Are you looking to learn how to edit using Lightroom? There has been this new craze of purchasing Presets from different bloggers or photographers to get that “perfect instagram look”. Well I am here to tell you that it is super simple to do yourself and create your own unique look for free!

First of all, you will have to go into your App Store and download Lightroom (LR) Mobile. It is free and easy to use!

With the capabilities that our phones have today, it is unnecessary to be lugging around a big bulky camera, unless you plan to do more with your photos than just post them on social media.

Once you have taken a photo in a well lit area, open your LR app and import the photo that you want to edit by clicking on the “add photo” icon at the bottom right of your screen.

For your first few photos, I would suggest going through each panel and toggling back and forth to get an idea of what each function does to the image. This way, you will get a better understanding of what you need to adjust to get the image the way you want it. An extremely helpful page that explains and shows each panel can be found here!

Light

• Exposure: Controls how bright your image is
• Contrast: Determines the contrast between light and dark colors. If you move the slider to the right, you will get a more dramatic photo whereas, if you move the slider to the left the image will be flatter and have more of a “film” look.
• Highlights: Controls the brightness of the lighter parts of your photo. If you image has very white or very light blue skies in it, you would want to move the slider to the left to recover the details of the clouds.
• Shadows: Works the same as the highlight function except it is changing the darkest parts of your image. For example, if you were taking a photo of a black dog, you would want to move the slider to the right so that you can see the dogs eyes or the detail in its fur.
• Whites + Blacks: Sets the white and black points of the image.

Color

• Temperature: Determines how cool or warm the colors appear in your photo. For example, if you are editing a sunset photo, you will want to warm the photo up by moving the slider to the right.
• Tint: Determines how green or purple the colors appear in your photo. Typically, I try not to adjust this one unless when I took the photo it had a green or purple tint to it, then I would move the slider in the opposite direction to remove the hue.
• Vibrance: This increases the saturation of the lower-saturated colors. For landscape photos, you will want to increase this and saturation to ensure a nice pop of color.
• Saturation: This increases the vibrance of the colors equally ie: giving them a pop! This function is typically increased when editing landscape photos and decreased if you are looking for more of a “film” look.

Effects

• Clarity: This changes the contrast around the edges of the subjects in your photo. Typically you would increase this in landscape photos and decrease if you are looking for that “film” look.
• Dehaze: This acts similar to the clarity function in the sense of when you would typically use it.
• Vignette: Makes the outer edges of your photo either lighter or darker depending on what you prefer. You can then play around with the functions (feather, midpoint, roundness, highlights) within the vignette to find out what look you are going for.

Detail

• Sharpening: This sharpens the details in your photos. This would be helpful if you are taking a photo with a lot of small details ie: jewellery.
• Noise Reduction: This reduces luminance noise in your image. This would often be used if you took a photo that didn’t have enough natural light. It would help to reduce the graininess of the image.
• Color Noise Reduction: This reduces color noise in your photos and used similarly to the above.
• Grain: This will add grain to your image which again can be used when looking for more of a “film” look.

Creating Your Own Preset

Once you find your perfect “edit” for your photos, you can create your own preset to save yourself time so that you don’t have to go into each panel for each photo that you want to edit.

You can make a few different ones to have depending on what your image is. For example: Landscape photos vs portraits of friends vs home decor. You may want to have a slightly different variation for each of these and creating a preset will keep all of your edits consistent.

1. Upload the image you want to base your preset on into the LR app
2. Edit that image and when finished click the check mark at the top right of the image
3. Still in the Edit panel, click Presets at the bottom
4. In the Presets panel, click on the three dots at the top right and select Create Preset
5. In the New Preset dialogue box that pops up, create the name you want to use for your preset and click save.
6. The next time you add a photo into the LR app and you go into the edit panel, choose Presets and your saved preset will be there.
7. Every photo you take is taken in different light so you may have to still tweak your edit a little bit.

If you want to learn how to edit winter photos using Lightroom, check out this post!

I hope that this was helpful for you all! Please feel free to leave any comments that you may have or if there are steps you feel that I am missing!

Keep Snappin’

Nicole