Tags: Photography for Beginners, Portrait Plus, Children, Portrait Photography, Travel Photography
Lightroom, as we all should know by now, is a powerful tool that
allows you to get the absolute most out of your raw files. For many
photographers, it’s an all-in-one solution for their post-processing workflow.
For others, it’s just a stepping stone before moving the file across to
Photoshop. While there are no hard-and-fast rules as to what you do to
your images at this stage, there are a few things to do to every photo
in Lightroom that will make your workflow easier and can help to polish
your images just a little bit more.
Under this tab at the top of the Basic module, you will find several
presets (such as Landscape, Portrait, and Neutral) that try to emulate
these settings within your camera.
Using these presets can help you to get a good start on your image.
They will adjust the colors and contrast in your image to a half-decent
starting point for the type of image you have. From there you can
fine-tune in any way you want.
As
you can see, using the Landscape preset on a portrait is something you
don’t want to do very often,
but the available options can be a powerful
start to adjusting your images.
Where Color Profile really comes into its own is when you use an
external tool to create custom
color profiles. Tools such as the ColorChecker Passport from
X-Rite allow you to create a custom
color profile for any individual
scene and lighting set-up. This enables you to attain accurate colors
for each individual situation.
To use this feature, you will have to create your custom profile with
the external software for the tool
you are using. Then you import it
into Lightroom, where you will find it under the Color Profile tab’s
subsection labeled Profiles.
In the case of the ColorChecker Passport, this task is as easy as creating the profile and restarting
Lightroom, where it will be waiting for you.
Creating
a custom color profile (via the ColorChecker Passport) has ensured that
the starting point
for the image is an accurate representation of the
colors as they were in real life.
2. White Balance
With your color profile set up, you can now turn your attention to the White Balance.
I like to start
each image off with as neutral a white balance as I can
attain. You may drastically alter it later, but I
feel the whole
process is easier with a neutral white balance from the start.
If you are doing this by eye, you can use the Temp and Tint sliders in the Basic module to adjust as
you will.
Pay close attention to any whites and grays in your images and try to
get them looking as neutral as
possible. When doing it this way, I like
to zoom in as far as I can on blocks of tone and color
(such as skin
and backgrounds) to see what effect my adjustments are having.
The
White Balance tool is basic, but it is still very powerful. I find
starting with a neutral white
balance +works well (though this is not a
rule).
If you’re using an external tool (such as a grey card) to set your white balance, you can do that instead
with your preferred method.
Using a grey card or other tool to get an accurate white balance can help save time and ensure
complete accuracy.
3. Sharpness
Another of the things to do to every photo in Lightroom is to turn the sharpness setting
(under
Details) to “0.” The reason for this is that using this feature in
Lightroom treats
sharpening as a global adjustment that affects the
entire image. It also does it at the beginning
of your workflow, whereas
I prefer to do sharpening at the very end of the post-processing stage.
The
Sharpening slider in Lightroom doesn’t offer a great deal of control.
Instead, use another
method that allows you to fine-tune the effects at
the end of your workflow.
By
turning off the sharpening at this point, you grant yourself far more
control over the process.
Once you’re in Photoshop, you will be able to
sharpen with far more precision than the slider
in Lightroom provides
you thanks to the various sharpening tools and other features such as
Layer Masks.
An
example of a Layer Mask for a sharpening layer in Photoshop. This
amount of control would be
very difficult to achieve in Lightroom.
Also, because the amount of sharpening you use will depend on the
output (a large file for print will
be sharpened more than a small file
for web usage), using the sharpening in Lightroom at the
beginning of
your workflow may actually set you back.
If you don’t use Photoshop, you can always still set the Sharpness to
“0” and when it comes time
to export your images for whatever output
you require, you can create a virtual copy of your
finished image and sharpen that copy accordingly.
4. Noise
Unless the noise in your images is quite bad, the noise reduction tool in Lightroom is rather good.
Under the Details section, these sliders will allow you to reduce the impact of any noise in your images.
As with the other things to do to every photo in Lightroom mentioned
in this article, it’s important
to do this at the beginning stage of
your image as the effect may dramatically alter the way your
image looks
as well as the approach you have towards it in further post-processing.
Lightroom’s
built-in noise reduction usually performs well. If there is noise
present in your image,
use it well. If there is no noise, leave it at 0
as you will risk losing some detail.
5. Lens Corrections
The last of the things that I suggest you do to every photo in Lightroom is to use the tool in
the Lens Corrections section.
Checking the Chromatic Aberration box
will go a long way to dealing with all but the worst
instances of
Chromatic Aberration. Lightroom does a very good job of this, and in
most cases,
you won’t have to do any more than to click this box.
If you do have to go further, the sliders under the Manual section
will help you make short work
of any Chromatic Aberration present in
your images.
The Lens Corrections tool allows you to fix Chromatic Aberrations and correct for the lens you used.
Checking
the Enable Profile Corrections box is one of the most useful things you
can do to do your
images from the very start. As long as you are using a
lens that has a Lens Profile in
Lightroom
(you can make one manually if it doesn’t), using this tool
will make adjustments to your images
that compensate for that individual
Lens.
Distortion and vignetting are two of the most prominent things that
this tool corrects for, and this
can have a dramatic effect on how your
images appear.
Left:
No corrections. Right: With lens corrections. The difference is subtle,
but it is very much there.
Applying the profile corrected both
distortion and vignetting.
The end
While this is a simple list, it’s often very easy to overlook some of
these steps once you are in
Lightroom. The excitement of looking at
your images and getting started with the adjustments
once you’ve
imported them is a hard thing to override.
However, taking the few moments that it takes to implement these
steps can help you to achieve
more natural and polished results with
very little effort at the beginning of your post-processing stage.
In the end, I hope you find these things to do to every photo in Lightroom helpful with your photo
editing journey.
If there is a step that you think that I should have included here, please feel free to add it to the
comments.
