5 Things You're STILL Doing Wrong in Lightroom

many thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this week's video so are you tired of spending hours tweaking Sliders in Lightroom only to feel utterly dissatisfied with your results do your photos lack the professional polish you crave despite your best editing efforts If so trust me you are not alone I have been through all of it whether you're a beginner seeking to refine your skills or maybe a season professional aiming to fine-tune your workflow understanding and resolving these missteps will undoubtedly elevate your photographic skill set from misguided exposure adjustments to halfhazard color grading in this video we'll dissect each mistake offering practical and easy to follow solutions to set you on the course towards fast photographic Improvement now one of the most common mistakes I see photographers continually make inside of Lightroom is using the vignette tool now I'm a huge fan of vignettes I put them on 99% of all of my photographs but I never ever use the vignette tool inside of Lightroom and I recommend you don't either so what most photographers do come down to the effect section and just drag the vignette slider over to the left toggle this on and off so you can see the effect and look it it looks like it did a good job it darkened down the corners left the center of the photograph brighter which draws the viewer's eye into the scene which is the purpose of the vignette but the problem is this is that it darkened all of the corners of the photograph the same exact way and most of the time let me just reset this most of the time you don't want to treat all four corners of your photograph the same exact way every photograph is is different so having the ability to customize your vignette is of the utmost importance and for some odd reason the vignette tool inside of Lightroom gives you no ability whatsoever to do this but there is a much better solution for you so if you come up here to the mask section we'll open this up we'll hit the plus menu we'll select radio gradient I'm going to make the image smaller on my screen and we're going to make a huge radius across the entire photograph and I'm going to hit this invert button this is the most important part because now you'll be able to tell that it actually flipped the radio gradient around and now we're actually targeting the area outside of the gradient which is very very important so when I uncheck it you can see now we're targeting the inside part of the radius now we're checking the out or now we're targeting the outside part of the radius I'm going to bring this down just a little bit maybe bring the feather up just a touch more to something about right there and now we can start to make our exposure adjustment to about maybe right here I think looks okay let's make this a little bit larger on the screen so we can easily see this and let's toggle this on and off so this is before and after before and after and you might be saying to yourself mark it looks exactly the same as what the radio gradient what the vignette tool did yes and it did but what you have now is the ability to change this effect on certain Corners so what I don't like is how much it's darkening the upper leftand corner of the sky up here see that I don't want that to happen and what I can do is just hit the subtract button here and I'm going to come over here to brush let's make the brush a little bit smaller let's reduce the feather of this brush and now here I'm going to put the mask overlay on so you can see it now we can paint this effect away all through the sky up here all the way across here the entire area I'm going to actually let me make this flow 100 because I don't want that effect anywhere in the sky I want it to be completely void of the vignette and if I want to make the vignette kind of slowly Fade Into the corners I can just make a couple little swipes right through here and just make it the transition very very soft and very very subtle so now when I toggle this effect on and off you can see that it's really only affecting the inner part or I should say the outer part of this beautiful beach right through here and that's exactly what I wanted I did not want this to affect any part of the sky and I think that that looks much much better so the next time you want to put a vignette on on the photograph definitely I should say next time you want to put a vignette on your photograph definitely try out this kind of custom vignette tool it is definitely something it's one of those things once you do it one time you will probably never go back to using the vignette slider again now the next thing has to do with white balance and this is huge this is a very very common issue in full disclosure it's by far the number one aspect of photo editing that I struggle with the most is setting a white balance now a common issue is how people use the white balance eye dropper so what'll happen is a lot of times people come up to the basic section grab this eyedropper picker and the idea here is that you want to drop it on a neutral Target to help Lightroom determine what a correct white balance is and since I was actually on the ship if I zoom in here I think you can see me yep that's me right there but if I zoom out here you know this ship had white sales so if uh if I click on this you can see what it did it made it extremely cool and the reason it did that is because there is a warm colored cast across these sailes right through here so if I pick the ey dropper again let's maybe pick this area here this is kind of a neutral area look how warm Lightroom made it and that's because this area here has a very cool color cast to it so a very common issue and I see this all the time and I used to do the same thing as well is I would take the the the Color Picker and I would drop it on an area that's neutral but nine times out of 10 that neutral area had some kind of color cast to it whether it's a a warm color cast or a cool color cast and when you're trying to identify that neutral area you really have to be careful that is no color cast on there and this is a great way to check for that so what I can do is let's come over here we'll go back to this example we'll drop it on the white sails you can see how cool it made it if you take the saturation slider and pull it all the way up to 100 you can see how the cool tones drastically dominate the entire photograph and there's very few warm tones here let me just undo this let's take our Color Picker again let's pick this area here that had the cool color cast drop that we can see how warm it is we'll take the saturation to 100 and and now we can easily see how these warm tones are very much dominating the entire photograph and there's very few cool tones so when you want to try and pick the uh a correct white balance or balance white balance or basically remove a color cast you kind of want those the warm tones to not overpower the cool tones and you don't want the cool tones to overpower the warm tones you want them to be kind of even a little bit so what I like to do let's just bring this back to as shot take this we'll leave the saturation at 100 and I can see that the warm tones are definitely over powering the cool tones so I'm just going to start to bring this more towards the cooler side to a point to where they seem a little bit more balanced and I think that that is looking pretty good there and now we'll just reduce the saturation back to zero and what's funny is when you look at a photograph that's got saturation 100 and you take it to zero it almost looks like it removes all the color that just goes to show you how quickly your eyes can become used to something but this right here seems to be a much more balanced white balance because like I said before the warm tones and the cool tones are more in harmony one is not overpowering the other now the next mistake it has to do with sharpening and this is a huge one everybody especially beginners love to sharpen photographs we are almost obsessed with with image Clarity image sharpness enhancing detail but a very very common problem that I see is people not us utilizing the sharpening tool inside of Lightroom correctly so what most people will do is I shouldn't say most people but what a lot of people do is what I used to do is you come over here to the detail section and start to just bring the sharpening up to a level you know maybe somewhere right around here and then you you you know common thing is you you zoom in you toggle it on and off to see the effect and you usually are trying to to get it to a point to where you can see that effect very easily that's what I used to do and then I would say okay now it's sharp enough because I can easily see that difference when I toggle it on and off here's the problem with that let me Zoom all the way out here if I come over here to the masking section and hold down the option on a Mac or control on a PC you can see that the entire image becomes white and as I click on the this masking slider and start to bring it over you can see something weird is happening now if you remember this that it's I think it's an old Photoshop saying that black conceals and white reveals so when we come over here to the masking slider when it's set at zero everything is white that means that this sharpening effect is being applied to the entire photograph but as I start to bring this over and I'm still holding down the option key on my keyboard as I can bring it over you can start to see that it's starting to change and there's areas that are now in black and there's areas in white and what I want to do is I basically I don't want sharpening in the sky or basically I don't want to sharpen things that are not sharp in real life like clouds are generally not sharp flowing water is generally not sharp so I don't want to apply the sharpening to those areas I want to apply the sharpening to the mountain I want to apply sharpening to the rocks in the foreground I I want to apply sharpening everywhere but the things that are soft the sky and the water and the masking tool gives you that ability so holding down the option key we'll drag it all the way over to a point to where the mountain is visible and all the area around the water in the sky is not visible so something to about maybe right here and now that sharpening effect is only in the areas that I really want it to be sharpen so us utilizing selective sharpening is a very very good route to go now this next issue and this is a real quick one has to do with exposure incorrect exposure Lightroom has an amazing tool to instantly tell you if something is underexposed or Overexposed and if you pull up a photograph and you're in the develop module and you just hit the shortcut key j this is the clipping indicator red indicates areas of Overexposed highlights and blue will indicate areas of underexposed Shadows or basically areas that are too dark and red will indicate areas that are too bright and that's just with utilizing the shortcut key j it's an amazing feature and then when you see this big red area you know that that area is too bright and then you can either bring down the Highlight you can maybe bring down the white point to a certain area but utilizing that shortcut keyj is a great way to just instantly tell if there's any areas of your photograph that you need to resolve and I'd use it all the time before I export a photograph just to make sure that there's not an area and this happens a lot of times if you've got like a bunch of rocks in the foreground that happens to be in shade sometimes there's little areas little pockets of shadow in between those rocks that might be too dark it might be areas of pure black by hitting that shortcut key j it'll automatically tell you if those areas are too dark and then you can add a little bit of uh you know Shadow recovery or maybe bring the black point up a little bit and then same thing with the overexposure uh the the clipping indicator as well it's just a really good way to just double check everything just by hitting that shortcut key j and now that I've resolved that when I hit the shortcut key j nothing is happening now this final one and this is huge and is happens all the time and it's something that I never really used to pay a lot of attention to but it's basically just dirty photos and Lightroom gives you a couple really good ability different tools I should say to fix the photos or to clean them up a little bit but a lot of times people just don't even utilize them so this is an image that I posted uh a few weeks ago and then here is the image after it was I guess clean so this is the clean version and this is the dirty version and as you can see let me just hit the develop module here there is a lot of stuff right through here a lot of stuff that I had to clean up so what I like to do and this is kind of a new tool I suppose this right here this is the content aware fill tool and we if we just click this and just kind of bring it right over to this area here and let Lightroom just give a a second to think and it'll fill it in its best of its abilities and you can see that it didn't do a great job what's cool though is if you hold on the command key and you can just tell Lightroom that you know I want you Lightroom to use this area to fill in that area and that usually will do a very good job and of course that time it did not let me make the size of the uh the of the brush that I'm using a little bit bigger something about maybe like this and just kind of go around this whole area to make it a little bit larger and let's see how that does and and that looks better let's hold on the command key and just say Lightroom I want you to use this area to fill in that area and let's see how that did and that looks much much better here's another area here let Lightroom fix that give it a second here see how that did and let's use the command function again say use this area to fill in that area and I think that that is looking pretty good it doesn't use that exact area but it just kind of uses some kind of computing Wizardry to to make an area similar to that fill in the area that you're wanting to fix but then I would go through and clean up all of these areas here now this is a very obvious example because these things are very very obvious you know most people would probably clean these things up but there are a lot of things where maybe there's an odd stick that's sticking in the side of your composition or maybe just just something weird but I like to do this on the edges of my entire photograph before I export it just to make sure that the edges are clean because you don't want to draw the viewer's eye to the to the the corners of your photograph or the edges of your seene and a great way to avoid that happening is to make make sure there's just not odd distractions down there so cleaning those things up is a very very good uh exercise to go through so before I do wrap things up though I just want to say a big thank you to the longtime sponsor of the channel which is Squarespace who I use for all of my website and e-commerce needs Squarespace provides a robust and beautiful online platform to develop your website you can showcase your photography using squarespace's professional portfolio designs and display your work using customizable galleries in order to make it your own and with squar sp's online store feature you'll have access to all the tools you'll need to start selling your physical digital or service products online immediately you can even use squarespace's new asset Library so you can upload organize and access all your content from a single place in order to easily find and use them across the entire Squarespace platform so if you're looking to start a new website or possibly upgrade your current website check out squarespace.com Marny for a free trial and 10% off your first purchase so I really do hope that some of that information is helpful hopefully you able to to get at least one one piece of helpful information out of this week's video that you can apply to your photo editing workflow moving forward if that is the case and I am a happy man and that is always my goal just to help people with at least one thing per video so hopefully this video hit the mark on that if you have any questions about any of these five common mistakes inside of Lightroom please leave those in the comment section below and I'll do my best to get back and touch with you as soon as possible and if you did enjoy this week's video if you could give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you're not subscribed already and as always I really do appreciate you carving out a little bit of time to spend it with me here today and I will see you all next Wednesday bye

Channel: Mark Denney

Views: 52,489

Keywords: landscape photography, landscape, photography, mark denney, lightroom photo editing, lightroom tutorial, lightroom editing, lightroom mistakes, lightroom editing mistakes, how to edit photos, how to edit photos in lightroom, lightroom editing tutorial, best lightroom photo editing, best lightroom video, lightroom tutorials for beginners, best lightroom tutorials on youtube, lightroom tutorials free, best lightroom tutorials, photo editing for beginners, lightroom tips, tutorial

Id: 0pWJihlcaFQ

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024