60-second Adobe Lightroom tips from Benjamin Warde

 

 

If you’re an Adobe Lightroom user and have a minute to spare every couple of weeks, then you should check out Lightroom team member Benjamin Warde’s new bi-monthly Lightroom Coffee Break video series.

In this series, Warde will cover various Lightroom tips and tricks in videos that are under sixty seconds, perfect for the busy photographer looking to improve their Lightroom workflow. So far, there have been two videos published, one about sharpening and the other about updating local adjustments that use multiple sliders. Both videos can be seen below.

Above, Warde covers the sharpening of an image (you can see his sharpening settings on the right-hand side of the display). After sharpening the image to the desired amount, he has introduced noise in the sky of the image. This is a common issue that can arise when sharpening images, so what does he do about it? He utilizes Lightroom’s “Masking Slider” to make it so that only the more prominent features will be sharpened whereas smoother areas, such as the sky, will not be sharpened. Choosing the correct masking slider amount will depend on the image, but Warde shows you how to utilize the Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) and then drag the slider, which will show you the mask on your image. Everything that is white will be sharpened and everything that is black will not be, so you can adjust the slider until only the areas of the image that you want sharpened appear white.

When you’re making a local adjustment that uses more than one slider, such as when softening skin in a portrait image as shown by Warde in the video above, how can you easily change all of the sliders after applying the local adjustment if you decide that you’ve overdone it? Click the turn down triangle above the sliders, which collapses the adjustment sliders that you used and this allows you to decrease (or increase) the effect of them all at the same time.

Keep an eye on the Lightroom Coffee Break playlist for more upcoming Coffee Break videos. If you’re just getting started with Lightroom or would like to give it a try, head on over to Adobe’s Lightroom Tutorials page and check out their helpful videos.

(Seen via The Digital Picture)