At the recent Automattic Grand Meetup in Utah I presented a Lightroom tutorial. During the course of the tutorial I went through the various Develop panels explaining what (most of) the sliders did, offering some advice sometimes on how to use them.
Here’s a few tips from the night and links you’ll find useful:
- Use ALT/OPTION to tune the white and black sliders to see how much the highlights are blown or shadows totally black.
- Hold down SHIFT and double click the white and black slider titles to auto set them. Be warned that Lightroom will stretch the histogram to do this and avoid losing data but that might not be what you want to do.
- Use the Upright tool (lens correction) to correct distortions and horizons.
- Don’t overdo “clarity”. It’ll introduce halos.
When editing a photo it’s useful to begin by setting highlights to -100, shadows to +100, and adjust the whites/blacks using one of the techniques above. Pull back the highlights and shadows to suit your taste, and increase the contrast.
Serge Ramelli has a great Youtube channel. He has an over abundance of “subscribe to my newsletter” and “buy my course” notifications but his videos are still worth watching. If you want to download the RAW files he uses you’ll find them here. I enjoy his sunset tutorials and videos:
And I love what he did with this:
I think I discovered his channel first by searching for black and white tutorial videos. This one got me hooked:
Also check out Anthony Morganti’s channel. His video on sharpening and noise reduction is excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imYJccSKx3E
| Aperture | ƒ/8 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 6D |
| Focal length | 82mm |
| ISO | 100 |
| Shutter speed | 1/200s |
