Very often on forums such headings appear.

The problem is that it does not know how to display colors correctly. In the first seconds after adding a photo, Lightroom displays a preview embedded in RAW. After that, the program displays a picture generated using the available profiles.

For cameras, adobe creates profiles itself, that is, in fact, it interprets RAW in its own way. It's not bad or good, it's just the way it is. It is for this reason that you first see more correct colors, and then “wrong” ones.

The same problem is typical Adobe Camera RAW because it uses the same engine as Lightroom. What to do with it?

How to get the right colors in Lightroom

There is a small disclaimer here. The fact is that the concept of correct color reproduction is a very multifaceted issue. Firstly, everyone has their own understanding of the correct color reproduction, or rather what it should be. Secondly, color rendition includes a lot of factors, from shooting to processing.

In the third version

Apply camera profile

Using the native converter

This option should be used when you need 100% correct colors. Here is an example of two photos from Lightroom 3 and Capture NX 2. They have not been processed, just exported from RAW.

P.S.

As a rule, Lightroom is used for processing reportage photographs and for photographs where color correction will be so strong that color reproduction errors can be neglected. For processing in which color reproduction is one of the most important factors, it is better to use native RAW converters or Capture one, which supports ICC profiles.

If you use Photoshop to edit photos, then you probably know that the same task can be solved with different tools. The possibilities of Photoshop are so great that to achieve the same result, photographers can go different ways and it's hard to say which way is "correct".

Lightroom is often referred to as the "alternative photoshop". Just like Photoshop, in Lightroom you can use various tools to achieve the same goal. Far from always obvious and conspicuous way is the best.

The purpose of this article is to tell a few Secrets of Lightroom and introduce you to alternative, but very convenient ways to solve typical photo processing tasks.

1. Use Luminance instead of Saturation

It often seems that on a clear day it is very easy to take a beautiful picture with a bright blue sky. But if you shoot objects that are on the ground, especially in the shadows, then the frame may turn out with an overexposed or dull sky.

When processing a photo in lightroom, you usually immediately want to increase the saturation of the sky with Saturation, but this is not always the best solution.

The Saturation slider increases the saturation of all colors at the same time, which can get in the way if the goal is only to increase the saturation of the color of the sky. Using this slider, you can get other difficulties, because the saturation will increase where it is not required, for example, on the skin of the model.

An alternative option is to use the "HSL / Color / B&W" panel.

In this panel you will see Hue, Saturation and Luminance tabs. In the Saturation tab, you can increase the saturation of only individual colors that are associated with the sky, without affecting other colors.

But then again, using Saturation may not give the best result, the colors will become exaggeratedly cartoony if you overdo it.

A good alternative would be the Luminance tabulator. You will operate not with saturation, but with the brightness of the color. Use the blue slider on the Luminance tab and you'll get a nice deep color for the sky without affecting the other colors.

You can read more about using Luminance in the article -

2. Combine Adjustment Brushes

The Adjustment Brush is a great tool for changing only certain parts of a photo. One of the biggest advantages of the brush is that, unlike Photoshop, it does not directly affect the image. You can change the change options in the brush area at any time if you don't like something or just delete it.

Even if several brushes were used, combining the parameters to achieve the best result. For example, to blur a specific area, you can set the brush to Sharphess at -100. And since this setting does not give a very strong blur, apply the “blurring” brush to the same area several times, achieving the desired effect.

To enhance the effect of the brush, after you have worked with it, click on the New button. This will create a duplicate brush with the same settings and you can use it on top of the first one. Repeat the action as many times as needed.

Keep in mind that these will still be separate brushes. You can select one of them again at any time and change the settings, for example, by decreasing the Sharphess value.

Each brush in the picture looks like a circle. If you hover over it, you will see the area of ​​effect of the brush. To select the desired one, click on it and a black dot will appear in the center of the circle. Now you can change the settings of the selected brush.

3. Quick skin retouching on a portrait

There are a lot of factors that affect how the skin comes out in a photo. For example, the skin may turn out too red and not very smooth.

In order to fix this, you can use several tricks. You can use together or separately. The main thing is not to overdo it. Best the enemy of the good.

First you need to change the brightness (brightness). Especially if the skin is reddish or too dark. Raise the brightness slightly, this will make the skin tone look more natural. An added bonus is that as the brightness increases, wrinkles and pores on the skin will not be as noticeable.

Then it is worth remembering the Luminance tabulator again. Try increasing the Luminance value for the reds and oranges. This will make the skin lighter and give it a healthier tone.

In order to make this action even easier, there is a little secret.
Note that there is a small circle to the left of Luminance's name. Click on it, then move the cursor to the area you want to change. Lightroom will automatically track the colors that are under the cursor.
To change, just move the cursor up or down while holding down the left mouse button.

This secret works in all three tabs Hue, Saturation and Luminance

Also, Lightroom has a great tool that is ideal for retouching a portrait - the Soften Skin brush. If you "paint" on the model's face with this brush, the sharpness will be locally reduced due to the Clarity and Sharpness parameters.

You can set other options if you decide that the suggested defaults are not suitable for this case.

Finally, there is another way to tidy up your skin. Go to the Noise Reduction tab, which is responsible for noise reduction.
Noise reduction also leads to some blurring, which can positively affect the portrait.

But be careful. Noise reduction applies to the entire image as a whole, and not to its individual parts. Therefore, you can spoil the image as a whole.

4. Changing the grid when cropping

Cropping a photo in Lightroom has hidden options to tweak the composition. Initially, the grid divides the frame into 9 parts according to the rule of thirds. But Lightroom has 6 grid options that you can use when cropping.

To see another option, just press the "O" key (Latin keyboard layout). When you press the Shift-O combination, the grid will be mirrored.

You can also see all possible grids by selecting Tools > Crop Guide Overlay from the menu.

5. Double toning for a retro photo effect

Double toning (Split-toning) is a very popular way to create various effects. Especially for creating antique or film effects. Similar effects are very actively used by Instagramm and many online editors, which provide the opportunity to get this or that effect “by pressing 1 button”

If you have previously used presets to create retro effects, but pay attention to what settings are set for the Split Toning tab. You will surely notice that they have the same structure, especially if you look at the Hue values ​​​​for shadows and lights (highlights, shadows).

In the highlights, the slider is moved to the left of the center, in the shadows to the right. This situation almost always gives a rather interesting effect.

Try setting Hue to the same position and then play around with the Saturation and Balance settings. But the result of changing these settings will greatly depend on your picture, more precisely on what is in it and what colors are priority.

Therefore, double toning is a very creative tool and any ready recipes it's hard to give.

If you are too lazy to do double toning on your own, creating antique effects, you can either use a wonderful plugin

6. Reducing Preset Strength in Lightroom

One way or another, we all use presets for Lightroom. It's nice to get something special with just the click of a button. But very often, applying a preset gives too strong an effect. For example, colors can become exaggeratedly bright, which is not always good.

In such cases, you want to slightly weaken the power of the preset, but Lightroom does not have a regular tool for this action.

More precisely, there are ways, but they are inconvenient. You can manually track the bookmarks, which parameters are changed and reduce the strength of each of them.
The second way is to use Photoshop. Take the original image, make a layer on top of it with the preset and change the transparency of this layer, achieving the desired degree of impact.

But there is a third way. Jarno Heikkinen has made a custom plugin for Lightroom that can be safely downloaded from his Knobroom.com website. The plugin is called "The Fader" and does exactly what we need - reduces the strength of the effect of the preset.

After you download and install the plugin, open the photo and go to File > Plug-In Extras > The Fader
A window will appear where you can select a preset and the strength of its effect on the picture.

7. Photo Information

While in the Develop module, press I on the keyboard and information about the image will appear in the upper left corner of the image. If you press I again, the information will change.

This can be very useful if you want to quickly look up source information or basic Exif data.

In addition, you can customize the information that you want to see in this mode through the menu View > View Options
And then in the Library View Options dialog that appears, open the Loupe View tab and select the data that you need most often.

8. "Lights off"

This is a well-known but rarely used Lightroom tool, which is nevertheless very useful.

When you want to focus on a specific area, use the Lights Out feature. For example, if you select certain pictures from a series. Lights Out will darken all other pictures except the selected ones.

If we press L again, the background, except for our selected thumbnails, will turn completely black.

This mode is also available in the Develop module. It can be useful to evaluate the image more accurately, without being distracted by interface details and other interfering elements.

9. Solo mode

There is another very interesting Lighroom mode called Solo.

While the overall Lightroom interface is very user-friendly and thoughtful, due to a large number settings and tools can be difficult to quickly find what you need. You can spend a lot of time scrolling through panels and constantly opening and closing them.

Especially for this, the developers of Lightroom introduced the Solo mode or the "single tab" mode. It works very simply - every time you open a toolbar, all others are automatically minimized. This greatly increases the speed of the program.

You do not believe? Just try. We are sure that soon you will not be able to imagine life without this mode.

To enable the mode, right-click on the title of any panel and activate the Solo Mode item in the menu that appears

10. Useful keyboard shortcuts

Finally, in addition to the article about , some useful keyboard shortcuts.

• Automatic transition when Caps Lock. If you press CapsLock, then when you assign a color marker, flag or rating to a picture, you will automatically go to the next picture. This is extremely convenient for the initial selection of images.
• Library Views. Pressing G will show thumbnails in grid mode. E - Enlarges the selected photo. C - compare mode, and D - switch to the Develop module for the selected image.
• Quick hide panels. The F5-F9 keys quickly open and hide the main 4 panels of the Ligthroom interface - top, bottom, right and left.
• Alternate Mode. Pressing the Alt key will put some tools into alternate mode. See the article "" for more details.
• Reset sliders. Double clicking on any slider will reset its value to its default value. Or when you press Alt, you will see a pseudo Reset button - clicking on which will do the same.
• Horizontal or vertical alignment. In cropping mode, press the Ctrl key and without releasing it, draw a line with the mouse, which must be strictly horizontal or vertical. Lightroom will automatically rotate the photo accordingly. This is incredibly handy, for example, for leveling the horizon.
• Hide all panels. Ctrl + click on the title of any panel in Develop mode will collapse all panels.
• See all keyboard shortcuts. Press Ctrl + / and you will see a box with all the available shortcuts for the selected Lightroom module

Original article: tutsplus.com © Josh Johnson

Many new users of Adobe Lightroom face two problems when importing RAW. It may happen that immediately after importing everything seems to be fine, but after a few seconds the colors in the photo lose their saturation, become pale and unattractive. The brightness can also change - imported photos become darker or lighter, sometimes the changes can be very strong. And both can happen at the same time.

The reason for the loss of saturation is a mismatched Picture Style profile. The fix is ​​very simple. In the Develop module, in the Camera Calibration section, you need to select the profile that is installed in the camera instead of Adobe Standard. Most likely it will be Camera Standard. The colors will immediately return to their place, you can save this default setting and forget about the problem forever.

The problem of changing the brightness is more serious. Searching the web easily finds questions, but there are no adequate answers to them. Probably most people just don't pay attention to it, compensating for tonal changes with Exposure, while not paying attention to the increasing noise level. This option did not suit me. After a lot of unsuccessful experiments and unsuccessful attempts to find the cause, I accidentally came across a post on a related topic on some forum. The answer to the question was not there either, but the author's experiments suggested in which direction to look.

It turned out that the reason was not in Lightroom at all, but in the camera settings! AT Canon cameras There is a feature called "Auto Brightness Correction." The user manual says that when shooting in RAW, it has no effect. Everything is true, it does not affect the image itself, but this setting is recorded in the metadata and taken into account when building an embedded preview image, the same one that we see on the camera screen after shooting. If you open this RAW in the original Canon converter (Digital Photo Professional), then the setting will be taken into account and as a result, the primary frame correction will be made - the image will turn out exactly the same as expected. Lightroom does not take this setting into account and does not make any correction, hence the change in brightness.

The obvious solution is to disable the "Auto Brightness" and "Highlights Priority" functions in the camera settings. Both of them lead to such a problem, but the second one is disabled by default. For cameras from other manufacturers, everything is solved in exactly the same way, the differences will be only in the names of the functions.

Well, if you, having a SLR camera, are reading this and for some reason shoot in JPEG anyway, then you should ignore everything written above and, on the contrary, activate both of these functions. While the result may in some cases be a noisier image, they will in almost all cases eliminate the need for exposure compensation, which can be very useful given the lack of redundant information in JPEGs for even minimal post-capture tone correction. .

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for beginners

I continue a series of articles for the "Photography for dummies" section. In this article, we will talk about photo processing, because post-processing of frames is indispensable in 95% of cases. Why?

First, because the dynamic range of a camera is different from that of the human eye. Secondly, because the camera does not always accurately convey the balance white color. Thirdly, the camera may not accurately set the exposure (the ratio of ISO sensitivity, aperture and shutter speed). Fourthly, the photo may need cropping (cutting out a certain part of the frame). Fifth, you may need to change the brightness, contrast and other settings to achieve a certain result. Therefore, you need to be able to process your photos.

One of the best photo editing tools is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This program allows you to work with your photo album in a convenient way, it provides very powerful processing capabilities for both single frames and a set of images, it can also publish edited images on social networks, and so on and so forth. One of the most interesting and even somewhat unique properties of this program is that it completely preserves the original image, because it stores all the editing stages in its own database. (For example, in the ACDSee editor, editing is done on the image itself and the program saves the original in a special subfolder, which is not very convenient.)

Despite the fact that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a very powerful program and it is used professional photographers, beginner amateur photographers will need very little time to learn how to use this program to process their photos. There you just need to learn a few basic concepts and learn how the basic processing functions work - and this article will hopefully help with that.

1. Adding a Folder of Photos to the Lightroom Database

To start working with images, you need to add them to the Lightroom database. This is done very simply: File - Import Photos and video(or just press Ctrl+Shift+I) and select the desired folder in the left column.

By default, all photos are marked for import, so all you have to do is click the button Import in the lower right corner.

2. View images in the Library

After importing, you get into the Library image view mode.

The default sorting is Added Order (in order of addition), but I recommend choosing Capture Time there (according to the time of shooting) - it's more convenient.

In the right column, you can open the Metadata tab - it will display there helpful information about a photo from EXIF.

We select the photo that we need to process, and go to the Develop item (processing).

3. Primary photo editing

Consider various standard photo processing tasks.

framing

Crop mode - icon on the top left of the toolbar. At the same time, the photo is supplied with a golden ratio grid, which helps to correct the composition. Angle slider - image rotation. Sometimes it helps to press Auto there - in fairly simple cases (collapse of the horizon or building) it quite correctly aligns the frame.

white balance

In difficult lighting conditions, the white balance needs to be adjusted. There is a corresponding section of the toolbar for this, and there is a drop-down menu where you can select the appropriate shooting conditions (this is for RAW, for JPG only "as is" and "auto").

Well, also, if necessary, the balance can be adjusted manually using the sliders.

Tone control

This is most often involved: exposure, contrast, shadows, and so on.

You can first click on Auto, look at the result and then adjust it to your liking. See what Auto does with this photo - it looks much better this way, doesn't it?

By the way, to display photos in various types before and after processing - icons from the bottom left: they switch the options for comparing frames.

The next Presense section is where all three parameters are quite important.

Clarity increases the clarity of edge selection. Here, for example, Clarity is at its maximum - an interesting effect is obtained, isn't it? Of course, this should not be abused (like everyone else), but for many plots Clarity can be raised by 20-30 points.

Vibrance - saturation of muted tones. This parameter is raised by 40 units.

Saturation - saturation of all colors. I very rarely raise it, rather the opposite - there are cases when the saturation has to be reduced by 10-20 units to make the frame look less open. Here's Saturation to the full - tear out your eyes, as they say.

Photo enhancement

In the Detail section, the Sharpening section allows you to play with sharpening, for which you can display some of the most characteristic part of the frame in the window. But I rarely correct sharpness.

But the next section Noise Reduction (noise reduction) can be quite useful in the case of editing night shots, where strong digital “noise” can appear at high ISOs (this is especially common when shooting on cameras with small matrices).

Here, for example, is a crop of a night shot taken on a smartphone of very average quality. See how "noisy" the picture is?

If on this frame you start adding Luminance in the Noise Reduction section, then the "noise" will gradually start to go away, but the picture will start to "blur", that is, smear. Well, here you need to find a reasonable compromise between "noise" and "blurring".

In the Lens Corrections section, it is highly desirable to enable the Enable Profile Corrections option: in this case, the program, based on information about the lens from EXIF, will select its profile and apply it to the image - as a result, chromatic aberrations, geometric distortions and vignetting will be corrected. It always makes sense to do so.

The Transform section is usually used in cases where you need to correct geometric distortions - this often happens when buildings are photographed from a low point. Here, for example, is a photograph with a clear distortion.

Go to the Transform section and just press the Auto button - in many cases it helps. Here is the result of her work.

If Auto did not work correctly, then the geometry can be edited manually with sliders.

In the Effects section, the lowest slider is Dehaze. This feature is very useful for removing fog and haze, but it also allows you to easily and quickly contrast clouds.

Here, for example, is the result of her work - Dehaze increased to +45.

Another way to contrast the clouds and sky is with a rectangular transparent gradient filter. The tool is called from the top right. The filter is applied with the mouse over the sky area.

Then you play with various filter parameters - exposure, contrast, sharpness - and you can achieve interesting effects. Well, after you exit the gradient filter mode, you can slightly adjust the overall color saturation and other parameters, if necessary.

By the way, with transparent gradient filters (there is also a round one) you can do very interesting things, but this is already beyond the scope of this article.

I note that with the help of processing, you can even pull out almost botched frames. Here, for example, is a clear marriage - the light is very contrasting, there are practically no details in the shadows.

Literally a couple of minutes - they removed the haze, played around with the settings - it's a completely different look.

presets

Lightroom also has a very handy feature called Presets. This is a set of presets. Each photographer has his own basic set of presets for certain subjects, and it is also very convenient to use presets for batch processing of a group of files.

In Develop mode, the preset group is located in the block on the left.

To add a new preset, you just need to click on the plus sign located in the block on the top right, and then mark which parameters of the settings you have made you want to include in this preset.

Well, I note that presets can also be used when importing photos, and when exporting.

Story

The history of all your operations is kept in the History section, and there you can roll back to any position. There is also a general Reset button that returns the photo to its original form.

Export

After the photo is edited, you will need to save it as a finished product. To do this, there is the Export command (Ctrl + Shift + E). You choose which folder to export to, how to rename the file, in what capacity to save it, whether to reduce the frame, what EXIF ​​data to save there. For web publishing, I usually scale down the frame to 2560 pixels wide.

If you want to put your logo on the image during export, there is Watermark Editor (Edit - Edit Watermark) for this. It is best to make your logo in the form of a picture of the appropriate size on a transparent substrate, I have this white logo with a small black shadow - here it is.

When exporting, it is indicated to use this logo and place it in the lower right corner - the result is something like this (this is a 100% crop).

If you look at the photo in full, the logo is small and does not interfere with perception, otherwise for some bloggers this logo takes up almost a quarter of the image.

I note that, although I considered RAW files in the example, for JPEG, in principle, everything will be very similar.

Well, that's probably all for the very starter course. As you can see, there is nothing very complicated in Lightroom and you can master the basic editing capabilities in just a couple of hours. Another thing is that Lightroom is a very powerful tool and with its help you can do all sorts of interesting things with images, but the main thing here is to start, and then you will learn Lightroom in all its details (if you need it at all).

Also, when starting to work with this program, you should remember that any processing should be in moderation and that you don’t need to turn the sliders back and forth if you don’t understand what they do at all. The standard mistake of almost all beginners is oversharping, overloading colors in saturation and acidity, raising shadows, and so on, which does not improve the photo, but, on the contrary, looks very unnatural. Everything should be in moderation. But it comes with some experience.

P.S. By the way, most of the features described above are also available in the mobile version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

I use several versions of Lightroom installed simultaneously on my computer running Window OS. Different versions have slightly different functionality, or different methods for implementing the same functions. Depending on the situation, I choose the version I need. Screenshots shown here are based on a fairly old version of Lightroom 3.7. I have all versions of Lightroom without Russification, because it doesn’t matter to me.

For a long time working with the program, I developed my own algorithm for working in Lightroom, which I almost always use. My 5 simple tips will help as much as possible only for those who shoot in RAW format and develop photos in batches.

For thoughtful development of each RAW photo individually, I recommend using the original (i.e. native) software. For example, for Nikon systems This .

0 (zero point). Importing RAW files.

The essence of the action: prepare working space for further file manipulation.

This is a zero, additional point, from which work with Lightroom always begins. To start processing photos, you must first import them into the program. I use fast and primitive loading: I just drag and drop all the files into the Lightroom window and click the 'Import' button. I always import from a directory located on the hard drive. If the import is carried out from a USB flash drive, then the import process will be delayed, since the program will most likely first copy all the source files to its special directory.

Importing has its own peculiarities. When photos are imported into Lightroom, you can sometimes notice how the preview picture (preview) changes its color, saturation, exposure. This is due to the fact that each RAW file contains not only the original information about the image, but also a lot of other additional data. One such data is photo previews for quick viewing. Roughly speaking, a JPEG thumbnail is embedded in the RAW file, which serves for quick viewing. taken photo on the camera display. This JPEG thumbnail is based on the settings specified by the camera. When importing photos into Lightroom, the program shows JPEG thumbnails plucked from the RAW file. After trying to view the photo closer, Lightroom builds (renders) a new image directly from the original raw data, using its own presets. Lightroom presets and JPEG thumbnails do not match, which is why the original picture changes before our eyes.

Unfortunately, it is very, very difficult to achieve an exact repetition of all camera settings from Lightroom. In fact, it is impossible to repeat all the camera settings. Only native software can display a RAW image on a computer in full accordance with the one that can be seen on the camera display. But in order to minimize the differences between how the picture looks on the camera display and in the program window, I recommend turn off all additional functions in the camera that improve the image. For the Nikon system, this primarily concerns the Active function.

All enhancements must be made with Lightroom. It makes sense to use on-camera functions to improve the image only when shooting in JPEG format, or if RAW files will be processed using native software.

After importing, you can add tags, labels, correctly catalog a series of pictures, and set up sorting photos in the feed.

Also, you can import immediately using a specific preset, into which you can write the settings listed below.

1. I set the camera profile.

The essence of the action: basic setting for the most correct / beautiful rendering of the original RAW file.

The setting is located at Develop -> Camera Calibration -> Profile -> select the desired profile

In order for the image generated in Lightroom to be as similar as possible to the one displayed on the camera display, Lightroom needs to specify the correct camera profile. In short, the Camera Profile is a picture management mode that is set on the camera (neutral, saturated, monochrome, etc.).

This is the key point. The correct profile of the camera allows you to significantly improve the visual perception of the image. Finding a good profile for a specific camera is very, very difficult.

Lightroom usually has a set of basic profiles: neutral, saturated, landscape, portrait, etc. These profiles correspond very poorly to similar profiles that are set on the camera.

You can search for a profile for your specific camera yourself. Usually, third-party developers are involved in creating profiles. I am sure that for a large number of cameras it will not work to find a good profile. In this case, you will need to choose the profile that you like the most.

An already existing profile can be modified, namely to adjust the color offset in the shadows, the offset and saturation of each of the three main channels. After that, you can create a custom preset, writing to it only changes related to Camera Calibration (when creating a preset, you should select only the ‘Calibration’ checkbox).

2. I set the lens profile.

The essence of the action: get rid of the flaws of the lens.

The function is set as follows Develop -> Lens Corrections -> Profile -> Enable Profile Corrections

Everything is simple here. By choosing a lens profile, you can completely get rid of some of the disadvantages of the lens. In general this setting allows you to completely cure vignetting and distortion. Also, lenses are treated here. Lightroom has an extensive database of lenses, with which you can “cure” any of them.

If the lens used is not in the list, then you can manually correct these parameters, and then write the result to a preset that can be applied to all photos.

After this adjustment, the distortions introduced by the lens should be leveled.

In the following, the lens profile will be applied to each photo.

3. Optimize and expand the capabilities of the camera and lens.

The essence of the action: make the most beautiful / desired image through basic manipulations with exposure and color.

Everything is very simple here. I usually choose one key photo from a series, or even from an entire shoot, and fine-tune it according to the main parameters:

• Increased DD - restoration of lights and shadows (Highlight recovery, Fill light, Dark)
• Adjusting Vibrance (Vibrance)
• Increase saturation (Saturation)
• Clarity enhancement
• Sharpening
• Noise reduction

The main thing here is not to overdo it.. I try to make the photo "neutral-positive" so that all further manipulations are already repelled from the original "normal" image.

Important: the level of one or another setting is highly dependent on the camera used and the shots directly taken. For example, I clearly know and understand how strongly this or that slider in Lightroom affects the RAW files of my cameras, and it takes a long time to get used to a new camera and processing its RAW files.

In the future, these settings will be applied to each photo.

4. Synchronize all images by one key photo.

The essence of the action: bring all images under one base view.

After all the previous manipulations, I synchronize all the photos with the changed settings. This is done very simply. In the 'Develop' section, all photos in the feed are selected (CTRL + A) and the 'Sync' button is pressed. In the synchronization menu, I press the 'Check All' button (Select All), after which I uncheck the 'White Balance' (), 'Crop' (Crop), 'Spot Removal' (Spot correction). Captured parameters should not be synchronized, since each photo has its own individual , cropping and spot correction / restoration.

Synchronization is part of batch processing. At the end of it, all photos are adjusted to similar settings.

After this manipulation in the Lightroom feed, all the photos are already more or less brought to normal. The previous four points allow you to “bring images to zero” - rid it of the shortcomings of the lens, camera and squeeze out the capabilities of the RAW file to the limit. After carrying out these four manipulations, it is already possible to begin real fine processing and prepare the image for the final stage that the client will see.

5. I crop all photos.

The essence of the action: correct framing imperfections - align the horizon, crop the photo with the correct arrangement of details in the frame, cut out key parts of the photo.

Unfortunately, cropping one photo and applying cropping to all photos of the tape will not work. After synchronizing the basic settings I crop all photos. During the cropping operation, I also selectively remove unsuccessful shots from the Lightroom tape.

Important: I highly recommend cropping photos with fixed frame proportions. The proportions of the classic frame are 3:2. After cropping, all photos have the same frame proportions and do not differ in any way during viewing. If this is not done, then after cropping, photos-squares, strongly elongated stripes, may turn out. This doesn't match general style photo tapes. In addition, during printing, with 100% probability, parts of the frame will be cut off or filled with white space. Usually printed on standard sizes, which also correspond to 3:2 proportions. For almost every shooting, I print photos or mount a photo book, it is very important for me to maintain proportions after cropping. To maintain crop proportions in Lightroom, just click on the padlock icon.

After cropping and deleting unsuccessful frames, I get a “licked” set of photos in the tape, with which further manipulations can be carried out.

Important: I call all specified action ‘ Exit To Zero’, since these simple manipulations allow you to look at the image, devoid of basic flaws, raw, neutral, like a blank sheet, looking at which you can already carry out further fine processing.

I believe that these manipulations can improve the quality of the original image by 30%. The remaining 60% is the finalization of the image using Adobe Photoshop (Photoshop, not Lightroom).

In my practice, it often happens that after completing just these five points, you can already get an image option that can satisfy both me and my clients. Most often, processing is limited to just these five points, if you do not need to retouch photos (eliminate skin imperfections, work with plastic, artistic color correction, etc.).

For me, the most difficult thing in processing is after bringing all the photos from the series / shooting into a digestible form - to choose the best ones for their fine refinement.

6. Export all photos (bonus point)

The essence of the action: get a ready-made result that can be viewed by any user/client on any device.

In this case, export is the process of exporting photos from RAW format to a format that is suitable for further processing or viewing. If I plan to do nothing else, then I export to a poppy JPEG. If I plan to further refine photos in Adobe Photoshop, then I use the 'TIFF' or 'DNG' format. AT recent times laziness attacked me, I do not use TIFF and I export all photos immediately to JPEG.

Eventually My photo processing workflow is divided into two stages: processing in Lightroom and processing in Photoshop. Lightroom - for basic settings, restoration of "wrapped" pictures, batch processing of a tape of photos. Photoshop - for the final “finishing” of photos, retouching, manipulations with layers, masks and more.

Philosophy

I am convinced that a photographer should have a clear action plan, a clear concept, a well-thought-out methodology with step-by-step photo processing steps. Spent technological process greatly speeds up and simplifies the processing and delivery of the finished material to the client.

Outcome. My basic process processing built like this: import -> set camera profile -> set lens profile -> expand camera/lens options -> synchronize selected settings -> crop -> export. I repeat - this is the basic process, the basis from which my processing begins.

Thank you for your attention. Arkady Shapoval.