10 Lightroom Tips You Should Know in 2020

I have been a photographer for the better part of the decade, and during that time I’ve compiled some tips and tricks that I’d love to share with you to make your Lightroom experience a lot more pleasant.

Let’s face it: we all get a little annoyed at how long it takes to do things in Lightroom from time to time, and not all of us have the latest and greatest iMac Pro to speed up our editing by 1,000 percent. So I decided to compile 10 tips to help you speed up your Lightroom experience from super basic to pro-level.

TIP 1: Auto Edit 

Okay, here we go, super basic stuff! If you are a newbie to the wonderful world of photo editing using Lightroom Classic, you may find this simple tip rather helpful to get your photos looking a little decent.

There is a button above the exposure slide that says “Auto.” Click that button to let the Lightroom algorithm edit your photo. The edit will be very basic and certainly nothing to boast about, but it will serve as a great base point for your image if you want to push it a little further.

Tip 2: Crop Overlays

Sometimes you can’t find the right crop for your image. Maybe it’s because you don’t have the tools you need to make the right decision when it comes to cropping. Let’s fix that.

This is another easy tip, but it’s a tip I use every single time I edit. While in your crop tool, hit the “O” key to change the crop overlay. You will see several options from the golden circle to specific cropping options for printing.

Find one you can use to give your image a different look simply by cropping.

TIP 3: Clean Up Your Radial Filter

Alright, let’s get into a more of a pro-level tool. If you are already using the radial filter tool, awesome. Let’s make sure you are using that to its fullest potential.

We know how it works: you can use this tool to emphasize or deemphasize an area of an image, but for this example, we will use it to emphasize the subject of the image. Let’s start by using it to emphasize our couple. As you can see below, they are now the brightest part of the image, but there is a lot of haloing happening here.

Let’s fix that by first pushing the “O” key to see the overlay we are working on while we are in the radial tool:

Now, let’s choose our brush within the radial tool, select the erase option, make sure Auto Mask is selected so our brush intelligently avoids our couple, and now let’s get to cleanup.

Now that we have everything cleaned up, let’s hit the “O” key again to see the fruits of our work, and now, bam! That is a nice and clean filter we have applied there.

For additional tips, check out the rest of the video above. If you’d like to join our educational community, you can do that here on our Facebook page. To connect with me personally, I’m the most active on Instagram.

For now, enjoy the rest of the tips on the following video, and definitely be sure to check out Tip 10 at the end!