Editing Exposure in Lightroom

Little Blue Heron

I strongly believe in the "garbage in, garbage out" principle in photography.  The more you expose your photographs properly when you take the picture, the less you have to do and the more you can do when you have your photographs in the computer.  In the field, I'm not as concerned with taking pictures that look pretty right out of the camera as I am with taking pictures that retain detail in both the light and dark areas of the photograph, if possible, and I'm especially concerned with the light and dark portions of the bird.  Now there are exceptions, like when shooting silhouettes, but generally speaking, that's my goal.

The following description of how I edit photographs will be based on Lightroom, but there are many software programs that do all the same things I describe here.  They may have different names, but you should be able to find the the right controls in your software program to do what I've displayed below.  If you click on any of the images, even the smaller "straight out of the camera" images, you can see them larger.

Little Blue Heron

When shooting a light-colored bird, like this immature Little Blue Heron (photographed above), I want to make sure that I have details in the bright parts of its feathers.  Once I have the photograph in Lightroom, I then can make adjustments to make the photograph look prettier.  For this particular photograph, I increased the brightness a little to give the white feathers a little more punch, but I also watched the histogram at the top to make sure that the right hand "bump" didn't move so far to the right that I would begin losing detail in the feathers. I also added some vibrance and saturation to the photograph.  I did this for two reasons: 1) it makes the photograph a little more colorful and 2) it tends to darken the blues.  So when I raised the brightness I lost some blues in the water, but I got it back when I raised the vibrance.

Be careful about adding vibrance and saturation.  Both add color, though to my eyes, adding vibrance creates a little more natural feel.  Adding too much saturation can make the photograph look a little fake.  I like my images very colorful, partly because I have red-green colorblindness, which (as best as I can describe it) tends to desaturate those colors.  But it's easy for me to overdo it.

Original Image Out of Camera
(cropping only)

Osprey

Osprey

When shooting a bird with darker feathers, like Osprey, I want details in those darker feathers.  So I usually slightly overexpose the photograph. So in the computer, I lowered the exposure and slightly raised the brightness of the photo.  Then I added fill light.  Fill light is a great tool.  It adds exposure to the darker portions of the photograph.  This allows me to get back in the shadows what I lost when I lowered the exposure.  The face looked a little dark to me, and I wanted to make that a little brighter.  I then added vibrance to add a little color.

Let me also mention the slider for blacks.  Lightroom automatically sets this to 5 when I import RAW photographs, and usually this is a very good starting place.  If the portions of the photograph that are supposed to be black look grey, I'll use this slider to make them look right again.

Original Image Out of Camera
(cropping only)

This is what I do for photographs that look basically right and need only minor adjustments.  In a future post, we'll look at making larger adjustments for when lighting conditions are not favorable or when you just plain make a mistake in exposure.