Software How To

Most photographers who use Adobe’s Lightroom know that it gives you the ability to see “before and after” previews of editing effects on your images. But there’s probably a lot more to Lightroom’s Before and After tools than you know.

You’ve probably noticed that lots of photographers these days are offering Lightroom preset packs. And you’ve probably wondered, how do they create all these awesome Lightroom presets? Even better, how do you create one yourself?

Photographer and Photoshop expert Scott Kelby is back with another quick tips video for Shutterbug. In the below two-minute video, Kelby explains a simple way to clean up and control sliders in Lightroom.

French photographer Serge Ramelli is known for spectacular landscape images. Yet, despite his mad skills, every so often Mother Nature needs some help because of poor light, pale skies, or weak colors. In this tutorial, Ramelli provides 27 free Photoshop presets, and demonstrates how to use them, so you can turn good photos into great ones.

You might already know how to do “dodging and burning” techniques in Lightroom to tweak the exposure of your images, but here’s a way to do it even better thanks to a special new feature called Luminance Range Masking. In the video below, Aaron Nace of Phlearn explains how to “dodge and burn quickly and accurately in Lightroom using luminance range mask.”

If you’re still learning about all that Lightroom has to offer (and who isn’t?), it’s great to get insider knowledge on some of the key hidden features of this vast image editing/organizing program from Adobe. For this kind of expertise, we love turning to photographer and educator Serge Ramelli who knows Lightroom inside and out.

Pro photographer Tom Mackie gets so many questions about how to make photos “pop,” he decided to do a whole video on the subject, which we have embedded below. And while a lot of folks might think all you need is some deft Photoshop skills to get your images to sparkle, there’s really a lot more that goes into it than that.