Basic and Intermediate Photo Editing with Adobe Lightroom

Overview

Ignore for a moment the concept of Basic and Intermediate Photo Editing with Adobe Lightroom. When you come down to it, what we want from our images are actually quite a small number of qualities.

1. Acceptable Sharpness
2. Depth
3. Realistic Colors & Tones

These qualities can be achieved with almost any camera made in the last decade and, whisper it quietly, almost any software.

The industry needs sales and to get sales they improve their offerings. Maybe it’s autofocus in camera, lightness in lenses or user friendly hacks in editing. The question we need to ask ourselves is “Do I actually need this new thing/upgrade that I want to buy?”

I say this as a man who has both DxO PhotoLab and Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and Affinity Photo. There are reasons, largely to do with my time as a commercial photographer when Adobe was pretty much the standard in every industry I worked in and my desire to find a credible alternative to Adobe. Don’t get me wrong, Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop is a fantastic software, it’s Adobe that are problematic!

However, the point of this post is not to highlight my own indecision when it comes to choice of software, but to explode several of the more pervasive myths around what software brings to the table.

The starting point for this conversation has to assume you’re taking images in RAW format. If you’re shooting jpeg then most of the power of editing software won’t be available to you anyway, just use the camera settings for picture style.

The starting point for an edit is not “what can I do with these tools” it is “What do I need to do to make this picture match what I had in my mind when I took it?”

And this is the kicker – real professionals know when the answer is “very little”.

The Edit

So with that in mind what I want to do is to go through my process of editing, in a way that shows when an edit is needed and how to achieve it.

I’m going to use Adobe Lightroom with a very average collection of pictures taken on a very grey day to make this point, but most of the content is common to all packages.

Culling

The first thing I do is assign a color to the RAW images signifying whether they are keepers or not. I usually dump the rest after the edit. So the process typically looks like this – I allocate a Green Flag to every picture that isn’t out of focus, badly exposed, accidentally shot etc.

A second pass then “promotes” the best of this bunch to an Amber Flag. I’m making a choice between similar pictures here and promoting the one that will give me the best image for the least work.

In the actual edit, I apply basic edits first and if I like the result then promote that picture to a Red Flag.

This method allows me to dump the no hopers immediately and to have the concept of revisiting photos at a later date to do more editing.

Basic or Global Edits

Next I go through the images applying basic edits. These are global edits involving Cropping, White Balance, Exposure Adjustment and Contrast. I would also remove any distracting elements at this stage. This takes about 20% of the time and delivers 80% of the value.

Next I’ll have another pass over the remaining pictures and ask myself whether each picture could be improved by further editing.

Local or Selective Edits

These will be selective edits applied to different areas of the image to enhance the impression of depth, the tonal variety or draw the eye to a different area of the image. These edits are more complex and need to be carefully handled, using masks in Lightroom or Control Points in PhotoLab.

This level of editing is what I do with all of the pictures that can benefit. It is not necessary to do this with every picture. And I think the lesson here is there are still some bells and whistles that can be applied but let your vision lead, not the software.

Next week I’m going to complete this exercise with DxO PhotoLab to demonstrate the different capabilities on offer.

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Using Masks in Lightroom

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