5 Lightroom Tips and Tricks (to Revolutionize Your Editing)
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Loading... - Zach Jackson
- 08 Jul 2022
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I’ve been using Lightroom for over a decade, and in this article, I share my top advice for amazing results, including:
· The panel that everyone should use for beautiful, artistic edits
· An easy way to apply complex edits at high speeds
· The best tools for creating fine-tuned, professional effects
Let’s do this!
1. Create color harmonies using the HSL panel
If you’ve never worked with the Lightroom HSL panel, then you’re in for a treat. It’s a little option hidden underneath the Tone Curve that looks like this:
The panel works by targeting different colors independently. You can choose to tweak only the reds in an image; you can brighten only the greens; you can desaturate only the blues. You simply pick the corresponding color slider, then make the necessary adjustments.
Note that the HSL panel lets you adjust colors in three specific ways. You can:
1. Change color hues. You can make the reds more orange, the purples more pink, or the blues more green.
2. Change color saturation. You can make the blues more faded or the reds more intense.
3. Change color luminance. You can brighten up the greens, darken down the blues, or brighten up the yellows.
When you’re just starting out, I’d recommend simply experimenting with the different sliders until you get an effect that you like, but here are a few ideas to try:
· Remove all the cool colors from an image for a warm, cinematic look
· Saturate the color of the main subject while desaturating the colors in the background
· Push several different colors in the same direction for a simpler color palette (and a more harmonious result)
This image, for instance, features a warm color palette (which can be achieved by desaturating blues, greens, and magentas:
2. Try the automatic slider adjustments
Sometimes, it can be hard to know how to start (or continue) a Lightroom edit.
In such cases, I recommend a simple little trick:
Hold down the Shift key, then double click on the sliders in the Basic panel. Lightroom will analyze your image, then apply adjustments automatically.
No, the edits won’t always be perfect, but they often look nice – and if you hate the result, you can always double-click on the slider name to set it back to zero. Plus, you can always use the automatic settings as starting points, then edit from there.
By the way, if you want to see all of Lightroom’s automatic edits at once, just click the Auto button above the Exposure slider:
It’ll instantly adjust the sliders in the Basic panel!
Now, these automatic adjustments don’t work for all Lightroom sliders. They won’t work outside the Basic panel, and they won’t work on the Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze sliders.
But you can use it to automatically adjust the white balance, the exposure, the contrast, and even the saturation – so why not give it a try and see what you think?
3. Use the clipping masks (or the clipping warnings)
Clipping refers to a loss of detail in the highlights and/or the shadows of an image – and in general, clipping is pretty bad.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to tell whether you’re actually clipping details while editing, and it’s possible to exacerbate clipping issues by pushing your sliders too far without realizing it. You can always keep an eye on the histogram, but it can be difficult to interpret, especially for beginners.
Fortunately, Lightroom has a solution: The clipping masks, which clearly indicate clipping in real-time.
Before you adjust the Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, or Blacks slider, simply hold down the Alt/Opt key. Then, when you increase or decrease the sliders, you’ll see a white or a black overlay, like this:
A mask that reveals zero clipping will be all white or all black. But a mask that shows some clipping will change colors over the problem areas:
(Note that, when adjusting the Blacks or the Shadows, clipping is indicated as color on white. On the other hand, when adjusting the Exposure, the Whites, or the Highlights, clipping is indicated as color on black.)
As long as you have no clipping, you’re good to go – but as soon as you start to see a loss of detail, you’ll want to dial back the intensity of your edits. Make sense?
One more quick Lightroom tip: If you want to identify clipping but you don’t want to spend time looking at the masks, you can always click the arrows at the top of the histogram:
This will activate the clipping indicators, which will cause clipped shadows to turn blue and clipped highlights to turn red:
