editing 101: lightroom part 1

We’re so excited for this blog post!  We get asked all the time for editing tips and editing questions, so we decided why not blog about how we get an image from SOOC (straight out of the camera) to a final edited picture.  Skies the limit on editing, and we’re excited for you guys to learn!  We’ll go through editing tips/tricks, basic editing, Lightroom editing, Photoshop editing, and iPhone editing.  We’ll also talk about editing photo shoots vs. everyday life pictures vs. house pictures vs. food pictures.

On today’s blog post, we’ll be talking about Lightroom.  Lightroom is an editing software, and we like using it because you can use presets to get different “looks,” and then you can batch your images to apply that “look” to numerous images which makes editing so much faster!  The one down side is that it’s not as powerful as Photoshop.  If we need to do major editing techniques like head swaps, cloning, removing items, or combining images together, we use Photoshop.  Lightroom isn’t good with that type of extensive editing.

Now let’s get started!

If this is your first time using Lightroom, this is how you import your images that you want to edit into Lightroom.  Make sure you’re in the “Library” tab and click “import”
Select the images you want to import, and then click the “import” button Now let’s start editing!  First I wanted to show you what it looks like unedited. This is the original image. There are a ton of different Lightroom presets you can purchase and some are even free!  We like using VSCO Lightroom presets.  When you go into the VSCO website, there are numerous sets you can purchase, and we have the “VSCO Film 01” pack.  Once you have those installed in Lightroom, just click on the different presets to see which particular one works for your image.  For this image, I’m using the “Fuji 400H+” preset. VSCO presets try to replicate the film look and so all the presets will add the grain to your images.  For our pictures, we don’t like having grain, so the first thing I do is remove the grain.  In the “Grain” section of Lightroom, I bring it down to zero. Here’s a closeup of what it looks like with grain and without grain. The next thing I do is adjust the “Exposure” which makes your image darker or brighter.  I usually adjust it to make it brighter.  I also don’t like having my shadows too dark, so then I adjust the “Shadows” and “blacks.”  If you feel like your whites are either blown out and want to adjust it, then move the “Highlights” or “Whites” slider.  Then I sharpen and make my image smoother by adjusting the “Sharpening” and “Noise Reduction” sliders This might be our dirty little secret. Ha!  We like to add some white faded framing around our images to add more softness/romantic look to our images.  To do this, we adjust the “Post Crop Vignetting” as shown below.
I’m sure you guys probably think that the image above is perfect the way it is, but we don’t like having too much orange on the skin.  We fix this by using the VSCO “Orange Skin Fix” preset.  There’s three different levels of the Orange Skin Fix, but I went with the lowest one.  When you purchase a VSCO pack, it comes with the Toolkit presets that help you adjust your images, and the Orange Skin Fix is one of the Toolkit presets.Here’s a closer look of the Orange Skin Fix preset applied The very last thing I do is add “Exposure” or “Contrast” to my images if it needs it.  Sometimes it just needs that extra oomph.  For this image, I added more contrast.

Here you have it! The final image!!  How easy was that?  😉  We would love to see your images after using these steps!  Feel free to email those to us!

For fun, I applied a different preset to the same image.  😉 Hope this blog post helped you guys!