Lightroom

Lightroom is one of the Creative Cloud apps used for editing photos. Many people think that Photoshop is the best for photo editing, which it does have its benefits and so many things can be created in it, however, Lightroom allows you to edit a photo beautifully in just a couple of minutes. I want to offer some of the things that I have learned using Lightroom and how to edit a photo in the app.

Editing An Indoor Portrait

The first picture is a RAW indoor image that I took for no particular reason, but I’m going to show you how to quickly touch it up. The first thing that I want to do is lighten my subject using the shadows tool, not the exposure tool because of the bright natural light coming from the windows, otherwise it would be overexposed. The next step is to turn down the highlights and whites to balance the lighting with the subject. The next step that I like to do is turn down clarity and saturation to at least -5. Finally, I like to have warm temperatures on my photos, especially ones with flat colors because it softens the image.

Editing An Outdoor Portrait

My process for editing an outdoor portrait is similar to indoor, but the thing that changes is there are many more colors to play with. This RAW image below is a bit underexposed because I shot it in a shady area. First, increase exposure to +0.20 (not too much exposure, but it also does not leave the photo underexposed). Next, I lighten the shadows to try and expose her face a bit more. I also increase the highlights and whites because I want more background light to highlight the yellows and greens in the background. Next, I set clarity at -5 and saturation at -10 because I want to warm the image, but do not want to saturate the colors. After I do this, I increase the temperature toward warm to soften it. What this does is it brings a lot of yellow onto her face and in the background. In order to avoid over saturating the photo, I scroll down to the hue, saturation, and luminance tab; and lower the green, yellow, orange, and red saturation.

Editing A Landscape

The final photo that I’m going to demonstrate how to edit is a sunset landscape photo, which can be tricky with the colors and contrasts. The photo is underexposed and I purposely did that for the sake of preserving the sunset colors. When I edit the photo, I want to increase the shadows and blacks quite a bit because the foreground colors compliment the sunset colors well. The next step is to decrease the highlights and whites because that will make the oranges, pinks, and reds stand out more. I will increase the temperature to make it warmer and soften the entire image. Next, I want to play around with different hues to see how I can make those colors stand out but also fit with the rest of the natural colors.