Photo Edits in Lightroom
Steps:
1) White Balance
Identify something that should be neutral — a black, a gray, or maybe a white. Select the White Balance tool icon. Position the cursor over the item, which should be neutral and click. You may then tweak the color temperature by using the temperature slider.
2) Tone Corrections
– Exposure & Contrast
Often you might start with exposure to modify tone. Drag the slider to the right, the image becomes brighter. Drag this to the left and the image becomes darker. This slider makes big bold adjustments to the overall exposure or brightness of the image.
You can use the Histogram as a diagnostic tool to decide if there is an exposure issue.
Contrast. Drag to the right, and that increases contrast. The whites become whiter, the blacks become blacker. Drag to the left, and that evens out the tone across the photograph.
– Shadows, Whites & Blacks
Often you can use these sliders to recover information that is hidden in the shadows or in overly bright areas of your photo. Dragging Highlights to the right, brightens up the brightest tones that we have in the image. Drag to the left, and it will darken them.
Highlights and whites are similar, and shadows and blacks are similar. Highlights works on the brightest whites. Whites is a little bit less. The black slider controls the deepest or the darkest blacks.
– Using Autotone
Auto Tone works with certain images and it just doesn’t with others. If ever you find an adjustment doesn’t really work, well just press Cmd+Z to undo the adjustment.
3) Vibrance & Saturation
You can modify, enhance, and even change color with Vibrance and Saturation. There are subtle differences between the two controls.
Saturation is linear. Drag to the left it removes color. Drag to the right, it increases color.
Vibrance favors the weaker colors, which are less saturated. Drag this slider to the left, it removes less saturated colors more quickly. The Vibrance slider allows us to add more color variety. Vibrance is also better for photographs with people as Saturation does not work well with skin tones.
4) Clarity
The Clarity slider adds punch or midtone contrast. It also affects the color. How does it differ from the contrast slider? The contrast slider works in pretty big and bold ways. It allows us to apply adjustments really to the entire tonal spectrum of the photograph. In contrast, clarity focuses more in on these mid-toned areas.
Increase the overall clarity, and you add some texture or detail or punch to midtones in image. Decrease clarity and the photograph becomes really soft and smooth.
Increasing Clarity can remove color which you may need to balance with the Vibrance and Saturation sliders.
5) Sharpening
Most digital photographs can use a bit of sharpening. However, it is important to do so with care. Oversharpening can make images look unnatural increase the noise. Sharpening is for subtle fixes.