Life inside a Lightroom

Ever since I lay my hands on Lightroom, I have been a convert and unabashedly so. So simple and powerful is this software that my pictures are almost never in the public eye before getting some Lightroom-love first J

So when my friend invited me to his very interesting and informative blog to share my experiences with it, I was more than willing to jump at this chance. To illustrate, I will share with you the Before-and-After results for one of my images. This is the image straight-out-of-the-camera:

 

Now for a few quick steps that I performed in Lightroom:

1. Created a virtual copy and headed into the “Develop” module of Lightroom
2. Cropped the image to close-in on the flower as I felt there was too much distraction on the left
3. Increased the contrast to 100% to create a dramatic effect and emphasize the curves of the petals
4. Increased the blacks to a value of 7 to further take away focus from the background
5. Increased the saturation by 2 points

 

 This is the resulting image:

 

You may notice how the centre of the flower seems to be “glowing” and ends-up creating a more captivating image overall.

That’s it! And this is just the tip of the iceberg; Lightroom offers so many easy-to-use settings that you can really have fun with your pictures and make them look so much better in no time. In fact, I chose this image because I wanted to show how minor tweaks are often needed to make your images really “pop”.

You can also choose from all the amazing presets that are available for free download and start using them to achieve the desired “look” for your pictures. Observe closely what changes each preset makes to your image and it won’t be long before you will start creating and saving presets of your own!

You can download a 30-day free trial of Lightroom here: http://www.adobe.com/go/trylightroom and the Learning Center has a lot of resources to help you get started: http://www.photoshopuser.com/lightroom2/

Hope you enjoyed this post!

 

Thanks Ashu

A huge thank you to Ashu for this great post.

You can see more of Ashu’s photographs at Flickr.

Ashu is also on Twitter.

Tomorrow, Simon Rudd.