Speedy processing is my goal. I want finely edited images with colors that pop and beautiful skin tones. I want to:. Sometimes I want to turn an ordinary scene into the end of the perfect summer day, with golden hues, sun flares and the scent of freshly cut grass.
Why buying Lightroom presets is a waste of money. The massive, massive advantage of Lightroom is that the catalog of edits is separate from the actual photos. Lightroom records the editing history so I can easily go back to any point in the edit and start over. Or I could just hit reset and start from scratch again. With one quick click I can flick back to before I started editing. If I get a bee in my bonnet and want to try different editing styles on an image, or even just a different crop.
No problem. Or keep it. Well, maybe mini-miracles. Have you ever felt the need to explain that Facebook messed up your photo and that it actually looks a lot better than the version you posted? In turn, Lightroom is photo management and photo editing, combined into a single tool. All of the edits are automatically kept in your Lightroom catalog, which acts as your database of edits and history.
If you shoot raw photos which you should , then I recommend that you first import your photos into Lightroom as the initial step of your image management process.
Lightroom is perfect for most basic photo editing, including but not limited to cropping, white balance, exposure, histogram adjustments, tonal curves, black and white conversion, spot removal, red eye corrections, gradients, local adjustments, sharpening, noise reduction, lens profile corrections, vibrance, and saturation.
Lightroom is also much easier to use than Photoshop, which can have more of a steep learning curve. When it comes to workflow, I believe Lightroom blows Photoshop out of the water. With Lightroom, you can create collections, add keywords, move multiple images or files around your hard drive, create slideshows, print books, and share your photos directly to Facebook with relative ease. As importantly, you can also copy or sync your photo edits to multiple photos at once. You can also use and create Lightroom presets to apply common settings across your photos.
Depending on the type of photography you do, this can be fairly often or practically never. That being said, there are a few specific areas where Photoshop actions and Photoshop elements that outperform Lightroom.
Advanced Retouching: If you want to have pixel level control to edit photos, or if you want to make an arm thinner or a person taller, Photoshop is needed. Having all your photos in one place is a bigger benefit than having many catalogues with a few files on each. You might want to separate work photographs from your family snaps. So having two different workflows would make sense. Other tips and information can be seen in this Lightroom tutorial and will help you understand the catalogue in minutes.
Collections in Lightroom are a great way to keep your photographs neat and tidy. I use them when finalizing a project I have been working on. After editing the photographs down to an idea number 15 for live concerts , I tag them using a green label. When I create a collection, I go for the smart version. This allows me to tell the collection to look into this folder, and only show those with a green label. This makes it easy to delete the ones I no longer want and find these images again if need be.
This article is a step by step Lightroom tutorial to creating collections and how your workflow can benefit from them. Lightroom is great at so many things. It is possible to hide panels so that you can see the image better and focus more on it.
This is especially handy on a laptop. Another great tip is changing the overlays when cropping images. The standard cropping tool shows you a grid, which is handy for straight lines like horizons. You can use the golden ratio or diagonal lines instead. Everyone has their own workflow method. The best way to do it quickly and efficiently is by using keyboard shortcuts. This article gives you all of the possible keyboard shortcuts you might use in your day-to-day editing.
What if you want to change a small part or select a single subject from an entire image? This is where brushes and masks come into play. There are many possibilities, from graduated to radial filters. You can use any of the tools and more found in the develop panel on the right. These can also be copied and pasted to other photos that have the same problem. This cuts down on editing time, leaving you free to capture more images.
Here you can do small, local adjustments such as increasing exposure or correcting the light balance. Or you can do something a little heavier. Such as applying masks to increase the hue of a specific area.
Lightroom is great for many different reasons. It has a great organization structure, allows keywording and gives you the change to edit your photos. Personally, I use Lightroom to batch process images. This means editing multiple photos at the same time. This is handy for editing as it saves a lot of time. Best used for sessions where the setting, white balance or light conditions are similar.
When we capture photos, we tend to shoot in the highest resolution possible. This comes from using sensors that capture a large number of megapixels. And for good reason. The more megapixels your camera sensor has, the higher quality your images are.
But, with large megapixel sizes brings a huge amount of memory being used. Cropping images can help with your composition. Making your image smaller removes and cuts out distracting areas of your photographs. Before applying adjustments that change the atmosphere and colours of the image, you should try rotating, flipping or straightening the photo.
This way, you might get a new perspective and decide what fits the photo the best. Lightroom has several methods for rotating and flipping your images, read our article to see which one would fit your workflow the most!
An aspect ratio is the proportion of the width and the height of the photograph. Digital cameras use a default aspect ratio of However, there might be times when you are aiming to print and frame your photos, and you need to change the ratio.
Luckily, Lightroom offers an easy way to change the aspect ratio while cropping an image. You can choose from different ratios, as well as create your own custom one. You might not need to be a lighting specialist or photographic professional to achieve a perfect exposure. Your camera can get very close, but sometimes, your image will benefit from a little tweaking in Lightroom. This is the local adjustment panel.
The exposure slider is used to add or subtract light. The contrast changes the tonal range and helps things to stand out a little more. Highlights bring down the exposure of the lightest areas. It does this without affecting the whole image. Shadows help to make the darker areas darker or lighter. This can push away unwanted detail or make it more visible.
The white and black sliders help to create pure white and black areas in your image. It will help naturalize your image better. Here is an in-depth account of what these local adjustments do.
You can use it to get the best out of your photos. This concerns the light reflected from your subject. These colours have dramatic effects on the final colour of your image. You might find that you will have to tweak the white balance.
After all, you want the white areas a little bit more natural and real. Also, you might find that the colour of the photographed objects is either a little too colourful or not colourful enough. As this article suggests, there are many ways that colour can be changed. Either by help normalizing the scene or adding a kick to your images. The bottom left corner deals with shadows and the top right corner with highlights.
This leaves the mid-tones are in the middle. These mid-tones are split further into light and dark areas. These are easy to adjust, you just need to know what you want to change.
For example, if you want to make the mid-tones darker, just click on the middle portion of the Tone Curve. Gently drag it downwards. You will see the image change as you do so. They can house some detail. This helps to make them more defined while giving a more professional look. Plus, the shadow might have a beautiful texture or design to it that adds value.
The Lightroom adjustment brush is a tool that allows you to make localised adjustments to any part of the image. By clicking on the brush and painting on the picture, you select the area that you want to apply the adjustments to. You can do several adjustments with the same brush. It is also possible to add as many of these brushes as you want, if you need them for different parts of a picture.
You can find the brush tool in the Develop Module, under the histogram. If you activate the mask overlay, you will see the area where the mask is applied. You can erase parts of the already painted area any time, and even move the brush if necessary. Sometimes taking photos where the colours are off is inevitable.
There are light conditions where it is almost impossible to get the white balance right. To be able to correct colours in Lightroom, you need to have taken your picture in raw format. RAW files allow you to edit your images in a non-destructive way while maintaining quality. There are several tools in Lightroom that allow you to apply colour correction to your image. The Temperature and Tint sliders give you an opportunity to correct white balance. You can also use the Color Tune Curves to edit the range of tones in your photo.
With the use of HSL panel, you can even edit the saturation, hue and luminosity of individual colours. Both have different ways of dealing with these colours. Either in-camera or during post-processing. In Lightroom, the colour can be changed in a few different ways.
Firstly, before changing anything else, make sure you are happy with the white balance. The Hue allows you to replace entire colours in the image. These sliders leave other colours untouched. Good to know: There are different presets for desktop and mobile.
The short answer is no. Actually, you have two options : you can either watch tons of Youtube tutorials and invest a lot of time in learning how to use Lightroom or you can buy some professional presets and use them right away. I will go into detail about each option.
This is how I did it. There are tons of Youtube tutorials and articles on the internet that teach the basics of Lightroom. After you know what each setting does, you can go a step further and start experimenting. Experimenting is the most important step. It took me about two years to finally get to the point where I can say that I love my edits.
The presets will take you from beginner to advanced mode in basically no time. All you have to do is apply the desired preset, and BOOM your photo is ready. A preset is a set of adjustments colors, exposure, contrast, and many others that changes the way a photo looks instantly. It works like a filter for photos. All you have to do is install these presets on your computer or mobile phone, select the picture you want to edit and apply the preset.
Learning how to edit photos in Lightroom takes a lot of work and dedication. Literally all of them. No matter if I post on Facebook, blog, or Instagram , Lightroom is my best friend. However, getting here, to the level where I am confident and completely happy with my edits, took a lot of time.
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