HOW TO USE THE DEVELOP MODULE IN LIGHTROOM 6 / CC

 

 Credit by : photoshopCAFE

How to Use the Develop Module in Lightroom 6Hey, Colin Smith here from PhotoshopCAFE, and today I'm going to show you how to use the basic adjustments in Lightroom to make a photograph look a lot better really quickly. All right, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to move a few sliders to get the best results as fast as possible in Lightroom for fixing an image.  So what we're going to do is we're going to stay inside the Basic Panel.  I'm going to show you the order in which I use the sliders and a couple of little tricks. So here we have a good shot that I did at the Grand Canyon a little while back.  And what I want to do is show you the workflow here.  So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to start down here, and this is where I will start, usually, is with theHighlights.  To recover those highlights because we're all blown out, and then, we're also going to open up the Shadows to show more information.  So now we can see the Highlight the Shadow areas.  So the next thing I do is I set the Exposure.  So we're just going to decide how bright or how dark we want this.  All right, that's pretty good.  All right, so there are a couple more things we need to do.  One of the things we need to do right now is to determine the Color Temperature.  So I'm going to go up to the Color Temperature here.  I'm going to grab this little thing and normally you would click this on an area of white or neutral gray. Now, it's going to be a bit of a challenge in this particular image because this is kind of brown, or we could go up into the clouds and click it, but it will make it a little too warm, and the reason for that is because, generally, it's a little bit of blue in the clouds, so that's actually why I was clicking there and just click in the highlight region of the clouds is a little bit better.  And I'm going to take this slider, maybe, and just pull it down just a bit, just to adjust it.  All right, so the next thing we really need to do is adjust the Contrast.  So, we could go with the Contrast slider and just increase that or decrease it.  But here's a better way of doing it because the thing about contracts is contrast is adding blacks in the shadows, and that's what gives the image its strength, its body, its punch.  And then, putting Contrast in the Highlights, it takes this milky whites and it makes them nice clean whites.  And the reason we want the contrast because without contrast, it's like looking through a dirty window, and then, when we add that contrast, it's like wiping that window or that lens off, and then we can see clearly, and that's what we want to do here. So what we're going to do is rather than doing the contrast, because that will do the whites and blacks together, I'm going to do it independently using the whites and blacks, because of this do the same thing.  But what I'm going to do now is we're going to set the whites and me 'm going to hold down the Alt key, that would be Option on the Mac, and then, I'm going to move the sliders.  So why am I holding out our option? That's because when I go, see those little spots appearing at the top? That's showing me where these areas are now clipping where they're going to a pure white with no detail.  So you don't really want to go much beyond there, because if you do thatóSee how you blow out the image?óso we're going to take the whites back just when they're just starting.  There's a good area.  And, now, the same thing, we can do with the blacks.  So we can slide these blocks down and just kind of guess where we're going or we can hold down the Alt or the Option key, and we can see those areas where it starts to clip to black.  So we're going to go right there just where they're starting and that's setting a pretty good overall tone for our image. So we basically got the adjustments done. There are a couple of things we're going to do, though.  Let's have a look at the before and after.  So there's the before and there's the after.  So what we have right now is a very natural result.  But the next step I'm going to move on is going to go into a little bit of enhancing.  So let's see what we can do; two more sliders, so the Clarity.  If we push the Clarity up, notice how it brings out the detail here in these rocks and in the sky there.  So let me just take the Clarity where it was.  Notice that? See there? And then we increase a little bit, it brings up some of that punch in that snap.  Now I donut like to use Clarity on people, and a lot of the time, sometimes there's water and stuffI don't like to do with soft areas, because it tends to make them look very unnatural, and kind of like a pro HDR, but when you're dealing with things like rock and stone and bricks and things like that, you can use a little bit of clarity and it seems to work really well in those areas. So we're looking pretty good.  That last thing you might want to do is just give it a little push of Vibrance; not a lot, just a little touch, just to give it a little bit of life. And then, finally, when we're done, we got to revisit Exposure.  Hold down the Alt key and if we push that up a little bit, are we going to get any clipping? Not really, not in those areas.  So we can safely, maybe, just give it a little touch there, just eyeballing it, because I want to see as much detail as I can there without blowing that up.  So if we look at this before, and then we can look at it after, you can see a real dramatic difference in that image just by moving a couple of sliders in that order.  So if you're new to Lightroom, just go ahead and do that.  And I've also got another tutorial, which is actually a 15-minuteguide on How to Use Lightroom in 15 Minutes, so add a link to that.  So thanks for watching. Oh, by the way, if you're using Camera Raw inside of Photoshop, those adjustments are identical in Camera Raw as they are in Lightroom. So, don't forget to hit that Subscribe button and you'll get a new tutorial every single week.  And thanks for watching, add a comment, and don't forget to hit the Like, and share this with your friends.  So until next time, I'll see you at the CAFE.