Trying to Learn Light Room 4

I am new to photography and I am learning Lightroom 4. Shall we say trial by fire. Any tips you can give me on photo editing would be greatly appreciated. Below is the photo I have edited. Be kind and understand I am brand new to editing photos.
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Looking at the image a little closer, it appears that the face of the leopard is a little blurry. Possibly due to camera shake at longer focal length. Can you share the camera settings? Shutter speed and aperture? I normally do minimal post processing such as increase contrast and black to make the image pop out a bit. If you were shooting at 200mm, I would increase the shutter speed a little bit more i.e. 1/400. Good portrait overall.

She was shooting through very thick glass.

I would likely increase the vibrance and contrast, as the colours look a little 'washed out' to me. Might do this with the adjustment brush tool just on the cat so it stands out from the background colour that is quite similar.

Might be a monitor difference, but the white balance seems a little cold. I've found that using the eyedropper tool is often easier than hunting and pecking with the sliders. The only thing I did in this edit was click the eyedropper on the white section on the cat's left shoulder.

To my eye the original has a definite greenish cast. Here I've adjusted the color balance using the Levels Eyedropper tool, adjusted the hue and brightness sliders to increase the contrast to give kitty a little more "pop" and flattened the layers. This leopard should look a little more tawny and majestic now.

I'm in the same boat. The images below are just not right IMO, I need to play with the settings in Lightroom a bit more and learn, learn, learn...


Skalas by MichiganClassics.com, on Flickr


Black Beauty by MichiganClassics.com, on Flickr

Joe, that green cast would cause me to look at WB.. Did you try adjusting that in LR??

You got some nice shots...

Pat in NH

carguy said:

I'm in the same boat. The images below are just not right IMO, I need to play with the settings in Lightroom a bit more and learn, learn, learn...

Click to expand...

In your case there are 2 steps. First, you're dealing with a blue cast from the indoor lighting, so you need to fix the white balance. Second, the images are a little dark, but not so much in the way of overall exposures but that the lighting is dark in some areas and not others. Two things only did I do (sounding a bit too much like Yoda): 1) Use the eyedropper to grab a white spot (panel behind the car in photo 1, guy's shirt in photo 2), and 2) use the Shadow slider to bring up the dark areas until they looked right. You could do more, but this is a start.

carguy said:

I'm in the same boat. The images below are just not right IMO, I need to play with the settings in Lightroom a bit more and learn, learn, learn...

Click to expand...

The quickest way, IMO, to correct color cast is to start by balancing everything against a midtone in the shot and then fine tune using a Hue adjustment. That's what I did here in about three clicks and most all of the color correcting is done.

Sharpen it up a tiny bit and you're good to go:

Horoscope Fish said:

The quickest way, IMO, to correct color cast is to start by balancing everything against a midtone in the shot and then fine tune using a Hue adjustment. That's what I did here in about three clicks and most all of the color correcting is done.

Sharpen it up a tiny bit and you're good to go:

Click to expand...

Remember, these guys are using Lightroom, not Photoshop. They'll have an impossible time finding a "Midtone" adjustment, and Hue is a whole different set of sliders.

There appears to be many ways to skin a cat... boom boom..



I'll get my coat.

BackdoorHippie said:

Remember, these guys are using Lightroom, not Photoshop. They'll have an impossible time finding a "Midtone" adjustment, and Hue is a whole different set of sliders.

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I assumed the methodology would be different but surely LR allows for tonal adjustments; meaning shadows, mid-tones and highlights... Right? I'm trying to address concepts I guess, leaving out the specifics of the mechanics because yeah, I do know LR and PS have entirely different layouts and menus.

LR3 used to have a midtone slider but not LR4 or 5 - not even in the curves section where you would expect it (it's broken down into lighter and darker mids). One would hope that once you get rolling you understand what that is, but I'm assuming these are fairly new users and don't want to confuse them. I just want to make sure that they understand that if they can't find what you're telling telling them about it's OK.

BackdoorHippie said:

LR3 used to have a midtone slider but not LR4 or 5 - not even in the curves section where you would expect it (it's broken down into lighter and darker mids). One would hope that once you get rolling you understand what that is, but I'm assuming these are fairly new users and don't want to confuse them. I just want to make sure that they understand that if they can't find what you're telling telling them about it's OK.

Click to expand...

Oh... Oh my. Thank you for that clarification.

Sorry for any confusion caused!

*cough*getphotoshop*cough*

BackdoorHippie said:

In your case there are 2 steps. First, you're dealing with a blue cast from the indoor lighting, so you need to fix the white balance. Second, the images are a little dark, but not so much in the way of overall exposures but that the lighting is dark in some areas and not others. Two things only did I do (sounding a bit too much like Yoda): 1) Use the eyedropper to grab a white spot (panel behind the car in photo 1, guy's shirt in photo 2), and 2) use the Shadow slider to bring up the dark areas until they looked right. You could do more, but this is a start.

View attachment 33740
View attachment 33741

Click to expand...

Nice, thank you for the tips. I do have PS7, but have never taken the time to dive into it much more than basic settings and cropping I'll take a look.

Horoscope Fish said:

The quickest way, IMO, to correct color cast is to start by balancing everything against a midtone in the shot and then fine tune using a Hue adjustment. That's what I did here in about three clicks and most all of the color correcting is done.

Sharpen it up a tiny bit and you're good to go:

Click to expand...

I like that look as well, adding these tips to my editing files

I agree the face is a bit blurry. Make sure focal point is pointed on the eye and shutter is at speed higher than your lense focal length. Try to boost the vibrance to bring out the color of the fur.

I recently bought an sprite colour checker passport. Now my colour and white balance is spot whenever I take a ref photo.

Lr is an organized workflow, so really just go through each section in order and adjust what's required. You can't mess up anything by experimenting. The best advice I can give is that a little goes a long way. People tend to over do the adjustments to make them "pop" when really a light touch lends to a more "natural" looking end result.

I don't know all the details of how this was shot, but it looks like your camera is back-focusing....or the AF target was about 3' behind the cat. You can clearly see the ground behind it as super sharp and the foreground fuzzy where the front paws are placed. I'd do a simple test to see if it's the camera, technique or it could have been the cat moving forward.