Hey folks I'm working on my photos in Lightroom and was wondering if anyone has any tips on Lightroom 5 on how to get the best possible photo? I want my pictures to look professional grade.
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- Thread starter phantemflyer88
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The histogram is your friend. The histogram for a properly exposed photo will look like a mountain/hill in the middle with a gradual slope to the edges of the histogram. You want the far right and left sides to just touch the edge of the window. You will see in the histogram there are arrows at the top of the window. You want to slide the shadows, black, and whites for those. Adjust the exposure slider to try and get the mountain in the middle. You want the photo to be exposed correctly out of the camera. The more adjustments you make in post could degrade the photo. Play around with the other sliders to your liking.
First and fore all: shoot in DNG!!! Forget JPG because you (might) trow away useful information.
For editing especially with programs like Lightroom, DNG gives you much more latitude and determining your WB afterwards can saves your day.
Remember, 'professional grade' begins with professional shooting.
The shape of a histogram is highly subject-depended! The bell shapes are only for average lightened subjects. There is no law for how a histogram must look. It is only a graphical representation of the tones of your image.
Look at a city-nightshot; the bulk of the histogram is on the left side. And it should be there!
Do not use your sliders in order to get a nice shape. A nice shape has nothing to do with a technically nice image.
In principle you should strive that the histogram reaches both sides, because in that case you make a optimal use of the dynamic range. For the rest use your sliders to obtain a pleasing image and forget the rest.
Analyze your images. Learn to see what is good an what is wrong. Believe me thats the most difficult and important part. If you know what you want and how the image should look like, the sliders will do the rest.
And there is a lot more information in your images then you see at first glance. Lightroom is a very good program for to extract that information.
Lightroom is a non-destructive program, you can use your sliders as often as you want, open and close your images as often as you want, your images will not degrade!
Experiment, experiment and experiment and learn, learn and learn. Professional grade photography is not a bunch of tricks.
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The histogram is a starting point. I understand each photo will be different. He didn't mention anything about night shots. And I don't agree with you about the photos not being degraded by "too" much processing. Lightroom will not degrade the "original" image.You could have issues with noise and color. I just ordered the P3P and have never used one for photography. I do plan on shooting in RAW with it.
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Here is a photo of mine showing the histogram. It's not the greatest example, but you get the idea. Generally the histogram will show more in the middle and fall off on the edges. As TonG stated, all photos will be different as will the histogram. If you would like to see more of my photos, you can click on the links below. You can be the judge as to whether or not I know what I'm talking about.
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Have a read of this (sure you have found other articles), as noted there isn't right or wrong histogram and it will depend on the subject and look of the shot. I personally only check it when I see that I might have very dark or bright components to a shot and want to keep within certain bounds (though bracketing exposures is another method of dealing with scenes such as that).
https://photographylife.com/understanding-histograms-in-photography
https://photographylife.com/understanding-histograms-in-photography
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