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7 Simple Lightroom Tips to Improve Your Photos
1. Correct the White Balance
Two ways to correct white balance:
For example, if you are photographing in a controlled environment like a studio where the light will be all the same, you can adjust the White Balance manually. But when you are out and about, this might not be efficient and could mean missing the vital moment.You can adjust the White Balance in Lightroom to give your image a more natural look.
There are two sliders that you can adjust. “Temperature” and “Tint”.
Temperature determines how warm or cold your image looks (yellow or blue)
Tint adds green or magenta (a pinkish tone). By combining these you’ll be able to get a natural look for your images.
2. Adjust the Highlights and Shadows
This means that there are no pixel details in that area so the image has either pure white or black areas.Ideally, you should aim to avoid large areas where this clipping happens. Lightroom has a pretty good function to enable you to recover these most of the time.
3. Adjust the Vibrance and Saturation
These neat tools in Lightroom can really help your photos pop by boosting their colors.
If and how much you use the Vibrance and Saturation sliders will depend on your personal taste, preferences, your subject, and how much the photo needs.
For example, for a sunset landscape shot you may want to boost the colors to give your image that wow factor. Whereas a portrait of someone might only need a very subtle boost.Simply move the sliders along until you get the desired effect. Just be You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. it as too much saturation will make the image look fake.
4. Tweak the Contrast
If you find that your image looks flat, often a good remedy is to tweak the contrast.There are several ways to do this in Lightroom. First is the Contrast slider in the tone section.Simply move the slider to the right to increase (or left to decrease) the contrast in the image. If you want more control, check out the Tone Curve section. You can either move the sliders or the line on the graph at various points to create the level of contrast that your image needs.
5. Straighten and Crop
If you do nothing else to a photo in the post-processing stage, the one thing that you should always do is ensure that it is straight.
This is especially apparent in any image that has a vertical or horizontal line such as a horizon in a landscape image. You should also look to fix images of buildings that suffer from converging lines (where the building looks like it’s falling over).
6. Dodge and Burn
Sometimes you will find that a certain area of the image can benefit from brightening up or darkening. For example, it might be that you want to brighten a person in your scene while not changing the overall image.
Using the traditional sliders will brighten the entire image, these are called global adjustments. But if you select the Adjustment Brush (hit K on your keyboard to activate it) located under the histogram on the right-hand side, you can then selectively dodge (lighten) and burn (darken) only certain areas. These are called local adjustments.
Dial in the adjustments you want to make, the brush settings (keep the feather number high to blend the changes more naturally), and the brush opacity (keep it low to apply edits gradually just like if you were painting). Then simply adjust the brush to the size you need and go over the area that you want to brighten or darken with your mouse clicked.
7. Remove Dust Particles
No matter how much you clean your lenses, there will always be occasions where you will end up with dust particles on the sensor or lens glass. These are especially evident in flat color areas like the sky. This is one of the main reasons that you should always check your work by reviewing it on your screen at 100%.
Select the Spot Removal tool (keyboard shortcut is Q) then click on the spot in your image.
Lightroom will automatically remove it by cloning another area onto the spot. You can adjust the source area (where it is cloning from) from by moving the circle that appears.
Note: You can also choose either Clone or Heal for this tool. Cloning is an exact copy of the source area, Heal attempts to blend the area you are fixing with its surroundings so you usually get a nicer, more natural looking result this way.
source:digitalphotomentor
1. Correct the White Balance
Two ways to correct white balance:
For example, if you are photographing in a controlled environment like a studio where the light will be all the same, you can adjust the White Balance manually. But when you are out and about, this might not be efficient and could mean missing the vital moment.You can adjust the White Balance in Lightroom to give your image a more natural look.
There are two sliders that you can adjust. “Temperature” and “Tint”.
Temperature determines how warm or cold your image looks (yellow or blue)
Tint adds green or magenta (a pinkish tone). By combining these you’ll be able to get a natural look for your images.
2. Adjust the Highlights and Shadows
This means that there are no pixel details in that area so the image has either pure white or black areas.Ideally, you should aim to avoid large areas where this clipping happens. Lightroom has a pretty good function to enable you to recover these most of the time.
3. Adjust the Vibrance and Saturation
These neat tools in Lightroom can really help your photos pop by boosting their colors.
If and how much you use the Vibrance and Saturation sliders will depend on your personal taste, preferences, your subject, and how much the photo needs.
For example, for a sunset landscape shot you may want to boost the colors to give your image that wow factor. Whereas a portrait of someone might only need a very subtle boost.Simply move the sliders along until you get the desired effect. Just be You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. it as too much saturation will make the image look fake.
4. Tweak the Contrast
If you find that your image looks flat, often a good remedy is to tweak the contrast.There are several ways to do this in Lightroom. First is the Contrast slider in the tone section.Simply move the slider to the right to increase (or left to decrease) the contrast in the image. If you want more control, check out the Tone Curve section. You can either move the sliders or the line on the graph at various points to create the level of contrast that your image needs.
5. Straighten and Crop
If you do nothing else to a photo in the post-processing stage, the one thing that you should always do is ensure that it is straight.
This is especially apparent in any image that has a vertical or horizontal line such as a horizon in a landscape image. You should also look to fix images of buildings that suffer from converging lines (where the building looks like it’s falling over).
6. Dodge and Burn
Sometimes you will find that a certain area of the image can benefit from brightening up or darkening. For example, it might be that you want to brighten a person in your scene while not changing the overall image.
Using the traditional sliders will brighten the entire image, these are called global adjustments. But if you select the Adjustment Brush (hit K on your keyboard to activate it) located under the histogram on the right-hand side, you can then selectively dodge (lighten) and burn (darken) only certain areas. These are called local adjustments.
Dial in the adjustments you want to make, the brush settings (keep the feather number high to blend the changes more naturally), and the brush opacity (keep it low to apply edits gradually just like if you were painting). Then simply adjust the brush to the size you need and go over the area that you want to brighten or darken with your mouse clicked.
7. Remove Dust Particles
No matter how much you clean your lenses, there will always be occasions where you will end up with dust particles on the sensor or lens glass. These are especially evident in flat color areas like the sky. This is one of the main reasons that you should always check your work by reviewing it on your screen at 100%.
Select the Spot Removal tool (keyboard shortcut is Q) then click on the spot in your image.
Lightroom will automatically remove it by cloning another area onto the spot. You can adjust the source area (where it is cloning from) from by moving the circle that appears.
Note: You can also choose either Clone or Heal for this tool. Cloning is an exact copy of the source area, Heal attempts to blend the area you are fixing with its surroundings so you usually get a nicer, more natural looking result this way.
source:digitalphotomentor