Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

Well folks, I really don’t have a blog where I post my recent photos. I thought about starting one but, as you can imagine, the last thing I need is another blog or website to keep up with. Instead, I thought I’d post a photo I took this morning at a local horse racetrack. I mainly went for practice and to see what the early morning light had to offer. I was really psyched when I got back and saw this though. At first glance it looks like a nice photo but then you realize the guy riding the horse is looking right at me. That changed the whole look of the photo to me. So, I figured I’d go ahead and post it. It was shot with my Nikon D-200 and a 70-200 VR lens. I was panning on a monopod zoomed to 130mm focal length at 1/250 sec at f/2.8. Pretty cool stuff huh? Click here to see a larger version.

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Not quite sure what the Fill Light slider is doing? Well, think of it this way - when you adjust your Exposure setting, Lightroom will tend to make the entire photo brighter. This may be fine most of the time but it may eventually push some of your highlight areas to the point where they’re clipped and become all white. If you reach that point and you’d still like to make the photo brighter, you can resort to the Fill Light slider. This will adjust the midtone areas of the photo and will, for the most part, leave your extreme highlights alone. It’s a good way to brighten the overall photo without blowing out your highlight areas.

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Here’s a site I stumbled across last week. It’s called A Photographer’s Sketchbook - Notes on Lighting. It’s run by photographer John Lehmann and it’s definitely worth stopping by. I’ve been way into lighting lately and there are some great tips presented in a very clever way. For example, if you go into the “How’d ya do that?” section, you’ll see some photos using 1, 2, or 3 flashes. Then if you click on a photo, you see a sketch of the setup involved in that photo. He also talks about setup, gear, and some overall lighting principles. Check it out at www.filmlessphotos.ca.

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Once you’ve taken the time to get your photos looking good, you’ll inevitably want to share them. It may be your personal portfolio or perhaps you need to quickly get them up on a site so a client can review them. Lightroom’s Web module is an ideal place for this since it can automatically create some simple, elegant, great-looking web galleries. Best of all - it’s fast, so you’ll instantly get an advantage over the competition because your photos will be ready for people to see right away.

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One of the things that Lightroom excels at is bringing your photos to you. There are no palettes in front of your photos and there are no windows to move around. It makes it really simple to see what you’re working on. If you want to take it a step further and REALLY hide the panels that appear on the left and right side, all you have to do is press the Tab key and they’ll go away. Now if you move your cursor over to either side, they’ll temporarily pop back into view. If you press Shift + Tab, the panels on the side as well as the filmstrip on the bottom will be hidden. Just press Tab or Shift + Tab again to get things back to normal. What can I say - you gotta love Lightroom and how it makes working with your photos easier.

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