How to Edit Your PHotos With Lightroom
Lightroom is the best editing app there is! It has everything you could ever need to edit your photos and the best part is that it is FREE!
With Lightroom Mobile you can completely transform your photos with just a few clicks, and you have the ability to save your edit settings a create “presets” .
I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about presets and have been wondering what exactly they are, well, they are your photo edit settings all saved so they you can easily paste them onto your other photos! The is great because if you edit some photos and love the way they look you can save those edits and easily transfer them into your other photos.
With Lightroom, and Lightroom Presets you are able to get that perfect cohesive Instagram feed we all CRAVE!
Now, I know Lightroom can be pretty intimidating for a first timer, but I have helped a ton of people understand Lightroom and I want to help you as-well!
Plus I am giving you 50% of my presets so if you feel like trying out a Themed Instagram this is a good time to start.
Light
- Exposure: This is a powerful tool in Lightroom and has the ability to lighten or darken your entire photo. However, this tool should be used with care as it can really wash out your photo if you make it too light. But if your photo is too dark and needs a little light to make it look nice, feel feel to use it (with care). Slide it to the right to make it brighter, and to the left to make it darker.
- Contrast: This is another powerful tool that has the ability to make dark areas of the photo even more dark, when the contrast is slide to the right – and make dark areas more light when the slider is slide to the left. If you are going for a light and airy photo feel, do not slide this to the right. But if you are looking to deepen some shadows for a rustic photo feel, slide it to the right.
- Highlights: This tool is used as an adjuster for the light spots in a photo. If you slide it to the right the bright spots get even more bright. If you slide to the left the bright spots get more detail and darker.
- Shadows: Shadows is the opposite of highlights. This tool either lightens the dark ‘shadowed’ areas of a photo (Slide to the right). Or it darkens the already shadowed areas (Slide to the left).
- White: This tool either lightens the white areas of a photo (Slide to the right) or makes the whites less bright (Slide to the left).
- Blacks: Slide to the left makes the black areas of a photo lighter, slide to the right makes the black areas lighter.
Colour
- Temp: Temperature controls how warm toned (orange) or cool toned (blue) your photo is. How you use this really depends on your photo preferences, but I highly suggest only moving it MAX 10 points in either direction or else your photo may end up looking to orange or blue toned.
- Tint: Tint is used to compliment the colours used in Temp. However I try to stay away from this tool as it can get pretty messy.
- Vibrance / Saturation: Both these tools contract the brightness and how colourful your photos are. This is another tool you have to be careful with because if you slide it too much the photo can easily look fake.
- Mix: Mix is my FAVOURITE tool on lightroom and make all the difference in my photos. With this tool you can go through all the colours in your photo one by one and adjust them individually. For example if you have a orange theme like me, you might make your reds more orange toned by sliding the HUE tab towards the orange colour. Play around with this tool and see all the amazing things you can do! It can completely transform your photos.
Effects
- Texture: This is a tool I rarely touch as it controls the amount of texture in a photo. I find this can look fake very easily and should be used with caution.
- Clarity: Clarify is very similar to texture and should be used with caution.
- Dehaze: Dehaze adds darkness or a white fog to your photos, and is another tool I leave alone.
- Vignette: This puts a border on the outer edges of your photos, making the boarder either light or dark. I am not a. fan of what this does to photos so I don’t use it.
- Grain: Grain adds a sort of vintage feel to your photos by adding small grainy elements to your photo. If you want to achieve a vintage look this is a good tool to use (only to MAX +20)
- Size: This controls the size of the grain used.
Detail
- Sharpening: This tool is used to bring out details in a photo and make it more sharp. If you are looking for a little bit extra detail use this tool to MAX + 40.
Now you know the general idea on how to use Lightroom mobile and what all the tools are for. You won’t really fully understand it until you play around with it a little, and it can take some time to find what works best for you!
That is why I am giving you 50% off my Lightroom Mobile presets for you to try out and experiment with. This way you can see all the edit settings I put on my photos and play around with them! You can either use them as they are or adjust them to fit you perfectly!
