Lightroom Techniques and Presets
Adobe Lightroom is a professional image processing program. It is primarily used to develop photos and is not capable of advanced photo manipulation. Lightroom has the tools necessary to improve almost every part of an image manually, but also has several presets for quick developing. These two features can be used together for an original "look."
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The Basic Window
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This window contains all the basic attributes needed to adjust a photo. You can adjust the white balance using either the direct temperature scale or by selecting from a list of preset conditions -- such as tungsten, daylight and fluorescent. General tone can be altered by adjusting the exposure, recovery of areas that are overexposed, fill light and black levels. You can also adjust general color information, like saturation, vibrance and clarity.
The Tone Curve
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Tone curves are the most important part of image processing, and it alters the way that the capture brightness levels behave. The bottom axis is a grayscale that increases from black to white and represents the tones in the original image. The vertical axis is also a grayscale but represents the "outgoing" or changed tone values from black to white going bottom to top. By increasing a segment of the curve, you will brighten those tones and vice versa. The typical adjustment is an S-curve, which increases brighter tones and decreases darker tones.
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Preset
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Lightroom comes with a collection of standard presets that can be applied to any photo for quick adjustments. They can be found within the "Develop" tab, on the left side of the window under "Presets." By clicking a preset, for example "Sepia," it will instantly change the photo's attributes. If desired, you can tweak each preset after it's applied by using the "Basic" and "Tone Curve" windows as normal.
Color
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Finally, you can adjust individual color qualities with the "Color" window. Each color has three separate variables. Hue is how close the color's accuracy is to itself, and can be adjusted to make a color appear as another color next to it on the color wheel. Saturation is the amount of pure color that exists, and reducing saturation to 0 causes that color to appear as black and white. Luminance is the brightness of that color along a grayscale. Maxing or minimizing luminance will turn that color white or black, respectively.
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References
- Photo Credit Thomas Northcut/Photodisc/Getty Images
