Software How To

There are so many handy tools regularly added to Lightroom, it’s easy to miss the latest and greatest features. But there are also some key tools that have been in Lightroom for a long time that you may have missed.

Bright and colorful photos are nice but sometimes you want your images to have added drama and a touch mystery. To do that, you can give them a dark and moody look during post-processing if you didn’t capture them that way in camera.

All photographers strive for maximum photo quality, no matter what type of images they shoot. One way to achieve optimum results is to use the lowest ISO setting that conditions permit.

Photoshop and Lightroom are so complex, you’ll probably never use most of the stuff this high-powered software does. But there are quite a few small but helpful “secret” tools and tricks in these photo editors you really should know because they’ll make your life so much easier.

British pro Nigel Danson is one of our favorite outdoor photographers and image-editing instructors. So when he claims to have discovered a “secret” Lightroom tool he now uses to process every image he shoots, we stop and pay attention. And you should too.

One unfortunate mistake we see regularly is bumping up saturation in an attempt to make photos “POP,” with a heavy-handed approach that gives the shot an ugly, unrealistic appearance and actually ruins the image.

You’ve probably noticed there’s been a trend for editing portraits lately that favors a bright, high key look. While there is some visual appeal to processing portraits this way since it gives them an eye-catching, ethereal color palette there are some trade-offs to this method.