Today’s episode is for all our photographers in the house or anyone who wants to learn how to improve their editing for social media photos. We are diving into the top 5 editing mistakes photographers make in Lightroom and how to fix them.

If you’re struggling to nail perfect skin tones, culling is taking you way too freaking long, or you just want to learn little tricks and hacks that make editing in Lightroom a million times easier, we’ve got you covered! 

Let’s get to the top 5 editing mistakes photographers make in Lightroom! This episode will be really helpful to listen to while you’re viewing Lightroom. So pull up Lightroom and let’s get started!

 

1. Not straightening horizons

This is really obvious if you are shooting in open spaces where the horizon line is clearly visible such as an open field, ocean, or the top of a mountain. When we are taking photos, it is hard to take a perfectly straight photo in the moment. 

It is a huge gamechanger and you need to be straightening those horizon lines.  

Do not try to manually straighten every image! You are wasting years of your life!

You can auto adjust in two separate places:

Under the crop tool. In the right corner, it says “auto” click that and VIOLA.

Down under “Transform” click the middle button “auto”!

The majority of times, these works, but occasionally the computer won’t be able to register the horizon line and you will need to manually do it. 

 

2. Culling in Lightroom

If you’re not familiar with the term, culling means picking and choosing the good photos you want to use. If you shoot more than an occasional 20 photos here and there and you’re currently culling through your photos in Lightroom, cut it out! You’re wasting SO much time.

Lightroom has to load the full file of the photo for you to preview. If you are shooing in RAW you are loading so much information in every photo and it takes precious seconds to load each one.

It used to take us about 5+ hours to cull through a wedding gallery when we used Lightroom. Now we can cull through a 4,000 image wedding in an hour or less. How?? Photo Mechanic. It is a game changer!

We talk about that in the Lightroom challenge in-depth, so make sure you join that for way more details on all of these points.

 

3. Under or overexposing skin tones (too muddy or too bright)

You need to find the balance within that! We often struggle and feel like we have to choose to make the entire image look good or just make the skin tones look good.

Skin tones are a make or break as a photographer. Making your skin tones either too dark and muddy or too bright and blown out can be the difference between pro and amateur.

Make sure your skin tones are glowy but not blown out, rich but not muddy. It’s a tricky balance, but SO necessary to focus on and master because it really does change the game.

As a client, you want the skin tone to be true to what it actually is in real life. You need to make sure the color is great but also the quality of brightness and darkness.

 

Tools to use:

The basic panel in your Lightroom. Use this in the initial step to fix skin tones. 

If you really want to go next level into skin tones or any colors, the HSL panel is a game changer! 

 

We have some serious tips and tools that will ABSOLUTELY change the game. We go over ALL of that in our Lightroom Editing Challenge. 

 

4. Not using lens corrections and custom vignette control

A vignette is when the colors of the corners of the images have a darkness to it. Often, people ignore it and don’t know that they can get rid of it. Whenever we take photos, depending on the lens we use, vignettes occur naturally.

Under Lens Corrections, you can choose from “Profile” or “Manual”. 

Under “Profile”, click “enable profile corrections” and it does it automatically.

Sometimes automatically is too much and you might want a little vignette in the corners to bring in some mood. We like to do it manually by going to the Manual tab in the Lens Correction control section. Under “Manual” go down to vignetting and slide the amount slider to the setting you want. This provides more control over your image. 

 

5. Not utilizing the heal tool

If you have the mindset that you have to take a photo over to Photoshop to correct any sort of minor detail, we have a solution! There is a Spot Removal in the local adjustment section of the Develop Module in Lightroom. There are two options: clone or heal.

The Clone tool is occasionally useful if you are trying to change a simple background significantly without Photoshop. Ex: Evie uses it occasionally to expand a blank wall/remove a doorway. Overall, it’s rarely useful. The Clone tool duplicates and exact spot and puts it over the spot you choose and often looks unnatural. 

The Heal tool is where it’s at! Healing takes one section of the image and it replaces it with another of the same type of texture, light, and color. 

Stop wasting time taking stuff over to Photoshop to completely remove aspects from the photo when Lightroom, for the most part, can do it! With that being said, it can’t do everything. If something is way in-depth then you’ll have to do it in Photoshop.

 

Episode Links

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www.theheartuniversity.com/content

If you want to connect with us and other listeners in the Heart and Hustle community join our Facebook group here.

Sign up and join the Lightroom Editing Challenge at www.theheartuniversity.com/challenge.

 

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