Whenever I am lecturing, or speaking with other photographers, I am always trying to teach them just how powerful Lightroom 3 truly is. In fact, approximately 98% of the photos that we deliver to clients in our wedding photography studio, Lin and Jirsa, have only been edited in Lightroom.

In this Lightroom tutorial, I will teach you all how to add dramatic colors to your images without even touching Photoshop. Since Adobe Lightroom is essentially just an enhanced version of ACR, these techniques will also work in Photoshop ACR as well.

If you like this tutorial, be sure to check out SLR Lounge’s Lightroom Tutorial Library featuring over 120 Lightroom video tutorials teaching you from the most basics of basics, to advanced editing and artistic effects in Lightroom.

Exercise Files

Download the exercise …

A Guest Post by Hannah Gordon

All too often I see budding photographers attempting to overuse effects. Whether this is an attempt to hide their inexperience or they genuinely think it improves the image, I do not know. However, customers will notice the obvious difference between portraits done with expertise and ones done with overuse of effects.

The “Top 2” effects overused are:

• Vignette – What can I say? Used sparingly, this effect can add depth and accentuate the subject in the portrait. Overused, it looks tacky and darkens the middle of the portrait horrendously.
• Softening – Again, a soft effect can bring out the subject, but too much just makes it look overexposed and blurry.

My first example is an outdoor portrait session with a family of three. Everything looks pretty good in the original.

The first enhancement …

Are you a JPEG shooter sick of reading ‘switch to raw’ when you search for editing help? I feel your pain. I shoot both raw and jpeg depending on what I plan on doing with the images. One of the most important elements to start with when editing your images is to review the white balance. A too cool or too warm white balance can completely alter the artistic interpretation of your images.

The first thing you need to do is be sure to set the correct WB in-camera. This will prevent the need for further altering, however as I said above, you may want to change it for other reasons.

{Editing White Balance in Lightroom}

You will find that in Lightroom, the adjustment options when editing a jpeg aren’t as vast as with a raw file, particularly …

Did you know there are three different ways to edit your white balance in Lightroom?

White balance is something that many photographers select with their in-camera settings and its function is to correct too warm or too cool colour casts as a result of  the lighting in your scene. For example, fluorescent lighting is very ‘cool’ lighting and your images will take on a cold colour cast if not corrected with a warming colour balance in the camera settings.

However, if the images are shot in RAW and the files remain open to total in-computer control, the while balance can be better-altered in computer editing programs. This means you can either alter an incorrect balance or employ changes to achieve a more creative interpretation of your scene (exe: to add a warm, golden hour glow). You can make these changes in a …

Recently I posted about the difference between exposure, brightness and fill light. Today, I want to talk about the difference between vibrance and saturation. Those fun little color boosting sliders which can make or break a shot.

First, I’ll give you some definitions and the we’ll look closer at the difference made on a shot.

{Saturation}

Saturation is a uniform bumping up the intensity of all colors in your shot, regardless of the starting point of the colors. This can result in clipping (over saturation of certain colors which results in loss of detail in those areas) and over saturation of skin tones leaving them looking too orange and unnatural.

{Vibrance}

Vibrance is a smart-tool which cleverly increases the intensity of the more muted colors and leaves the already well-saturated colors alone. It’s sort of like fill …