UKC

I probably know one percent of what is capable in Lightroom and I'd like to discover more.

Any of you Lightroom Jedi, willing to share your tips?

For instance please tell me more about presets?

In reply to The Lemming:

I'm no jedi but I do use presets in the following ways.

I found that I do many of the same basic things with many of my photos e.g. lowering highlights, lifting shadows, lens correction, colours settings (calibration), add a bit of vibrance & clarity. If you do the same, then you can save these settings as a preset and apply them during import. Saves on doing the same repetitive across lots of photos. Not sure if I'll be crucified as a philistine that I do this, but it gets all my common or garden photos to a reasonable starting point, I can continue editing from that point or leave them as is.

LR also has its own range of presets which can be applied to photos e.g. high contrast b/with or sepia, which you can apply to a photo with one click. They can be a useful starting point as well.

Ta

In reply to The Lemming:

Upload a decent well exposed, daylight outdoor, sharp (no camera shake) low ISO (200 on GH4?) RAW image file I can download (eg from Dropbox/GoogleDrive) and I'll suggest some baseline LR settings to use as an import Preset that I would start with (which would then evolve with time).

In reply to The Lemming:

Check out YouTube, millions of videos about everything you can do in lightroom.

In reply to ChrisJD:

Sir, you have mail.

In reply to The Lemming:

Cheers for the image file.

This is only a start - you'll need to work on these settings over a range of images (you can update Preset with current develop setting using mouse-right click. MAKE SURE THE 'AUTO' BOX IS NOT CHECKED.

The preset effect is not meant to be dramatic, trying to achieve something that works across all imports to move you forward for every image, so hopefully any further manual adjustments are refinements rather than major changes (this will not be the case in difficult light and low light situations!).

Don't necessarily expect the Preset to make it the 'final' image (often it should be close). I try to think of it as getting a better looking 'jpg' equivalent out of the camera (but of course much much better, lol).

Most of the initial manual adjustments after Import will then be Exposure, Whites, Highlights to sort out exposure at capture. And often lifting the shadows/blacks (you have a black dog!). I also sometimes use the Dehaze - often a better alternative to adding more Clarity.

The really hard one is sharpening; this will take you some more work in the Import Preset. The interaction of the four setting is tricky!. Don't overdo it, but often this will come down to taste. Alter sharpening at 1:1 Zoom. No noise reduction added at moment; like sharpening, noise reduction can also be tricky, but you shouldn't need it for base Import Preset. Overall, I think that Sharpening/Noise are amongst the hardest setting to get right (well there is no 'right', but you know what I mean).

You can also create separate Presets that just alter Sharpening & Noise reduction - especially useful for higher ISO images as the baseline sharpening will make the noise in higher ISO look more obvious. I wouldn't overdo noise reduction in high ISO - I prefer grain to smoothness and lack of detail!

I'll can send you the preset file to import, but these are the settings changed from Default on the DNG, probably easier to do this yourself:

Preset: GH4 Base Import V1

Contrast: +10
Shadows: +10
Clarity: +10
Vibrance: +13
Saturation: +5

Sharpening
Amount: 85
Radius:0.6

I also enable 'Remove Chromatic Aberration', but I hear some people notice a LR slow down with this checked and do it right at end. Got a fast PC, so don't suffer that

Hope this helps you along the way. LR can be daunting!

In reply to ChrisJD:

You sir, are a star.

I shall, this very moment, untick the AUTO BOX in the pre settings. I got this tip(?) off the interweb.

Cheers