I posted this tip a little over a year ago when Lightroom 3 came out, but I thought I'd post it again, since surprisingly it is one of my most-read posts. Looking to blur out a background to reduce distractions? In Lightroom 3 or later, use the adjustment brush with Sharpness at -50 to -100. [...]
Sometimes I find that for cloning or healing I need to put one Lightroom spot removal fix right on top of another. If you have used this tool, you know that this isn’t directly possible — putting the cursor over an existing circle just gives you the hand tool to move that circle. It finally occurred [...]
The HSL panel allows you to affect individual colors in your image. HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. You can use Hue to shift a color towards another color, for example, blue to purple or green. (Yes, you too can have purple skies!) Saturation is the intensity of color, so you can make your blues, for [...]
Recently a colleague of mine, Kathy Eyster, wrote an article in her award-winning blog, Essential Digital Camera, on how to fix flash-filled pet eyes using Photoshop. The red-eye tool won’t fix them, as it simply takes red out, and pet pupils don’t turn red. Kathy points out that there are two steps, first turning the pupil almost [...]
Quite a while back I wrote about a technique to invert your images from negatives to positives or vice versa that involved an Adobe Camera Raw workaround. In looking at my blog stats, I notice that people are still reading that post, so I thought I would provide an easier technique — now that Lightroom 3 [...]
I am working on a Lightroom 3 training DVD, which I will be offering for sale, hopefully soon. The concept is a "Lightroom Workshop on DVD". It is a series of many videos, several hours long in total, designed for beginning and intermediate Lightroom users. I cover just about everything I teach in my two-day Lightroom [...]
If you have upgraded to Lightroom 3, when you look at images in the Develop module that you have adjusted with a previous version of Lightroom, you will see an exclamation point in the bottom right: This is a signal to you that the image is continuing to use your settings from the old (pre-Lightroom 3) [...]
Looking to blur out a background to reduce distractions? In Lightroom 3, use the adjustment brush with Sharpness at -100. If this is not enough blur, do it again: click on New to start a new adjustment, and paint a second time. Also consider using the graduated filter with -100 Sharpness to simulate a shallower [...]
You may or may not have noticed that when you are using the spot removal tool, you can work in either Heal or Clone mode. Let’s take a look at the difference. Here is an image before any work: (c) A. Nowacka First I clicked on the spot removal tool to select it, and then on [...]
I knew it wouldn’t be long before folks started creating wild presets with the new point tone curve in Lightroom 3 Beta 2. Here are SOME and SOME MORE from Jeffrey Friedl. (UPDATE: This is applicable to later versions of Lightroom as well.) Play with it yourself: In the Tone Curve panel in the Develop module, [...]
I used the image below in a a post on exposure a few months back. A reader asked me to show how I developed the image, so I have produced a video showing my technique. Click HERE to view it. To develop this image, I use the Basic, Tone Curve and HSL panels, as well as [...]
Curves isn’t exactly intuitive, so Adobe lately has been introducing tools to make it more accessible. As I mentioned in my “Introduction to Curves” post, the sliders available underneath the curve in Lightroom (and Camera Raw) to adjust brightness of Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows are one example of this. Another example is the targeted adjustment [...]