Nature Photography How To

If you're like most photographers the goal is to finish up the image-editing task as quickly as possible so you can get back out in the field doing what you love most. The tutorial below will help you do exactly that, with eight Lightroom hacks for fast and effective edits.

Instructor Simon d'Entremont is an acclaimed outdoor photographer based in Nov Scotia. While he illustrates these powerful tricks with stunning wildlife images, you can use what you learn to edit just about any images you shoot. And Simon insists that "these hacks will change how you process images forever."

Some of these quick techniques are what you may call "hidden." Or as Simon puts it, "If you're a Lightroom user you may be surprised at how many tricks and features it has that you may never have heard of." For example, did you know that Lightroom has a dust spot finder? Take a look to see how this and other unfamiliar features work.

Simon kicks off the lesson with Lightroom's Targeted Adjustment tool that is found within the HSL panel. Most photographers know that these tools enable you to adjust individual colors, Luminance, and Saturation. But there's also a trick for tonal adjustments when you're unsure of the color values in the area you want to enhance.

Another helpful hack involves a very smart masking feature within Lightroom's Details panel that is commonly used for sharpening and noise reduction. Simon notes that it's important not to make an image worse by sharpening it, thereby increasing noise——particularly in featureless areas of the background.

With this trick you'll see how to sharpen a main subject, where detail is important, without sharpening other areas of a scene where noise will become more visible and ugly. This is accomplished by tapping the Option key and moving the Masking slider. Then areas with details and features will appear in white and will have sharpening applied. The featureless areas appear in black and aren't sharpened at all.

Simon demonstrates another powerful trick for using the Option keystroke when working with Lightroom's power Targeted Adjustment tool. This one helps you prevent blown-out highlights and crushed shadows when using the sliders to adjust whites and blacks.

This is just a taste of what you'll learn in today's eye-opening 10-minute lesson. So take a look and add these simple hacks to your Lightroom bag of tricks. Then head over to Simon's instructional YouTube channel for more outdoor shooting and editing advice.

On a related note, be sure to check out an earlier tutorial we posted, explaining three top features in the latest Lightroom update and how to use them for a better workflow.