Using Adobe Lightroom to Edit Photos

Knowing how to edit photos is essential for anyone who wants to build an educational website, a blog, or even a slide deck. At the very least, educational technologists should know how to crop and rotate images. Those two things are easily done with a smartphone or tablet now. More advanced photo editing requires a more finessed program, one designed for photo editing. While Adobe Photoshop is often considered the photo editing gold standard still, it can take time and numerous classes to fully master the program. Enter Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom comes in two versions - regular (cloud-based) and Lightroom Classic. For my project, I've chosen to use the regular version since it is more streamlined and requires less training. For my project I've chosen a photo of a double Asiatic lily from my garden that I took back in July.

I edited the photo using four basic Lightroom tools - Crop & Rotate; Light & Color; Brush; and Radial Gradient. A few caveats before I begin my explanation of how I used Lightroom to edit this photo. I have been taking photographs for about 20 years and am pretty familiar with what has now become the Adobe Creative Cloud. I also worked for a newspaper for seven years, where I occasionally took photos and was in charge of uploading submitted photos. I almost always used Photoshop to edit these photos. So, I probably have a slight advantage over my peers when it comes to photo editing.

Crop & Rotate

The first thing I did was to crop my photo using the Lightroom cropping tool. I wanted to crop out the cinder block bricks I used to create my raised lily bed and make the photo more square in shape. To do this, I simply clicked on the "Crop" button on the right hand side of the Lightroom interface. I adjusted the frame around my photo to crop off the bricks at the bottom and the weeds at the top. I also made sure to center the lily in the middle of the cropped photo, so I cut a bit more off the top than off the bottom.

Next came the harder part, how did I want to rotate my image? I did not want to do a 90-degree rotation with the "Rotate & Flip" options under the "Crop" panel in Lightroom. Instead, I used the settings under the "Geometry" section of the "Edit" panel. As you can see below, I rotated the image +4.8 in order to make the flower appear more upright in the frame. This also forced me to have to re-crop my photo since there was white space showing around the edges after the photo was rotated. I did this again using the "Crop" function in Lightroom.

Light & Color

Once I had my photo cropped and rotated, I decided to tackle light and color. I wanted the pinks on my lily to pop more, so I began playing with vibrance, saturation, tint, and temperature under the "Color"/"White Balance" settings on the "Edit" panel. Vibrance ended up with the most variation - +69 - while tint and temperature were adjusted a modest +9. I set the color saturation to +30.

While in the "Edit" panel, I also decided to add a few Lightroom effects to my photo. I chose to use a vignette setting of -42 to darken the edges and bring the lily in the center to the front more. I added a clarity setting of +12 and a dehaze setting of +21 to clear the photo up a bit since it was taken using my smartphone, and I added a texture setting of +63 to give the photo more depth.

Brush & Gradient

Once I had finished with the changes to light, color, and effect, I still was not satisfied with how my photo looked. I wanted to remove the yellowish-green centers on my lily and replace them with a more pink and purple center. I achieved this by using the "Brush" tool in Lightroom. I used a 4.2 size brush setting and -88 hue setting on the brush tool. Below is a slideshow showcasing the before and after photos of the center part of the lily for comparison.

Before

After

After I got the center of the lily how I wanted it, I decided the background looked shabby. I decided to check out the gradient features of Lightroom to see if I could even out the background color a bit. Lightroom features tools for both linear and radial gradients. I tried the linear gradient, but found that it encroached on my lily too often for my liking. I decided to use the radial gradient, but found that it took too long to use the circles to fill in all of the background I wanted to update. I ended up using the radial gradient brush with a +4.2 size and a +45 hue to make all of my background green to contrast with my pink lily. The end result is below along with the original photo underneath it for comparison.

Lightroom's Best Features

There are quite a few Lightroom features that I like. My favorite is probably the rotation feature under "Geometry" since it allows you to fix photos that are slightly off-kilter. I have always been a fan of the crop feature in any photo editor because, let's face it, more often than not our cameras do not capture exactly what we want, particularly if, like me, you rely on a smartphone camera for most photography now. The dehaze and clarity features also come in handy for refining photos taken on your smartphone.

Editing color and light balance are essential photo editing tools. If you are taking photos on a particularly sunny or especially overcast day, you are going to need to balance light and color in the editing process more often than not. You can also use these features to add a bit of pop to the colors in your photos. The effects that Lightroom offers are also useful if you want to bring an element to the front of your photo (or make one less visible).

Uses of Lightroom in Educational Technology

Lightroom is a particularly useful tool in educational technology when you are creating websites, slide decks, blogs, online course materials, or handouts that use photos (as most do nowadays). Photos often offer the color, humor, or pizazz that draws your learner in and makes them want to read the rest of the educational materials you've worked so hard to create. But, a bad photo that doesn't have a lot of color or a photo that has too much extraneous space that needs to be cropped out can be off-putting to learners. If a photo is not properly edited, the learner may wonder what the point of the photo is or what part of the photo is relevant to the lesson.

Lightroom can also be used to zoom in or crop down a specific portion of an infographic or other graphic that you want your learners to focus on. Or it may be used to bring one part of the graphic to the forefront for learner understanding. For example, if you have a large infographic that you are breaking down into multiple lessons, you might use Lightroom to either crop the graphic or blur out the portions that you don't want students focusing on for a specific lesson. Educational technologists may also use Lightroom to make graphics created in other Creative Cloud applications or created by other designers pop more by adjusting colors and adding different effects.

There are numerous uses for photos and graphics - and, therefore, numerous uses for Lightroom - within educational design.