How to Create a Desaturated Cinema Effect in Lightroom

In this tutorial we’ll walk through the process of creating a desaturated, cinema-inspired effect in Lightroom’s develop module. The process is pretty simple, it works well with a wide variety of photos, and it creates an interesting and dramatic effect.

Here is a look at the sample “before” photo.

And here is what the sample photo will look like after the cinema effect.

11 Steps for Basic Portrait Editing in Lightroom – A Beginner’s Guide

I love Lightroom, and use it for the vast majority of my portrait editing. You can achieve a wide variety of portrait effects in Lightroom, from harsh and grungy, to soft and dreamy. My technique varies depending on the kind of portrait I’m editing, although the workflow remains consistent.

The photo I’ve selected for this exercise, is one you can easily replicate at home. It was shot indoors, with a large window as the only light source, and is one of a series shot in the same location.

14 Snazzy Lightroom Before and Afters

Lightroom will surprise you.
Many photographers see it as a tool for basic adjustments, like exposure, white balance, and contrast, but think that creative processing needs to be done in Photoshop. Once you really dig into Lightroom, however, you’ll see that you can do so much neat stuff, it may just blow your mind.

We’ve been using it as our primary editing program for a couple years and it still regularly amazes us! So we’ve thrown together 15 snazzy examples to show you just how much creative editing you can do using only Lightroom!

Note: All of these have had the colour balance adjusted, some had tone curve adjustments, and some had profile corrections. The creative editing has been described after each example to give you an idea of how to achieve the look yourself! These are all processed fairly heavily, so you can see how much can be achieved. Make sure to edit to your own unique tastes!
1. Frost Branch



LIGHTROOM TIPS:
Basic adjustments – increased exposure, contrast, saturation

How to Create Your Own Lightroom Presets

Here’s an example of how I created a Develop Preset to use when I import photos taken with my Fujifilm X-T1 camera. The idea was to create a preset that takes me to a neutral starting point from where I can process the file. You can follow along to create an import Develop Preset for your own camera. I’ll explain what I’m doing at each step and suggest some variations you can try.

Start by selecting a photo taken with the camera that you are going to create the Develop Preset for and open it in the Develop module. Zero all the settings by pressing the Reset button at the bottom (you may find it helpful to make a Virtual Copy of the photo first so you don’t undo any edits you have already made).

1. Camera Calibration panel

I set Process to 2012 (Current) the most recent, and Profile to Classic Chrome (the Film Simulation setting I use most often). The Profile options available to you vary depending on the camera.

Possible variation: You can create a different Develop Preset for each Profile that you regularly use.

Four Ways to Improve Your Photos With the Clarity Slider in Lightroom

The Clarity slider is one of the most useful in Lightroom when it comes to giving your images extra punch and impact. Today I’m going to show you several ways you can use it to improve your photos. But first, let’s take a look at exactly what the Clarity slider does, and how it differs from its cousin the Contrast slider.

This photo is ideal to demonstrate the difference:

It was taken on an overcast day and the light was very flat. This is confirmed by the histogram, which has gaps on both the left and right-hand sides (screen capture image to the right).

Now let’s see what happens when we set the Contrast slider, and then the Clarity slider, to their maximum settings of +100:

Data plot plugin for Lightroom

This is an introduction to Jeffrey Friedl's plug-in named Data plot which help you to plot a histogram of focal length, aperture, ISO, shutter speed... in your current Lightroom catalog.
After install this plugin, you will have an extra plugin option named JF data plot in menu File\Plug-in extras

Data plot plugin

How to Add A Plug-In To Lightroom

Example of Lightroom plugin (JF data plot)

If you’ve every said “I wish Lightroom would let me do X”, then you might be interested in a plug-in. These little packages provide a powerful way to extend the functionality and capabilities of Lightroom in a number of different areas. There are plug-ins for exporting images to other sites like Flickr, Facebook, or 500px; adding more options to the LIbrary Filter; managing and consolidating your keywords; adding new file types for exporting; and analyzing your catalog for camera, lens, and focal length usage. If you regularly send your images to retail stores for printing, there is likely an extension that will allow you to export directly from Lightroom to the store.

Finding Plug-Ins For Lightroom
A good place to start