Tuesday Tips & Pics - My Favorite Lightroom Tricks

This week for Tips & Pics I wanted to show a couple handy little tricks in Lightroom.  These little tools are a big part of why I could no longer edit with Photoshop alone!

The Luminance Slider - I love using the luminance slider.  The luminance slider has the ability to brighten or darken a single color without affecting the rest of the photo.  I find this especially useful for the color blue on blown-out skies.  In the photo below as you can see the sky is way too blown out but the couple is properly exposed.  Using layer masks or adjustment brushes to fix the exposure would involve carefully painting around the couple and could end up with a "halo" effect, not to mention I'd also end up darkening the clouds which I wouldn't want to do.

All I did in the before and after below is lower the luminance of the color blue.  By doing this alone I was able to bring back detail and color in the sky without touching the exposure of the rest of the photo.




The Hue Slider - The Hue Slider is another very handy tool to affect the tone of one color in the photo.  The white balance and tint sliders can also affect the color tone, but it will change the color for the whole photo instead of a specific area.

Your camera sometimes can see things differently than your eyes.  In the photo below, the lavender looked quite purple to me when I took the picture, but when I loaded the picture it looked blue.  I didn't want to change the white balance or tint because I like the tone of the green and everything else in the picture, so I simply moved the blue hue slider to the right until it looked as purple as I remembered.




Adjustment Brush - When I first learned Lightroom I didn't think I'd be able to live without layer masks, but now I couldn't live without an adjustment brush.  With the adjustment brush you can simply paint on exposure, saturation, contrast, and sharpening wherever you like and easily erase it after in areas if necessary.

In the photo below, the main subject of the photo, the bee, is severely underexposed.  I first increased my fill light slider, which helped quite a bit, but the bee still needed more brightening without my affecting the rest of the photo.  I used the adjustment brush to add increased exposure, contrast, and sharpening, just to the bee.



The "after" above also included my final Photoshop edit, which was the action "posh" by Florabella at a low opacity.

I hope these tips were helpful! I can't wait to see what you've been shooting!