Working In LR

alisaconn

I'm trying to improve my editing in LR. My pictures look very washed out. I try to boost the black to where the black is highlighted and the contract to about 30. For my exposure i move the exposure to the right until it touches the right hand-side but doesn't run up the wall. Is this right or can I leave some space from the highlights to the wall? Hope this makes sense.

fschop

You can't make wrong images right, but you can make right images better with LR.
There are some adjustments you can try:
- Exposure makes the entire image lighter / darker
- Fill light adjusts just the mid tones, leaving extreme dark and extreme light untouched
- Brightness also adjusts the mid tones, but also adjusts the contrast
- Recovery only adjusts the extreme light
- Blacks only adjusts the extreme dark
- Contrast adjusts moves exposures to (or away from) the mid tones
- Clarity slightly adjusts the sharpness and contrast
- Vibrance slightly adjusts saturation of mid tones, contrast and sharpness
- Saturation adjusts the amount of color

So if your image is washed out, I would try to reduce the exposure to make the image darker, adjust contrast to balance extreme dark and extreme light, increase fill light if the dark areas lack detail, and increase vibrance to make the image pop a little.

Frank.

ikko

Hi, try to download some presets for LR and see what settings are used to achieve these presets, that will give you an idea of what does what.

A combination of setting like vibrance, clarity and contrast gives me very good results but everybody is different. It's a trial and error process.
Lightroomkillertips.com is a good source of infos.

E

Carlos

Assuming you are bringing RAW files into LR, the controls will allow for a variety of adjustments to improve an image. However, agree with fschop, contrary to popular believe this days, can not make a bad image good with either LR or PS.

If your images are washed out, I beleive overexposure and lack of contrast maybe the culprits. Pulling the exposure some will help, what I would do however is use the tone curve rather than the contrast adjustment to improve the contrast of an image. It offers more control than the sliders on the basic panel for this and can really make your images punchy.

If you are new to LR, I would strongly recommend getting the LR book by Scott Kelby, is the most straight forward book I have read to understand the true power of LR.

Carlos

ButchM

I have found this video tutorials to be very helpful in explaining the nuances of LR ...

http://www.jkost.com/lightroom.html

alisaconn

WOW, thank you so much for all the great advice....