To follow along with this tutorial, you’ll need these support files. Download them here.

Step One

Open Adobe InDesign and go to File>New>Document. I’m using InDesign CS3, but other versions should be somewhat close to the instruction here. Among other new features, CS3 has a more convenient palette layout, but those with older versions should be able to follow along relatively closely.

Step Two

Set the number of pages to 4 and the number of columns to 5 and keep the paper size to Letter. The setting should reflect the ones shown here.

Step Three

Let’s add a header to the newspaper that will appear on every page. In the Pages palette, double-click on the pages next to A-Master.

Step Four

Just like with many other Adobe programs, use Cmd/+- (PC: Ctrl/+-) to zoom in and out of the document. Zoom into the area at the top of the left master page. To move around the page, use this shortcut and press the Space bar and hold it while clicking-and-dragging. Select the Text tool and click-and-drag a text box that centers over the page.

Step Five

With the cursor in the text box we just created, open the Paragraph palette and change the alignment to Center (the second-from-left option at the top of the Paragraph palette).

Step Six

Type in the words, “Smalltown Sentinel.” Click-and-drag over the text with the Text tool after you type it and change the font size to 36 on the Control palette at the top.

Step Seven

With the Text tool selected, click-and-drag out a new text box on the left side corner. Be careful to not click within the other text box, or it will just insert the cursor into the other text box. If you are having trouble, just click-and-drag off the page to create the new text box, and then click-and-drag it with the Selection tool to drag it to the corner.

Step Eight

Let’s enter the automatically-updated page number. With the cursor in the new text box, go to Type>Insert Special Character>Markers>Current Page Number. This will insert an “A” in the text box indicating where the current page number will go.

Step Nine

Next, let’s add the page number to the right page. Instead of repeating those steps, let’s duplicate it. Option-Click (PC: Alt-Click) the “A” text box and drag it over to the left page on the mirror side of the original page (the top corner). Hold down Shift to keep it aligned vertically. Let go of the mouse first and it’ll be duplicated.

Step Ten

To duplicate the title header, let’s use another technique. With the Selection tool, click on the “Smalltown Sentinel” text box. Go to Edit>Copy. Go to Edit>Paste in Place. Press the right arrow to move it over to the right page. Hold down Shift for it to move more quickly over. Center it over the page just like the original header. On the Pages palette, click on pages 1 to 4 to see how the master page headers and page number are applied. It should look something like this.

Step Eleven

Save this InDesign file as newspaperlayout.indd and we’ll open it up in part 2 and begin setting up Paragraph styles to save time when formatting text.

Next: Newspaper Design with InDesign part 2 of 5

One ”web 2.0″ look is the reflecting icon. The clean, crisp look of these attractive images makes clicking through a website’s navigation fun. Here’s how to make one of those neat icons.

Step 1
Open a new document in RGB mode, since this will be for the web and not for print. For this example, we’ll make a black background with white icons for a wide variation between the icons and their background. Draw a black square or rounded square with the Rectangle tool or the Rounded Rectangle tool (click-and-hold over the Rectangle tool icon on the Toolbar to get more options). Hold Shift while dragging to make a square.

Step 2
Click-and-hold the Rectangle tool icon and then click the Star tool. Change the Fill at the bottom of the Toolbar to White. Make sure the Stroke is set to None. Click-and-drag on the black square area to draw a white star.

Step 3
Click the Selection tool on the Toolbar. Hold down Option (PC: Alt) and click-and-drag the star to duplicate it. It doesn’t matter where you move it, we’ll situate it correctly next. With the Selection tool, click-and-hold the middle box at the top border of the star. Now drag it down so that is upside down but about half the size of the original star. Move it so its two points meet the points of the original star.

Step 4
Click the Rectangle tool and draw a rectangle over the new upside down star. In the Gradient palette (Window>Gradient), change the gradient to white and black, and move the middle slider to the left. I set it to about 15%. Change the angle to 270° so the black is on bottom moving vertically to lighter shades.

Step 5
Select the rectangle we just made as well as the upside down, smaller star. One way to di this is to click-and-drag over the area with the Selection tool, then Shift-click the black background to de-select it. In the Transparency palette (Window>Transparency), click the arrow to get the flyout menu. Click Make Opacity Mask. Now we have the reflecting icon!

Step 6
Try a few different shapes. Here I’ve drawn a few different objects by drawing the shapes then grouping them (Object>Group) to create a few more examples.

One of the coolest aspects of Illustrator’s Text tool is its flexibility once the text is outlined. You can then edit the text just like any other Illustrator path, moving the letters around and even the lines and shapes around.

Step 1
Start out by typing a simple phrase, a company name, or a slogan. Include the ampersand in it for this example. I used the font Rosewood. Click once with the Text tool to make the first word, then click elsewhere with the Type tool and type the ampersand, then click somewhere else with the Type tool for the other word.

Step 2
With the Selection tool, click the ampersand. Click-and-drag a corner to make it bigger.

Step 3
Let’s make the text more editable for our purposes of reshaping (rather than changing the character of the font). With the Selection tool, Control-click (PC: Right-click) over each word as well as the ampersand and click Create Outlines.

Step 4
Next, with the Selection tool, Control-click (PC: Right-click) again over each word and the ampersand and click Ungroup.

Step 5
Zoom in the art to see that we can now edit the text as shapes. With the Selection tool, click-and-drag the letters to move them closer together. Click-and-drag on a corner box to resize specific letters. With the Direct Selection tool, click an Anchor point to stretch the letter or make it conform to another letter.

Step 6
Click-and-hold the Pen tool to get the Add Anchor Point tool. Click on the paths were there should be another anchor point to add one. Then use the Direct Selection tool to move it.

Step 7
In some spots, you can have one letter’s stroke adjacent to another. Be creative with how the shapes of the letters conform to the other letters.

Step 8
Now instead of a boring slogan we have various sizes and shapes for the letters, some flush with each other.

Step 9
Try adding a gradient fill. Click-and-drag with the Selection tool a box around all of shapes (or go to Select>All). Go to Window>Gradient, select colors from the Swatch (Window>Swatches), and choose a gradient to finish the look. You may also want to color specific letters differently. For this just select each letter separately, then choose a color from the Swatches palette.

Learn to create warped text that is still editable on top of another object by creating a pirate’s map.

Sometimes it’s necessary to create outlines of text so that it can be distorted. But perhaps you want to be able to modify text after it’s warped. Here’s a neat way to do that. September 19th was Talk Like a Pirate Day, so let’s make a pirate’s map using this envelope warping technique. Here’s the image file I used: a map of Madagascar.

Step 1
Open a new document in Adobe Illustrator. Choose the Text tool, and click-and-drag and area to insert some text. You can type in some text, and Edit>Copy from another source and Edit>Paste into the text box. I’ve inserted some text from the classic book, Treasure Island, which is in the public domain.

Step 2
Change the font style and size to your liking by clicking-and-dragging over it with the Text tool then changing the font on the Options Bar or under the Type pull-down menu. I’ve used Snell Roundhand at 20 points to get a more “pirate” feel.

Step 3
Choose the Rectangle tool, and change the Fill and Stroke to None. Click-and-drag a box just around the text.

Step 4
Select both the new box and the text underneath it by clicking-and-dragging around both with the Selection tool. Go to Object>Envelope Distort>Make with Top Object.

Step 5
Go to Object>Envelope Distort>Reset With Warp. Choose a shape for the warp; the Fish shape makes for a good curved piece of paper look if the settings are correct - Horizontal Selected, Bend % set to 10, and the Horizontal Distortion set to 14 and the Vertical Distortion set to 17.

Step 6
Go to File>Place and choose the map of Madagascar. Click Place.

Step 7
With the Selection tool, click the placed art and resize by clicking-and-dragging a corner bounding box. Then click on the Live Trace pull-down arrow and choose Color 6. This will convert the map to a vector object.

Step 8
With the map selected, go to Object>Envelope Distort>Make with Warp. Enter the same settings as before: Fish shape, Horizontal Selected, Bend at 10%, and Horizontal Distortion set to 14 and Vertical Distortion set to 17.

Step 9
With the map selected, go to Object>Arrange>Send to Back and then change it’s Transparency to 70% (Window>Transparency).

Step 10
Click-and-drag the map directly underneath the text. Now both the map and the text are curving on the same shape coordinates. What’s neat about this is that you can still edit the text. Go to Object>Envelope Distort>Edit Contents and use the Text tool to edit the text. I changed the text “shook the four corners” to bold.

Text layout doesn’t have to be boring. Designer David Carson became famous using unique typographic effects, one of which was flowing text in an unusual way. In many magazines, text not only conveys information but joins the photos and colors to become art and part of the style of the magazine as well. Here’s a way to thread text on paths, which has many possibilities once you get the basic concept. Let’s thread text on path shapes to create unique magazine layout designs.

Step 1
Open a new Illustrator file and place a raster image, or open a vector image. This will provide as the background to our mock magazine layout. Optionally, pick one which curves or straight lines to flow the text around.

Step 2
Next, let’s create a path the text will initially flow on. You can create Circle, or us the Pen tool, but for this example I drew a curvy line with the Pencil tool. Optionally, make the Stroke black to see it; make the Fill None.

Step 3
Now we’ll insert the text. Click-and-hold the Text tool to bring out the other options. Click the Type On a Path tool. Click on the path where you want to have the text begin to flow.

Step 4
Go to File>Place and select a Microsoft Word document or another text document to insert. Once it is selected, click Place. Click OK in the next dialog. The text will flow from the point we selected.

Step 5
Select the text you want to change (font style, size, for example) and change it by selecting a new style with the Control Palette. I changed the title to a little bit bigger size font for emphasis.

Step 6
Now let’s flow the text from the path to another area. With the Selection tool, click the little red box in the lower right-hand corner of the path. Where we click next, the text will begin where it was cut off from our path (assuming your path was too short for the entire text document’s contents). Click-and-drag an area to have the text flow into a rectangle shaped text box.

Step 7
To make a unique text flow, with the Selection tool, hover over a corner of the new text box and click-and-drag to rotate it. If there is still text to be flowed, click the red box again, this time in the new text box. Click-and-drag to make one or two more text boxes, repeating the steps to link the threaded text.

Step 8
With the Selection tool, click-and-drag the boxes or paths to move the text to your liking. What’s cool about this technique is that the text flows automatically if you insert or delete text. For example, if you added more to the title, the text would flow to the next text box. There are many possibilities with flowing threaded text: try flowing text from a Circle to a Spiral, or from two block paragraphs into a wave shape drawn with the Pencil tool. All of these can create unique and unusual magazine-style layouts.

If you haven’t done so already, complete the first two parts of this tutorial and download the support files to follow along. We’ll be finishing up this tutorial with an introduction to pull quotes and text wraps.

Step 1
Open the Adobe InDesign publication file we saved from the second part of the tutorial. Go to the back cover (page 4) and use the Text tool to add a title using the same font we used for the titles on page 3. I used Rosewood. Creating two separate text boxes enables us to move each line to where we want with a Selection tool, instead of having to move it word-processor style.

Step 2
Go to File>Place and select the Word document, Spreading Joy.doc. Instead of clicking-and-dragging a text box, just click somewhere and the entire article will be placed. Move it so it’s over the photo like shown here.

Step 3
Select the photo of the woman blowing the bubbles. Open the Text Wrap palette (Window>Text Wrap). Click the third-from-left option at the top so the text will wrap around our photo. Normally the text will wrap around the entire photo. But since this photo is overexposed and has a lot of white area in it we can have text, let’s have the text wrap more specifically around the subject in the photo instead of the entire photo. Change the Contour Options to Detect Edges.

Step 4
This causes the text to wrap around the woman.

Step 5
Draw two circles using the Ellipse tool (hold Shift to make perfect circles). Select them with the Selection tool and add a text wrap on the Text Wrap palette. Select the third-from-left option at the top. We also want to get rid of the lines where only a word or two is, on the right side of the woman. So move the photo over to the right a little bit to push the text out of that area.

Step 6
One downside of using the Detect Edges County Option on the Text Wrap palette is that it maybe allow text in areas you don’t want it to be. For the photo of the woman blowing bubbles, the white area shown here has let an “a” letter in there.

Step 7
Let’s fix that. One way to do that is to create an object—such as a circle here—and add a text wrap to it on top of the area we don’t want text.

Step 8
Let’s add a pull quote to one of the articles. Go to page 2 and off to the side use the Text tool to add a quote. Change the font size of the actual quote and have the source of the quote be a smaller font size.

Step 9
Add a text wrap to this text box, using the same option as the other text wraps.

Step 10
Next, click-and-drag the text box with the Selection tool over an area of text. Placing it on the edge somewhere prevents it from creating awkward short text sections such as would happen with placing it slightly off the side of the page.

Step 11
There’s a little too much white space here between the pull quote and the article. Fix that by clicking-and-dragging the sides of the text wrap. You can move the line or just a corner. This enables the text to get closer to the pull quote.

Now we’ve created a four-page publication and learned a few techniques in the process. Try creating a newsletter, portfolio, or magazine with the same tools we’ve used here. Here’s the PDF of the resulting magazine layout.

My wife and I went to Crested Butte, Colorado, recently for spring break. We snowboarded for a few days and enjoyed the outdoors, taking a few photos along the way. One sure thing to do when enjoying the outdoors is to take panoramic shots. You don’t need a wide-angle lens to capture the vast expanse of outdoor landscapes photography. A technique I and many other photographers utilize is to take overlapping shots of a landscape and merge them later in Photoshop. Photoshop CS3 has a few new features and options to consider.

First, let’s go over some tips for when shooting these types of photos.

1. Hopefully, you’re using an SLR camera with an adjustable shutter speed and aperture. Don’t let the shutter speed and aperture change between shots; this would cause the resulting merged photo to not match up. Some parts of the resulting photo would have more exposure with a wider aperture and slower shutter speed. The depth of field would also differ with different aperture settings. So use manual mode, and remember what settings the shutter speed and aperture are set to and keep them the same for each shot.

2. Once you focus on the first photo, turn the lens to manual focus. This way, you control the focus of each shot, which should be the same for all of them.

3. Shoot the shots with the SLR camera held vertically, so more if covered at the top and bottom of the shot.

4. Be sure to overlap each shot about a quarter of the previous shot, so they overlap. We should avoid any blank areas in between obviously.

5. Before the first shot, take a photo of something unique, like your hand or snow glove in this case. After the last shot of the series, do that same thing. This way, you know which shot if the first in the panoramic series and which is the last, when you later browse the folder on your computer.
 
Step 1
Now let’s get started. For this example, I didn’t use my SLR camera, because I didn’t feel like lugging up the bigger Canon Rebel while snowboarding, especially since it’s more expensive than the one I brought, a Ccanon Powershot. I can put the Powershot in my pocket while snowboarding, so it was more convenient. But using an SLR is ideal for the reasons listed above. Go ahead and start up Photoshop CS3. Here’s there six images that we’ll be using from the support files.

Step 2
Go to File>Automate>Photomerge.

Step 3
A dialog will open that lists a few different options. “Auto” tells Photoshop to choose the best setting and apply it. It has less flexibility, but is quick and to the point. “Perspective” sets the image in a perspective that includes  less barrel distortion, while “Cylindrical” has more barrel distortion. “Reposition Only” simply does that—repositions the images but doesn’t change the perspective. “Interactive Layout” allows a few more options, so let’s choose that.

Step 4
Click Browse and select the images from the support files by clicking-and-dragging over them in the dialog. Click OK and the images will now be listed in the dialog. If we had already had the files open, they would already be listed there. Click OK to merge the photos.

Step 5
The Reposition Only option shows how the photos would look like if they were just copied and pasted next to each other.

Step 6
Clicking the Perspective option on the right adds perspective to the photo, rather than a “flat” look.

Step 7
The tools on the left side let you select and move the photos (the selection tool), move the view around (the move view tool), and the rotate and zoom tools let you rotate and zoom into the photos. The other one is the set vanishing point tool, which can be used when perspective is selected. Click somewhere to set the vanishing point. This example shows moving the vanishing point to the side of the photo.

Step 8
I pressed Ctrl-Z (Mac: Cmd-Z) to undo that tool. Select either perspective or reposition only and press OK to merge the photos.

Step 9
Notice how each layer is a partially-masked photo.

Step 10
Select the crop tool and crop out the empty pixels.

Using the photomerge tool is a great way to create breath-taking landscape photos. Here’s a few more examples.

by Chad Neuman

This is the second of a three-part tutorial on magazine design. If you haven’t already, complete the first part of the tutorial first and download the support files to follow along.

Step 1
Open Adobe Illustrator and open the Japanese vector file with the gradient we created in the first part. Open the publication we created in Adobe InDesign. In Illustrator, choose a Selection tool and click on the Japanese gradient flag and go to Edit>Copy. In InDesign, double-click on page 2 icon on the Pages palette. Go to Edit>Paste and resize the object to go across the spread of pages 2 and 3.

Note: In InDesign, you need to hold Cmd (PC: Ctrl) when you resize the object. If you just click-and-drag the corner without holding Cmd (PC: Ctrl), it will crop out that section instead of resizing it.

Step 2
Next, let’s place the photo we want for page 4, the back cover, and you’ll see what I mean. Go to page for by scrolling or double-clicking on its icon in the Pages palette. Go to File>Place and place the bubbles.jpg file. With a Selection tool, click-and-drag it to move it so the photo is flush with the bottom of the page and towards the right. To crop out parts of the photo that are unneeded, click-and-drag a corner. If you want to resize it, hold down Cmd (PC: Ctrl).

Step 3
Now let’s add the cover images and titles of the articles. You could add the text into the image file, but if we want to change the text later it’s more of a hassle. It’s preferable to add the text in InDesign as text boxes over the image. In InDesign, go to page 1 and go to File>Place and place the file lines.jpg. Resize it and move it towards the center of the front cover. Go to Object>Rotate to rotate the text along the lines. Designers such as David Carson bring text design in magazines to a new creative level. Instead of just typing in horizontal text, try vertical text or coordinate it with the photo behind it, such as we do here.

Step 4
It should look something like this if it’s placed the same way as I did.

Step 5
Next, let’s create a nice title header for the bottom part of the cover. Open Illustrator and use the Ellipsis tool to draw a perfect circle (hold down Shift to maintain ratio for a perfect circle). Use the Rounded Rectangle tool to draw a shape on top of it like shown here.

Step 6
Click on each of the objects and change the Fill color to an orange color from the Swatches palette. Set the Stroke to None if it isn’t already. With the Text tool, click to add some text. Click again to create another text box for the page number. Resize the fonts with the Control palette. Alternatively, if you just clicked instead of clicking-and-dragging, you can click-and-drag the text to resize the text size. Move it over the objects as shown here.

Step 7
Click-and-drag around all the shapes and text, and go to Edit>Copy. In the InDesign document, go to the cover (page 1) and go to Edit>Paste and move the objects to the bottom left of the cover. Go to File>Place to place the same photo we have on the back (page 4), named bubbles.jpg. The cover should look something like this so far.

Step 8
Let’s add a title and an “about us” section of text on the cover. On page 1, click-and-drag with the Text tool to create a title at the top. I used Impact for a strong font. In the bottom right-hand corner, click-and-drag a text box and type out what your publication is about.

Step 9
Now let’s insert the articles. Go to page 2 (the left hand side of the inside spread) and go to File>Place and place the Word document file, Kimonos and Video Games.doc. Once you select the file and click OK, the cursor will turn into a paragraph mouse icon. There’s two ways to place the text. You can either just click somewhere and the entire article will be placed and you can resize the resulting text box. Or click-and-drag out where you want the paragraphs to be.

For this tutorial, let’s use the second technique. Click-and-drag in the left hand side of page 2, from near the top to the bottom to create a column of text. Most of the article will still not be placed, so there will still be text to be placed. Click once on the red plus sign at the bottom of the text box and click-and-drag from the top to the bottom again. Repeat this for a third column, and then repeat it for the rest of the text to go along the bottom like shown here.

Step 10
The text is left-justified, which is what text usually is if you’re using Word or some other word processor. But we want it to fill the columns like they do in newspapers. So select the text in the article and click the Justify icon on the Paragraph palette.

Step 11
One of the biggest problems of beginning layout editors, at least in my experience from advising a university newspaper, is uneven paragraphs (besides copy editing, which is a different subject). There’s an easy way to vertically align the paragraphs. Click-and-drag from the top Ruler down to the text boxes to move it right below the first line of text. Then click-and-drag the text boxes to align them using this guide. Add a title and a subhead by adding new text boxes.

Step 12
Let’s place two articles on page 3. Go to page 3 and go to File>Place and place the Word document, Top Ten Places to Travel.doc. Use the same techniques from the previous steps to create the columns in a customized way. Add a title above it. I used the Rosewood font. Place this article on the bottom half of page 3.

Step 13
Next, go to File>Place and place the Word document, Thoughts on Travel.doc. Add a title above it in the same font as the other article. (You don’t want too many fonts in a publication; perhaps 2 or 3 at most for body text and titles).

Step 14
Most of you may just manually add indents when typing in a word processor such as Word by using the tab key. There’s another way to indent the first line in paragraphs so you can add the indent after placing the text without having to manually go through and tab every indent. After selecting the text of the article we just placed, go to the Paragraph palette and change the value in the second-from-top field on the left to 1 pica (1p0).

Step 15
This will indent the first line in each paragraph automatically.

Step 16
If you’re following along exactly as opposed to customizing the articles to your project, your page 2 and 3 spread should look something like this.

Save the InDesign publication to finish up this publication in the next and final section of this tutorial.

to save some time so you’re not doing repetitive things in Adobe Photoshop? Look no further than the Actions palette. Let’s say you to need to adjust settings, add a filter, resize, or any of the other many options in Photoshop to a large number of photos. Instead of having to go through each photo one at a time, applying effects, resizing, or adjusting levels for example, it’s much easier to edit one photo and record the actions. Then, we can apply that action to an entire folder of images.

Step 1
Go ahead and get a bunch of photos and place them into a folder. Open one of the photos in Photoshop. Select one which we’ll edit and record the changes for the action. Go to Window>Actions to open the Actions palette.

Step 2
Click the Create New Action icon on the bottom of the Actions palette.

Step 3
Name is “Black and White Thumbnail” and click Record. There are some other options, such as assigning a Function Key or changing the set of actions it’s placed, but leave those for this example as we don’t want to assign a function key and want to keep it in the default actions set.

Step 4
Everything we do next will be recorded as a step in the action. While there are many ways to convert an image to black and white, such as going to Image>Adjustments>Black and White, let’s do a simple desaturation for this example. Go to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation and drag the saturation to the left and click OK.

Step 5
Go to Image>Image Resize and change the Height to 200. As long as the Constrain Proportions is checked, the Width should resize automatically. Click OK.

Step 6
Now that it’s black and white and resized to a thumbnail, we need to add a border. Double-click the Background layer in the Layers palette and click OK to make it a normal layer that we can apply layer styles to. Go to Layer>Layer Style>Stroke. Change the Position to Inside, the Size to 2 and click OK.

Step 7
Now we need to save it with certain settings. Go to File>Save As and save it as a JPEG to a new folder named Thumbnails. Finally, click the Stop Playing/Recording icon on the bottom of the Actions palette. Now we have created an action that converted a color image to a black and white, resizes it to a thumbnail, adds a 2-point interior stroke, and then saves it as a JPEG. Close the file and don’t save changes so we don’t erase the original file.

Step 8
Now that we’ve created the action titled Black and White Thumbnail, go to File>Automate>Batch. Set the Action to Black and White Thumbnail. Click the Choose button near the source folder setting and find and select the folder of images to apply the action to. Click the Choose button near the Destination folder setting and find and select the folder to save the thumbnail images to. I set the source folder to one called Photos and I set the destination folder to one called Thumbnails. Also make sure to check Override Action “Save As” Commands since we already have a save command in the action.

Step 9
Now all seven photos from the source folder, originally full color and large size, have been saved as black and white thumbnails with a border in a separate folder. Remember, instead of editing photos one at time, when we want to edit many of them with the same effects, try actions instead.

1. Shoot about 30 minutes before and after sunset.
A sunset is a great thing to capture, but even if you’re not shooting the sunset but instead shooting at a 90-degree angle to the sunset or even shooting with the sunset at your back, having that subtle light brings out the colors in landscape photos. Most outdoor photography magazines won’t even consider shots that haven’t been shot around this time, as well as before/after sunrise.

2. Shoot about 30 minutes before and after sunrise.
As well as before and after sunset, shooting before and after sunrise causes a lot of detail and tone to be seen. The lighting avoids being overexposed, which happens many times when shooting in the middle of the day with harsh light. For portraits, you can shoot in the shade for subtle light even during the middle of the day, but with landscapes, you can’t put the entire landscape into the shade. You have to rely on the weather for that. You can shoot a little longer after sunrise if there’s some slight cloud cover, but usually an hour or two after sunrise and it’s already really bright.

This is an example of a slightly underexposed landscape photo. It’s not shot during the right amount of light, and was shot when the sun was too far down or with too much cloud cover.

3. Have a foreground, middleground, and background.
This is part of the rule of thirds, which I cover in the next tip. Make sure you have three elements in landscape shot in order to make it more aesthetically pleasing. For example, if there are some seagulls running on the beach along the shore, that can be the foreground, while the middleground would be the waves crashing and part of the ocean, and the distant ocean and horizon would be the background.

4. Use the rule of thirds.
The rule of thirds applies to landscape photography as well. Imagine drawing out a tic-tac-toe design, with two lines running vertically and two horizontally. The plane is divided into three equal parts. Try to put the subject where these lines meet; for example, to top left or top right or bottom left or bottom right.

In this photo, the umbrella is in the lower right corner.

The angles and placement of the two objects near the upper left corner work well here.

5. To include as much as the scenery possible, use a long depth of field.
Using a more closed aperture makes the depth of field longer (and the f-stop setting a higher number). This allows for more things to be in focus. While blurring out the background is sometimes preferred, with landscape photos, we often want to have many elements in focus.

In this photo, the camera focuses on the grass, but we want the depth of field to be high so we can see more of the landscape as well.

This is one example where we can see the detail of even elements far away.

6. Don’t put the horizon in the middle of the shot.
This tip is closely related to the rule of thirds tip: don’t put subjects (the subject being the horizon in this example) in the middle of the shot. While many beginning photographers may be inclined to divide the photo in half, having the horizon the top third, or even top fifth or top eighth, is much better, as is having the horizon in the bottom third, fifth, or eighth. This allows us to focus on either the sky or the ocean or earth so we have some kind of focus.

7. If the sun is harsh, shoot away from it to get blue skies. Shooting close to where the sun is causes the areas to be blown out.

This example of the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood shows how areas are blown out when shooting to close to the sun.

8. Finally, keep the horizon level.
This one may seem obvious, and although there are times when the horizon may need to not be level to accommodate a better composition of a subject, keeping the horizon level when possible is good practice.

This is one example where the horizon isn’t level. We’ll fix it in the next part of this article.

For a bonus addition to this feature article, here’s a short tutorial on making a horizon level.

1. Open an image with a horizon that’s not level. Instead of having to guess the angle to fix this at, here’s a short method that is lot more effective. You can use this image and save it to the computer and open in Photoshop. Download support file

2. Click-and-hold the Eyedropper tool to pull out the menu. Click on the Ruler tool.

3. Click-and-drag the Ruler tool along the crooked horizon.

4. Go to Image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary.

5. The degree of angle will be set to change the ruler to being level. Press OK.

6. Now we have some areas to crop out. Select the Crop tool.

7. Finally, we have a level horizon. We did change the composition though because areas had to be cropped out, so weigh the pros and cons before adjusting a horizon.