Lightroom 2 Quicktips

PW75: Adjustment Brush Dodge and Burn

This week I decided to celebrate the launch of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 with a full week of shows demonstrating the new features. Today we start with the best known new feature – the adjustment brush. We’ll be using that to dodge and burn some flower macro photos taken at Kew Gardens.

Image and tutorial: John Arnold

PW76: Adjustment Brush Colour Filters

Today we work on Lighroom color. We spend more time with the adjustment brush – there’s just so much you can do with it! We’ll try changing the background colour of an image completely as though we’d used a clever shaped colour filter when we shot the picture.

Image and tutorial: John Arnold

PW77: Adjustment Brush Clarity and Saturation

In today’s ligtroom tutorials we’re sticking with the adjustment brush as we move on to a new image and use clarity and saturation to re-focus the eye and draw attention to a different part of the picture.

Image & tutorial: John Arnold

PW78: Adjustment Brush Presets

Today we move on to a picture of my sister and do a little beauty retouching with the soften skin adjustment brush preset. We also do some cropping, rotation and tweaking the colour temperature.

Image and tutorial: John Arnold

PW79: Advanced Adjustment Brush Tips

Today we round out the first week of Lightroom 2 tips with some advanced techniques for use with the Adjustment Brush. We also look at spot editing, snaphots, the non-destructive history in Lightroom and how to make graduated edits without using a Wacom tablet. Look out next week for a second week of Lightroom 2 tips!.

Image and tutorial: John Arnold

PW80: Neutral Density Graduated Filter

Today we work on a landscape image with an over exposed sky. We do some cropping and rotation to begin with followed by a little spot editing to remove some distractions. Then we get to work with the Graduated Neutral Density Filter to fix up the sky and bring the tones in the image closer together.

Image and tutorial: John Arnold

PW81: Advanced Graduated Filter

Today we continue looking at our landscape image. We’ve already corrected the exposure in the sky but now it’s time to get a little more creative by bringing the sky and ground tones together and then adding a smoke coloured filter. We also fix up some more light issues and refocus the viewer’s attention using a little more adjustment brush.

Image and tutorial: John Arnold

PW82: Export plugins

Today’s show is a bit off-plan. I intended to show you the new features of LR2 but what I’m showing today is stuff you could already do in LR1. Adobe did make it a little tidier and cleverer so I guess it counts. Today we’ll look at how to setup export plugins that give lightroom more useful export capabilities. In particular we’ll see a couple of different ways to upload to Flickr directly from Lightroom. We’ll also look at where you can find more interesting and useful plugins.

Image and tutorial: John Arnold

PW83: Post crop vignettes

Those of you that know me know how much I love my vignettes. Well Adobe made me very happy with Lightroom 2. They added a post-crop vignette feature that does everything I could have wanted. So today Im going to show you all about how to use it.

Image and tutorial: John Arnold

PW84: Keywording

It’s the end of our second week of Lightroom 2 tips and today we look at all the myriad ways Adobe have given us to add keywords to our images. I know it’s something most of us shy away from doing. Who needs another post processing step when all we’re really interested in is how the picture looks? But keywording is one of those tasks that given just a little of prior thought can be fast, consistant and incredibly useful. So let’s delve into the tools we have available.PW84 – Lightroom 2 Quicktip – Keywording (mp4 video)

Image and tutorial: John Arnold