Wedding and portrait photographers may be more familiar with Anthropics PortraitPro than they are with LandscapePro, but you might want to make room for both on your hard drive. After all, you can control a lot of things in your work, but you can’t control the weather and LandscapePro—especially the newly released version 2—can make dull, grey skies look sunny and bright.

Once you understand LandscapePro’s tools, the software is highly intuitive. Selections that are complex to make by hand take mere minutes by placing the appropriate labels onto areas such as skies, water, trees, plants, mountains, etc. In version 2, Anthropics has added several new labels including snow, waterfall and bridge. Selections, which are pretty easy to adjust with the application’s pull tool, can now be refined with the new smart brush.

And speaking of brushes, version 2 also adds new lighting brushes. The 2D Lighting Brush provides standard dodge and burn capabilities, but if you want to tweak lighting to add depth and structure, check out the new 3D Lighting Brush.

LandscapePro 2 now has 100 additional skies to choose from as well. Like the original set of skies, the software offers plenty of adjustments to tweak the day or night skies to the look and feel you want.

If your scene includes a body of water such as a lake, the new Sky Reflections in Water label expertly reflects your chosen sky. It’s very cool and surprisingly accurate.

The cross-platform software comes in three editions: Standard, Studio and Studio Max. While Studio and Studio Max offer essential features such as RAW, color space conversion, Photoshop and Lightroom plug-in capabilities (Standard is standalone only), I recommend Studio Max since it now comes with a histogram and batch processing.

Upgrade pricing is available from LandscapePro to version 2, as well as from one edition to another. If you’re looking to buy for the first time, Standard will cost you $80, Studio $120 and Studio Max $240, but you can pick them up for half price on the site right now, or there’s a free trial if you want to check out the software before you buy. If you shoot outdoors, we think you’ll quickly be sold on LandscapePro 2.

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