Me

Lazy photographer’s Lightroom workflow.

This tutorial is for those of you who don’t want to edit every photo you take, but are using RAW for all the advantages it has. It gives you a quick solution, however it is not magic. Most photos can look better when manually tweaked to show their full potential.

Install Lightroom. Make sure it’s the latest version or at least 2.2.

Go to Edit/Preferences, Preset tab. Check ‘Make defaults specific to camera ISO setting’.

Go to Edit/Catalog Settings, Metadata tab. Check ‘Automatically write changes into XMP’.

Get your camera and a make a photo at every available ISO setting. Copy those files to the folder where you keep your RAW files.

Go to Library/New Folder. Select the folder where you keep your RAW files. If you don’t have a very fast computer, create a folder where you will temporarily keep the files you are working on, so you don’t keep all your files in the catalog. In the Import dialog make sure ‘Add photos to catalog without moving’ and ‘Develop settings: None’ is selected. Import photos to Lightroom.

Go to Develop module and select first photo.

On the left panel, Presets/Lightroom Presets select ‘Sharpen - Portraits’.

On the right panel, scroll down to ‘Camera Calibration’. Select Profile: Camera Faithful.

‘Details’: Sharpening is already set by the preset; Noise reduction will be set later, for now select Defringe: All edges.

‘Tone Curve’: Highlights: -10; Lights: 0; Darks: 10; Shadows: 10; Point Curve: Strong Contrast.

‘Basic’: Clarity: 20; Vibrance: 20.

Go down to the film strip and select all the photos (Ctrl-A). On the right panel, the button ‘Previous’ changes label to ‘Sync…’. Pressing that, the Synchronize dialog opens. Uncheck all and select only the following: Vibrance, Tone Curve, Clarity, Sharpening, Calibration and Chromatic Aberration.
Now select every photo in turn, and for the current ISO setting adjust Noise Reduction to your liking (this is why you took all those photos with every ISO setting available to your camera).

These will be the default values. Now we have to save these so Lightroom will use them every time you import a photo. To do this hold Alt and on the right panel the ‘Reset’ button changes label to ‘Set Default…’ Pressing that button you save the default settings for your camera and ISO setting. Make sure you haven’t touched any of the white balance or exposure sliders or they will be saved also as defaults. Save defaults for every ISO setting.

We’re done setting up Lightroom. Go back to Library module and remove the test photos from the catalog, and import some real photos to verify that the defaults where saved correctly. Make sure they don’t have any .xmp files besides them, or Lightroom will ignore defaults and use the saved values.
You can just copy your files to the folder used for RAW’s and synchronize that folder in Lightroom. Any new file will be imported.

Now the usual workflow:

Import photos using Develop Settings: None.

Correct white balance if needed. This should always be the first step, because white balance influences how exposure is calculated. You can use Sync to copy settings from one photo to the others.

Go down to the film strip and select all photos. Right click/Develop Settings/Auto Tone. You will notice that Lightroom tends to make photos too dark because it overuses Contrast and Brightness. To correct this, reset Brightness to 50 and Contrast to 25. Then synchronize this to all photos.

Congratulations, you’ve finished editing. This gives you a natural look something close to the real thing, if you want more punch you can try in Camera Calibration, Profile: Camera Standard or Camera Landscape but be aware that they tend to over saturate and blow out bright colors. For landscapes you can apply the Lightroom preset ‘Sharpen – Landscapes’.