Photo editing doesn’t have to be complicated, even with a program as powerful as Lightroom. With the right techniques, you can make significant improvements to your images while streamlining your workflow.
Coming to you from Arnulfur, aka THAT ICELANDIC GUY, this practical video dives into 10 Lightroom tips to enhance your editing process. The first tip introduces the “Spot Glow” effect, which uses radial filters to add subtle glows to specific areas of an image, such as light sources. By combining feathered masks and adjustments to clarity, texture, and luminance ranges, you can achieve a natural bloom effect that makes highlights pop. It’s a straightforward way to add atmosphere and drama to your photos.
Another standout tip involves the use of AI masking tools to speed up your workflow. Lightroom’s AI can detect subjects, backgrounds, and even individual features like lips, eyes, or hair. This level of precision allows for targeted adjustments without the need to painstakingly paint masks by hand. For example, selecting a person’s lips and enhancing their color takes seconds, making portrait retouching significantly faster and more efficient.
For dealing with noise in high-ISO images, Arnulfur demonstrates how Lightroom’s AI denoise tool can clean up grain while preserving detail. To counteract the softening that sometimes occurs after noise reduction, sharpening can be applied selectively using the masking slider. This ensures only the necessary parts of the image, like edges or fine details, are sharpened.
Another tip focuses on saving local adjustments as presets. If you often use masks to highlight specific areas, such as brightening the center of an image or darkening skies, you can save those adjustments as reusable presets. This not only speeds up your workflow but also ensures consistency across a series of images. For landscape photographers, presets like these can be especially valuable for applying similar effects to multiple photos in a shoot.
One of the most exciting features covered is Lightroom’s Super Resolution tool. This is ideal for creating large prints or cropping into photos while maintaining quality. By using AI to intelligently add pixels, Super Resolution allows you to work with older, lower-resolution files in ways that weren’t possible before. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Arnulfur.
