Photography Tip Tuesday: Editing in Lightroom Part 2

In case you missed it, head over here to see the Editing in Lightroom Part 1 post!

We talked about last week importing our photos into Lightroom and getting them ready and organized to be edit in Lightroom, so now we are ready to start editing! Now, I’m going to start off by saying there is no right or wrong way to edit. Everyone has a different style and different type of look that they are going for. I’m just going to go over some basic features of Lightroom to help enhance your photos!

First make sure you are in the develop module (when you import the picture you will be in the library module) then the first thing I always do is bump up the exposure just a tad, I personally like a more bright picture and never want my subject to be underexposed, so that’s always my first step. I then typically bring the the black and shadows down a little bit (so I move the slider backwards to the left), I suggest playing with all these sliders by moving them up and down to figure out the look you like the best, there is never any harm in testing what they do. If you make an edit you completely hate all that you have to do is click edit in your toolbar and undo and it will undo the last edit you did. By clicking reset which is right above the pictures on the right hand side you will bring the photo back to its original pre-edit state! I then typically bring the contrast up to about +10 and the Clarity up anywhere from +5 to +15 it just kind of depends on the image. See screenshot below to find where exposure, contrast, highlights, whites, blacks, and clarity is located!

The other thing I always make sure to do to every picture is sharpen it. Use the side bar to scroll down until you see detail on the right hand side where you are editing. You then will see Sharpening I usually pull the slider until it say around +45 then bring the detail slider to about 30, this will just make your photo a little more crisp.

Now, one of the best features about editing in Lightroom is this next step. After you get the picture edited just how you want it you can then click and highlight that edited photo, hit shift on your keyboard and hold it while you select however many pictures you want to copy that same edit to. After you have all the images selected that you want to have that same edit then all you have to do is hit the sync option right next to reset and it will sync all those photos to look like the first one you edited! I do want to throw out a disclaimer, you do not want to copy the same edit to a picture that was taken in a completely different light because most likely it will not look right.

Now after you are finished editing all your pictures all you have to do is highlight all the pictures and go to the top next to the develop and click “library:. Once you are on the Library screen, instead of hitting import like we did last time we are going to hit Export so we can export all the edited images out of Lightroom.

That covers the basics of Lightroom and what you can do with it! Again, I suggest playing with all the sliders and seeing for yourself which is does and how it makes your picture look!  Leave any questions in the comments!!

xo,

Deeana & Bess