Lightroom Tips

Here are some of the most useful lightroom tips that can help beginners and professionals alike. With Lightroom being one of the primary image editing software used by photographers, it is essential to learn how to use it efficiently. Doing so will speed up your workflow, and let you arrive at your desired final product confidently! Let us explore some of the best Lightroom tips.

Related: Lightroom or Photoshop, Which One to Use?

Best Lightroom Tips

Tip 1# Auto Tone

Auto Tone is a great starting point for beginners to get their image edited well. If you don’t have a direction, this setting can quicken your editing workflow quite significantly. With one click of a button, Lightroom will edit your image based on what it thinks is best. However, Lightroom tends to overexpose the image a lot. Typically, if you use Auto Tone, you will need to reduce the exposure to get usable results.

Tip 2# Quick Before and After

Did you know you can toggle between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states of your photograph in Lightroom? When you’re in the Develop module, the official Before/After buttons can be found at the bottom left of your image. These buttons are good for showing the Before/After states right next to each other. However, there is a better way to do it. You can simply use the keyboard shortcut ‘backslash (\)’ to toggle between the states!

Tip 3# Fast Image Rating

No matter what you are shooting, a question that you always ask yourself after you import your images is: which of these photos do I keep, and which do I discard? Often, you will find yourself with multiple images with only slight variations in them. The star rating system comes in handy in such situations. You can use it to rate images from 1 to 5 stars and segregate them. You can access this feature at the bottom of each thumbnail in the Grid View of your library. By just clicking the numbers 1 to 5, you can immediately assign a star to the images. This hotkey can speed up your workflow quite significantly.

Tip 4# Correct White Balance

If you’ve ever shot a photo in the day, under bright light, and found the image to have a cool look to it, you’ve experienced one of the limitations of digital cameras. No matter how much they have advanced over time, they are no match for our eyes. The blueish tint in that picture is because the camera couldn’t capture the image exactly as you saw it. However, there is a simple way to fix it. All you have to do is adjust the white balance. This can be done either while you are taking the image, or you can also adjust it in Lightroom during post-production. In Lightroom, you can easily correct your white balance by adjusting two sliders – the tint and the temperature sliders. Tint adds a magenta or green tone to your image, and temperature affects how warm or cool your image looks.

Tip 5# Using Curves to Adjust Color Contrast

You can use the color curves in Lightroom to micro-adjust the color in particular areas of your image. You don’t have to modify all three of the curves for each image. Keep the following in mind when making any adjustments:

• Red is the opposite color to cyan
• Green is the opposite color to magenta
• Blue is the opposite color to yellow

This means that increasing any one of these curves is going to reduce the corresponding opposite. A typical reason for using this feature is to adjust skin tones to make them look more natural and true to life.

Tip 5# Using Masks When Sharpening

An easy way to make your image pop is by sharpening it and boosting the edge contrast. However, it is very easy to overboard, and get an image that is oversharpened. If you simply zoom into areas where there is some transition and max the sharpening setting, you will see the detrimental effect oversharpening has on your image. The ‘mask slider’ is an excellent tool that lets you choose where you want to apply the sharpening. You can easily eliminate areas of the image that are out of focus, and shouldn’t be sharpened, and focus only on the area that matters. You can do this by holding the alt button and adjusting the slider. The white area that appears shows the regions that will be sharpened.

Final Thoughts

Adobe Lightroom is a great tool for photo editing. Knowing some quick and easy tips are great to get started, or even enhance your current workflow. We hope that you have gained some insights into how you can use Lightroom to edit your images effectively!