Photo Editing li g h t • r o o m Lightroom is the best. I sometimes catch myself referring to Lightroom 5 as “bae”, so be careful when you start editing because you might never want to stop. Editing will make your photos so much better, and bring you from being just another person with a DSLR to someone that can make meaningful photos. The Develop Module: After importing the photos you want to edit (by clicking COMMAND-I), you can move over to the Develop Module (which you can see in the top right). From here you have access to a lot of things. A LOT. So we’ll just include a few things you should make sure to look out for when editing photos. The BASIC panel White Balance: Shoot in .RAW, and then correct the white balance in Lightroom. Just move the sliders until things don’t look too blue or too orange. For example, you don’t want a portrait subject to look like a) a cadavre b) an oompa loompa. Exposure: Fix it. You’d be surprised how much light Lightroom can bring back to a photo. Many tend to underexpose, so correct that by bringing the slider up a little more. Vibrance: Sometimes adding a little vibrancy can make a photo “pop” much more. Do it sparingly though, because sometimes it will make the photo look worse.
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Clarity / Saturation / Contrast: Don’t mess around with these that much. Really. They are very powerful, and using them with a heavy hand can cause some nice photos to look just… bad. Sometimes you might need to add some more contrast to a shot, and the best way to do this is by playing with the blacks slider, instead of the contrast. THE BEST TRICK IN THE WORLD When in the Develop Module, you can click on a photo and hit (COMMAND-C), which will bring up a screen that will let you copy and paste the setting you have for the selected photos onto any other photos. You can check as many boxes are you want (for example, I usually keep the “crop” box unchecked so that when I paste the settings to other photos, my composition doesn’t get screwed up). If you are shooting an event with the same settings in each shot, this can make editing a breeze!