Learn 6 Basic Lightroom Tools in 6 Minutes

Lightroom Tutorials  •  Photography Tips

While most will agree that there is a point where you can over-edit your images, a little post-processing can be very beneficial. In this video, Rob guides you through the process of using Lightroom’s most basic functions. The tools he uses may only be a fraction of those available, but they are the most important, and the ones that will quickly give you much more appealing images:

The Six Most Important Editing Tools:

1. Exposure – This lets you adjust the overall brightness of an image. So if you need to fine-tune your photo to be little darker or lighter, use this tool.
2. Contrast – Sliding this tool to the positive side will make the highlights brighter and shadows darker. This creates a punchier image. Sliding this tool to the negative side gives your image a flatter look where the highlight and shadows come closer to the same brightness.
3. Highlights & Shadows – These tools allow you to selectively affect each one. So if you’re shadows are fine, but your highlights are little too bright, you can dial them back a bit.
4. Color Temperature – This adjusts the overall color of your image. Moving it to the warmer side produces a yellow tint, while the cooler side gives you a bluer tint. This can make a big difference if your image has the wrong white balance.
5. Crop – Whether you need to center your subject or get rid of an annoying object on the side of your image, the crop tool will let you fine tune your framing.
6. Straighten – This is perhaps one of the simplest, yet most important tools there is. An image that is slightly tilted to one side or the other is easy to notice and often doesn’t look very good.

Although there are tons of editing tools available in Lightroom, the basic tools are all you’ll need most of the time.

For Further Training:

A popular photo editing training bundle, Super Photo Editing Skills, has just been updated to cover the new version of Lightroom (as well as the old ones). This package is very comprehensive with video tutorials, eBooks and actual presets that can help you start post-processing right away with your own photos.

It can be found here: Super Photo Editing Skills