Learn how to quickly and easily adjust an image’s White Balance
In the Lightroom Basic panel’s White Balance area is a White Balance Selector. You can get to it by pressing the letter W. Hold the White Balance Selector over an area of the image which should be a neutral color, such as gray, black or white – gray is the better choice.
You will see the Loupe appear (which is a grid of 25 cells showing the color under and around the cursor). Click once to set the white balance, using the center color as a reference. If the result isn’t what you want, click again to sample another area. Continue until you get a good fix for the image.
Create the Orton Effect in Lightroom with the Clarity Slider
The Orton Effect is named after photographer Michael Orton. This process results in a somewhat surreal image which has a slightly out-of-focus look while retaining lots of edge detail.
You can quickly give an image a faux Orton look using the Clarity slider in Lightroom. All you need to do is drag the Clarity slider to the left close to -100 and then, increase the Blacks in the image to an higher than usual value.
Of course there is a lot more to the Orton effect than this but this gives you a good start and, for many images, may be all you really need.
Give an image’s Midtones a Boost with the Clarity Slider
The Clarity slider helps you adjust the Midtones in the image so it adds Contrast to them which also results in them looking a little crisper and more saturated too.
It’s a great tool, but try not to overdo it. Typically, a Clarity adjustment of around 25 is a good choice for most images. In Lightroom 4 the adjustment has been tweaked a bit so you can add more Clarity in Lightroom 4 than you are perhaps used to doing in Lightroom 3.
Find Lost Details Hidden in Shadows and Darker Parts of an Image
When you have an image that has details lost in the shadows or darker areas of the image, the Fill Light slider in Lightroom 3 or the Shadows slider in Lightroom 4 can be used to recover this detail.
Don’t use either of these as a tool for lightening an image or to lighten shadows if there is nothing interesting in the shadows. Use them instead when you want to get some interesting detail out of the shadows.
The result of using the Fill Light and sometimes using the Shadow tool is that some contrast in the image will be lost – so you nay need to increase Contrast as a result of using the Fill Light slider in Lightroom 3 or apply a tone curve adjustment in Lightroom 4.
Learn how to crop and resize in bulk in Lightroom. If you have a lot of images you need to, for example, crop to 5 x 7 and then save at a particular pixel size and resolution, you can learn how to do this quickly and effectively in Lightroom. This makes use of the tools in the Quick Develop panel in the Library module.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can bulk crop and resize images and export them from Lightroom.
A reader recently posed a question to me and that was what do I do if I need to crop all my images to 5 by 7 in size and get them out as 500 by 700 pixel images. In Lightroom that’s not that difficult to do. What I suggest you do is you do it from the Library in Quick Develop mode. So I’m going to select the images here and then I’m going to select Crop Ratio and I’m going to choose 5 by 7. And that will crop all of these images to 5 by 7 images. But look what it’s done with the verticals. It’s cropped them to 5 by 7 but it’s kept that same vertical alignment.
So now let’s go to the Develop module and just see what we’re seeing here. This is the crop marquee. And you can see that this image, each one of these images in fact has been cropped to 5 by 7. And let’s go and find a vertical crop and see how it’s been cropped. Again, it’s been cropped to 5 by 7 but in a vertical direction. So this means that all of these images have automatically been cropped.
All we would do is have a quick look and make sure that important parts of the image have not been cropped off. If these were people we’d have a quick check to make sure that somebody’s head hasn’t been chopped off for example. And having done that now knowing that everything is cropped to 5 by 7, to export these images at 500 by 700 pixels in size or 700 by 500 we would select all of them by clicking on the first and Shift click on the last. I’m going to right click and choose Export and then Export again and we would just set up the Export option. So here I’m going to put this in a folder called 5 by 7.
I don’t want to rename these files. All we want to do is to resize them. But what I do want to do is I want to select Resize to Fit. And the longest edge since I know that these are all 5 by 7s is going to be 700 pixels and the resolution I can set to 100 pixels per inch. So these are then going to be 5 by 7 images at 100 pixels per inch resolution. And all I need to do is to click Export and Lightroom is going ahead and it is cropping and resizing all of those images so that they are all going to be the exact right size that we chose. And here they are including the ones that were verticals. You can see that these are 500 by 700 pixels in size. This one is 700 by 500 because it’s a landscape image.
So in Lightroom you could batch resize and export these images in just a matter of a few seconds by just choosing the right option. And that is here in the Quick Develop module setting a crop ratio for those images. This is not something you can do easily in the Develop module, but it’s something that you can do very, very simply here in the Quick Develop area of the Library in Lightroom.
My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Lightroom video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please comment, press the Like button, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. You’ll also find more of my tutorials, tips and tricks on my website at projectwoman.com.
Area Picker – Viewing a Preview Image when sharpening
The Detail panel of the Develop module in Lightroom contains the features you need to sharpen an image. In this panel is a small square icon with lines radiating from it. Click this once and now hover over an area in the larger image. As you do this you will see that area of the image appears in the preview panel at 100% magnification. Use this tool to click on an area of interest in the image that you can view in the preview area so you can see how the sharpening is being applied.
If minor adjustment is required, drag the preview image in the preview area with your mouse to fine tune its placement.
Switches in Lightroom appear in areas such as the Develop module where they can be used to enable or disable a setting such as the Tone Curve. You can use this switch to compare your image with or without the effect in place.
Set the switch to the up position to turn it on and to the down position to turn it off.
The benefit of doing this is you can turn the effect on and off in isolation to any other changes made to the rest of the image and you don’t have to wind back your history to see the change.
In the top left corner of the Library and Develop modules you’ll see the Navigator. Hover your mouse over an area of the image in the Navigator – it will look like a magnifying glass – click to view that portion of the image in the main preview.
In addition, whenever you see a rectangle in the Navigator you can drag on it to move the area of the image being viewed.
Sometimes when you need to grab a color in Lightroom you’d really like to use a color sampled from your image. This is easy to do.
In any situation where you have access to the Color Picker, click on the color swatch to open the Color Picker and hold your mouse over it. Press the left mouse button to get the Eyedropper but don’t let go – instead move out of the dialog and over the image and sample your color from there.
