Landscape Photographer: Why I Don’t Use Global Sliders in Lightroom

When you use Lightroom, do you edit globally or locally? Many (possibly most) people use the global editing sliders liberally when processing an image. But landscape photographer Thomas Heaton‘s most recent video makes a good case for using mostly local adjustments and leaving those global sliders alone.

In a video released this past weekend, Heaton shows his viewers how his Lightroom workflow has slowly but surely evolved to include only two or three global adjustments in total. Instead, he recommends breaking an image—in this case a landscape captured in Iceland—into parts that are each edited individually using local adjustments like the brush tool and radial filter.

Obviously, this doesn’t apply equally well to all genres of photography, nor is it necessarily the “right” way to edit an image. But it is an interesting departure from the “typical” way many of us edit our RAW files. If you haven’t evaluated how you process an image since the first time you learned, you might want to give Heaton’s workflow a shot.