Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC can be tricky to learn at first, but it has become my go-to tool to edit and cull all of my raw photographs. This video tutorial shows how I used Lightroom to edit my photograph that I took at Grand Canyon National Park. I hope you enjoy watching!
0:00 Hi! This is Juventa with Vezzani Photography and today I wanted to show you how I go about editing my photos in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic. So this is my after picture. I’m going to start from the beginning and show you how I got to my after.
0:16 So when I first took this landscape picture, this is what it looked like. The first thing that I did – if you notice the histogram in the upper right hand corner, I noticed that some of the highlights were blown out. If you click on this little triangle in the right hand corner you can see where the highlights are blown out.
0:35 So the first thing I did is I added a brush stroke. The brush, it looks light a paintbrush, is located right here. And so what I did is I painted on the area that you see red. I painted it with a -.29 exposure. It took a lot of the highlights out, but as you can see, there are still some highlights here that need to be taken down.
1:00 So the next thing that I did was I added a Graduated Filter. That’s located right here on the menu. It’s a little rectangle. The area that I did was this. You just pull it down and it’s that area. For this graduated filter, I took an additional -.29 and then I increased it to -.96 as you can see over here. And that kind of helped the sky, the clouds to pop, and it helped give a darker color.
1:30 After doing the graduated filter, the next thing I did is – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has presets. If you look here on the left, there are a whole bunch of presets included with Lightroom. With landscapes, I often like to use the punch preset and so I used the punch preset to kind of give it a little bit more clarity and to help the colors to be brought out.
1:55 Now I want you to notice something. If you zoom in, you can kind of see how it’s grainy in this picture. It has a little bit of grain and so I decided to do some luminance smoothing. That’s located down here on the right hand side if you scroll down. There’s the luminance and so I took it up to +17 at this point.
2:14 After that, I wanted to add a little bit of clarity. It’s kind of hard to tell, but I can notice a difference when I zoom in. I notice the clarity, if you can see. And so what I did is I took a brush and down here I painted this whole area with +41 clarity.
2:36 After I did that, I wanted to crop my picture and so what I did is – there’s a little crop feature here – and when you click on it, you can see how far I cropped. The rule of thirds.
2:55 One thing that is a common mistake when taking pictures like the Grand Canyon is that you’ll have half of it sky and half of it the Canyon. You really want to reduce that so that it’s a third sky and two-thirds canyon, unless the sky is your focus and then you would do it in the reverse.
3:12 The next thing I did is that I added a little bit more clarity to the overall picture from +50 to +81. After that – I thought it was too blue and while the blue is pretty, I wanted it to look more like what I saw, and so I took the white balance, which is over here, and I made it auto.
3:33 After doing that, I noticed that it was still a little bit grainier than I particularly like and so – you can kind of see here – and so I just added a little bit more to the luminance to kind of take out some of that grain. It’s just a minor difference, but I can notice a difference.  So I took the luminance up to +41.
4:00 The next thing I did is, just ever so slightly, I had to change the angle on the crop. I did that because I wanted the skyline to be perfectly level and it was a little bit crooked to me. If you go to the corner where it shows kind of a curve, then you can adjust the angle.
4:20 After that, I wanted to see a little bit more blue in the sky, and so I focused just on the saturation of the sky and it’s just a tiny bit more blue. You do that on the right hand side, if you scroll down, you see this coloring right here. I clicked on the blue and I just brought it up +6 to bring a little bit more blue out in the picture.
4:52 The next thing I did – if you notice on the upper right hand on the histogram, this little arrow is blue and what that means is that there is a little bit too much black in the picture. And so I did what’s called, “black clipping.” It’s hardly noticeable, but you can shift it here and I brought it up 3. So that took that away and now the histogram looks nice.
5:16 The last thing I did – I wanted a little bit more contrast in the picture – and so I took the contrast from +25 and I brought it up to +43.
5:25 So as you can see, this is my after of the Grand Canyon. I’ll show you the before. Ready? Here’s my before and here’s my after. That’s how I edited my Grand Canyon pictures. I hope you have a great day and thanks for listening!
6:01 If you want to see more of my pictures, please visit www.vezzaniphotography.com
I hope you enjoyed learning more about how to edit your photographs in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC!
Happy travels!
Juventa Vezzani
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