In this video, Christian Möhrle shows six creative ways to elevate your photos in Lightroom, such as creating a fog or light bleed effect.
I've been using Photoshop long before Lightroom even existed. It has been the software of choice for nearly all my editing until roughly two years ago. I used Lightroom to organize my images and do basic raw adjustments — that was it.
But times have changed, and Lightroom has become competent editing software. Its masking feature becomes more powerful with every new release, giving you endless ways to work on your photos. For a long time, layers were one of the main reasons to use Photoshop over Lightroom. But that's no longer the case. Aside from exposure blending and focus stacking, Lightroom can handle most editing needs.
Convince yourself in Möhrle's video, where he shows, among other techniques, how to create autumn colors or an Orton glow effect. I also like his tip on adding fog to a landscape photo. The result looks pretty convincing.
As Möhrle shows, you can do very creative edits in Lightroom with the right sliders and a combination of masks. Some of these edits would have been hard to achieve in Lightroom just a few years ago. With focus stacking already working seamlessly in Lightroom with the help of Helicon Focus and its DNG workflow, the only missing piece now is a proper way to blend photos. Here, the HDR feature of Lightroom and many other plugins still falls short of what's possible in Photoshop. It will be interesting to see what the future brings.
