My Workflow: How I Edit Photos in Lightroom

This post is all about editing photos. How I edit, what I do, and what I look for. Hopefully it will give you a look into what I do after I take photos and put them on my hard drive. (A quick note, if you’re curious about which programs I use, how I stay organized, or which programs/software I use to speed up my workflow, I wrote another blog post about that and you can find it HERE). Let’s dive in!

Getting Started - The Develop Module

After I import my photos, add them to a collection, and choose which one I want to edit, I start by entering the Develop Module. This is where we’ll do all our editing and make our image look good.

*A Quick Note About Presets*

Presets are one of the easiest and quickest ways to edit a photo. I do have several presets that I have created and that I use to edit my photos, but I’ll be walking you through these steps below and describing what I’m doing as if I’m not using a them at all. If you’re interested in learning more about my presets and/or would like to purchase them so you can get a jump-start on editing, you can find all of my preset bundles HERE.

Rotate and Level

The first thing I do once I choose which photo I want to edit is rotate and level it. I like to get all my horizon lines straight and make sure my eye is seeing everything correctly.

Editing - First Steps

After rotating and leveling, I move down to the “Basic” panel and click “Auto.” I do this because I like to see what the computer thinks the image should look like exposure-wise, and it gives me a good idea of what the “propper” histogram should look like. After looking at this for a second I’ll push “Reset” and start editing my photo.

The first changes and adjustments I make are to exposure, shadows, highlights, and blacks (usually in that order). I almost always lift the shadows up to a range of 60-70 and lower the highlights. I’ll also play around with the White Balance slider because this is one of the biggest ways you can manipulate the colors and temperature of your image. After this, I go down to the curves panel and start to tweak the tone curve.

The Tone Curve

Before I dive into the tone curve it’s important to note that every image is different and will require its own unique tone curve. This is a general idea of what I like to make mine look like, but every image and style is different, so play with it a little until you find something you’re happy with. The first thing I do before I start moving random points on the curve, is to place points throughout the curve that look like this:

Once I have those points set, I’ll start to slowly move them around until I see something I like (if you’d like to move a point more gradually, hold the “Shift” key while you move the point and it will limit what you can do with it (this is crucial for helping with minute changes). I’m a big fan of slightly faded blacks so I’ll use the point in the bottom-left corner to do that, then I’ll use the point in the top-right corner to do the same to the highlights. I do this so that my highlights/whites aren’t as over-powering to look at. This is what my tone curve usually looks like:

HSL/Color Window

After the tone curve is in a spot that looks good, I like to move onto the HSL/Color window to tweak individual colors. If you’re unfamiliar with this window, HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance, and this window gives us control over all of these.

This part of the process varies drastically from photo to photo (especially for photos that contain a lot more color than the one I’m using as a sample image. It’s important to be patient and just play with these different sliders. I like to have my hand on “Command-Z” so that I can slide the various colors, see what they change/how they impact the look of the photo, and either undo it by pushing “Command-Z” or keep it and move on to the next color.

Calibration

The last big way to change colors is by using the Calibration window. Once again, trial and error is the only thing to do here and you’ll quickly notice that each of these sliders can have a drastic effect on what your image looks like. This is one of those tools that I like to use in moderation and most of the time don’t even touch at all.

Effects

When it comes to the Effects panel I almost always apply a slight vignette to my images, especially when I know they’ll be posted on Instagram. I like to do this because it focus’ the viewers eye to the center of the photo and also helps the edges of images match more coherently when they’re in a grid on Instagram. I also like to apply Grain to my images to give them texture and usually use an amount of 30-40.

Detail

Last but not least I make some changes to “Sharpening” and “Noise Reduction.” I only use noise reduction if the photo needs it, but sharpening is handy because it can help draw out specific areas of focus. A little tip here is to hold the ‘option’ key while you slide the “Masking” slider because this will show you a mask of the area it is sharping and changing on your image. The white portions are what will be sharpened and the black areas will not be sharpened.

Adjustment Brushes, Graduated Filters, and Radial Filters

To me, this is where the real magic of editing comes about. Brushes, graduated filters, and radial filters can add extra depth and life to your image, as well has help emphasize certain things in it. If you’re unfamiliar with any of these tools I would recommend watching some tutorials on YouTube because they’ll help you out a ton. Here you can see a little bit of what I do:

Split Toning

I only use split toning in certain instances. This is one of the ways people can achieve a very specific look and style, but I prefer to not use it since it drastically effects the look of an image and takes away in most cases in my opinion.

Exporting

After I have my image edited it’s time to export. These are the settings I use and prefer for 99% of the images I work with.

The Final Result

That’s it! That’s a quick little run down of what I do and what I look for while I’m editing in Lightroom. You can see a timelapse of the process below as well as the final image.

If you have any questions or would like to ask me something else, please feel free to reach out! I hope this was interesting and insightful for you. Thanks for taking the time to read this! Cheers, Justin