Workflow - 4 sliders

As we have learned there are a lot of different parts to making photographs, and any one of them can be broken down into a myriad of steps. This can (and sometimes does) become overwhelming.

The thing that is important about this small section of your workflow is that you strive to get the correct feel in the image. Also keeping the movements on these sliders small and not go to extremes. Making the changes slowly will help you see the subtle differences that occur...go too fast and you're wasting your time.

Once you have opened your image in Lightroom, you should be spending the vast majority of your time only working with these four sliders. IF you find yourself making changes that are dramatically different than the original image you need to go back and work on your exposure technique. No...we haven't gone over that yet, but we will...

In the beginning of your image-making it is very important to make sure your images portray a sense of 'reality' or that they fall within the 'Range of Acceptability'. Remember my little saying:

"Every image deserves two things...a little bit of white and a little bit of black".

Here are the six steps I want you to do when you first start to work on a new image (or even an old image).

1. Exposure
2. Blacks
3. Recovery
4. Fill Light
5. Go back and do steps 1-4 again.
6. Go back and do steps 1-4 again.



Please don't cheat yourself and skip steps 5 or 6. Seriously, they are so important that I can't ask you strongly enough to really do those steps with care. Re-evaluation is a very important part of post-production, and really it is a very important part of every step of the process. You NEED to be willing to go back and ask yourself the hard question of whether or not you truly did your best job when going through those six steps.

If you are curious about the Curves box, feel free to play with how that works also. I would suggest either working in Curves -OR- those four sliders, but try not to do both as they tend to do funny things if you do extreme movements with both tools at the same time.



It is also very important to understand that there is a cause/effect relationship between each of those four sliders. If you change one of them, it effects all of the histogram. This is the reason why going back and looking to see if what you did is truly what you want the end result to look like is so important. As you move through those steps you will find that the movements become smaller and smaller and the decision of where you want the image to be might actually become harder. When you are approaching that point you know you are close. If you are ready to quit out of desperation or out of confusion, it is time to take a step back from the computer, take a little walk and clear your head.

Sometimes looking AWAY from the computer screen is the best thing you can do when working on your images.