Because Lightroom 4 has different Basic Panel controls than Lightroom 3, if you have created presets in Lightroom 3 that use Basic panel controls, you may  be finding that they don’t look as expected now that you are using them in Lightroom 4.  Sharad Mangalick, one of the Adobe product managers for Lightroom, has written a post on how to update your presets for Lightroom 4, over on the Lightroom Journal. By the way, this is an excellent blog to follow to keep up on Lightroom bug fixes, new releases, and more.

If you have upgraded to Lightroom 4, when you look at photos in the Develop module that you had in a  previous version of Lightroom, you will see an exclamation point in the bottom right: This is a signal to you that the photo is continuing to use your settings from the old (pre-Lightroom 4) processing technology. The photo therefore should look the same to you as it did as you had left it in the earlier version of Lightroom (worked or unworked), and you will have the same Develop controls as before (for example, Recovery and Fill Light in the Basic panel, instead of Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks.) The new Lightroom 4 controls/technology are called Process Version 2012; [...more]

When I crop a photo, I often can’t judge whether I like it or not with the whole photo still showing, so I used to have to get out of the crop, decide, then go back in if I want to adjust it further. Here’s a tip I picked up from Victoria Bampton (aka the Lightroom Queen) quite a while back: Open the crop tool, and set your proportions, if needed. Turn on Lights Out mode, with the shortcut L. Typing L once will dim the background; typing it again will black out the background.  Drag on the crop edges or corners to make your crop. In Lights Out mode, you will not see what is outside the boundaries of [...more]

(Updated 1/30/12) Soft proofing is new in the Develop module of Lightroom 4 (the Beta at this point). It allows you to get a better idea of what your photo will look like in print when printing with profiles, and what it will look like when you export to sRGB or another color space. If your photo has richly saturated colors, for example, when you soft-proof you will see them become muted, since many printers and papers, as well as sRGB, can’t display them so saturated. When you print to paper, your photos will also lose contrast, as paper whites are never as bright as monitor whites. Soft proofing allows you to preview this, and then if necessary, make further [...more]

Do any of these happen to you? You have to crop a photo, perhaps because it isn’t straight or you applied lens corrections, but the crop cuts out something you really need? Something in your photo is right on the edge of the photo, and needs to be moved up a bit? You need to fix two things that are really close to each other, and the spot removal tool won’t let you? If so, you will want to watch my 5 minute video here showing some cool tips for using the Lightroom spot removal tool.  They won’t always work, but when they do they are quite handy. These tips apply to all version of Lightroom, and to Camera Raw [...more]

UPDATE: While this was written during the beta release, these instructions and video are completely applicable to the official Lightroom 4 release! The Basics panel in the Develop module of the Lightroom 4 Beta may not be the sexiest feature, but the improvements are quite powerful, and the new controls are one of the few new features that you will use many times every day. Working successfully with them requires that you change how you work with the sliders. The keys to successful work are to (1) understand that Exposure is now midtone brightness rather than the white point, and (2) that the sliders are designed to be worked from top to bottom. Here is a video I have produced [...more]

Occasionally I want to add  or subtract more clarity, contrast, or some other setting to or from the whole photo than the Lightroom Basic panel slider will allow.  At this point I often turn to the adjustment brush or graduated filter. They are intended for making local changes to a photo, but you can also apply them to the whole photo. They allow you to use the following settings: If, for example, I need more than 100 of clarity on the whole photo, I would set the Basics panel slider to 100, and then using the adjustment brush or graduated filter, I would add more.

I hope you aren’t disappointed when you read this, but truly, the most important thing you can do to get great results in Lightroom’s Develop module is to master the Basics panel.   It can get you all or most of the way to a stunning photo. Note: This article was written for Lightroom 3. For Lightroom 4, see this post to learn its much different Basic workflow. I am going to work through the photo below to illustrate the use of the panel.  The photo is dull and flat — the bright tones aren’t very bright, the dark tones aren’t very dark, it doesn’t have much color, and it doesn’t feel very three dimensional.  The photo is a raw file [...more]

One of the great things about working with Lightroom’s Develop module is that anything you do can always be undone. If you want to undo everything you have done, you can click on the Import step in History: or hit the Reset Button (in the bottom right):   Let’s look at the difference between the two methods:

People often use the vignetting sliders in the Lens Corrections panel (or Lens Correction Vignetting in the Vignettes panel of Lightroom 2)  to darken or lighten the edges of their photos for creative purposes. Is there anything wrong with this?  If it looks good, then definitely not. However, this Lens Corrections vignetting is designed specifically for eliminating dark corner vignetting that many camera lenses create.  It works on the edges of your original photo.