The Adjustment Brush, located in the Tool Strip under the Histogram, allows you to make adjustments to exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness and color. You can choose any configuration of these settings to apply to selective areas of your photo, and you can even edit those settings on the fly [...]
The Graduated Filter is one of my favorite new features of Lightroom 2, and it has considerably reduced my need to send photos to Photoshop for additional local adjustments. It is worth noting that like any software adjustment, you can only work on data that is actually in the photo to [...]
Using the Painter tool requires a little bit of imagination. You see, you need to imagine you have a spray paint can that doesn’t use paint. Instead of paint you can load the Painter tool with a color label, flag state, star rating, metadata template, develop preset, rotation setting or one [...]
The types of tasks performed in the Library module generally fall under file management, such as separating the keepers from the clunkers, applying keywords, organizing into collections, renaming, applying metadata, etc., and each of these views are designed to help make those tasks a little easier.
The four Library module views—Grid, Loupe, [...]
One of Lightroom’s greatest strengths is the database (known as the catalog file) that records everything you do when working in Lightroom. When you import photos all the information contained in the metadata gets added to the catalog, such as exposure, ISO, time and date of capture, f-stop, camera model, and [...]
The Folders panel may be one of the most used panels in all of Lightroom, but it may also be one of the least understood. There’s actually quite a bit of functionality in this little panel, and with the addition of the Volume Browser in Lightroom 2 it puts quite a bit [...]
When in Grid view, you’ll find the Filter bar located at the top of the image display area. You can show and hide the Filter bar by pressing the \ key, so if you don’t see it right away press the \ key once to bring it out of hiding.
There are three [...]
Lightroom is built upon a database. Inside this database, commonly referred to as the catalog, is all the data about your photos. This includes all the metadata created by the camera at the time the photo is taken (shutter speed, f-stop, ISO, etc.) as well as all the data you add [...]
The essential distinction between a preset and a template is that a preset contains a collection of settings that can be applied over and over again (such as develop and metadata presets), while a template is more of a structural collection of settings that you can reuse into the future [...]
The White Balance Difference
One of the first things to keep in mind when working with rendered files—JPG, TIF or PSD files—is that they already had a white balance setting applied to them at some point in their history. It was the first time that rendered version was created, which may have been [...]