10 Tips for Optimizing Your Photos with Lightroom: A Primer on Basic Techniques

If you’re just starting out in Adobe Lightroom and would like some guidance on how you can use the software to improve your photographs, here’s a free lesson that may be of interest to you. Photography instructor Tim Grey shares his top 10 tips for optimizing photographs in Lightroom.

The talk runs for nearly 2 hours, so you’ll need to carve a chunk out of your day to watch it, but it could be helpful for anyone in need of a primer on some basic tools.

Grey offers a number of techniques that you can include in your image-optimization workflow beyond the basic Develop module, using adjustments to correct the noise, chromatic aberration, and perspective distortions seen in your photos.

In case you’d like to jump around in the video, here’s a “table of contents” with topics and the time at which they appear:

1. Start with the Basics (1:00)
2. Embrace “Presence” (20:00)
3. Isolate Colors (25:25)
4. Don’t Ignore Noise (33:20)
5. Check for Chromatic Aberrations (41:50)
6. Correct for the Lens (50:30)
7. Crop (Almost Always) (1:05:30)
8. Go (Virtually) Black and White (1:17:30)
9. Cleanup (and More) in Photoshop (1:27:00)
10. Get Targeted (1:42:45)

(via B&H Videos via Reddit)