com/complete-lightroom-workflow-black-white-landscapes/