20 essential tutorials for learning Lightroom photo editing

August 20th, 2018
Tutorials

If your avid photographer or even a designer looking to take your photographs to the next level the next natural progression is to understand how to edit photos. Lightroom is leading the charge as one of industry best tools for photo editing. There a various common, and popular effects used within magazines, posters that can be easily replicated from within lightroom.

If you a veteran user of Lightroom or a designer who wants to learn some photo editing skills. This blog posts is perfect for familiarising yourself with these common effects, and how easily they can be recreated yourself using lightroom. There are a several great effects from Lomo to HDR. We recommended spending some time going through each lightroom tutorial, as it’s a great way to learn. Each tutorial is short too, so not a huge consumption of your time. If you do each tutorial from within list, you’ll master photo editing within lightroom.

I hope you enjoy the roundup, and as always, any feedback is always apricate and suggestion for further posts you would like to produce are always welcomed.

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1. How to Create a Lomo Effect in Lightroom

The lomography look can be replicated in Lightroom for creating fun, vintage-style effects for your photos. The colors and vignetting created by toy cameras result in a distinct look, and in this tutorial we’ll go through the process of creating a lomo-inspired effect in Lightroom. And if you want to save a little bit of time, you can also download a preset created in this tutorial and put it to use in your own work.

2. Soft light

All babies are adorable, at least to their own parents. If you’re dealing with a face only a mama could love, the good news is that you can bring out as much cuteness as possible in your photos.

3. Haze Effect

Haze can add a nice touch to outdoor photos, from nature photos to portraits. Recreating a hazy effect can easily be done in Lightroom or Photoshop. In this article we’ll go through the simple process of adding haze in Lightroom.

4. Film Style

If there’s has been a noticeable trend in post-production in the past few years, it’s the enthusiasm for old school, film-style looks. Multiple preset packs and actions exist to take your images back in time. However, in this tutorial, we’ll learn how to build and customize our look in three easy steps in Adobe Lightroom.

5. Desaturate

In a matter of just a few seconds you can easily make one (or a few) of the colors in a photo pop.

6. Cinematic Effect

In this tutorial we’ll go through the process of creating a cinema-inspired effect in Lightroom. The cinematic style works well with a lot of photos, and it is not difficult to create.

7. Vintage-Film

In this tutorial we will quickly walk through the process of easily creating a vintage film-inspired look in Lightroom. This effect is not intended to replicate the look of any particular film, it is just a look inspired by an old film photograph. The settings used in the tutorial are from one of the presets in our collection of Vintage Film Lightroom Presets. That collection includes 30 different presets, so if you like this effect be sure to check out the full collection.

8. Light Leak Effect

Light leaks, although sometimes unintentional, can add some character and intrigue to a photo. In many cases light leaks can be used to create a vintage feel. While light leaks are ideally captured in-camera, Lightroom also makes it possible to artificially add a light leak effect

9. HDR Merge

There are a number of different ways to merge or blend multiple exposures to create an HDR image. You could use software like Photomatix that has been created exclusively for HDR, you can use Photoshop’s HDR merge, you can do it manually by using layers and masks in Photoshop, and since the release of Lightroom 6/CC you can also do it right in Lightroom with no plugins or additional software needed.

10. Matte Black & White

If you want to create an awesome black and white conversion, using a matte effect can be an excellent approach. In this tutorial we’ll quickly walk through the process of creating an aged matte black & white effect in Lightroom.

11. Faded Effect

In this tutorial we’ll walk through the process of creating a nice faded effect in Lightroom, and we’ll show the exact settings that you can use to get the same effect.

12. Underexposed Effect

Before we even get started I should make clear that this is to be used as a last resort effort to save a photograph that can’t possibly be retaken any time soon, not something we should make a habit out of. We all know that the best way to save an underexposed photograph is to simply pay attention to the histogram while taking photos and if it’s pushed all the way to the left adjust our settings and reshoot.

13. Misty Effect

Enhance the green hues in your photos with this Lightroom Preset.

14. Split Toning

Lightroom’s split toning sliders provide great opportunities to enhance your photos in several different ways, but if you have never used the split toning sliders it can be a little confusing.

15. Desaturated Cinema Effect

In this tutorial we’ll walk through the process of creating a desaturated, cinema-inspired effect in Lightroom’s develop module. The process is pretty simple, it works well with a wide variety of photos, and it creates an interesting and dramatic effect.

16. Graduated filter

17. Crop Tool Overlay

18. COLOR correction

Lightroom has tools for correcting color not just across the entire image but also for correcting individual colors.

19. Film-Inspired Look

There are countless different possibilities when it comes to post processing, but one popular approach is to mimic a film look or style. The film look can work well with just about any type of photograph, and landscapes certainly are included in that.