How to do a quick clean edit in Adobe Lightroom

Welcome back to our weekly edition of Workflow Wednesday. I've got a quick clean photo edit tutorial for Lightroom today. 

I don't like to spend a lot of time working on our everyday photos. I just want them to be bright and happy and in my scrapbook album. I used to love playing with editing my photos but with a busy homeschool schedule and wanting to find some "creative" time for me. I prefer to be creative on paper rather than spending tons of time on the computer editing my photos to make them "portrait perfect". 

Don't get me wrong though, I like my photos to look nice in my album. I just prefer to spend more time on editing the photos that I'm going to showcase on the walls rather than the ones that go in my album. I've found this quick edit in Lightroom to be exactly what I needed and wanted to do that very thing. This is another way I shaved several hours off my weekly project workflow. I hope this will do the same for you!

JUST THE BASICS

• After you've gathered all your photos into the Quick Collection folder, using the metadata information to find your photos for the week, we're going to click on the "Develop" module.

For the first few steps, we will be working on the right hand panel for some really basic edits. 

• I click on "auto" first, right next to "tone". This automatically "fixes" the exposure of the photo based on the histogram at the top. I have found it to be really great for the simplest of simple edits.

After I've fixed the exposure, I work on fixing the color cast. 

• To do this, I click on the eyedropper "white balance selector" (W) tool. I then look for a neutral grey area on the photo and click down on that area. You can see what it will look like in the thumbnail in the upper left hand corner of your screen. It will show you the results before you actually click down your eyedropper tool.

"CHEATER", USING PRESETS

I'm usually pretty happy with the results at this point and ready to print. However, I bought a preset collection, Life Inspired by My4Hens Photography, that I really like to use to add a few helper presets. 

Sometimes, I want to get really creative and I'll pick one of the presets and use that for all the photos. This is great if you want all your photos to have the same tones as all the other photos. I use Beautimous Light preset a TON. 

I also use the Soft Sharpen helper and Brighten Up helper presets on almost every photo. These are my most used and favorite presets from this collection. I love how they help the photo rather than take away any of the adjustments you've already made to your photo.

Also, if the photo is overexposed I like to use the Recover Whites helper. For landscape photos when the blue sky gets overexposed in order to see the rest of the landscape, I like to use the Sky Pop helper.

That's it, easy peasy! Next week I'll share how I prepare my photos for printing, by choosing the size I want them to be and then using the Print module to save as a file on your computer.

How are you enjoying these Lightroom tutorials? I hope they are making sense to you. Don't hesitate to contact me with questions. I want you to be able to get the most out of your weekly project workflow and photo editing.