Tuesdays with Eli - Adobe Lightroom Tip #1

Hey everyone, today is Tuesday, that means you'll be hearing from me again. Since I've been doing so much personal blogging lately, I decided to share with all you interested photographers and photo enthusiast a couple tips I've learned for my post processing. First of all I want to say I'm no expert, there are plenty of great ways to post process your photos, the key is to just find a great system that works best for you. I'm just sharing with you my current system that's working for me. The first part of my workflow after capturing the photos onto my hard drive, is using a program called Photo Mechanic. It cost $150 bucks, but makes selecting, re-ordering, marking, and re-naming the original files much faster that trying to do it in Lightroom. I save tons of time doing it this way first. I shoot a lot of pictures, so that means I get rid of a lot too. I like to shoot a lot because sometimes I'm just looking for the difference between a half smile and a real smile. I try to catch that fraction of a moment that's just right, so I shoot a lot and I'm liberal with trashing the ones that don't make it. When I ready to import into Adobe Lightroom, I make copies of the selected photos as backups. When I import into Lightroom I always make sure that I'm adding the copyright metadata to the images during import.

I choose to add the photos to the catalog without moving them. You can do it either way, just make sure you have a backup. After the photos are in Lightroom, I go through every photo in order and make my adjustments. In my opinion, the key to great post production is subtle adjustments. You want to get it right in camera before you begin to process in Lightroom. I make small adjustments to preserve the look of the photo. Too much post processing can kill a great photo. Here you can see the before and after. I also want you to be able to see what I adjusted in Lightroom.

I shot this with my Nikon D90 at 1/1250 SEC at f / 1.8 200 ISO 85mm. You can see the original photo was pretty nice as is. I just made a few small adjustment to the photo in Lightroom to make it pop a little more. The older I get, I realize the things that my parents taught me can be used in just about any area of life. "Everything in moderation." I basically only make small adjustments to the exposure, blacks, sharpness, sometimes vibrance and color. Then After I have processed all the images in that set, I make another backup. You don't want to have to do the same work over again. Hope this helps, Thanks for listening. : )