Sometimes I partner with a photographer and they take photos for me, but lately with my hectic schedule, I’ve been using my own camera and just have had my friends and other bloggers shoot me. This means that I’ve had to master the art of editing my own photos. Editing a set of photos usually only takes me 15-20 minutes since I’ve nailed it down to a science. Here is my quick and easy Lightroom Tutorial with a few simple steps to ensure that your photos will pop!
LIGHTROOM TUTORIAL FOR FASHION BLOGGERS
1. Adjust Your Exposure as Needed
First things first, head over to your “Develop” tab in Lightroom and make sure the “Basic” panel is open (Windows > Panels > Basic). You’re going to live in this panel for the rest of this tutorial. First thing I do is adjust my exposure as needed. If your photo is looking a little dark, slide the scale up. If your photo is too bright, bump it down. Be sure not to bump it up too far up or down, or else your photo might start to appear a bit grainy.
2. Adjust Highlights
9 times out of 10, I’ll go ahead and bump up the highlights in my blog photos. Keep an eye on your image when you’re doing this and be careful that nothing gets too “blown out”.
3. Bump Up The Shadows
This step really depends on your skin tone. Since my skin is super dark, I always have to adjust the shadows since the white balance is usually off in my photos. I do this to get my skin to look a bit more what it actually looks like IRL. Again, if you’re more on the pale side, you can probably skip this step, but it never hurts to play around with this setting.
4. Adjust your whites and blacks
Are you kind of getting the gist of this? You’re basically adjusting sliders. So, so easy, anyone can do this! I usually bump up my whites and I darken my blacks a little (that’s right, this is the first element you’ll actually slide down versus slide up). This just gives my photo a bit more contrast and pop.
5. Adjust the Vibrance
99.9% of the time, I use vibrance instead of saturation to give my photos a bit of a color pop. Saturation tends to make my skin appear more red than it is, so that’s why I tend to avoid that! Slide it up to give your photos more color, or if you like a faded look, slide it down. #easy
6. Adjust the Tone Curve (Optional)
This is a totally optional step, but this is how I get my photos to have a slighly faded look. Scroll down to your Tone Curve section. Place one point right in the middle of the line and place a second point to split up the line. Take the third point that is already at the bottom left of the tone curve box and slide it up to the point I did in the image below. Boom! Theres a slight film-like quality to your photos.
And look at that, you my friend are D-O-N-E.
Lightroom Tutorial – Before:
Lightroom Tutorial – After:
What else do you want to know about blogging? Hope you enjoyed this Lightroom tutorial! Leave a comment and let me know what you’d like to see in future posts!
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