Five Edits That Take a Landscape Photo From Okay to Finished

# Overview Ian Worth walks through a single raw landscape captured on an OM-1 Mark II with a 12–40mm f/2.8, showing five repeatable edits he says he never skips. The demonstration uses DxO PhotoLab 10, and the method focuses on practical masks and subtle color work so the edit points the viewer rather than shouting for attention.

# The five edits, in order

Apply DeepPRIME XD3 at the top of the workflow to handle denoising, demosaicing, and chromatic aberration. Worth runs the tool even on a base-ISO frame and uses an accidental ISO 8,000 shot to show how a noisy file becomes usable once the noise reduction is applied.

Crop as a creative decision rather than a cleanup step. Shoot a touch wider handheld to leave room for straightening horizons and choosing the final aspect ratio. Because the crop is non-destructive, the raw still contains all the original data.

3) Control viewer attention with local adjustments Favor local masks over global sliders. Worth uses gradient masks to darken the sky and the new depth mask to lift the heather in the midground while avoiding changes to foreground or background. The guiding question: which plane in depth carries the story? Brightening or warming that plane gives the image direction.

Use color contrast rather than overt shifts. Worth cools shadows and warms highlights using PhotoLab 10's color wheel. He drags to preview a hue, locks it with shift, then reduces intensity until the effect is barely visible. The goal is color separation the eye reads before you consciously notice it.

5) Final pass: global tweaks and cleanup Finish with global exposure and tone adjustments, plus cleanup tools. PhotoLab's retouch tool automatically detects sensor spots with adjustable sensitivity. Make this pass last so restoration and creative moves don't need to be reworked.

# Practical notes on workflow

• Think in layers of depth: foreground, midground, background. Many landscape problems shrink when you treat the scene as planes and mask by distance rather than by hand.
• Use local masks to target narrative planes: isolating the middle distance often replaces multiple overlapping selections.
• Keep color grading quiet: aim for a hint of warming in highlights and cooling in shadows to create contrast without obvious color shifts.

# Tools and ecosystem details Worth highlights

• DxO PhotoLab 10 provides DeepPRIME XD3 (denoising/demosaic/CA) and a depth mask for distance-based selection.

# Why these five moves matter Each move solves a common editing bottleneck: clean pixels so detail is trustworthy, frame composition deliberately, direct the viewer with masks tied to depth, add subtle color contrast to make forms read, and finish with nondestructive cleanup. Together they reduce guesswork and make finishing photos a repeatable process.