Photoshop How To

If you’re relatively new to Lightroom and feel overwhelmed by the wide variety of tools, this comprehensive beginners guide is just what you need. After watching the straightforward tutorial below, you’ll no longer be a novice and your photos will look better than ever.

One of the challenges for less experienced Lightroom users is that there are a number of ways to accomplish the same task—some more complicated than others. The goal of this surprisingly quick primer is to explain the easiest and fastest methods for many common enhancements.

Brought to you by our friends at Phlog Photography, this indispensable primer describes 70 effective Lightroom tips, tricks, and “secrets,” in barely 14 minutes, so you’ll want to take some notes for future reference. In short, watching this episode is like taking a free Lightroom workshop in the comfort of your home.

Instructor Christian Mohrle makes the learning process as easy as possible by organizing his advice in various chapters—each explaining a specific category of tools. And he provides a helpful “Table of Contents” in the description beneath the video so you can watch whatever section is most appropriate for the task at hand.

Mohrle begins with a couple tricks for using sliders to adjust exposure, and he demonstrates how you can “drag the histogram” for precisely controlling highlights midtones and shadows. You’ll also learn the best ways to use Lightroom’s crop tool to refine framing, straightening crooked horizons, and employing presets.

The chapter on Masking techniques is a bit more involved, as Mohrle covers everything from selecting the sky or foreground in a scene, and adjusting tones using Luminance and Color Range masks, to adding gradients for selective enhancements. You’ll also learn how masks can be used to create special effects like vignetting, glow, and polarization.

Other chapters cover the basics of important Lightroom techniques for adjusting sharpening, color grading, lens corrections, calibrations, and the ever-useful Transform panel. Bottom line: This is one video you don’t want to miss!

You can find more editing and shooting tips on Mohrle’s YouTube channel, so pay a visit and subscribe. And be sure to check out the primer we posted from another editing expert, explaining how another pro edits photos in Lightroom for precise color.