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53 Articles

Welcome to Teach yourself Lightroom

Welcome to the latest edition of our Lightroom bookazine! Adobe’s excellent software is a dual-purpose tool. It organises your images and enhances them too, so we start out here by looking at its import and cataloguing tools. Lightroom’s editing tools grab the headlines, but it’s often in the Library module that the really important work is done as you learn to sort, search and organise an ever-growing collection of photos. Next, we run through the image enhancement tools in Lightroom’s Develop module, from basics such as cropping and straightening, to tone curve adjustments and the increasingly powerful localised adjustment tools. We also run through Lightroom’s Print, Map and Web modules, as it’s no use collecting a vast library of photos if you don’t do anything with them. And we’ve a…

Welcome to Teach yourself Lightroom

The Lightroom workspace

Photoshop Lightroom combines the professional raw-processing tools in the more expensive Photoshop CC with the asset-organising powers of the cheaper Photoshop Elements. It also has plenty of unique photo-fixing and organising tools of its own, as you’ll discover while working through this book. management. It provides easy ways to add keywords to batches of files as you import them from a memory card, so you can find specific images more quickly in the future. We’ll look at Lightroom’s asset management functions in more detail in chapter two. One of the biggest challenges that we face as digital photographers is managing our collections of images. Lightroom enables you to take the tedium out of asset management. It provides easy ways to add keywords to batches of files as you import them…

The Lightroom workspace

Import your photos into Lightroom

1 Choose a source Lightroom collects files from a variety of sources and displays them in its Catalog. After launching Lightroom, click the Import button at the bottom-left of the interface (or choose File>Import Photos and Video from the main menu.) An import window will appear. In the Source section, browse the files and folders and choose a source such as a memory card, your camera if it’s plugged in, or a folder of photos on an internal or external hard drive. 2 Check or uncheck? The assets in the selected source folder or memory card will appear as thumbnails. Use the slider to increase the thumbnail size for a closer look. All the files are checked automatically. You can tick Uncheck All and then manually check the thumbnails of…

Import your photos into Lightroom

Find photos fast using metadata

It’s common practice to share your digital photos as electronic copies. You might do so by emailing them to clients, putting them on your social network site or presenting them in your online gallery. Once you’ve shared a photo you can’t control where it ends up, because it’s easy for others to make an electronic copy. This can lead to scenarios where your work is shared or published without you being credited or paid for it. As the creator of the image, you own the copyright to it, so others must seek your permission to use it. To help them do so you can assign your copyright details to the photo’s metadata. When your camera processes an image to describe its colours and tones, it also includes information about the…

Find photos fast using metadata

Organise images using Collections

Thanks to digital cameras, you can generate thousands of photographs in a relatively short time. Lightroom gathers images from multiple folders and external hard drives and stores a link to them in its Catalog. You might have to spend a long time scrolling through the Library module’s imported thumbnail images in search of a specific photo. The Catalog panel has the option to display all the photos in the Catalog, or you can narrow things down by clicking the Previous Import label to see your most recent additions to the Catalog. In chapter two we’ll look in detail at the ways Lightroom’s Library module enables you to organise your images using a range of tools and commands. However, we’ll pre-empt that chapter by introducing you to a quick and effective…

Organise images using Collections

Introducing the Library module

In the previous chapter we demonstrated how to import images into Lightroom. We also touched on ways to organise your assets by placing them in Collections. In this chapter we’ll delve deeper into the Library module and demonstrate how it can help you to manage (and edit) your images. You may have thousands of photos to deal with, and they may be scattered across a variety of folders and external hard drives. Without Lightroom’s Library module, you’d have to rummage around in those separate folders looking for specific photos. Lightroom gathers assets together and places them in its Catalog, so that they are all under one roof. You can then see your images more conveniently in the Library module. On this spread we introduce the key panels and tools in…

Introducing the Library module

Sort and rate your images

If you’ve imported thousands of photos into Lightroom’s Library module, you may be daunted by the challenge of finding specific files when you need them. Fortunately, Lightroom is packed full of tools and commands that are designed to help you separate the wheat from the chaff. In chapter one we demonstrated how to add selected photos to Collections, so you could group images together in a similar way to putting prints into a photo album. We also demonstrated how to use the Smart Collections feature to collect and display files according to specific metadata criteria, such as whether they had a portrait or landscape aspect ratio, for example. Lightroom displays all your thumbnails according to the date they were captured, so you can scroll back through time and rely on…

Sort and rate your images

Find images with keywords

We just looked at ways to begin sorting your collection of photos by adding ratings and flags, and using their existing metadata to filter photos according to certain criteria, such as aspect ratio or camera model. Later in this chapter we’ll learn how to locate photos according to where they were captured, thanks to the GPS coordinates stored in the metadata. It’s handy to be able to search for files according to coloured labels or shooting locations, but these tools will only go so far. To find a photo according to its actual subject matter, we could try to remember when it was taken and then scroll down through the Grid view in an attempt to identify its thumbnail. Alternatively, we could add keywords to our photos and then use…

Find images with keywords

Tag your images with location data

After travelling abroad it used to be traditional practice to print your holiday snaps and store them in an album to flick through. Now, you can gather your holiday-sourced photos together in a Lightroom Collection (see chapter one). Alternatively, you can use the Map module to present your photos according to where they were captured, which provides a fun and informative way to find particular files. When you take a photo on your smart phone, the software records the location of the photo using GPS (the satellite-based global positioning system). These coordinates are stored in the image file’s metadata, so when you import it into Lightroom the software can read the map coordinates and display the photo’s location in the Map module. Here you can see a map, see little…

Tag your images with location data

Introducing the Develop module

At the end of the previous chapter on the Library module, we touched on ways to improve photos using the Quick Develop panel. This aptly named panel enables you to quickly tweak some of the most common image-related issues. Once you’ve imported and organised your collection of digital negatives into Collections and added keywords, you’ll be ready to deal with more complex image-processing challenges – and this is where the sophisticated Develop module comes in. Adobe invented the. dng (digital negative) format to make it easier to store and access unprocessed raw files. The word ‘negative’ harks back to the traditional days of analogue film. Before you could see a film negative’s true colours and tones, it needed to be developed in a darkroom, which is why the Develop module’s…

Introducing the Develop module

The histogram window is one of the most useful tools in the Develop module. The histogram graph performs a similar function to the medical chart clipped to a hospital patient’s bed. Just as a doctor or nurse can use a chart to help diagnose the health of a patient, we can look at the shape of a photo’s histogram graph to see if the image is under- or over-exposed. We can also use Lightroom’s histogram window to help us create an image that has a healthier spread of tones that displays more detail in its shadows, midtones and highlights. In the walkthrough below we’ll show you how to analyse a histogram so that you can understand how parts of the undulating graph equate to a photo’s tonal characteristics. Our TYLR04.dng…

Use Smart Previews

As we revealed in chapter one, Lightroom can gather photographs from a variety of locations (such as external hard drives) into its Catalog. It then creates and stores standard-resolution previews of each imported photo on your PC’s hard drive, while storing the original high-resolution images on your external hard drives. This enables you to save valuable disc space on your laptop or PC. However, if you plan to use a laptop to edit your photos while away from the office, then you won’t want to have to lug around a collection of hard drives in order to access and edit your images. By creating a Smart Preview of a photo, you can edit the image while on the move, without requiring access to the external hard drive. After you disconnect…

Use Smart Previews

Make basic colour adjustments

If you plan to share your edited photographs online then you don’t need to worry as much about over-saturating the colours. Computer screens can reproduce millions of colours, but if you’re planning to print your photos then you need to be more careful about avoiding over-saturated colours at the editing stage, because printers can’t reproduce as many colours as you can see on a monitor. If you print over-saturated colours, they may look garish and lack detail in the print version. We’ll look into ways to get more faithful-looking prints in chapter nine, but it’s worth being aware of the concept of printable and unprintable colours at an early stage. Lightroom is also designed to help you counteract colour casts. These warm orange or cold blue tints can occur when…

Make basic colour adjustments

Crop & straighten your photographs

While looking at a scene through your camera’s viewfinder, you can zoom and pan the lens to compose the photo. You may know what makes a good composition, or you might employ a more intuitive point-and-shoot approach. Often, it’s only when looking at photos on the camera’s LCD display (or even in Lightroom’s Library) that you can spot a photo that stands out as being well-composed. When taking the picture you may not notice a distracting object at the edge of the frame. For example, when directing a model in the studio you’ll be more attentive to her pose than concentrating on any bits of backdrop or lighting kit that might be straying into the photo. And you may not notice problems such as tilted horizons until you’ve imported a…

Crop & straighten your photographs

Remove lens distortion

What you see with the naked eye isn’t always what you get in a photo of the same location. When shooting with a wide-angle lens, the edges of the frame can become distorted, with horizontal and vertical lines appearing curved instead of straight. This barrel (outward) or pin-cushion (inward) distortion is especially noticeable when looking at architectural photos that feature lots of straight lines. Cheaper lenses can also add colour-related artefacts to a subject. When faced with a high-contrast edge (such as a white swan against a dark blue lake), you may find fringes of purple clinging to the edges of your subject. This ugly and distracting chromatic aberration is caused by the lens’s inability to focus different wavelengths of light onto the same spot on your camera’s sensor. Also,…

Remove lens distortion

Get a better perspective

Most buildings have vertical walls at a 90-degree angle from the ground. However, in photographs the walls often appear wider apart at the ground, but tilt inwards towards the top. These converging vertical lines are created by perspectival distortion. Tilting your camera to get the top of the building into the photo when shooting up close increases this distortion, as does using a wide-angle lens to fit the sides into the frame. To avoid these converging vertical lines, you could try shooting your subject from a more distant (or higher) vantage point, so you no longer need to tilt the camera upwards. This will help the subject’s walls run parallel with the edge of the frame. Alternatively, you could buy a specialist tilt-shift lens that counteracts the converging verticals as…

Get a better perspective

Reveal more midtone detail

At the start of this chapter we tackled a high-contrast scene that had both over- and under-exposed areas. We used the Develop module’s Basic panel to independently adjust the shadows and the highlights to reveal detail where it was desired. The starting image on this page has some bright areas in the background windows, but the majority of the photo consists of dull shadows and murky midtones. The flat-lit printing press has lots of interesting textures and details, but in the unprocessed picture these areas of interest are lost in a muddy wash of dull brown midtones. To reveal more detail in this scene we could have captured more tonal information in a series of bracketed exposures. However, Lightroom lacks Photoshop CC’s ability to merge multiple photos as a single…

Reveal more midtone detail

Remove sensor spots

Despite our best efforts to keep our lenses and cameras clean, we may find that some photos suffer from sensor spots. When you swap lenses over on location, tiny fragments of dirt and dust can enter the camera body and adhere to the sensor. These sensor spots can then show up in a photograph as small, soft, dark blobs. These blobs are particularly annoying because they appear in the same parts of every photo from a shoot. They are particularly noticeable in clean smooth areas such as skies (as you can see in the starting image). Your DSLR camera may attempt to remove sensor spots by vibrating the sensor, but this automatic mechanical technique may not prove effective. For a more thorough clean you can activate the camera’s sensor cleaning…

Remove sensor spots

When it comes to exposure, most photos will benefit with a few slider tweaks in Lightroom’s Develop module to reveal more tonal detail. The Basic panel’s Exposure slider makes global adjustments that evenly lighten or darken the tones in the photo. This slider works well if the entire image is slightly under- or over-exposed. However, if you use the Exposure slider to lighten under-exposed shadows, then you may blow out (or clip) correctly exposed highlights. If you try to claw back missing highlight detail with the Exposure slider, then you’ll plunge the shadows into clipped darkness. To help you make selective tonal adjustments you can use other sliders (such as Highlights and Shadows) to target and adjust specific tones, as we demonstrated at the start of chapter four. In that…

Editing with Auto Mask

On the previous spread we demonstrated how to use the Adjustment brush to dodge the dark standing stones, while burning more detail into the brighter sky. By altering the size, softness and flow of the Adjustment brush, you can target and tweak the tones of specific objects with precision. When you click a photo with the Adjustment brush you place an Edit pin. This pin records the position and strength of all the tonal adjustments you make. Thanks to Edit pins you can make multiple adjustments to a photo and then click a pin to fine-tune its effect at any time in the future. If you click a pin and drag it to the right, you can increase the value setting of each associated slider to, say, brighten the image…

Editing with Auto Mask

The Graduated Filter tool

The Graduated Filter is one of the most useful tools that Lightroom has on offer. It works by creating a gradated tonal blend between any two points in an image. The area behind your first point is completely affected, and beyond your second point remains unaffected, with a blend in between. What makes it such a powerful tool is the fact that, just like the Radial Filter and Adjustment Brush tools, you have complete control both over the area it affects, and the type of tonal changes that you’d like to make in that area. You can click and drag a line in any direction to create your blend, but the classic example of a graduated filter in action is to darken a sky in a landscape. One problem that…

The Graduated Filter tool

The Radial Filter

Just like the two other selective tools – the Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush – the Radial Filter tool enables you to alter the tones in parts of an image. The difference is in the way you define the area you’d like to change. While the Adjustment Brush works by painting and the Graduated Filter works by creating a straight-lined blend, the Radial Filter enables you to create a circular blend between the area affected by the tonal changes, and the area that remains unaffected. As such it’s very useful for creating subtle vignettes that draw the eye towards your subject and away from distracting edge details, or for softening parts of an image you want to de-emphasise. Here we’ve used the tool for two very different tasks. For the…

The Radial Filter

Master the HSL panel

Certain colours are weaker in some photos than in others. If you boost the overall colour intensity of the image using the Basic panel’s Saturation slider, then weaker colours will have more impact, but the stronger ones may become over-saturated. This can lead to colours that won’t print correctly because they’ll be clipped and lacking in detail. In addition, a model’s skin tones may become too orange and garish. The Vibrance slider is designed to solve this problem by enabling you to increase the saturation of weaker colours without over-saturating the stronger ones. It also tends to boost natural landscape colours such as blues and greens more strongly than oranges, which helps you to avoid creating over-saturated skin tones. If you venture beyond the Basic panel you’ll find some alternative…

Master the HSL panel

Better black and white images

When shooting with black-and-white film, pre-digital photographers could also place a coloured filter over the camera’s lens to produce more striking monochrome pictures. Different coloured filters would lighten or darken the greyscale tones of specific objects in the scene. For example, if you placed a red filter over the lens it would make blue skies become dark greys in the monochrome print, enabling lighter clouds to pop out in contrast. Many digital cameras enable you to use a Monochrome picture style setting to produce a black-and-white photo in camera. You can even set the camera to apply colour filters that help lighten or darken greyscale tones in particular areas, such as blue skies or green fields. This in-camera approach can be very hit and miss, so we’ll show you how…

Better black and white images

Create HDR images

Lightroom’s HDR feature enables you to merge several different exposures into one, providing a high dynamic range with detail in the brightest highlights and darkest shadows (which makes the feature particularly useful for high-contrast landscapes and interiors). Best of all, it then creates a merged DNG raw file packed with tonal information. Understandably, the feature isn’t as in-depth as dedicated HDR software like Photomatix or Nik’s HDR Efex Pro, or even Photoshop’s own Merge to HDR command. But Lightroom’s approach is slightly different. It creates a detail-rich raw file without resulting in the over-processed look that puts many photographers off HDR. As such, it’s more HDR as a utility than as a style, and all the better for it. While limited, the options in the Merge HDR command are very…

Create HDR images

Introducing the Tone Curve panel

When shooting a high-contrast scene it can be a challenge to capture detail throughout that scene’s full tonal range. If the camera’s metering mode attempts to capture detail in a bright area (such as a background window) then a shaded room may be plunged into shadow. If the camera meters to capture detail in shaded areas, then the shot’s sunlit sections may blow out. When you review a photo on your camera’s LCD you may not see any detail in the brighter highlights, but if you’re shooting in raw then Lightroom’s Develop module will come to the rescue. Because raw files are always packed full of information about a scene’s tonal range, you can overcome common exposure problems with ease, and restore detail to clipped areas. As we demonstrated in…

Introducing the Tone Curve panel

Make Tone Curve adjustments

The Develop module’s Basic panel is designed to help you reveal a photo’s missing tonal details by independently targeting and adjusting the Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. This enables you to lighten or darken problematic areas without changing correctly exposed ones. The Tone Curve panel that was featured on the previous spread provides you with an additional and effective way to target and tweak specific tones. You can combine the controls in the Basic and Tone Curve panels to overcome any tone-related problem. Lightroom has two new powerful techniques to manipulate the Tone Curve; parametric adjustment sliders and the targeted adjustment tool. The parametric adjustment sliders are useful for choosing precise values for accurate tonal changes, as they split an image into four distinct sections: Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows…

Make Tone Curve adjustments

Sharpen up your images

Getting your photos looking pin-sharp can be a challenge for a variety of reasons. Many digital cameras have a built-in filter that blurs the photo a little in an attempt to avoid producing moiré patterns. This low-pass (or anti-aliasing) filter can also soften important details such as our flower’s fine stigmas. By placing the camera close to a small subject (such as a flower) you risk getting a shallow depth of field. This means that only a narrow band of detail will be in focus. Features in front of and behind this sharply focused zone will look blurred. An image that appears to look sharp on the camera’s small LCD may turn out to look disappointingly soft when examined on your PC’s larger screen. Fortunately, Lightroom’s rather aptly named Detail…

Sharpen up your images

On the previous spread we demonstrated how the Detail panel enables you to sharpen a photo while keeping noise at bay. Noise is added to a photo when using a high ISO sensitivity setting on your camera, or when shooting at night with a slow shutter speed. There are two types of noise – luminance (greyscale) and chroma (or colour). Luminance noise appears throughout the image’s tonal range as tiny dots. Chroma noise manifests itself as tiny patches of distracting rainbow colours, which are especially noticeable in detail-free sections of a JPEG image, such as a sky. Luminance noise can be compared to character-adding film grain, so it isn’t as distracting or undesirable as chroma noise. We’ll show you how to use the Detail panel’s Noise Reduction tools to get…

Camera Calibration

Many digital cameras provide the opportunity to process a photograph immediately as they capture it, using a range of built-in presets such as Portrait, Landscape, Neutral and so on. These presets change the look of the captured photos’ colours and tones. For example, a camera’s Landscape preset might boost the saturation of blues and greens. The Neutral preset will avoid boosting the colour and contrast so that you can get the look you want in Lightroom. If you shoot in JPEG format, then the results of these in-camera presets will be harder to alter in Lightroom. However, if you shoot in your camera’s raw format then you can experiment with different looks quickly and effectively in Lightroom, courtesy of the profiles and sliders in the Camera Calibration panel. This panel…

Camera Calibration

Powerful presets

One way to discover more about how Lightroom’s sliders and panels function is to experiment with presets. In the previous chapter we demonstrated how you could use presets to change a video clip’s colours and tones using the Library module’s Quick Develop panel. However, video clips only have access to a limited range of preset effects. When editing raw files you can take them into the more sophisticated Develop module and apply a wider range of effects to your photos, as you’ll see on this spread. You can use presets as a starting point for a range of looks and then fine-tune them to customise the results. 1 Preview the presets Open TYLR11.dng in the Develop module. Toggle open the Presets panel below the Navigator. Toggle open a folder such…

Powerful presets

Take it further…

Custom Blue Filter preset Here’s the result produced by the customised Blue Filter preset in our four-step walkthrough. We darkened the reds to darken the dress so that it stands out in contrast with the white background. We also lightened the girl’s skin for a less grey look. Yellow Filter preset This preset filter applies values that dramatically lighten the reds of the dress and the oranges of the subject’s skin to produce a smoother milky complexion. This helps her eyes and hair to stand out from the other elements in the photo. Cross Process 2 preset This Lightroom preset mimics a traditional darkroom processing technique by tweaking the Tone Curve and adjusting the HSL panel’s Saturation and Luminance sliders. We’ll explore cross-processing in more detail in the following chapter.…

Take it further…

Bring your landscapes to life

1 Tweak the colour Before adjusting individual areas of the image, make some basic adjustments to the whole image. The main adjustments are to Vibrance and Saturation. Set Vibrance to around -60 and Saturation to around +60 to boost the blues and greens to enhance the cool look of a winter landscape. 2 Enhance the land To bring back some detail in the headland, select the Adjustment brush and paint over this area. If you paint over the sky or sea, use the Erase option to correct it. Drag Exposure to around +3, Shadows to +64 and Contrast to 75. Increase Clarity and Saturation to around +30. 3 Adjust the sky Select a new Adjustment brush and paint over the entire sky. Add more contrast to the sky by setting Clarity…

Bring your landscapes to life

Try creative cross-processing

The term cross-processing refers to a developing technique used in pre-digital chemical darkrooms. It involved deliberately developing print negatives using chemicals that were designed for use with slide film (or visa versa). The use of these incorrect chemicals resulted in a shift in colour and an increase in contrast. This darkroom technique created great stylised and eye-catching images. Cross-processed blues often took on a green hue for example, while the shadows might feature a hint of magenta. This editing process is still popular now, especially with fine art, fashion and stock photographers. In the days of the traditional darkroom the results could be a bit hit or miss, so you had to experiment to get the desired shifts in colour and tone. But Lightroom’s Color panel enables you to tweak…

Try creative cross-processing

Create a panorama

Lightroom’s Merge Panorama command stitches several horizontal or vertical frames together to create a panoramic raw file – perfect for those times when your lens can’t fit everything in, or if you want to pack in extra detail. When shooting the frames for a panorama, use a tripod to keep the camera position fixed and make sure that the panning motion remains perfectly level by checking the horizon as you pan (a spirit level comes in handy here). Shoot with your camera in vertical orientation to record the maximum amount of detail, and allow for a generous overlap between each segment. Lightroom’s Merge Panorama command offers three Projection modes that stitch the frames in different ways. Spherical maps the frames as if on the inside of a sphere. It’s ideal…

Create a panorama

Produce detail-rich HDR panoramas

If you want to create detail-rich panoramic HDRs, two of Lightroom’s newest features – HDR Merge and Merge Panorama – make the process quick and easy, producing images that pack in the detail while remaining natural and realistic. Shooting for HDR panoramas requires a tripod and some basic exposure control. Like you would with a normal panorama, you need to shoot the scene in overlapping segments (ideally with a vertical camera orientation). But rather than shooting a single frame for each segment, you need three frames taken at different exposure values. The easiest way to do this is to set your camera up for bracketed exposures. So for example, if your panorama has five segments, you’ll end up with 15 shots. When it comes to combining the images, first you…

Produce detail-rich HDR panoramas

Create a dramatic landscape with Merge to HDR

Landscape imagery is near and dear to most photographers, capturing the beauty we see as we travel through our lives. One thing you’ll notice pretty quickly is that unless the sun is at your back, the sky will be much brighter than the land, especially for sunrise and sunset. Traditionally photographers would use graduated filters to help account for this, but there is a way to go without them. That way is high-dynamic-range or HDR processing. Here you combine a series of photos at set stop intervals apart, usually two or three stops with more than two photos. (This process is called bracketing.) Most people use a combination of three photos, but five, seven or even nine are also common. Usually only the shutter speed is changed between each set.…

Create a dramatic landscape with Merge to HDR

Soft proof your images

In chapter five we processed the colours and tones in a landscape photograph to reveal more detail in the image and create more attractive vibrant-looking colours. After processing a photo to look good on screen, it can then be frustrating to end up with a print that looks less bright and vibrant than the digital version of the photo. Your printer may struggle to reproduce the processed picture’s colour accurately. This is because computer displays produce millions of colours by mixing reds, greens and blues (RGB) together, while most domestic printers combine cyan, magenta, black and yellow (CMYK) to create a narrower range of colours. Colours that can’t be printed are referred to as ‘out of gamut’ colours. The image on your monitor is also brightly illuminated, leading to vibrant…

Soft proof your images

Introducing the Print module

The majority of this book on using Lightroom to make the best of your digital photos has dealt with ways to organise your assets in the Library module and then process them in the Develop module. Most people will spend more time in these two modules than in the other five. However, many Lightroom users will want to share their skilfully edited photos digitally as stock photos or on social media websites and apps. We’ll cover these sharing options in the last chapter. Others will want to print their photos to place in a frame or in a physical photo album, and we’ll look at this in the next few pages. On the previous spread we touched on the difference between processing a photo for on-screen display and hard copy…

Introducing the Print module

Create a custom print layout

The Print module’s Template browser is packed with preset templates that enable you to duplicate and resize a photo (or a selection of images) so that you can produce a Picture Package containing prints with a range of sizes. You can also print a collection of photos in the Filmstrip as a series of thumbnails, courtesy of one of Lightroom’s Contact Sheet presets. In the Layout Style panel you also have the option to create a Custom Layout, which is handy if you need to print a range of different sizes that aren’t available in the Template browser. Lightroom’s layout templates place your photos in cells. These cells can be manually dragged into any position on the page so you can easily change the layout of a Picture Package. You…

Create a custom print layout

Watermark your images

Online galleries and portfolios provide quick and easy ways to share your photographs, but your photos are vulnerable to theft on the internet. By shooting a photo you automatically own its copyright, but once it’s been downloaded and re-posted to other sites, prospective clients won’t necessarily know who the photograph belongs to. This might result in a photo being used without anyone crediting or paying you. You may also want to send a client proof photos to peruse and order, without the risk of them making unauthorised prints. As we saw in chapter one, you can digitally assign your copyright and contact details to a photo’s metadata, so that this important information will always be attached to the image. This helps potential clients to contact you if they want to…

Watermark your images

Publish your photos online

One of the most common ways to share pictures is via social media sites such as Facebook and Flickr. These electronic outlets enable us to enjoy instant feedback on our work from friends, colleagues or other people who are interested in photography and image editing. Lightroom acknowledges the need to showcase your images by including upload links to some of the most popular sharing sites in its Publish Services panel. This panel also links to Behance, a service for creative professionals who need to share their images and exchange feedback with their peers. The Publish Services panel also enables you to save exported images in a particular format (such as JPEG or DNG). Simply click on Set Up and log into a service such as Facebook using your password and…

Publish your photos online

Create an online photo portfolio

Many photographers present their images in an online gallery to promote their shooting and image-editing skills, enjoy feedback, and drum up business. You may find that although you have a website showcasing your work, it’s out of date. This could be due to the fact that it can be time-consuming to work on a website’s content while trying to master web design packages. You may also have been distracted by easier ways to share and your photos, such as by using a Facebook page, where no HTML or Flash knowledge is required. Lightroom’s Web module enables you to take a Collection of images and turn them into interactive web galleries without any coding knowledge. In this walkthrough we’ll show you how to explore a range of web gallery templates and…

Create an online photo portfolio

Get creative with Lightroom

Over the next few pages we’ll show you a side of Lightroom you may not have seen before. We’ll take it for a creative spin and uncover how to use the Develop module (or alternatively, the near-identical controls in Camera Raw) to transform your images in a range of wonderfully creative ways. Compared with Photoshop Elements or CC, Lightroom doesn’t offer anywhere near the depth of tools for image editing. But it does give you the kind of tools you need to make a huge range of tonal effects. What’s more, because Lightroom employs parametric editing (where all changes are saved in a ‘sidecar’ file), everything is completely non-destructive. Of course, we can use separate layers for non-destructive editing in Photoshop, but the top-down way that layers work means you…

Get creative with Lightroom

Creative colour wash effects

You might think that Lightroom is only designed for making basic tonal tweaks, black-and-white conversions, sharpening, and so on. In other words, for all of the fundamental things that photographers need. Lightroom does all of these things really well, but it also gives you the opportunity to transform your images in surprisingly creative ways, such as this colourful portrait effect opposite. Two powerful Lightroom tools central to this technique are the Graduated Filter and Adjustment brush tools. Both of these tools enable you to define an area for adjusting – either by painting, or by plotting two points for a gradual blend. You can then use the sliders at the top-right of the interface to change the exposure, colour or detail as you see fit. The most obvious use for…

Creative colour wash effects

Four Lightroom treatments

Use the Basic Panel sliders to increase colour and reveal detail, then plot an S-shaped curve on the Tone Curve line to add extra punch and saturation. Next, grab the Adjustment brush, paint a mask over the eyes and use the sliders at the top-right to lighten and boost the area. Click New and paint another mask over the skin, then set Clarity to -70 to soften the area. Go to the HSL panel and choose Saturation, then simply grab the Target tool from the top-left of the panel and drag down over the colours you want to remove, or use the sliders in the panel. Next, grab the Adjustment brush and set Saturation to -100, then paint with the brush to completely remove any remaining unwanted colour. Crop the…

Four Lightroom treatments

Instant mono magic effects

Lightroom is a preset lovers’ paradise. Presets are so easy to set up, organise and apply that you could conceivably never have to perform the same task more than once – just set the task up as a preset and apply forever after with a single click. We’ve used a few of the existing Black and White and toning presets here to give you an idea of the effects that can be quickly applied. To try them out for yourself on your own images, simply click through them in the Presets panel to the left of the interface. Even if the Presets don’t have the exact desired effect that you were looking for, they can be a useful starting point for further tweaks using the right-hand side panels. And if…

Instant mono magic effects

Retouch your images like a pro

Many of us consider Adobe Photoshop to come in two versions – the budget-friendly Photoshop Elements and more sophisticated Photoshop CC. We tend to overlook Photoshop Lightroom as something that falls between these two stalls. Lightroom CC is now sold in a package with Photoshop CC, equating it in some people’s minds with the cheaper Elements, or even with a freebie. But it’s actually just as powerful as the more expensive incarnation of Photoshop when it comes to processing raw files. By shooting in raw you get access to more of a photograph’s colour and tonal information, so it’s much easier to retouch a shot while keeping blocky JPEG compression artefacts at bay. Lightroom doesn’t give you access to layers, of course, so it’s of little use if you want…

Retouch your images like a pro

Synchronise Lightroom Mobile

Lightroom Mobile is an app that will run on a tablet or smartphone. It’s a companion app to the full version of Lightroom CC that runs on your Mac or PC. The mobile and desktop versions of Lightroom work seamlessly to enable you to organise, edit and share your photos from your home or on the go. To use Lightroom Mobile you’ll need to sign up for an Adobe ID so that you can access the Adobe Creative Cloud. This enables you to create a collection of photos on your desktop copy of Lightroom and sync them via the Creative Cloud to Lightroom Mobile on your portable devices. You can then use Lightroom Mobile while on the go to add ratings to your photos and adjust their colour, tone and…

Synchronise Lightroom Mobile

Working with Lightroom Mobile

On the previous spread we created our first collection in Lightroom Mobile by importing photographs captured with a smartphone or tablet. By default the collection is called My Tablet Photos, but you can re-label the collection in Lightroom Mobile by tapping the three white dots at the bottom-left of the collection’s cover photo. This reveals a list of commands including Rename. You can also rename the collection after it has been synced to Lightroom on your desktop. Go to the Collections panel in the Lightroom Library module and right-click the My Tablet Photos collection label. Choose Rename from the context-sensitive pop-up menu that appears. If you rename the collection in one version of Lightroom, the name change will automatically be updated in the other. As well as syncing photos snapped…

Working with Lightroom Mobile

Sort images with Lightroom Mobile

Once you’ve created collections in Lightroom or Lightroom Mobile, you can begin to sort your shots to flag up favourites, or mark some files for rejection. You can also highlight images that you’re proud of by using star ratings. If you flag a file or add a rating in Lightroom, then these changes are added to the file’s metadata and automatically synced to the version of the photo in Lightroom Mobile’s equivalent collection. In the same way, if you rate a photo in Lightroom Mobile, the assigned rating or flag badge will appear by the same photo in the Lightroom collection. This versatility enables you to start rating on your desktop computer and then continue reviewing, rating and flagging your files on your iPad or smartphone. If your tablet lacks…

Sort images with Lightroom Mobile

Shooting with Lightroom Mobile

Although Lightroom users will usually use pretty serious camera kit, many of us also take casual pictures on our smartphones too. In fact, there’s a growing art movement in mobile photography. The camera module built into Lightroom Mobile is really useful. The first reason is that it offers more advanced camera controls that your smartphone’s built-in app won’t necessarily provide, including white balance and exposure compensation adjustment. Second is that you can use a small selection of ‘shoot-through’ presets that apply a specific image effect to your photos, but in a non-destructive way. It’s like using regular Lightroom presets in that you can modify the settings or choose a different preset at any time. The third reason is that any pictures you take with the Lightroom Mobile camera are automatically…

Shooting with Lightroom Mobile

Mobile’s powerful editing tools

When you synchronise your images to your mobile devices, you’re sharing smaller-sized Adobe DNG-based smart previews that can nevertheless store all of the adjustments that you make. These work in the same was as they do in the desktop Lightroom application – all the changes you make are ‘non-destructive’ and can be modified or removed at any time. And this still applies if you start editing an image on your desktop computer version of Lightroom and then carry on modifying the picture on your mobile device in the app. When you look at the image on your desktop computer again, all of the changes that you made on your mobile device will have been added to that version automatically. Early versions of Lightroom Mobile had relatively modest adjustment features available,…

Mobile’s powerful editing tools

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