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How to Creatively Alter the Light in Your Photo Using Lightroom

photo of a Tokyo streetscape after being fixed in Lightroom

Learn how to fix problem light and enhance your vision for your photos in Lightroom.

If you’re like most of us, you’ve taken photos from time to time that you’ve had high hopes for, only to realize later on that they didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped. Often what looks like awesome light when you captured the image, just doesn’t translate to great light when you view the photo on your computer screen.

When the photos you’ve captured are once in a lifetime memories they deserve better than this. Thanks to Lightroom they can be improved, fairly quickly and easily. In this video you’ll see how to relight a photo in Lightroom. You’ll learn techniques that you can use on your photos to move the light from where it is now to where you want it to be.

You will see how to use the Graduated Filter to darken skies, how to use the Radial Filter and the Adjustment Brush to bring light and saturation to where you want it to be.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big advocate of using the correct settings and capturing a good photo right in the camera. I’m also pragmatic and I know that, despite the best of intentions, the photos you capture don’t always look as good you’d like. Lightroom can help.

So here’s how you can use Lightroom’s tools to improve a photo. This rather lifeless Tokyo streetscape is improved so it is a crisper, shinier image with light and saturated color where it should be. This is something you can do too.

We’d like to see what you do with these tools and your photos, so feel free to show us in the comments below.

Update: if you don’t have Lightroom check out this special deal Adobe currently have for dPS readers.

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Helen Bradley
Helen Bradley

is a Lifestyle journalist who divides her time between the real and digital worlds, picking the best from both. She writes and produces video instruction for Photoshop and digital photography for magazines and online providers world wide. She has also written four books on photo crafts and blogs at Projectwoman.com.

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