Lightroom tutorials

[SquarePeg]

Decided to venture back into Adobe now that I have a new MacBook that can handle it. I used it only briefly once during a trial period. Looking for some good tutorials about the basics of LR tools and some advanced techniques. I understand the editing concepts already from using PSE and Affinity.

To complicate things further, I just switched from pc to Mac so would prefer either Mac based tutorials or tutorials that specify both the pc and the Mac commands where necessary.

What tutorials have you used that you really found useful? Willing to pay a bit for quality instruction. No Tony Northrop please he annoys me.

 

[Derrel]

What, the Silver Fox annoys you? Know what you mean.

 

[smoke665]

I've found this lady to be a good source of information on the nuts and bolts of Lr Lightroom Tutorials by Julieanne Kost . Lightroom - Online Courses, Classes, Training, Tutorials on Lynda has some online courses, with a free month to try. This one has a lot of free and paid videos Lightroom Tutorials - Professional Tutorials for Beginners and Up. Finally if you can pickup a copy of https://www.amazon.com/Studio-Anywhere-Photographers-Unconventional-Locations/dp/0134084179 it can be helpful, as he walks you through a shot from setup, to lighting, to how he processes the shot in Lr.

 

[paigew]

I offer live Lightroom classes. I consider myself advanced in LR editing and file management. Let me know if you would like to set up a lesson!

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

 

[PJM]

Anthony Morganti. I've found some of his to be helpful.

Mastering Lightroom Classic CC – 10: Adjustment Brush

 

[SquarePeg]

Anthony Morganti. I've found some of his to be helpful.

Mastering Lightroom Classic CC – 10: Adjustment Brush

That is exactly who I have been using. Love his straightforward uncomplicated approach. I’ve been watching them as I run into certain issues but I may spend this coming weekend running through all of them from A to Z.

 

[Scott Whaley]

I like these:

Anthony Morganti

 

[weepete]

I'd reccomend something slightly different: a book called "The Digital Negative" by Jeff Shewe. It's less of a "how to" and more of an explaination of how lightroom works, what each tool is and how it can be used in editing.

Anyway, I'm not selling it well but it was fundimental in my understanding of how Lightroom works and I'd rank it as a must read if using Lightroom is a goal. It's a really good book.

 

[SquarePeg]

I'd reccomend something slightly different: a book called "The Digital Negative" by Jeff Shewe. It's less of a "how to" and more of an explaination of how lightroom works, what each tool is and how it can be used in editing.

Anyway, I'm not selling it well but it was fundimental in my understanding of how Lightroom works and I'd rank it as a must read if using Lightroom is a goal. It's a really good book.

I learn much better from reading than watching videos so this is a good idea for me. I will look into getting this as I'm liking LR so far and will probably stick with it.

 

[Derrel]

After 20 or so years with PS, the made the switch to Lightroom. After two years I felt pretty competent with Lightroom and after four years I felt really comfortable. I have not opened Photoshop for over a year now.

 

[cgw]

Have a look at Victoria Bampton’s books.

 

[Derrel]

Lightroom is so awesome. A wonderful tool for digital photography. It makes so many operations so easy, and its parametric nature is so welcome. The implementation of the adjustment brush is possibly my favorite thing about LR. I also like the preset concept.

 

[Derrel]

Tooth whitening... use 20 percent and do two passes for about the count of 12 each time. This makes it easy to avoid overdoing it and making things look too white and fake.

Tooth whitening can also be used as a form of quote makeup/skin softening/background softening the key is to do it at a low percentage and to keep the brush Moving.

The iris tool is quite useful. the key is to do it at a very low percentage for about the count of 10.

A really fun way to make creative portraits is to Minus the overall exposure by 3.0 EV and then using a medium sized adjustment brush, with auto masking and the Feathering of about 3 pixels, use the Dodge tool to "paint back" lighting, and bring the exposure back in three passes of .9 each. The auto masking can discern between a portrait subject and a simple background quite easily. This type of amazingly quick file correcting is beyond the tool set of adobe Photoshop. In Photoshop it is a much more involved process, at least in my version of Photoshop which is old. The ability of Adobe to do simply astounding Auto -mask and to discern between subject and background at a very high level of reliability with no user intervention is something that came in with Lightroom 4 or thereabouts, and is an amazing advancement in post-processing.

 

[Derrel]

The tutorials that I found the most useful were from YouTube and Lindsay Adler and an F-stoppers tutorial by Dani Diamond, about how to add highlights to the face, forehead and limbs.

 

[Derrel]

This was shot in front of a medium gray background. I pulled the overall exposure Down to minus 3.0. I then painted on some highlights on the little girl's hair, as i had just learned to do the day before from the Dani Diamond tutorial. I then created a much larger adjustment brush and proceeded to paint on some Dodge tool at about + 0.7 EV. Then in three passes I painted on brightness over the whole group and Lightroom auto masking was able to differentiate between the people and the background. This is probably my first- or second-ever attempt at this technique, and it is the only one that I have on my phone. I was able to create a black background (from gray) and process over 300 frames in one afternoon. I have found that in many types of operations it is much better to break it into three equal steps and it is much easier to achieve the desired result that way.