Lightroom - care to share your typical adjustments?

eoren1

Until yesterday, the majority of my shots had three simple adjustments made to them in LR:
White balance
+5-10 Light curve adjustment
Sharpening

That's all I did for most shots -especially of the kids. I would play a bit more with landscapes. Add in boosting the clarity and vibrance. Maybe some saturation adjustments.
I would only adjust the exposure if the photo was actually underexposed.
I occasionally also used the gradient tool and adjustment brush.

Then I watched this:
http://lightroom-news.com/2009/03/21/exposure-and-brightness-adjustments/

And last night put this to work by dropping the brightness to 25-30 and increasing the exposure. I then used the recovery slider much more liberally (up to 50 without concern), fill light a bit (up to 10), blacks (again up to 10 or so). I did the light curve bump (of about 5-10) and then sharpened.

Suddenly my images have much more 'pop'. Now I'm wondering what else I'm missing out on. Care to share some specifics on how you process your typical portraits and landscapes in LR?
Thanks in advance,
E

tupawk

My process so far
I've just started playing around with lightroom and here are some of the things I have been playing around with the last two days. I have only messed with with the major stuff so far. I am still learning a good process for using the LR curves and other functions. Just the few steps below though have really added that detail and "pop" that everyone talks about in their photos.

First, I set my black point. I do this by holding alt or option down and sliding the blacks slider until I get a good area of shadow detail of where I want my blacks to be black.

Second, I adjust the white point (exposure). Same thing here hold alt/option down while sliding until the highlights are where I want them to be white.

Next, I adjust the fill light to bring back some detail in the shadows.

Finally, I adjust the recovery slider and make any fine tune adjustments on the other controls to get it where I want. You need to be careful with the fill and recovery depending on the shot as it can make the photo look not quite right if you are not careful. On the otherhand, a lot of times I can push the recovery all the way to 100 and get good results. Just play around with it and you will see what I mean

My last step so far is setting the vibrance and clarity. These two really depend on what type of shot I am working on. For nature, landscapes, etc... I usually bump these up more. Portraits, I rarely add any clarity and less vibrance.

pathfinder

Eoren,

The advantage of RAW in Lightroom or ACR in Photoshop, is the great precision offered in post processing the image, including Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, Clarity, Vibrance, Saturation, Tone Curve, Detail - capture sharpening and Noise reduction, Chromatic Aberration, and choice of camera calibrations.

Each of these adjustments help improve the quality of my final images in terms of sharpness, color balance, tonality. I adjust each one, individually, for each of my images. Many of the adjustments do not vary that much, but I always do them unless I have several shots with the same lens in the same light at the same distance and focal length. For those shots I copy my RAW settings and paint them in to the rest of the similar images.

Some of my best L glass needs chromatic aberration corrections to be their very best.

Spend some time with a good Lightroom text or watch the videos offered by Michael Reichman and Jeff Schewe to see all that Lightroom offers in image improvement.

eoren1

Hey guys
Thanks for the comments. I have actually been using LR forever and have read a number of books and followed several podcasts. For some reason, the idea of using exposure as a white point adjustment rather than an exposure adjustment wasn't brought home until I saw this video. I've also not seen many people take the time to go through their 'typical' edits for landscape, portrait or other shots. After I saw the video above, I changed my workflow but, again, am wondering if I'm missing other obvious tricks. Just spending more time with those main sliders - exposure, recovery, fill and black level - is probably enough to give me a real push in terms of my post work.
Anyone else have a typical set they run through with certain shots? The more specific the better:D
Thanks again,
E

ontherivet

Sounds like more than a few of us have had an epiphany watching Martin's tutorials. I haven't had a chance to test out his approach to using exposure to set the white level and adjust from there using brightness but I'm anxious to try. I'll admit I have never touched the brightness slider and I don't typically mess with the contrast slider either.

I've only used LR for about 5 months or so and because of the first and only LR book I bought I'm a Kelby disciple. I've suspected that his approach to editing is but one of many and might not be ideal for everyone. I bought Kelby's book to focus on workflow which is what I think he does well, but I've read quite a bit online and have looked closely at a number of develop presets to see what other folks are doing. I'm actually starting to rethink my whole approach based upon what I've learned.

That said I have what I have been focused on are the exposure slider, fill and recovery when necessary and black to get the picture levels nailed. Clarity, vibrance and saturation to taste as I think these are much more subjective and not always required (leave alone or reduce for portraits, maybe add some clarity and vibrance on landscapes). From there it's usually straight to sharpening. Rarely do I use curves and I'll use HSL only occasionally. Brush, clone/heal and gradient as necessary.

I used to add some post crop vignetting to certain shots but after learning more about what post crop vignetting does (it actually impacts the entire average picture level) I now avoid it, and going forward it's lens correction vignetting on shots I don't crop or I use presets that I defined using the gradient tool to create my own exposure-based vignettes.

Generally speaking I think less is more and is why I use LR and not PS.

TheSuede

A slightly different approach.... May give more "film-like" results, depending on your camera and calibration. Slides off some saturation when approaching pure black & pure white. This is my standard import setting.

eoren1

TheSuede wrote:

A slightly different approach.... May give more "film-like" results, depending on your camera and calibration. Slides off some saturation when approaching pure black & pure white. This is my standard import setting.

Thanks for sharing these screen captures.
I'm leaning toward modifying the default import settings but was actually thinking of dropping the brightness to 25. Interesting that your default is a -0.6 exposure and +70 brightness....
I'll give these a try and see what they do.
E

jogle

There was an interesting video recently from one of the Lightroom guys at adobe, showing how he approaches the basic tweaks and a bit of what they do under the hood.

http://lightroom-news.com/2009/03/21/exposure-and-brightness-adjustments/

Edit.... I should have really read the whole of the first post before posting. Doh!!!! But I'll also add that I got a lot of good listening out of the lightroom podcasts from adobe http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/lightroom/podcasts/ or http://www.mulita.com/blog/

pathfinder

Lightroom comes with a large number of presets on the left panel when in the Develop mode. You can select one of these presets, and see what the sliders are set on the left panel, and use those for a place to start as well.

I like the positive film preset sometimes.

manda

Not typical adjustments, but I find I am using the gradient tool more and more ...













I would love to see what brush settings people use for editing eyes and lips if any one has found a winning combination.

thanks Mandy