7 SIMPLE LIGHTROOM TIPS every beginner photographer should know

a big thanks to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video so in this video i'm going to show you seven really simple lightroom tips that i wish i had known earlier morning everybody fantastic to see you all again i've not done a lightroom video for a while um and i was actually editing a photo from iceland and i was just doing a few things on it i was thinking do you know what i didn't know these things about six or seven years ago and they've really made a big difference now i sort of take them for granted but they've really changed how i edit my photos so i wanted to go through some images and give you some examples of how these things have changed now they're really simple things they're not super complicated but some of them even if you're pretty advanced you might not know about or you might not have tried so stick with it because there's some really good ones towards the end of the video as well the other thing i'd say is if you like it give it a thumbs up because it massively helps me in the youtube algorithm okay let's get into them the first one which is just understanding your image and the luminosity brightness levels the shadows and the highlights of your image it's really simple this really obvious but it's amazing how many people probably don't do this before they start editing so you've got an image like this one here and not done anything to it you can look at the histogram it looks pretty good but um the first thing i do on every image is i take the exposure slider and i just dial it all the way back all the way and then i think okay well what is in the clouds i've got all the detail there um you know there's some really nice detail in the clouds here um some nice detail on the horizon there so that's really great and if i just go back you can't see that quite as much you obviously can't see any of that it looks burnt out and then i take it the other way and i dial it all the way up and then i go in and have a look and you can see again you know this just looks really dark but just by dialing up i can think well it still needs to stay dark this but i can pull out some of the shadow detail so i can i can pull out some more contrast probably in this area which will be really good um and then you can see that i don't want to burn out this wall by dialing up too much you know this is this is a wall that's got a lot of detail in it all the way along so i've got to be careful of that um you know that's pretty much exposed correctly but there's a lot of information that can be pulled out of the highlights of the shadows in in this photo but if i take another photo for instance this one here which was the one that i was editing when i was thinking about this this this image here is is one of three actually and i'm going to talk about that in one of the later tips but this is um one that i exposed for the highlights and you can see that the highlights are pretty good uh it's a drone shot so you're never gonna get quite as much detail or dynamic range out of a drone shot but looking at the histogram it's pushed to either side of it when i go to the shadow area on this image and you can see i've only just got the highlight detail so when i go to the shadow detail and bring that up you can see that there's a huge amount of noise in this image and that's an issue you know i need to be careful about that i need to know about that i need to be careful about what i pull out of that i need to potentially do some noise reduction to it so by just moving this exposure slider left and right i found out quite a lot of information about both these images and that helps when i get into the editing process and we'll come back to this image because i'm going to show you a trick um that you may or may not know to how to improve this image okay number two is all about contrast so how much do you think you know about contrast so we probably all know that contrast increases the difference between the light and the shadow tones so you can see if you look at this histogram as i increase the contrast the highlights again further to the right and the shadows are getting further to the left but the other thing you might not know is that contrast also increases saturation so you can see on this image a little bit especially in in this area here if i increase the contrast you can see that the oranges are just getting more saturated but if i just increa increase contrast globally on this image you can see that you know it's not great is it you know we don't want to increase contrast across the whole image we actually when we're messing around with this contrast slider we can see that actually we probably want to increase contrast in this area here but we probably don't want to increase it so much in this area here or we want to increase it in a slightly different way in this area here so what what's called shadow contrast rather than just global contrast so a top tip for this is just use some of these tools up here and these tools allow you to do local adjustments and i've got a video on it and i'll link it here all about using local adjustments in fact i think i've got two videos on it so i'll link one of them here and you can go and have a look at that in more detail but this is just a radial adjustment here and what i could do is i could just really crudely place it here so you can see it's affecting this area only what i could do is i could just just increase the contrast in this area here maybe some add some whites a bit just to bring it out a little bit and you can see that maybe just make it a little bit warmer as well so you can see just by using contrast and a little bit of warmth and increasing the brightness then i've gone from before here to this here so i've just increased the contrast and the saturation in this area here and that is a good way of using contrast so first of all understand contrast and what it does it increases saturation as well as the difference between the highlights and the shadows but also understand the contrast probably shouldn't be applied to the whole image it probably should be supplied to selected areas but you can see that just by increasing contrast in two areas but rather than the whole image already it's starting to improve this image by those local adjustments okay so let's go to this shot here this is a woodland scene and this is somewhere where i would use contrast and the reason i use contrast is that not only do i want to increase the contrast and the separation of the shadows and the highlights but i also in this case want to increase the saturation but i don't want to do it just by doing that because you can see that looks pretty horrible but what i do in this case is i just take the contrast slider and just push it to the right because i think it needs a little bit more contrast and you can see that i'm just getting a little bit more depth to those colors as well and that is the way that i would control not just contrast but saturation in an image like this the third point is something that i've already talked about which is don't just do things globally but do things locally so the majority of the adjustments that i make to my image are local adjustments so i might go down these sliders here and i might say um okay i could probably just pull the highlights in this image back a little bit yeah i definitely want to do that a little bit um okay i could increase the shadows a bit but then i'm not don't really want to increase the shadows there so i don't want to do that huge amount and um don't want to change the black so i don't want to change any of that so you know at the end of the day on this image like this i probably wouldn't do many of these adjustments here and what i see all the time is photographers changing all these and doing these global adjustments when actually you don't want to do those adjustments to certain parts of the image now you could do those adjustments and then go back and change them which is another point i'm going to talk about but the best thing to do is just do local adjustments like i've done to the sky and here so for instance this area here we know there's detail to be brought out it'd be a perfect place to do a local adjustment so again i just put a radial filter there and we could probably just increase the brightness of it a little bit um actually probably just decrease the contrast of it and pull some whites out and then maybe just drop those blacks back a little bit and in this case we might just want to add a little bit of clarity so that's an adjustment i've made here and you can see now with all these local adjustments it's starting to look really good and balanced and probably more what the eyesore but i've not made any major adjustments on the panel on the right hand side they've all been done by those local adjustments so that third point is don't think you have to just use those think more about local adjustments on your image and i've done a video on it about local adjustments and i'll link it there okay on to the fourth point which is something that you may or may not know about and that is when you make something bright or you overexpose something in your image you can bring it back so for instance say this image here i think actually it does need brightening up the whole image needs brightening up so say i do decide i want to pull brighten that whole image up this area here is now burnt out but it doesn't mean you've lost that information the raw file in the background is retaining that information and that's really important to know you're never doing any destructive editing so you can always pull that back even if you add clarity and then remove clarity with another filter that that would work as well so for instance in this case i might just want to put a radial filter here i mean this is probably going to look a bit naff but let's just do it anyway and i might just say okay well let's let's just pull this information back and i could do it using the highlight slider or i could just reduce the exposure let's do it with the highlight slider and you can see quite easily i probably want to do it sort of over here on this particular case you can see i pulled that information back now i actually don't think that looks right on this particular image and it does need a little bit of care and attention over here and again i've done a radial filter video here go and have a look at that and it'll talk more about how i use radial filters when there's a bright part in the image to create a little bit of a glow which is really important in this particular case okay on to the fifth point and back to one of the images we looked at in the first point and that's all about hdr hdr is this thing that um in photography people um used to associate with really horrible looking images where they made the sky and the land all look the same luminosity levels and they just looked awful but actually in photography creating a high dynamic range is really really useful um especially when you're taking photos with a camera that's maybe older um or doesn't have as good dynamic range as the modern camera obviously on this image here that you know the nikon z7 has got an amazing dynamic range so you can see we could pull all that information back there was no real noise in in the shadows here and the highlights weren't blowing out but on an image like this then we can see that when you look at the shadows then it's not so great and in that case it's good to take a series of images and i do this all the time with my drone it's really clever the drone when it hovers it's so stationary that you can take three shots at different exposures and they're perfectly aligned um not perfectly but they're almost perfectly aligned and then lightroom does the rest of it for you so if you're in a situation and this is a bit a step before lightroom i suppose but really useful to know when you come into lightroom to have that information so if you're in a situation where you've got a scene you think ah it's really bright i'm not sure i'm going to capture everything and you're worried about your exposure then just go um a stop or two down and stop it two above and take three shots or maybe if you really would take five shots um at different exposure levels and really there's no excuse you could you can always do that and you can that means you can always get the perfect exposure and what it means is you'll have a much broader dynamic range when you blend them in lightroom and i've done that here so this was a stop below and you can see this was the bright image and if i go down on this you can see i've not got any highlight information but the shadow information if we look at the shadow and if we compare it to let's just do a comparison here if we compare it to this shadow and if i just look at that and then we'll put that one there we'll zoom in a bit you can see that this one here where i've just let a little bit more light into the drone camera is significantly better in the shadow area than this one here so that means that when i blend them together as a hdr image then i'm going to get that shadow detail i'm going to get the highlight detail and it's just going to be an amazing image so it's really easy to do that if i just reset these so i'll just reset all the settings on these two i've got three images here one in the middle and two at either end you just right click and then you click photo merge hdr and don't do auto settings and then once you've done that you just click merge and then we get a image like this so this is the merged hdr image and you can now see in this image if i just pull back the highlights you can actually see you can see on the histogram here that i'm pulling back all this information from the right hand side can you see it's just like recovering all that information whereas on this bright one here just watch what happens there's just a massive peak here and that's just lost information there's no information in the highlights past that point back onto this hdr one that we've blended i've got all that information there and then in the shadows um if we just zoom in there's no noise um i've i've got the shadow information from the brighter image so i've got the best of both worlds and that means now that i can go and do a really quick edit on this you know drop drop down the sky you know inc this is really quick don't say how crap this is in the um comments but and create a quick edit on that and you can see that that's great i've got a really fantastic shot there that's really manageable and all i needed to do was just take those extra two shots um and it made a really big difference to what i could do in lightroom so think about that you should always end up with a photo that's got no blown out highlights and no block shadows where you've got noise in those shadows it's really easy to do just by thinking about taking those three shots by the way just on on this image here um let's just zoom in this this is the road that comes in you can see it and it goes right round here around the bottom and i've actually my car's not on here my car's parked here but when i went to this place in in in the highlands i was the first person to go down this road there was like marker posts where you meant to go which was which was quite scary there's nobody here just nobody for two days i didn't see anybody it was really amazing um okay on to on to the next um point which is actually about um the clarity slider so the clarity the clarity and dehaze sliders are sliders that people tend to use to make their image look better and it's like this um almost like a really good way of making something have a bit of punch but the way i see them is that yeah you can on certain images then it's a really good idea to increase the clarity what it does is it gives you just more edge contrast basically so it looks at the edges with the images and just gives you more edge contrast there but but actually they're really useful for reducing the clarity or reducing the dehaze because you can do really nice ethereal painterly photos with them so this is a good example this is a woodland scene so this is with no clarity and dehaze applied again a shot that that's in my woodlands book cop is still available i've checked i've got rid of the claritin dehaze i put on this and you could just think okay i'm just going to increase the the clarity on this and yeah it adds a bit of punch but what i like to do in my woodland scenes is reduce the clarity a little bit so you can see as i'm reducing it it's just creating a little bit more of an ethereal look to it and you can see that as i'm just reducing this i don't want to go all the way because that looks horrible muddy but i just might reduce it my by -14 and i'm just getting just a nice just ethereal look to it maybe go to about there and then also dehaze again it can add a little bit of glow so i might not very much but i might just want to reduce the dehaze on that so this image here prima was a great example of when i reduce clarity and dehaze on an image so again it was a very ethereal day already but i didn't want to add clarity to this it just looks horrible it looks just the clarity is already there in the definition between the snow and the trees just looks really good but if i just reduce clarity a little bit again you don't want to do it too much then it looks great and again in this particular one reducing the dehaze looks so nice now you might when you do that i have to add a bit in back in the blacks which you can see i've already done here but this just looks so nice it's still got a sharp appearance to it but now i've got this softer look and that's exactly what i wanted with this image this image here it has got some clarity you can see that i added some clarity in this which was really good but what i have done in this image you can see on this top bit here i've reduced the clarity so i've taken the clarity and reduced it back down so that basically what i do is i have a a gradient of clarity throughout my image so this is really sharp it was really sharp i was really close to it and there was no atmosphere in the in the air but as it went further back it was softer so it helps to create depth in the image by controlling and thinking about how you use clarity so here i've got a little bit of clarity and back here i've got negative clarity so think about that think about that when you're editing your images don't just crank those dehaze and clarity sliders to the right sometimes that is good most of the time i prefer to do it the other way okay let's go back to this shot here the gathering um for the final point which is all about saturation so um there's a real temptation on shots like this just to think okay needs a bit more saturation i'm going to increase the saturation across the board but what i've done on this particular image is and i do on most of my images is i control the saturation and you can see i've done a lot of saturation changes here on a color basis so rather than changing the saturation globally sometimes i'll do it on local adjustments in certain areas but quite often i'll control the saturation on a color basis so for instance in this particular case you know increasing the saturation of the green might be a good idea because i just want to pull out those greens and maybe the oranges but not quite as much as the greens so i want these oranges to stand back a little bit i want the greens to pump forward a little bit and by doing that by controlling the saturation on a color by color basis you really have a lot more control in your image and you can create something that just has a little bit more umph to it and by combining all those elements together you can really create something quite special so i hope you've liked it once again give it a thumbs up and if you're not subscribed then consider subscribing below i also wanted to say that if you don't follow me on facebook i'm starting to publish a lot more on facebook and the quality of the images there are quite good as well compared to instagram so go and check out my images on facebook and if you're not following me give me a follow um okay i just wanted to mention this week's sponsor which is squarespace squarespace have supported this channel for many years now and i'm really grateful for that it means that i can continue to produce these videos so if you're looking for a website or a domain then take a look at squarespace i absolutely love it it really helps me out and the most important thing for me is it just gives me that flexibility to change things that are that were in the past probably a little bit more technical to do one of the things you hang with websites is you set it up and then you never change it again so for instance if we just have a look at my site then you can see here that i've changed the home page to include one of the images from my 2020 calendar a good plug for my calendar and i wasn't meaning to do that by the way but um you know it was really easy to do this this took me five minutes probably less it probably took me longer to work out where the photo was than to actually change all the other things you know i've created a link to um the calendar page i even added this calendar and um yeah i've got a calendar in in my basket as well um obviously gonna buy myself a christmas present anyway do take a look at squarespace and if you're ready to set up a website then you can get 10 off by using my code which is www.squarespace.com forward slash nigel or offer code nigel okay thanks so much for watching the video and until next sunday bye you

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 181,576

Keywords: lightroom, photography, lightroom tips, simple Lightroom tips, photography tips, lightroom tutorial, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: KDpbq2YNxzw

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021