My Lightroom Editing Process and Tips

what's going on guys I'm coming at you from the Great Indoors here in the UK and I've been doing some Lightroom organization and also editing some old photos and I realized when editing that there's like ten things I do to every single photo I edit and so on today's episode I thought I'd kind of like walk you through that editing process and what I do but first this video is sponsored by Squarespace com if you're looking for a place to hell is your travel photography website blog portfolio or maybe sell some prints Squarespace comics are really really easy to make a professional-looking website using their templates really quickly so go to Squarespace comm slash Brendan Benson there's a link in the description if you want to discount on your first purchase over there now let's get into the video I'm gonna kind of jump back and forth between my face and my computer which is hiding down there so let's go down to the laptop um this is an image from Iceland we're gonna work on this image today I have edited it before we're gonna try to kind of get to this point once again and the first step that I do to every single image is I import camera calibration settings I import that as a preset and not like a preset like instagramers try to sell you but a preset that's kind of functional that saves you time in the long run that you'll use on every single image so essentially what you're doing is if you scroll down here on the panel and develop to the lens Corrections you can see two options chromatic aberrations chromatic aberrations are like an imperfection and images usually they they come like a line on backlight images it's like blue or magenta so there's not a whole lot on this one but you kind of want to remove them anyway just in case there is and then the other ones profile correction this is essentially gonna fix your lenses lenses imperfections most lenses have like distortion especially if they're wide-angle lenses and they usually have been getting so I shot this on the 15 to 35 as soon as you click this it's gonna fix that you saw that jump you have the lens profile down here 10 and 15 to 35 if you unclick it again you see how it changes it so on every single image I want both of those things so the way you can make that happen is by creating a preset and to create a preset you go to the left side where it says presets you press the Add button create preset it'll automatically take your your edit and create a preset so you make sure in the settings it has lens Corrections up here lens profile Corrections chromatic aberrations and then you might want to call it something like import settings like that and then you hit create now if you ever import an image in the future so let's pretend we're importing images from Morocco because that's what I got open when your import module comes up you're going to click over here on the handle file handling I always set this to 1 to 1 but that's not the important part the important part is applied during import and in develop settings you click on this you go down to your user presets and you can see I have my import settings you click that you might add some keywords and then when you hit import all of those settings are gonna apply to every single one of your images that you import it just saves you so much time you're gonna probably click those two buttons anyway so why not get it out of the way at the start and you can do that for any setting if you like make every photo you take black and white you can do that it's just a bit of a time-saving thing and then something I do every single time when I import so now the images are imported the next step I take is checking for focus and that's the first thing I do if a photo is not in focus its dead to me and the way I check for focus is really simple in Lightroom you can see when you hover over you've got a magnifying glass if you just click somewhere on the image it zooms you in this image isn't fully loaded but now it is and then I basically just check that it looks sharp an image should be sharp 1 to 1 which is zoom to a hundred percent you can see in the top left here so this image looks sharp and then the next thing I do is kind of one that's probably gonna shock you I oughta edit yeah I do it I know it's crazy but I Auto edit so over in the develop module what I do is I go back up to the top and there's this button for auto and that just says auto edit in auto correct some of the things in your image and the reason I do that it seems like a silly step is I want to see if the image comes to life a little bit better with a little bit of an edit the Lightroom edit is fairly tame but it usually fixes the dynamic range a little bit and if it does look like maybe it's gonna work I move on and the next step is looking for imperfections so I'm looking for four things I'm looking for my horizon is my horizon Street on this image it's actually kind of hard to tell because there's a bunch of hills and the lines are weird so what I'm actually trying to focus on as my horizon is this foreground element I want this to be straight and it looks like it is the next thing I might do is try to fix some of those imperfections by playing with the crops an image doesn't look right to you sometimes going up to the crop tool and then clicking on this area here to aspect ratio can kind of give you some ideas to play with so you can go to one to one you can be like now that doesn't really work you might go - lets go sixteen by nine because I think for this image sixteen by nine really works well yeah I actually think that works best so go like this then I'm gonna try to clean up distractions distracting elements I see in the image usually they're like spots or things like that in this image I see this this little black box kind of really sticks out at me so I'm gonna go up to the spot removal up here click on that be sure it's clicked on heal and not clone clone gives you like yeah it's just not as good I think it has its purposes but generally heal is what you want and then we're just gonna paint over this you might not know this because it's circular but if you touch and grab you can actually just draw the area you want removed and so that'll clean that up and I want to get rid of that one - the reason I'm getting rid of those is my I just was drawn to them and you don't want your eye drawn to things that aren't the main part of the photo you might want to also clean up something like this in the foreground that's like kind of broken off the edge you might want to do that or maybe even this one I wouldn't have done that normally in this image but for the sake of this video just gonna do that and then the next thing I do is I'm looking for spots so spots are sensor spots and you do that again by going up to spot removal you click on that and then if you go down to visualize spots it helps you find them so this is like the power of the spot so if you zoom that all the way up to the top you can find spots so you see up here there's like this area that's got a big round area that's a spot that's a sensor spot we can get rid of that it also looks like maybe there's a little one up there then one up here and so I'm just removing those sensor spots I think that's it if you have a really dirty sensor it can like there can just be spots everywhere and obviously if you're shooting something like f-16 they tend to show up a little bit more if you're shooting into backlight they show up more it can be an absolute mess and one of the things I did early in my days of photography is I never did that I skip that step and then I remember I printed an image and I looked at it and it was like just covered in spots and it was really really embarrassing so that's a step I definitely never skip so now the image is kind of this is my base this is my canvas I've gotten rid of the the imperfections I've kind of have a little bit of a base edit on it now I go into the final actual edit and the first thing I always do is fix the white balance white balance you can obviously click on this little pointer the white balance selector and then click on something gray like these rocks and it should fix it but often especially when there's snow present or crazy colors it doesn't work so the way you can do it then is go down to vibrance bring it up to a hundred percent and bring saturation to a hundred percent and you can really see not only on the image but in the histogram up here what the balance of the temperature of the images and temperature is yellow is warm and blue is cold so obviously look at how blue this is it's way too cold and up here in the histogram you can see the Blues are way to the right so we're gonna go down to the temperature and just drag this until they're about even and you can either watch the histogram to do this and try to level them out or you can watch the picture and tried to get to a point that it's level so we'll go to you see if you go like this it becomes yellow and you can see the histogram the Blues are pushed over so we're just gonna draw it back to where they're about even which might be about there and now you can see another thing the greens are way too far to the right which means that our tint is slightly off and so we want to bring the magenta out a little bit and even that out I think that probably looks pretty close to perfect even though the the vibrance and saturation are jacked all the way to a hundred it doesn't look out of control and the crazy part is when we bring the vibrance and saturation back to the middle it'll almost look black and white because because the color balance is so perfect and that's not always what you want that's just where I like to start my my image because I feel like you have more room for manipulation i play with the the highlights and shadows next I tend to almost always go Plus 50-50 with the whites and blacks there's a trick and then that you can use this trick also for highlights and shadows but if you're on your whites and you press alt while you drag it you get a black screen and then what happens is if you've gone too far you can see where the clipping starts to happen so you see how that's going crazy down there with the blue and white that's saying that it's clipping that area so we'll go something like that and then it won't be clipped you can do the same thing with the blacks you press alt so you drag this and you can see what what becomes black means that that area of the image is clipped meaning you've kind of smudged the details so we're gonna take that to something like -21 then I like to kind of play with sharpness on my image using clarity and texture I use clarity to kind of give a soft dreamy wide effect and then I use the textures to keep the the detail sharp so I tend to just bring my clarity down to minus 50 and then slowly bring it up to a point where I think it doesn't look like it's so with this image it looks like about minus 28 and then we're gonna drag the texture up just to bring out the sharpness and things like this rock back here and that looks really good I think I don't touch D haze yet but on this image particularly I definitely will hit D haze I'm gonna play with the vibrance first we're gonna go up to like plus 55 I think on this image because it definitely needs some color and then we're gonna bring the saturation to like plus 18 or plus 20 we're really pushing it on this image because there was a lot of color but it's really hard to pick out and then D haze is one of those things that sometimes if you push it too much it can make the image look crazy and if you don't have your white balance right with D haze it can actually totally mess everything up so I'm gonna bring the D haze all the way up to let's go like that I think plus 36 and that's my edit that's the basic edit the next step I take is using gradients and local adjustment brushes to add drama so this sky looks a little bit bluish yellowish and I think it could go a little bit more dramatic so I'm gonna go up to the top right and use a graduated filter and I'm just gonna create this grad filter across the sky I am not actually going to bring the exposure down because I like it the only thing I think I'm gonna do is bring out the shadows on this mountain a little bit bring out the whites a little bit brighter and then I'm going to change the tint to make this guy a little bit more purple and the temperature a little bit to kind of balance that out I think something like that I'm gonna bring the contrast up to make it stand out a little bit more and then I'm not gonna touch the saturation any more because I think that'll take it over the top and you can just see that the sky's become way more dramatic you might see that the mountains gotten a little bit messy so I'm gonna take a local adjustments brush here you use something on snow as well that's the teeth-whitening have you used teeth whitening on snow it tends to get rid of the weird like blue or yellow glow you get on things so we're gonna paint that with the tooth teeth whitener and that's way more dramatic that's way more dramatic and I think it looks really nice the next thing I do is I check to see if I've gone too far and you can do that by by doing the before and after you go down to here and you press the this and you'll get your before and after and I'm not sure why I guess it's because the gradient filter is attached here that was obviously not before but you can see that before and after and you can see if you've gone too far and you can make a decision okay I need to dial back my edit a little bit I think my saturations may be a little bit too high so I'm gonna bring that back a little bit something like that and then the next thing I'm gonna do is give it a color rating and this is something I've only started to do recently it's just a way that I can help organize my Lightroom catalog a little bit better I use stars obviously I give them the image of rating on stars based on how good I think the photo is one means I want to keep it on file two means I want to edit it three means it's good enough to share with the world the internet for means it's likely one of my better images from that destination in general and five is like best of the year top 12 of the year top 10 of the year and then the color rating I do to denote what type of image it is I press six which gives it a red rating if it's Street or people I give I press seven which gives it a yellow rating if it's urban or architecture or City I press eight to give it a green and that's landscapes or nature and then I press nine which gives it a blue which is wildlife so this is a landscape we press eight it's labeled as green and now if I want to in the future go back and find images from wherever that our landscape and four star rated I can do that really easily and quickly and that's it that's the image really like it's done that's how fast I edit images there's three things I never ever do with my photos I never add sharpening if an image isn't sharp it's dead to me it sucks butt photo editing shouldn't be to fix images it should be to enhance them and that's just my opinion you might differ that's okay I never use actual presets I have never in my life used a preset and I know almost every photographer sells them I know a lot of people have asked me for presets I never use them and that might be my own fault but I don't use them and I never do split toning split toning let me jump back to my computer split toning is down here and it allows you to manipulate a tones color so if you want to manipulate just the highlights and make just the highlights of an image more blue you can do that if you want to make the shadows more red you can do that and you got to do it like this I mean that there's ways that you can do split toning in a really nice way I'm just not good at it so it's something I've never done there will be a video from the great outdoors I think on Wednesday I've got an idea for a video and I think it's gonna be fun a massive shout out to squarespace.com if you are still looking for a place to host your website blog or portfolio head to squarespace.com slash brendon Vanson and you'll get a 10% discount over there and that's it for me I'll see you guys on the next one peace

Channel: Brendan van Son

Views: 16,171

Keywords: lightroom editing, lightroom tutorial, lightroom photo editing, Brendan van Son, Lightroom Tips

Id: 1Roh8qCl5CM

Length: 16min 51sec (1011 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020