Develop Module in LightRoom

When you open an image in the Develop Module, you can see that some sliders have presets. Since they sort of work for me, I have not taken the time to find out if I can change those settings.

My flow is influenced by my habit of just going back in the develop history instead of actually undoing a step. I feel if the log gets too long it becomes cumbersome and it is easy to undo a step that did not work out.

Normally, I start with the spot brush set on healing (not cloning) to clean up spots – sometimes a bird can look like a ‘spot’. You can move the circle from where LR gets its data for replacement, which can allow for some creativity. Then I look at the temperature. In the camera, I have the White Balance set on Automatic and most of the time it is right on. Next, I look at the exposure / brightness of an image as well as shadows and highlights. If there are relatively straight lines bordering the area that needs to be changed (overexposed sky for instance), I use the ND filter otherwise the adjustment brush (check the automask this helps in the transition areas)

ND filter: by having the 3 lines of the filter close together, you work with a hard transition. The more they are apart, the softer the transition becomes. You can tilt the lines of the filter to parallel ‘lines’ in the image. Depending on need, I apply the filter from the top down, from the bottom up (usually to open up a shadow area) or from the sides in.

Adjustment brush: I use it for the same purposes where the ND filter does not work or to play with light in small selective areas. It works great to make white really white.

The next step is the clarity slider and last the color treatment. In about 90% of the time I am done at that point. In rare cases, I will export the image now into Photoshop for more complex editing