The Five Biggest Mistakes Photographers Make in Lightroom

Lightroom is a crucial tool for many of us, but no matter how well versed you are on the software, you might still be making mistakes.Serge Ramelli is known well for his landscape photography, but moreover, his YouTube channel where he teaches Adobe Lightroom. His tutorials are helpful to all ability levels and well worth a look. In this video, he goes over five of the biggest mistakes he sees users make.

I've made a lot of mistakes with Lightroom, some of which are mentioned in this video. In my early days, I was prone to ramping clarity up to make up for shortcomings, which it certainly did not do. More obscurely, I had a no idea how to manage my catalog effectively and not let it swell out of control in size.

What mistakes have you made in Lightroom?

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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19 Comments

Mistake #0 : Using Lightroom to do post processing.

It's buggy, slows down for no reason; almost as bad as Apple ITunes.

Unfortunately, you are right.

I had one upgrade that made LR unusable, but once it was fixed, it's been smooth sailing. For my work, LR/PS have no peer.

"No peer" is quite a tall claim. I wouldn't quite say that. Industry standard sure, but there are a few application out there that are on par or exceed what LR does. it might be a pretty accurate claim for Photoshop though. it's only real competitor is affinity photo.

Remember, I stated that there was no peer for my work which means I haven't found anything that does all facets of what I do better. Sure, one or another may do a certain thing better, but as a whole, there's no match, especially combined (LR/PS).

It may be buggy and slow for you... not necessarily for others.

Thank You! I thought my mac was somehow defective! 😅

16 x 9 is "standard cropping"?

It's the aspect ratio of almost every screen out there, so yes, it is. Get with the times.

Questionable as most smartphone screens are 18:9 native at this point.

I certainly wouldn't consider it to be a standard crop for what I do, but it depend entirely on what you're looking to do. It's certainly a standard crop if you're looking to create a desktop wallpaper even if it's not a standard crop for any common print size.

Back in the day, I was adamant on 16x9 crop so I can burn the images on a DVD and play 'em back as a slideshow on my TV.

Nowadays, I just pretty much stick to 3x2 or occasionally 4x5 on some verticals.

I like cropping better in the left image, people seem to close to the lower part on the right one.

Wow, How much did he pay you guys for this advertisement?

Why fstoppers nowadays only post YouTube videos that are not even from their channel?

No kidding. I came here for an article only to find it's a couple paragraphs about a video, not even made by the author? What a disappointment and waste of time.

Yup, you can also just go directly to youtube. To be honest, the comments are better than the articles itself.

I don't know that saying Peter Lik is the polestar for "natural" editing is helpful to viewers of this video. The authenticity of his images is dubious at best and there's no verification he's sold as much as he purports.

i find using -100 highlihts +100 shadows bit too much on the web now. same shit as crazy vibrance or clarity settings. Looks much better if you leave highlights on 0. Basicly going trough the end of the sliders never looks that good in LR. Want better contrast? add custom tone curve...