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 [...]
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 [...]
I love Lightroom’s adjustment brush, because it allows me to make local changes to my photos very precisely. I can lighten or darken a particular area, add or reduce contrast or saturation, add or reduce clarity, sharpen or blur. I can even add or change the color of an area. Or I can do a combination [...]
As you are working on a photo up close, it can sometimes be useful to see a second copy of the photo zoomed out so that you have a better perspective on your work. For example, while brightening the whites of eyes or teeth in portraits, it is hard to know if you are brightening too [...]
When you are trying to match the appearance of two photos in Lightroom, it sure would be nice to be able to see them side by side as you work on one or both. In my last post, I talked about Compare View — but it is in the Library module, not the Develop module. [...]
Anywhere you see a color selection square in Lightroom, such as for page background color in the Print module, you can choose a color not only from the color picker that comes up when you click on it, but also a color from one of your photos. How? Simply click in the main color selection area [...]
I wrote about basic techniques of fixing color casts / setting white balance in Lightroom in my Getting Rid of the Winter Blues post. I thought I would show you some additional tricks for dealing with mixed lighting, using the photo below. It is from a Lightroom workshop student of mine, Jim Levitt (thanks, Jim!). [...]
For this week’s Lightroom tip, I am resurrecting one from a couple years ago: I recommend that you do all of your Lightroom clean up and retouching work zoomed into 1:2 or 1:1 (the latter for larger prints). You should also review all of your local adjustments at these zoom ratios to make sure that [...]
In my first post on sharpening in Lightroom, I discussed the three steps in the sharpening workflow, and went into depth on how to do capture sharpening using the Detail panel in the Develop module. I mentioned that the second stage in the sharpening workflow is creative sharpening. This is an optional stage, in which local [...]
The tone curve is not the most intuitive feature of Lightroom or Photoshop. In this tutorial I will explain how to read the curve, and then how to use the basic version of it in Lightroom and Camera Raw. Note that this is a rewrite of an old post. If you are a Photoshop user, [...]
As I wrote in my recent post on sharpening in Lightroom , occasionally when I go to a photography show at a gallery, my first reaction isn’t “What great/horrible photographs!”, but rather “Wow, too much sharpening!” Sharpening has always been a tool that is easy to go to far with. Unfortunately, with all the new powerful [...]
I was having dinner last week with my good friend Martha, who is a very talented photographer, when she suggested that I do a post on sharpening in Lightroom. Yes, this is what instructors and photographers talk about at dinner, even after the wine is poured! Coincidentally, in the past week, two other readers have also asked [...]