Editing in Adobe Lightroom can be a fickle beast… but a powerful one. If you’re serious about editing your wedding photos, chances are you’re going to need to wrap your head around Lightroom at one point or another. So we’ve decided to put together five quick tips to get you started on your photo editing journey in Lightroom.
Editing in Adobe Lightroom Like a Pro
Next time your jump into Lightroom post-session, remember these 5 quick tips to help speed up your photo-editing process.
1. Auto Straighten Your Photos When Editing in Adobe Lightroom
Ever take a photo and only notice in post that your horizon wasn’t as straight as you thought it was? There’s an easy fix!
Under the Crop Tool option lives the Auto Straighten function. If there’s a clearly-defined horizontal line, Auto Straighten will identify it in the photo and adjust the image accordingly.
Click here for more info on straightening and rotating your images!
2. All About Bokeh
Who loves bokeh? WE LOVE BOKEH! But we know it’s not necessarily an easy skill to learn. Though once you do, it can add a level of professionalism to your photos and really WOW your clients.
With bokeh, you’re essentially blurring a specific part of the photo. And sometimes your blurring the photo entirely. For a more in-depth look at how to add bokeh to your photo-editing arsenal, check out this article!
3. Use Spot Removal to Fix “Ruined” Images
Before concluding that an image is ruined due to unwanted spots on your photo, why not try the Spot Removal tool?
In Lightroom, Spot Removal has two options: Clone and Heal. To get a good grasp on how to use these tools to virtually wipe out any spots or blemishes on your photos, give this article a quick read!
4. Save Your Work!
We know, saving your work in Lightroom is a given. But the fact is that Lightroom saves your work in a much different way than Photoshop or other photo editing programs.
In Lightroom, the adjustments you make to your images are stored as a set of instructions. This makes it easy to return to any step in your editing process when needed, and also means you can take more risks with your photo editing without the worry of going too far. Read this helpful article to find out more about how Lightroom saves your editing work.
5. Create Eye-Catching Collages When
Editing in Adobe Lightroom
If you can create eye-catching collages in Lightroom, your clients and potential clients will see that you can do much more than just snap a pretty picture. Luckily, Lightroom makes it incredibly easy to make collages of the photos you take.
Check out this article to harness this skill and channel your teenage collager for maximum results!
5 Bonus Tips!
We know we said this was a Fast 5, but we have a few more favorite tips we wanted to share! So here are 5 MORE tips to help increase your Lightroom knowledge.
1. Hazy Photos — No Problem
When it comes to eliminating the haze in your photographs, Lightroom makes it a breeze. The dehaze tool’s slider button functionality can enhance the saturated colors of your photos and create sharp lines and clear subjects. So next time you’re working in Lightroom, try to pull up the dehaze tool and experiment a little — really get comfortable with the power of this slider.
2. Turn Down the Noise When Editing in Adobe Lightroom
Sometimes when you’re shooting in low light, unwanted noise can show up in your photos. So the first thing you want to do is work out if it’s color noise or luminance noise.
Color noise is signaled by a distortion of color when you zoom in on your images. Luminance noise often looks grainy and off-putting. So take an image with unwanted noise, zoom in to 100 and use the Noise Reduction sliders — always adjusting the color noise before fixing the luminance noise. Then with the noise is down to your liking, sharpen up the landscapes with the Detail slider.
3. Make Use of Black & White Photography
Depending on your style of wedding photography, you may want to experiment with the mood of your photos through black and white imagery. Sometimes you’ll want to highlight moments that the bride and groom might find most memorable. We suggest training yourself to know what photos you’ll want in black and white while shooting. It’s also wise to create a preset for your favorite black and white Lightroom adjustments.
Which brings us to…
4. How to Create Your Own Presets When Editing in Adobe Lightroom
Editing your wedding photos can often be a long and tedious process — which is why so many professional wedding photographers choose to outsource their photo editing. But if you choose to undertake editing yourself, presets can be a lifesaver. Lightroom makes it easy to create your own presets with the presets folder. Just be sure to save the presets you create in a separate folder for easy access. Also, no preset is ever truly “set-it-and-forget-it”, so when you apply a preset of your own to your image, take extra care to make sure it actually enhances the photo.
Here is what Adobe has to say about creating your own Lightroom presets.
5. Editing in Adobe Lightroom in Batches
Editing can rob you of hours from your post-production workflow — so try to edit smart. Make use of Lightroom’s batch editing feature to edit groups of similar photos. The key to happy clients is a fast turnaround time — so the quicker you can get their wedding photos back into their hands the better!
For even more reasons on why you should be using Lightroom to edit your wedding photos, as well as tips on how to use some of Lightrooms most powerful features, CLICK HERE.
As wedding photographers, it’s crucial that you become familiar with the ins and outs of Lightroom. But if you’re looking to have someone else carry the “heavy lifting” of your photo editing — try partnering with a professional service like ShootDotEdit.
With turnaround times as fast as 48 hours, you’re guaranteed to impress your clients — which could mean more referrals for you!
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