Editing in the Lightroom

Hey, Amanda here with your photography tutorial for July. This month I’m going to talk a little bit about Lightroom (LR). Prior to having this fabulous program I did all of my editing in PSE & editing took me a really, really long time. I started shooting in RAW format at the same time as beginning to edit in LR, however, you don’t have to use only RAW files; LR will import JPGS as well.

One of my most used is the ability to add keywords & add my copyright information when importing the photos, it will add them to the entire batch, saving TONS of time. The information gets written into the final photo file as it’s exported. Some of the information I give every file is my copyright information & a set of keywords. Personal files get a standard set: “year; Amanda Pratt Photography; month; JMK; Life Behind the Lens; My Life; Personal” & client images get a similar set, but there are more keywords.

Once I have my batch of images imported I do a quick run through, culling out anything that might be too terribly out of focus (sometimes capturing my own kids is beyond difficult & the moment is just a blur) or extra duplicates, etc. I use keyboard shortcuts a lot, both when I edit in LR & when I am in PSE.

I do this step in the “LIBRARY” mode. To quickly cull the images, I simply scroll through them & hit the “X” button for any image I want to ‘reject’. I also give the images I really love a rating, usually 5 stars, these are the ones that end up on my blog and/or Facebook. Notice the little flag in the upper corner of the image ‘frame’ as well as on the photos in the bin, not only does it flag them, but if it is rejected, the photo appears to be greyed out.

As soon as I have gone through it once to cull, I use the filter function (located in the bar above the ‘bin’) to filter them out & delete them permanently from the disk (this pulls them out of the folder the files are in & sends them to the trash). So filter, ‘REJECTED’ (the little flag with the x on it), select all (crtl+a) and then delete from disk (ctrl+backspace).

Once all my rejected images are out of the bin, I remove the filter, leaving the photos I want to keep. Once of the really great things about LR is that nothing is permanent until you actually export & even then, it saves all the steps & you can revert back to the originally imported photo.

With my “keepers” in the bin, I will now go through & do a little quick editing, by going into the “DEVELOP” mode. (I don’t like to spend a ton of time editing things, so keep it pretty minimal). Dark images I’ll bump exposure & fill light. So for example here is a photo of my son, that I took for AWITL project, he’s helping me do the dishes, but it came out pretty shadowy.

First I’m going to up the exposure, by dragging the slider to the right. I upped it +.77 (which is a little more than 2/3 of a stop).

Then, I’ll adjust the fill light (which lightens up some of the darker shadows) & since there are some hot spots (where the sun was streaming in & it’s significantly lighter) add some ‘recovery’ to pull those up.

One of the more recent things I figured out is how to use the “ADJUSTMENT BRUSH” (which is located in the top section of the panel & looks like a long paint brush). I don’t want to up the exposure on the entire photo, but some places could use a little more sun, specifically on his face. I’m taking the brush, and making it about the same size as his head, telling it I want to increase the exposure, but not change anything else. I also did a little bit of decreasing the exposure under his chin.

To finish it off I will use the temperature & hue settings to adjust the white balance. I know that my camera usually adds more magenta to images than should be there, so I decrease that slider and up the temperature slider just slightly. Give it a little boost in clarity & call it good.

The SOOC (straight out of camera) and the edited versions:

Of course, like Photoshop & PSE you can download & create presets in LR (these are like developing actions). There are numerous free ones available around the web. I’ll link you up to a couple at the end, but my point of bringing them up was to show you another fancy feature. When I am adding special effects or looking to give the photo something more than “regular’ editing, I always “Create a Virtual Copy” by right clicking on the image & selecting this choice. This gives you ENDLESS copies to work with, you can do it multiple times & apply different effects to the same photo without having to duplicate & save in PS/E.

I really love this photo I got today of my oldest little one, but I think it could use a little something extra & fun. So I just went through my presets & picked something that was a little like an antique wash. You can tweak & adjust the presets once you apply it to the photo, the same way you adjust for ‘regular’ edits.

SOOC, edited & ‘fun”:

Once everything is edited & ready to be exported, go FILE>EXPORT & tell it where you want to send the files, you can rename them, you can adjust size, DPI, etc.