shot the images at, you can clean it up pretty well just by using the Luminance slider. Somewhere around 50 will usually clean up even the noisiest of photos. Is your photo crooked or does it need cropping? We’ll finish up by going way back up top to just above the Basic palette. There are six tools there, with the one on the left looking like a box with a grid. Select that and you can crop your photo as you see fit. It will also give you an Angle slider so you can straighten things up.
Exporting from Lightroom
Congratulations! Your photo is now processed. While the above sounds like a lot, it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds once you get used to the locations of the tools and how they perform. Now what? If you want to post your photo on Facebook or send it to a magazine, head back to the Library module (click at the top), then at lower left click on Export. In the popup screen (below), select export to “Hard Drive” in the top dropdown button, select the destination for your photo in the Export Location box. You can also rename it in the next box. Keep scrolling down and you can choose the output (TIF, JPEG), resize it, and even do further sharpening. Once done, click on Export in the lower right of the popup box and away it goes!
Now, here’s another important difference between Lightroom and Photoshop — Lightroom never changes your original photos. All the changes you make are written to a “sidecar” (.xmp) file, while the original photo remains unchanged. It is important, however, to not move your photos from folder to folder using your computer’s desktop; any photo movement should be done within Lightroom so the sidecar file follows the original photo. Back to processing. At the top of the palettes
on the right is the Histogram. We’re not going to do anything with this right now; click on the arrow next to Histogram to close it. We’re mostly interested in the next palette down, the Basic palette. Click on the arrow next to Basic so it’s pointing down and displaying the various sliders we’ll be working with. Like Photoshop, Lightroom is loaded with
tools you may not need. We’ll skip a few on this introduction. The first thing we’ll do is go to the White Balance. Two sliders here control the temperature and tint. You can play with the sliders, or you can click on the dropdown menu just above the temperature slider to choose from a series of presets. If you have a difficult photo that needs adjusting, you can use the eye-dropper tool. Click on it, move it over the photo, and click on a neutral color in the photo. It will give a pretty good guess at the white balance that can be further tweaked with the sliders. Moving down to Tone, we’ll use four of the
six sliders found here. Exposure is fairly self- explanatory, as is Contrast. The Highlights slider does what you would think it does — brightens and dulls the highlights. Likewise, the Shadows slider can be used to open up or darken shadowed areas in the photo. You can adjust to taste, but I usually give every photo a –24 on the Hightlights slider (to recover any super-bright areas) and a +24 on the Shadows slider to open up the shadows. We’ll leave the Whites and Blacks sliders alone for now, although you can experiment with them to see what kind of effect they give. Moving down to the Presence palette, we’ll use two sliders here. The first we’ll use
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is Clarity, which helps to sharpen photos; I usually give my photos a +20 in Clarity. Saturation will boost your colors (and also your shadows and black levels), and I give most of my photos a +10 here. Once again, adjust to your taste.
Details Beyond the Basics We’re now finished with the Basic palette,
but we can still do a bit of tweaking. Let’s drop down to the Detail palette and open that up. The first thing we’ll look at is Sharpening, and we’ll only use the Amount slider. Depending on the image, I use anywhere between 50 and 100. The other three sliders we can ignore for now. And finally, we’ll go to Noise Reduction. Depending on what ISO you
The Right Tool for the Job? Like any software, there is no one “right”
way to do things. However, Adobe has been providing powerful tools for creative workflow for more than 30 years, and its line of software is designed to enhance the creative process, not replace it. Each tool in Lightoom (and Photoshop) replicates an actual darkroom process. Some techniques you may never use, while you may discover others you can’t live without. Have fun!
All experienced photographers are welcomed as guest columnists for CAMERA BAG. To get started, please contact editor Steve Barry at
editor@railfan.com.
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