The Photographers Guide to Lightroom's Develop Module

By Robin Whalley

Lightroom is powerful and easy to use. But it isn’t always obvious how to achieve the best results. In fact, many of the most powerful features are buried away and easily overlooked. It’s also not obvious in which order to apply your adjustments, which can make a substantial difference to your results.

This comprehensive, yet concise guide to Lightroom’s Develop module, is organised into four sections:

Section 1 – Lays the foundations to help you work quickly and effectively in Lightroom. The features covered here are often ignored, yet they can make it much easier to edit your photographs.

Section 2 – Provides detailed guidance for all the adjustment tools. Use this section to develop your skills, and then later as a reference. It’s also packed with hard earned tips from many thousands of hours using Lightroom.

Section 3 – Explains how to make selective adjustments to your images. Creating selections is one of the most valuable editing techniques you can develop. Despite this, surprising few people can do it well. This section will guide you through creating detailed and complex selection with ease.

Section 4 – Helps you develop your Lightroom workflow. You can then apply this to the three comprehensive examples. RAW files to accompany the examples can be downloaded from the authors website, allowing you to follow along on your own computer.

This book will help you:

•Fix common problems with your images.
•Learn how to reveal the full potential in your photos, making them stand out from the crowd.
•Create complex and precise selections that leave most people wondering how.
•Develop a standard workflow you can apply to any image, for great results.
•Use important tools and adjustments, but also understand why.
•Understand the best way to tackle any image and what order to apply your adjustments.
•Find new and powerful uses for tools you may previously have ignored.

The Photographers Guide to Lightroom’s Develop module has been written and illustrated with the latest Lightroom Classic CC edition (release January 2018). But if you’re using an earlier version of Lightroom, it’s still relevant but you won’t have access to all the features covered.

This book has been written for photographers by a photographer. It assumes only a limited knowledge of Lightroom’s Develop module but will quickly build your skills to an impressive level. It doesn’t matter if you find Lightroom a challenge, everything is explained with the author’s characteristic, no-nonsense approach.

If you want to achieve excellent results fast, follow the guidance in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robin Whalley
• Release date: Mar 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370267774

Robin Whalley

Robin is a Landscape Photographer with a passion for software, image editing and a skill for sharing knowledge. He has been honing his photography skills since 2000 starting first with film before moving quickly embracing digital. Whilst he is not widely known as a photographer, his work has been published and sold around the world. He has appeared in exhibitions including The Landscape Photographer of the Year and been published in the popular UK photographic press. He now speaks at Camera Clubs and Photographic Societies throughout the North West of England where he likes to share his insights into how to create engaging photography.

Book preview

Section 1 – Laying the Right Foundations

If you’re tempted to skip over this first section to get to the sexy adjustment part, don’t. To make the most of Lightroom and its features, you need to understand two things:

What’s happening under the hood of Lightroom, in the Lightroom Catalogue.

How to use the interface and different features of the Develop module.

That’s what this section of the book is about. Even if you have been using Lightroom for years, it’s quite possible you will still find something of benefit in these two short chapters.

Understanding the Lightroom Catalogue

Lightroom is based on the concept of a catalogue. The catalogue contains information about, and links to your image files. Many people mistakenly think that after they have imported their images to Lightroom, they can delete the original image files. Please don’t make this mistake . Lightroom doesn’t import your image to its Catalogue. If you delete the original image file, Lightroom will complain that it has a record in its catalogue of an image file that it can’t find. Worse still, you will have lost your image .

The Lightroom catalogue also contains information about your image that you might add to, for example keywords and star ratings. The catalogue even contains an image preview, which is possibly why people make the mistake of thinking Lightroom’s storing their images. When you use the Library module in Lightroom and see all your images displayed, these are the previews held in the catalogue. What you aren’t seeing is the original image.

If we select an image from the Library module and then switch to the Develop module, we are selecting that image to work on. When we then apply adjustments to an image in the Develop module, we see the effect in the preview. The adjustments aren’t applied to the original image. Instead Lightroom records our changes in the Lightroom catalogue. This is how Lightroom achieves non-destructive editing. You may have noticed that you can adjust an image in Lightroom one day, close Lightroom, and then the next time you open Lightroom your adjustments are still available. This is because all the adjustments, together with the history of changes, are stored in the catalogue.

Tip: When you’re working with Lightroom, you’re really working with the information in the Lightroom catalogue. Adjustments are only applied when you export your image from Lightroom.

You can only have one catalogue open in Lightroom at any time. You can though have multiple Lightroom catalogues, each containing different information, which you can switch between. Lightroom allows you to manage your catalogues using the file menu. The key commands are:

New catalogue… creates a new empty catalogue.

Open catalogue… opens a different catalogue to the current one.

Open recent displays a list of the recently used catalogues, from which you can then select one to open. You can see an example of this in the screenshot below.

Opening a recent Lightroom Catalogue

Figure 1: Opening a recent Lightroom Catalogue

Most people aren’t aware that Lightroom has this capability to support multiple Catalogues and typically they don’t need to know. The majority of Lightroom users will never come near to reaching the limits of a single Lightroom Catalogue. The reason we are looking at this is that it can help you to better understand Lightroom as well as correct problems that initially appear to be faults.

What Happens When We Import Images

At this point, I’m going to assume you know how to import files into Lightroom and already have images in your Catalogue. When you imported your images, Lightroom created a link to the image file, and this together with key image information (such as meta data), and a preview of the image were all added to the Catalogue. If you now change the file name of the image or move the file on your computer, Lightroom will report the image as missing.

Once you have imported your images to Lightroom, they appear in the Library module as a grid of thumbnails. If you switch to a different Lightroom Catalogue, the same images wont display, unless you also imported them to that Catalogue.

To the left side of the Library module, you can see a folder list. Lightroom updates this list to reflect the imported images as shown below.

Folder list from the Lightroom Catalogue

Figure 2: Folder list from the Lightroom Catalogue

Here you can see a new folder called 18-01-08 Mam Tor has been added as a subfolder in the 2018 Images folder. Many people confuse this folder list with the folder structure on their computer. This isn’t the case. This list only shows imported image folders in the Lightroom Catalogue. If we were to switch to a different Lightroom Catalogue, you might see a completely different folder structure. The 18-01-08 Mam Tor folder containing 96 images may not even be shown.

Summary

Although short, this chapter is very important. Without understanding this, Lightroom’s behaviour can often seem a little odd and frequently causes people to make mistakes. In the next chapter we’re going to look more closely at the Lightroom Develop module and some of its more important features. Again, don’t skip this as it contains several poorly understood tools. These are essential to helping you effectively edit your images.

The Develop Module Interface & Features

In this chapter we’re going to examine the interface in the Develop module in some detail. The objective though isn’t to cover every element but to familiarise you with the ones that can make editing your images much easier .

Before we look at the interface of the Develop module, we need to set some context. There is a close relationship between the Library module and the Develop module. The Library module helps you organise and select the images you want to work on. You can see a screenshot of the Library module below.

Layout of the Library module

Figure 3: Layout of the Library module

Here you can see the module menu at the top of the screen and the link to the Library module indicated by the number 1. To the left side of the screen and marked by number 2, is the folder structure within the Catalogue of the imported images. When you click one of these locations, thumbnails of the images are displayed. The same images are also displayed as a film strip along the bottom of the screen.

Clicking on an image in the Library module selects that image. When you then switch to the Develop module, you will be working on that image in the editor. You can see a screenshot of the Develop module below.

Layout of the Develop module

Figure 4: Layout of the Develop module

The numbered areas you see above are:

The Develop module link. Use these links to switch between the different Lightroom modules. Notice the Develop link is lighter than the others, indicating it’s selected.

Tools to help you with the image editing process. We’ll be looking at these in more detail shortly.

Preview of the image being edited. This is updated to reflect the changes you’ve made.

The development panels, containing development tools you can use when editing images. Section 2 and 3 of this book cover these tools in-depth.

A collection of useful tools to help you with common tasks such as comparing two version of an image.

Thumbnail film strip. These are thumbnails of all the images in the same folder as the selected image. This is a quick way to switch to another image, rather than using the Library module, or to batch edit several images.

Let’s now take a deeper look at the important elements of the interface.

Navigator

The Navigator panel is located to the top left of the Develop module and can be seen below.

Navigator panel when the main image is magnified

Figure 5: Navigator panel when the main image is magnified

The panel displays either the image you’re working on, or if you move your mouse over the film strip along the bottom, a thumbnail of that image.

In the screenshot above you can see a white rectangle over the image. This shows the area of the image being displayed in the main preview. The rectangle provides an easy way to navigate around the image when the preview is magnified. You can do this by clicking on the thumbnail image in the navigator. This moves the white rectangle to the new area. Alternatively, you can click anywhere within the rectangle and drag it to a new position.

If you look to the top right of the panel along the title bar, you will see default magnification settings. These are:

Fit – This displays the entire image, so it fits within the dimensions of the available window space (both horizontally and vertically) with no hidden area.

Fill – Resizes the image so the width fills the available preview area. Depending on the dimensions of the image, this may hide and area at the top and bottom of the screen. The entire image may be too large to fit in the preview area.

1:1 – Displays the image at 100% magnification and is one of the most useful options.

Also shown in the screenshot above is a fourth option of 2:1. This isn’t a default setting and can be changed by clicking the small icon with two arrows, to the right. Clicking this icon displays a popup list featuring different levels of magnification. When one of these is selected, it’s displayed in this position until changed.

The available magnification levels are from 1:16 to 11:1. When the first number in the pair is 1, the magnification level is less than 100%, for example 1:2 = 50%. If it helps, you can think of the ratio being a fraction, for example 1:2 is the same as ½ or a half. Where the first number is greater than 1, the magnification is greater than 100% for example 2:1 is 200%.

Tip: When working on very high-resolution screens such as a Mac 5K Retina monitor it may be better to view your images at 2:1 or 200% magnification. This is because high resolutions can hide flaws in the image which might otherwise be visible.

Presets

When you adjust an image in the Develop module, it’s possible to save a copy of the adjustments. These are then available for future use and appear in the Presets panel on the left of the screen. Using Presets can be a significant time saver or can help spark your creativity. You can see a screenshot of the Presets panel below.

The Lightroom Presets panel

Figure 6: The Lightroom Presets panel

Here you see a series of collapsible lists, each potentially containing Presets. Lightroom comes with several useful presets which appear in the categories starting with the word Lightroom. Click one of these lists to expand it and you’ll see the names of any presets contained, for example Blue Filter appears in the Lightroom B&W Filter Presets list.

Tip: It can be tempting to click on a preset to check the effect on your image. This can be helpful but there’s a better option. Rather than click the preset, move your mouse over it in the list. You then see the small preview in the Navigator panel discussed above, showing the effect of the Preset. Presets are a great way to generate new creative ideas so it’s often worth checking a few if you’re unsure how to edit an image.

As well as the Presets that come with Lightroom you will see another category at the bottom called User Presets. This is where you can save any Presets that you create. In this example the screenshot shows a Preset I created called BW Extreme.

Although this is useful, you don’t need to restrict yourself to using this folder. It’s possible to create new folders when you save a Preset. If you look to the top right of the Preset panel, along the title bar, you will see an icon displaying the + symbol. Click this to display the New Development Preset dialog shown below.

Options when saving a Preset in Lightroom

Figure 7: Options when saving a Preset in Lightroom

At the top of the dialog is where you can enter the name of the new Preset you’re creating and below this is a dropdown list. Here you can select the folder to save the new Preset to (excluding the Lightroom folders) or create a New Folder….

Further down the dialog you can see lots of settings, some of which have ticks against them. This may look complicated but it’s not. These settings relate to the development settings in the panels on the right-hand side of the Develop module. Some relate to specific panels whilst others such as Sharpening are elements within a panel. By ticking one of these options you’ll save these adjustments as part of your Preset.

People often find Presets confusing because they produce unexpected effects. This is frequently due to the way the creator of the preset chose to save it. For example, if all the options in the save dialog are ticked, each time you use that Preset it will replace any existing image adjustments. Alternatively, when only one or two of the settings are saved in the Preset, effects can be layered on top of any existing changes. It’s when Preset creators become lazy and mix the two approaches that it can become confusing for the user.

Looking back to the list of Presets and folders, if you right-click these with your mouse, it will display a popup menu. The contents of the menu will depend