7 POWERFUL LIGHTROOM TIPS you SHOULD know

in this video what i want to do is go through seven powerful lightroom tips that you might not know morning everybody fantastic to see you all again well i'm a bit excited at the moment because i've got a pre-production copy of the z72 and also the 14 to 24 millimeter lens which is a lens i've been looking forward to trying for a long time so i'm looking forward to trying that out and there will be a video out on on the z7 and two years of using the z7 and what i think of the z6 and z7 as well in fact this um video is being filmed on the z62 so it'd be interesting to see if the focusing is improved and there's no hunting so this is all about lightroom and some of the more powerful things that i use in lightroom i've used for a long time some of them are new as well in in the newest version of lightroom and they're things that i feel that maybe a lot of people might not know about some of them you may some of them you may not so i wanted to sort of give you some examples of how i use lightroom and these particular tools and tips to edit my photos and i'm also at the end of the video i'm going to announce the winners from the competition for 250 000 subscribers so stick around for that there's three prizes and i'll announce the winners of those at the end of the video so the first tip is all about brushes and using brushes in your editing and it's something that i do all the time i dodge and burn with brushes and you know it's just a really good way of just tweaking small parts of your image i used to do it back in the darkroom days when i when i used to process black and white photos in that time i i used to have to have tools to dodge and burn the light going from the enlarger onto the paper but now it's much easier to do in lightroom so i've got an example here this is a photo that i took in the pharaoh islands you can see we've got a bit of snow coming down some amazing light and one of the things i want to do is i just want to bring out some of the textures in this mountain here so i go to the brush tool here and then i can go and just paint in some effects now one of the things first thing to know is if you just double click on the effect it resets the tool so it does the same for a graduated filter or a radial filter as well so what i've done and the tip here is to create presets for your brushes so i've got just a small number of presets that i use to be able to go and change parts of my image so for this one what i know here i'm going to want to do a dodge no color preset and what this does is it adds a bit of contrast adds some whites and shadows and i might want to tweak it afterwards but it's a good starting point add a bit of clarity and then i can just reduce my brush size it sets the flow to about 41. the flow is how much of that actual effect is going to show and if you keep brushing it then you get you get more and more it's almost like getting a paintbrush and just brushing more onto it it gets denser and denser the more you do and what i want to do is i just want to increase this area here so i'm just going to brush this on nice and easily and i'm just going to maybe do it one more time and that's just going to slightly improve that a little bit and if you look at that before and after i can just um delete that you can see that's before that's after and and that brush tool has really helped me bring out some details here now another top tip is just click o to see where it's applying to and if you want to tweak it then you can do that really easily so here's another image that i could do it to so this was an image that i shot recently in the woodland it was foggy and got some autumn colors i really like this this is now a print on my portfolio on my website so you can go and check that out and maybe what i want to do is i want to bring out some of the detail here on on this bark and i've got a preset which i could do this all the time with with trees it's just it's a bring out bark presets i just want to resize my brush here and then what i want to maybe do is paint in down that bark now because it's a straight edge there's a super top tip here if i just click the brush once there i can click the shift button now and do it right to the bottom of the tree and because it's straight it creates a straight line there so that's a good way of just using brushes on straight lines if you've got a horizon or if you've got some buildings or something like that that can make a really big difference and then i can just you know if i want to just just hand do it as well and what this does this this bark preset is just bring out some of the contrast in the bark again if i just delete that you can see that it's just pulled out just a bit of texture a bit of contrast in that bark area and i find it a really good way of just improving my tree or woodland photos it just it's just a really good way of doing that and then you can tweak it afterwards if you want to so whilst we're on brushes and filters um let's go on to the graduated filter because there's a top tip for this as well so this here is a shot that i took in glencoe and what i want to do is i just want to increase the contrast and the the drama in the sky it's already fairly dramatic but it was so rainy it was so dark the cloud i want to really bring that out so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to apply a graduated filter to to this i'm just going to click clear that effect and then what i want to do is just darken the sky and i want to add some contrast and i want to maybe just increase the shadows a little bit increase the whites a little bit uh brilliant darken it even more about that i'm going to darken the blacks but what you can see is it's dark on the top of the mountain as well and if we click o we can see that it's applying to the mountain here i don't want it to apply to the mountain the easiest way to do this is just go to the brush tool go to erase and then click auto mask and what that does is it helps you erase that effect and that mask just on the actual mountain here so it creates a really good mask so i've just got this set up now and all i'm going to do is just make sure i'm careful still but it will look at that edge and it'll be a little bit it'll help me out a little bit when i'm doing this so that i don't go too much into erasing the actual mask on the sky and get a really horrible line so i can go around here and not be not have to be as careful with it because you know that it's going to help me out when i do this like that and now i've got that effect applied to the sky but not to the mountain now i've probably overdone it a little bit there just to show you in this this demo but it is so useful that i use that auto mask all the time to arrange a mask when i'm using a graduated filter so definitely try it it makes a really big difference okay we're going to stick on masks this is the last tip with maths masks but i think they're so useful and what i want to do is just talk to you about range masks now i will do a whole video on this at some point but range masks are so so useful they allow you to choose a selection based on color or luminosity so what i want to do maybe is just tweak this blue area here and what i can do is i can just grab it with a radial filter here but obviously that has actually selected the mountain and the snow in the foreground so what i can do is i can go to the range mask click color and then just select some of the blue here and that will now just select the blues within the image now if i didn't want to change the sky there i could obviously brush out that mask in the sky but what this allows me to do now is just tweak the color or the um i could make it a little bit more orange i could make it a little bit i could just tweak the color of that i could also reduce the highlights um you know shadows or whatever of that so you can change colors within your image by using these range masks super easily but there's an extra tip around this and that is having the ability to use to create hue changes on an image so for instance in this one if i want to change the hue of this water here which is blue i would usually just go down to the hsl slider go to the blue slider and the hue and i could change it and that would change the color of the water but what you can see here is it's also changing the color of the sky and it's changing the color of the rainbow which is not good in this case you don't want that to happen the rainbow's got to stay the same you don't want to change the hues of the rainbow but you can change the hue of this using um a range mask which is a lot of people probably don't know about and it says it's quite a new thing within lightroom i can just create a graduated filter or even a radial filter put it here i'll just double click it to reset it and then i can click arrange mask click color choose the blues here i'm just going to be rough and ready with this you can see that i've now selected the um c here i've also got some of the shadow detail here but i'm not bothered about that and then by changing the hue here this will change the hue of just this blue lake here but not the blue sky so i can then just tweak the color of the blue in the water by changing this hue which is super super powerful and obviously we're not going to make it that change it that much but just making those small tweaks to individual parts of the images on a color basis can make a really big difference to how powerful that image is okay on to the next tip tip number five which is all about color grading and these new tools have been added into lightroom 10 which are really good before you could color grade the highlights and shadows they've now added in the ability to color grade the mid tones and give you a little bit more flexibility around the luminosity of those tones as well and i have to say it's such a brilliant tool to be able to just fine-tune your images so this is a woodland shot that i took i've done some basic edits on it and i'm going to be talking more about this in probably next week's video actually when i was in this woodland and how i took this shot but what i want to do is i just want to tone the highlights and the shadows a little bit so what you can do is you can go down to this color grading here and you can tone the mid tones the shadows and the highlights so the things that you need to know and the top tips for this really are some of the key board shortcuts because with these keyboard shortcuts it makes it slightly easier to do it so you need to know shift and command command allows you to choose a hue and then shift allows you to fine tune the saturation of that hue and it's much easier than just dragging it to where you want on on the color wheel i found so what i do is i drag it roughly to about there say and then i press command which is control on windows and i fine tune it so i want it to be sort of a yellowy green the the highlights on this and then once i've got that i can press shift and it doesn't change the color it just changes the saturation so i can say okay how much saturation do i want there so i actually in this case want quite a bit and then i want to do the same with the shadows so i'm going to tone them a little bit blue and then again with the shift key when i've got the right blue i can just fine tune that and then if i want to if i think i've got the right saturation i just want to fine-tune the color i can press the command key and fine-tune the color so those keys are really useful the other good thing with this new update is we have to do the mid-tones now i don't do the midtones a huge amount but um i i think you can just so in this case i think just adding a little bit of warmth to those mid-tones helps so i'm just going to add that there and then i'm also on the mid tones i'm just going to darken them down a little bit now that is something that is really useful so i can just darken those mid-tones down and then i'm just going to brighten the highlights and then the blending and balance are two really useful tools as well so blending is the amount um of shadows highlights and midterms that are blended together so they're overlapping so you can have more or less of that i usually just increase that a little bit and then the balance is are you just going to concentrate on the shadows or concentrate on the highlights so if i go down to the shadows it's going to make the shadows tones go across the whole range of tones or if i go all the way to the right it's going to make the highlight tones go across the whole range of tones so on this particular image i just want to push those highlights a little bit more so i'm just going to move that to the right and there we go i've toned that image it just gives you that extra little bit of control to just make your images super special so definitely check out color grading and remember those keystrokes okay the next one is a little bit around the color tools as well but it's around black and white and something you might not know about which is really useful so if i convert this image into black and white just click black and white up there then you can control the effectively what filters you're putting in in front of it to control the density of the colour tonal ranges within that image now you can just move these backwards and forwards and change things but what i like to do is use this little picker here and if you just click that picker on on an area then it will change those colors associated with that picker it works really well when you click on the sky and you can click on different parts of the sky so for instance i want to click here and i just want to create a bit more contrast in the sky so this is now just going to know that that's blue and it's going to reduce the blue i might click here and tweak it a little bit more and then here it's going to tweak the oranges the yellows and the oranges so it's a good way of controlling your black and white photos quite quickly and just getting a feel for it and then you can maybe fine tune them a little bit so try that use the picker when you're in black and white mode and it can really help you create some really powerful black and whites okay the next thing is about using lightroom mobile and in this case i've got my ipad and how i how i use my ipad and that's around collections so i i noticed a lot of people i speak to don't use collections very much i use collections all the time and what they allow you to do is sync specific images with lightroom mobile and the adobe cloud so that then you can get those images on your ipad or your iphone you can make adjustments to them um when you're away from your computer and those adjustments then get reflected obviously back into your right lightroom catalog so for instance in in this case here i had set up a catalog really easily to do a catalog you just have to select the images within lightroom it's really easy so if i wanted to create a catalog i would just go to a set of images so if i just go to q4 here and say for instance i go to some foggy images from canuck chase here so these are some images i could select them all so i could just go select all go down here click the collection button here and click create collection and this will then include selected photos and sync with lightroom so i can just name that collection and it it's a really good way of going through your images when you've got back from a trip on your mobile or looking at those edits so for instance here i did one from the late autumn lakes and i can go through these images i can look at the images and i can decide whether i like them or i don't like them and i can also do that do some basic edits on them or i can look at the ones that i've already flagged this picked i could go into them and maybe tweak them so in this one here i could maybe think okay well that just needs to be a bit bluer it's just a bit orange or i could just do those those final edits on my ipad it's really really useful so if you've got an ipad or even if you've got an iphone then i'd definitely recommend doing that so the final thing is creating your own presets um i think it's so important to be able to have your own style with within your photography and if you can create your own presets then it's a really easy way of when you've edited a few photos and you think oh that looks good good on that particular scene then then save them as a preset and then you can apply those presets to photos when when you're starting your edit and you can get a feel for what they might look like it also means that you start to develop a style a little bit more because you're using those presets all the time now i don't think that you should just be completely a slave to those presets you should obviously every image has its own edit that you're going to tweak out of that preset or some of your presets just may not work but i think it's a good way of starting i've got my own presets if you're interested in those then there'll be a link in the description but to be honest i wouldn't get my presets i would create your own presets um because you you want to develop your own style but these are my presets i use them myself all the time so for instance on this one here i think okay well this will probably look quite good with a lingmore fell preset and that just gives a color tone and a feel to the image that that people will probably associate with my photos and i think it's just a really good way of doing it to create a preset it's so so simple you just create your edit whatever you've got here as your edit you go over to the preset section here and you just click the plus icon above presets and you just create crate preset and this will then create a preset from the edit so you can decide whether you want to include everything or not so obviously you're probably not going to include transformations in in your preset you might not include exposure in your preset because you know different photos are going to want different exposures but shadows highlights things like that tonal curves are things you're going to want to put in your preset so i hope you've enjoyed those powerful lightroom tips there's certainly things that i wish i'd known earlier in my photography exploration because they would have helped me they're a really good way of creating some powerful images okay so let's talk about the competition winners we had so many entries i was just blown away but you had to be a subscriber you had to like the video and you had to leave a comment so i looked at those people i randomly selected three people that won and those people are for the first prize first president whether there's a first second and third but for the one of the prizes which is the case magnetic filters that's simon godfrey so well done simon if you get in contact with me just drop me an email or contact me through social media then i'll make sure they're sent off to you the print of your choice so that's an a2 or a3 print of any of my portfolio then that is mary o'neal so well done mary and the book um so my book vistas this book here which is in its second edition at the moment that's gone to jack cook so well done jack and thank you ever so much for everybody who sent some really fantastic messages you know of getting to 250 000 subscribers i massively appreciate it it's been such an amazing journey um and also thanks for the comments on last week's video where i was fairly honest and open about the reality of landscape photography and me running around like a headless chicken it seems that everyone enjoyed that so maybe i'll i'll i'll tell the truth a little bit more i do tell the truth i always try and show you exactly how it is but that was a particularly hectic morning but i've got some really exciting videos coming um talking a little bit about gear i'm going to mention more about my z7 experience over the last two years i get asked that a lot so i'm going to talk about that and i'm also going to do more in-field videos i've recorded a few i just need to edit them and share those thanks ever so much for watching and until next sunday bye [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 160,080

Keywords: lightroom, lightroom tutorial, lightroom editing, photography, photography tips, lightroom classic, photo editing, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: Q6gnRpXYHfs

Length: 21min 29sec (1289 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020