How to Get the Most out of a Single Exposure Using Lightroom and Photoshop

This tutorial is all about getting the most out of your Lightroom + Photoshop workflow, pulling details out of an image, adjusting lighting so it works better, general image clean-up techniques all while editing in a non-destructive way.      

Tutorial length: About an hour

There is a lot of work that Adobe Lightroom can handle quickly before you bring an image into Photoshop to final it, so let's take a look at some of the common tweaks to a photo that can be made in Lightroom, then let's do the deeper editing work with Photoshop after we've gotten the quick stuff out of the way.

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This tutorial is an advanced tutorial and assumes you know the basics of Photoshop, how to open files, what Lightroom is, and I use a few hotkeys in the tutorial which are:

• "x" switches between foreground/background color
  
• Typing "1" when in a brush sets the opacity of that brush to 10% and typing "0" sets the brush opacity to 100%, etc
  
• Holding ALT while in a brush allows you to pick a color by sampling from the image, clicking sets that color
  
• CTRL + Click on a channel to create a selection from that channel
  
• CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + Click will step a channel's selection down in value
  
• CTRL + L opens a levels adjustment on a Channel or Layer
  
• Holding ALT while clicking the New Layer icon brings up options for the layer (ability to name it, blending mode, fill with 50% gray, etc)
  

Techniques Covered:

• Using Lightroom to tweak color range and value range
  
• Editing a daylight, slot canyon photo start to finish
  
• How to bring out details of an image without over-sharpening it
• Precision-editing light/value range with luminosity masking
• Sharpening
  
• General image clean-up

Software Required: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom

Prerequisites: 

None! I always recommend watching the Luminosity Masks: Dodge and Burn Like a Pro -- as that goes into one of the main techniques used here and in all other post production work.  Also, that tutorial is free (although tips $$ are appreciated!)

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