Simple Lightroom Photo Editing Advice for Crazy Results

People who get into photography these days are often bombarded with hundreds of editing presets or people on the internet telling them about how they “must” edit to achieve result xyz.

We were at this point as well several years ago. Once we detached from these viewpoints things drastically changed for us. It wasn’t easy, all things worth doing aren't easy at the beginning.

The before and after you can see here is legitimately just a few slider adjustments apart from each other. No masks, no presets, no fancy trickery.

So how can you go from zero to hero with just a few slider adjustments?

When starting out it’s beneficial to have a goal in mind. How far do I want to take this photo? What are the possibilities here? How can I adjust the light, tones and colors to bring the photo alive or make it what I had in mind whilst capturing it?

By asking these questions before starting the edit, or even while taking the photo, you set yourself up for an easier straight forward process and also provide yourself with directions. Of course, you can also take the experimental route and try out anything. That’s actually a great idea if you are a beginner starting out. Down the line, you want to develop your own style to build a cohesive body of work. Especially if you want to go fully professional as a photographer and offer your service to the marketplace.

Example

For the sake of your time and the length of this blog post, we’ll focus on the example image shown above. Luckily though the simple way of editing it won’t take long!

Step one: Starting out - Tone Curves
Adjusting the overall tones, light, and contrast of the image. We are doing this by using the parametric curve.

By reducing the highlights you can add a subtle fade in tonality to the bright parts of your image. Making it softer and blend more smoothly together.

By boosting the lights we bring in more pop and contrast.

By reducing the darks and shadows we give the image more depth and contrast.

This screenshot shows the difference just the tone curve has on our image. The left one is the RAW file and the right one with just the tone curve adjustments.

Step two: Basic adjustments

With the tone curve adjustments, we dialed in the baseline. Now we enhance it even further by using the actual basic sliders of Lightroom.

The left photo shows the tone curve adjustments from before and the right one the basic slider adjustments on top of that. For this image, we used the shown slider values. As always it is very image-specific. We never use certain numbers. We know where we want to go with the image. Thus we only use the tools available to us to get there. Numbers don’t matter here.

Shadows, Whites, and Black were used to further push the light and contrast of the photograph.

Step three: Colors

Having done the light, contrast, and tone work, we now focus on color. Which is already the last and final step for the example image.

Only by adjusting the aquas and blues this way we achieve the following result:

Concluding

It’s incredible how little of the right adjustments can achieve great results. Would you have thought of this outcome by just seeing the RAW file straight out of the camera??

Please check out our full-fledged 18 min. editing video on YouTube to delve deeper or to just take in the pieces of information in another way.