Beginner to forum but not photography!

stefanolomby

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Hi everyone,

I am 18 and I have a passion for photography like I'm sure most of you do. Although my career won't be in photography I will do this on a regular basis. I am a landscape/cityscape photographer. I have recently bought Lightroom and have been learning how to use it. I have got some positive outcomes with it but not as good as I would like.

How do you guys edit your photos on Lightroom? What are the main adjustments you guys use?

I would post a picture to show you guys what some of my photography looks like but it won't let me for some reason:(
 
Welcome to the forum. I don't use Lightroom, so I can't help you there. But most of the photogs here use Lightroom and most of us here are quite helpful.
 
Hi and welcome to the forum.
Lightroom is a powerful tool with many, many options. Especially the local adjustments are an incredible feature, but it is hard to tell you what to do without seeing an image. Maybe the filesize image you are trying to upload is too large?
 
I use Lightroom. I like to adjust the exposure, clarity, saturation, occasionally do highlight or shadow adjustments (recovery of over-exposed highlights, or brightening-up of under-exposed or shadowy areas), as well as re-sizing of the images, and applying sharpening to the exported JPEG images made from raw captures.

I use Lightroom quite a bit to dodge areas or to burn-in areas, as well as to apply tooth whitening, and iris adjustment. I also use Lightroom to clone out minor imperfections in images.

Lighrtoom is a very fast and very efficient image editing application.
 
I would post a picture to show you guys what some of my photography looks like but it won't let me for some reason:(
Decrease the size of your file, then just drag n' drop.
 
I don't use it either. But my post process goal is always to make the image as close as possible to what I saw in the viewfinder. I generally do as little editing as possible.
 
I don't use Lightroom much but I start the vast majority of my image edits in Photoshop Camera Raw.
Ps Camera Raw and Lightroom's Develop module are the same application - Adobe Camera Raw, though there are some minor differences between Ps & Lr.

I generally start with the Presence sliders near the bottom of the Basic panel - Clarity and Vibrance. Way less often I use the Saturation slider.
Next I use the Sharpening panel to globally sharpen and to do global noise reduction.
From there what edits I do can vary a lot and for a lot of edits I open the image in Photoshop so I have more precise selection tools, more tools, more tool options, layers, and parametric non-destructive adjustment layers.
 
Thank you everyone! So I scaled it down for it to upload. I don't know if that is too small for you guys to see. What is a good size for posting on this forum?

So here is something I was working on in Lightroom. I took this last year in a small town Thunder Bay, ON, Canada. I would like some feedback, what I did wrong? what I should of done?
 

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I find the image slightly over saturated, the blues are too blue, the orange too orange ...
The sign and helicopter are very distracting making me wonder about the intent of the image, is the photo about the lake/bay or about the helicopter or the sign ...
For me, you have too much dark foreground. Framing the shot is great, but your bottom framing element takes up about 25% of the image...
 
I find the image slightly over saturated, the blues are too blue, the orange too orange ...
The sign and helicopter are very distracting making me wonder about the intent of the image, is the photo about the lake/bay or about the helicopter or the sign ...
For me, you have too much dark foreground. Framing the shot is great, but your bottom framing element takes up about 25% of the image...

Yes, what Gary said are the issues I see as well...oversaturation and too much dark foreground, and a not-quite-perfected sky/foreground relartionship; the sky appears a bit too bright, and needs some detail recovery in the bright tones, and the dark foreground prevents examinination of a lot of the scene-setting, close-range detail. As Gary mentioned, the close-range stuff comprioses a large percentage of the shot, so not being able to see all that stuff makes the sahot feel unrewarding; the closest stuff sets up "the scene" in many shots, so not being able to really,really see that closest stuff is a drag for me.

The over-saturation is plugging up the shadows, and choking off the highlights; this scene had a LOT of subtle detail, a lot of nuance of the lighting, that needs to be revealed. Over-satuating this file has hurt that balance of tones, that nuance that you experienced when you were there; this is a very challenging type of image to process, and one that would take some fiddling to get just right. I bet that if you return to this file in six months' time, you will process it differently.
 
Thank you for the feedback both Gary and Derrel. Looking at it now I do see what you guys are talking about. The issue with less saturation that it looks really dull. I should have cropped the shot a little to take out the foreground. Thanks guys!
 
I use lightroom then photoshop for deeper edits.

In lightroom its basically an import, color balance, eye and teeth edit, remove chromatic aberration, reduce noise then export to photoshop, skin and hair touch up, a sharpen then save back to light room then export to desktop.

Id say the bulk of lightroom is used for cataloging and it keeps me from destroying the original file.
 
Lightroom's interace was set up to provide a "left to right" and "top to bottom" workflow.

When you import your images, you use the "Library" module on the left. That module is intended to manage images -- but not to edit/adjust them. Use the "Library" to apply keyword tags, rankings, descriptions, check equipment & exposure data (e.g. want to find all the images you shot with a specific lens at a specific focal length using a specific f-stop... the "Library" module can do that).

Also (very important), the Lightroom catalog is keeping tabs of every image being managed by Lightroom EVEN THOUGH these images are just out there on your disk drive in various folders. If you decide to move images around (and those images are managed by lightroom) you MUST use the Lightroom "Library" to do the moving around of images (don't attempt to use the native Windows or Mac file management tools to do that or Lightroom will get confused.)


Now that the images are in the Library, you can move "right" to the "Develop" module and start adjusting.

The controls in the right margin of the Lightroom window are meant to be used in a "top to bottom" flow.

You'll notice the "Basic" exposure adjustments are at the top... white balance, exposure, highlights & shadows adjustments, etc. are up there and as you work your way down the list you see things like "Tone Curve", then color & saturation controls. Then you'll see things like split-toning (I usually don't use this), details (sharpening & de-noising). And toward the bottom you see things like "Lens Correction", "Transforms", "Effects" near the bottom.

If you do these out-of-order (and you can - nothing prevents that) then you may have to resist the controls at the top. For example, if you mess with hue/saturation controls before you do "white balance" correction... then you'll probably have to back down and re-fix the hue/saturation after you do the white balance because one affects the other.

One tip that won't be obvious. Some of these controls will show you different things if you hold the "alt" or "option" key down while adjusting the slider. For example... if you just slide the "Whites" and "Blacks" sliders in the basic exposure controls box you'll see the image is getting darker or brighter -- as you'd expect. BUT... if you HOLD the alt/option key on your keyboard while making the adjustment something very different happens...

Hold alt/option while adjusting "whites" and the image will go completely black EXCEPT for any part of the image that is clipping in the whites. So you can use this to nudge the whites up until you see some pixels start to appear... then back it off to get that to disappear. Now release the alt/option and the whole image comes back and you can now that you've just adjusted the white point as far as you can go without clipping (or at least if you intentionally clip, you know exactly which pixels clipped and maybe it's not an important part of the image.)

The same is true for blacks but it works in the opposite direction... press alt/option and the screen goes completely white EXCEPT for any part of the image that is clipping in the backs.

My favorite use of the feature is in the sharpening adjustment. There's a "masking" slider. That allows you to mask the image so that sharpening is only applied where edges of contrast are detected in the image. If you hold alt/option while pushing the masking adjustment to the right you'll see the image show you were it's detecting edges of contrast and then any sharpening adjustment you apply will only be applied in those areas.

The biggest bit of advice I'd give to anyone learning to adjust images is that often... less is more. Think of it like seasoning your food. If a little seasoning is nice... a LOT of seasoning is NOT necessarily better and often ruins the meal. Subtle adjustments usually improve an image, but over-use of adjustments often results in images that look completely fake and they loose the appeal.

One last tip... often when I'm adjusting images, I'll feel I'm satisfied with the adjustment. I'll come back and re-visit images a full day later and I'll often be surprised at what I did. An adjustment that looked good "yesterday" looks terrible today (I'd fire the guy that turned in that work.) So I usually don't want to publish any images until I've "slept on it" and reviewed the adjustments a day later.
 
Hi everyone,

I am 18 and I have a passion for photography like I'm sure most of you do. Although my career won't be in photography I will do this on a regular basis. I am a landscape/cityscape photographer. I have recently bought Lightroom and have been learning how to use it. I have got some positive outcomes with it but not as good as I would like.

How do you guys edit your photos on Lightroom? What are the main adjustments you guys use?

I would post a picture to show you guys what some of my photography looks like but it won't let me for some reason:(

I use old Photoshop CS5
(don't want to upgrade and pay extra for the "cloud"
www.flickr.com/photos/mmirrorless
 

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