Editing photos is one of the things I love most about photography process. Some say that editing photos is actually depriving the places or people of their natural beauty but I disagree. I will later explain why. My absolute favourite program for editing is Adobe Lightroom. It has so many amazing features that I decided to write this blog post and to tell you how to edit photos in Lightroom.
First thing I want to mention is that I use Adobe Lightroom CC paid version. There is a free version and even a mobile app. The difference between free and paid version is that with a paid one you can use all the features that Lightroom has, while in a free version some features are locked. If you love editing photos like I do I suggest trying it for free and then you’ll decide if you want to use the other features as well. For some, free version is enough, but I like to have more possibilities while editing.
How to edit photos in Lightroom? What’s the first step?
The first step is (after you downloaded Lightroom) to start importing photos you want to edit. The easy part! Next, choose the photo and let’s begin! Since I want this blog post to be as understandable as possible I’ll use the screenshots from my Lightroom mobile app. I’m guessing most of you are using your phones for editing since we all know it’s quicker and you can do it anywhere.
When you open the photo in Lightroom app at the bottom of the screen you will see the editing tools. They’re sorted like this: Selective, Healing, Crop, Profiles, Auto, Light, Color, Effects, Detail, Optics, Geometry, Presets and Reset. Let’s start from the beginning.
How to edit photos in Lightroom?
The first thing I use is Light. When you open the Light feature you’ll find the usual editing tools that almost any editing app has. Here you can adjust exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows. The thing I love about this is The Curve (check out the screenshots above). It’s a great tool and offers so many options. You can adjust the Curve so your photos are brighter or with more or less contrast. It’s amazing. You’ll see when you try it. Only one move on the curve can change the whole look of the photo. The best way to learn how to edit photos in Lightroom is to play with it, to explore its options and see what suits your style the most.
The second thing I use is Colour. When you open this tool you’ll see again a few features (temperature, tint, vibrance and saturation). This means you can adjust the temperature (whether you want cooler or warmer tones) as well as tint. You can see if you want your photo more or less saturated and vibrant. I like to adjust temperature, usually lower the saturation and play with tint. The great thing is that you can adjust each color individually.
For example, if you want to edit nature photos in Lightroom, where there are lots of greens, select green and play with saturation, hue and luminance. Maybe you want the trees to look more dark, so you’ll choose to move the hues to the right. If you lower the saturation and increase the luminance you’ll get a nice pistachio color. That’s just an example.
If you want to edit a photo from your summer holiday I’m guessing there will be lot of blue tones. Since blue is my favourite color I just love playing with it. If you’re editing the sky or the sea for example when you move the hues to the left you’ll get a more turquoise shade and moving them to the right will give you a shade that leads to purple. It’s up to you to choose! Saturation and luminance are always tricky if you ask me. They can make a photo look amazing, but on the other hand they can totally ruin it! For example, if you edit the sky too much it will look completely unnatural and that’s not what we’re here for.
I won’t explain what you’ll get by playing with hues, saturation and luminance for each color individually since you’ll see that yourself when you start editing.
The thing I’d like to tell you is how you can get warmer or cooler tones, how your photos can be bright and airy or dark and moody. It all depends on you and what you prefer.
To get a bright photo with light colors you’ll definitely want to go up with brightness, shadows, highlights and down with contrast for example. As for colors, you can lower the saturation and increase the luminance.
If you’re more into a moody look lower the brightness and shadows, increase the contrast and play with highlights and blacks. As for colours, you’ll see that you’ll get stronger tones if you move the luminance for each colour to the left.
To get a bit of a vintage look increase the temperature and play with yellow, orange and red colours. This will give the photo warmth. You can also lower the contrast. Another great tool in Lightroom for getting that vintage look is Effects. Here you’ll find Dehaze, Clarity, Texture, Vignette and Grain. Grain gives your “new” photos that old film look and you can adjust its size and roughness.
In the Effects tool you’ll find Split toning which I love but I don’t use it on every photo. Here’s why! Split toning allows you to manipulate the highlights and shadows of the colors in your photo. For example, if you see a photo that looks like it’s covered in blue whatever its main colors are – well, that was done either with split toning or with the colour curve. This is one of my favourite tool when I edit photos in Lightroom, whether it’s for the photos on my Instagram page or a blog post.
Let’s say you want your photo to have pinkish hues you’ll move the shadows to the pink-red part of the color spectrum and then see what looks good. I suggest not to go overboard using this tool because it can also ruin your photo. You’ll see yourself how much it can change a photo.
The Selective tool and Healing are great for editing a certain part of the photo. With selective tool you can choose a brush, a circle or rectangle and mark the part of the photo you want to edit. Let’s say you are in the shot you want to edit so you want to make yourself stand out a bit. You choose the brush on Selective, “paint” yourself and start editing. You can increase clarity or brightness for example.
Let’s say that one part of your photo is all in the shadow and you want it to be more visible. Go to Selective tools and choose a rectangle. Then mark the part of your photo that’s in the shadow. Now you can move the shadows to the right. This will make it more visible without making changes to the rest of the photo. Pretty cool, right?
With the Healing tool you can actually remove an unwanted object from the photo or remove a mark from someone’s face for example. I used this tool to remove some cables a few times but never removed other objects or people from photos. Again, it’s all up to you!
Another great thing about Lightroom is that it has its own camera which takes amazing shots. Just check it out cos not a lot of people use it. The photo below was taken with my iPhone 7 using the Lightroom camera set to Pro. If you’re using some of the older iPhone models you know that night shots are far from great. (the word is that this has changed on new iPhone 11!) So, if you’re up for a quick night shot and the only thing you have on you is your phone try this camera and let me know how it worked.
In the next blog post I’ll write about how you can make your own presets and save them.
I’m also thinking to make an IGTV video so this all would make more sense.
I hope this post was helpful. If you have any questions about Lightroom feel free to contact me HERE or to send me a message on Instagram. I’ll be happy to answer all your questions.
Thank you for reading!
