Editing in Adobe Lightroom

So this blog post it to show how in Adobe Lightroom (LR) you can achieve some amazing results to your photos. But again with LR is all about your preference, and your personal taste.

Whether its trying to get more of a natural feel to your photos, or you want your photos to pop from extreme editing. I will show some examples of both, below.

For me I like vibrant colours and vivid contrasts that highlight edges and create vibrant highlights and deep dark areas.

The photo on the left is of a fallen tree as the subject, however I have edited it in LR to bring out the light areas and contrast that with the darker areas. This brings the tree more into the focal point to the eye, making it stand out from the rest of the image.

Below are some examples of some edited photos, and their original comparisons.

Here are the originals straight from the camera.

As you can see the set of post (images edited after the fact of taken), are lot more vibrant and clear. But at the same time keeping to their original colouration.

Now let us look at taking the images above, and messing around with their primary properties, to add some visual affects.

Firstly, let us take a look at the following properties.

If we adjust each of these levels then we will ultimately change the visual affect of the overall image.

Lets Look at Temprature

So if we look at 'Temp', the extreme left is 'cooler' whereas the extreme right is 'warmer'. Terms used in light description.

This blog is not to go in-depth in every setting, it is just an overview of what you can do with your photos.

Here we have the original with the extreme cool, and the extreme warm. Same image just different sides of the Temp spectrum.

So now you can see we can really have some fun with our photos, to get the image YOU want as a photographer.

So what I have done below, is to bring the temp of cool/warm to 50% each side.

So now we can see that the colours are not too extreme, but still look unnatural to the eye.

It is now time to play around with the other three variants in this section to get the image YOU are looking for,

Lets Talk About Exposure

So what is exposure?

Exposure is how much light affects your photo. This is why it is under the 'Light' section in LR.

What I like to do is show through photos or images rather than explain what the terminology means, hence the galleries within the blog.

So let us play around with this original photo. Middle one is original, the extreme left and right represent the exposure. But before that here below, is the original photo I will use as an example of editing.

I like this photo, cause of the focused branch/twig in the foreground. With playing with the settings, I want to pronounce that twig against the rest of the picture.

Here is the extremes of the exposure spectrum, shown from far left to mid (original) to far right.

So the first image is over exposed (maximum light) and the last image is under exposed (minimum light). The outputs are of the same middle (original) image that has had its exposure adjusted in LR. As you can see it is obvious without explanation what exposure can do to a photo.

So just for example I will adjust an image shot in low light.

As you can see, even if you have taken a 'bad' (I say bad because the original was how I wanted to capture the tree, this is just an example) picture you should be able to correct it in Light Room.

What is Saturation