Photoshop How To

You may think you know Lightroom, but do you really know Lightroom? Software pros have been using Adobe Lightroom for so long they know some editing secrets you can only dream of.

In the below video, professional outdoor photographer Mark Denney pulls back the curtain on some of these secrets, sharing five Lightroom tricks pros use to fool you.

“In this week’s episode, we discuss the secret Lightroom editing tricks professionals use to fool you and the step by step process in which they do it,” Denney says.

“The five editing tricks covered in this video, are some of my favorite techniques and can really take a photo from good to great in just a matter of a few minutes. And, by the time you watch this video and become comfortable applying these tricks to your own photos, you'll begin seeing many use cases within your own photography moving forward.”

Below are the three Lightroom tricks pros use to fool you that Denney discusses in the video. We’ve included time-stamps where you can find them in the video. The tutorial is a follow-up to one from last month where he shared a secret Lightroom tool to edit photos like a pro.

Trick #1: Sun Glow (0:52-minute)

“This is a great example of a sun that looks little bit too defined, a little bit too crunchy because when you look at the sun it naturally has an atmospheric glow to it,” Denney says. “And if you’ve ever wondered exactly how to create that, this is how.”

Trick #2: Side Light (3:38)

“The second trick is something that I use constantly, and I know a lot of other photographers do as well, and it’s something I call side light. You can see that the sun is setting in this region right through here but it’s very soft, it’s not very exciting, it’s very subdued. And I really want to pump that up.”

Trick #3: Gold Hour POP! (6:19)

“On just about every single image that I have that’s either a sunrise or a sunset; any type of image that has a golden hour light, I use this type of a technique. It’s just a way to emphasize that beautiful golden light that’s already occurring in your photograph.

Trick #4: Spring Towards Fall (10:18)

“I personally don’t like to have super super vibrant greens in an image. I usually like to have them look a little bit more towards yellow that takes on more of a fall type of a look. It’s a great technique to not necessarily make spring photographs look like fall photographs but if you want to kind of shift the colors of green more towards something else, this is a great way to do that.”

Trick #5: Digital to Film (12:33)

“As the popularity of film has come back again, there’s a lot of different ways to create that kind of film look using a digital camera and there’s a lot of fantastic ways to do that through post-processing as well. You’re basically taking a digital photo and making it look a little bit more like a filmic photo.”