The Digital Photography Book

Why You Need a Polarizer

You’ve probably heard that every landscape photographer should have a circular polarizing filter, which I actually think is true but not for the reasons you’ve heard, which are it makes skies bluer and more contrasty. Well, that’s kinda true if you use it right, but you can do a better job in Lightroom or Photoshop. What you want a polarizing filter for is to do something you can’t do in Lightroom or Photoshop—cut reflections. That’s the magic of a polarizing filter. Let’s take a stream, for example. The water in the stream reflects what’s above it (the sky), so you don’t see all the interesting rocks below the waterline, ...