Author: Megan Galope
Have you ever taken a photo on a trip, and then once you’ve uploaded it to your computer, wondered why exactly you took that photo? You must have seen something to want to capture the scene, but on your computer the colors and lighting just look, well, blah. It’s very tempting to throw these photos out. Before you do, however, it may be worth playing around with them in Lightroom to see if you can figure out exactly what you saw in the first place.
I recently took this photo on a trip to the Tetons in Wyoming. Looking at it just after importing it in Lightroom didn’t thrill me.
So I decided to see what I could do with it. Just using the dehaze slider made a big difference:
Tweaking the exposure and contrast brought out the sky and mountains a bit more:
Decreasing the highlights and opening up the shadows made an even bigger difference:
A few more tweaks to clarity, vibrance, temp and tint gave me this:
I then used the adjustment brush to bring out the pine tree a bit more:
Here are the before and after versions of the same photo:
Lightroom helped me remember why I took this photo in the first place!
To learn more about Adobe Lightroom, Arizona Highways Photo Workshops is offering Adobe Lightroom 101, 102 and 103 courses. Each course is one day and is instructed by photographer Suzanne Mathia. You can find out more about these courses here: http://www.ahpw.org/workshops/.
Megan Galope is a trip leader with Arizona Highways Photo Workshops.