One of the most exciting things that you can do in Lightroom CC is to use it to improve your photographs. And the editing controls in Lightroom CC are designed to help you do just that. They're both powerful in terms of what they let you do and at the same time they're presented in a streamlined way that makes them simple to discover and to use. This lesson is an overview of the editing controls and techniques in Lightroom CC. If you're following along with the sample files for this tutorial or with your own photos add those to Lightroom CC as explained in the first tutorial in this series. To remind you download the sample files from the tutorial page and then click the Add Photos button in Lightroom CC. Navigate to the sample files for this tutorial, tutorial number two in this get started series. Select the 2_sample_files folder and then click the Review for Import button on a Mac or the Choose Folder button on Windows. In the preview window that opens there's really only one thing to do and that is to go up to the Add to Album area and click the arrow there and click New, so you can create an album for these sample files, so you can easily access them as a group in Lightroom CC. I'll call this album Tut 2 and then I'll click Create. I'll leave all of these photos checked and come up to the top right and click the Add Photos button. To edit a photo select it here in the grid and then come over to the far right and click the Editing icon. Here you've got lots of controls to work with. The controls in the column that just opened are the global controls. They affect the entire photo. You have controls for adjusting Light and Color and if you scroll down you see that you have panels of other controls too to explore. And then over on the right, there is a Crop tool. And by the way if I do need to crop a photo that's usually what I do first so that I don't waste time editing areas that I'm going to crop away anyway. And then below that are some local editing tools, tools for editing just part of a photo. So, after I apply the Crop tool if I need to I usually come to the column of global editing tools and I'll just start at the top because it's easy to do it that way and use the controls that I think I need on my photo adjusting the lighting and then adjusting the color and then going down to some other panels if I need to. And of course, you can go out of order. So, if I have a photo with a really bad color cast I might first come here to the White Balance tools and correct that. So now we're worried about how I set up my workspace here. I usually will collapse this filmstrip at the bottom that shows you all the other photos in the selected source. To collapse the filmstrip come down to this icon in the Toolbar and click. And the other thing I like to do is to come over to this menu with the three dots. I call this the more menu and from there choose Single-Panel Mode. What this does is just keep one panel open at a time and this can be helpful when you're working on a smaller screen. So, notice that if I click on another panel the Light panel closes and the Color panel opens. Let's go up and open the Light panel and here we have sliders as our controls. Now you could just drag sliders and you can see that the image automatically changes. But sometimes you may want to have more control over these sliders. So, in that case you can click in the value field for a slider and then you can use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to adjust the slider in small increments. If you hold the Shift key that adjusts in larger increments. And then press Enter or Return on the keyboard. I find it really helpful when I'm editing to compare a before and after view. If you want to do that come down to the Toolbar and click this icon. And that shows you the original, the before view. And then click again and there's the after view with your edits. And of course, it's always important to know how to undo. If you go up to the Edit menu you can choose Undo there. It tells you exactly what you're undoing which is the last slider move that you made. So here I'm undoing that adjustment I've made to the Shadows slider. And you can keep going backwards in time that way and you also can move forwards in time with the Redo command or you can use the keyboard shortcuts: Command Z on a Mac or Control Z on a Windows machine for Undo and Redo is Shift Command Z on a Mac, Shift Control Z on Windows. And then if you want to revert everything back to the very beginning you can come over to the three-dot menu, the more menu and from there you can choose Revert to Original. And if you like keyboard shortcuts the shortcut for that is Shift R. Now that you have an overall feel for the editing controls you probably can't wait to dive down into them and get to work. But before we do that, and we will in the following tutorials in this series, let's see how to use presets to do some of the editing work for us in the next lesson in this tutorial.

 

If you're someone who likes applying filters to photos in different mobile apps then I'm pretty sure you're going to like the editing presets in Lightroom CC, which you'll find here in the desktop app and on the mobile app as well. They give you a quick way to change the look of a photo and as we'll see in this lesson they also come in handy as a way to learn what different editing controls are capable of. If you're following along with the sample files for this tutorial go to either the Tut 2 album that you made during import or up to All Photos and select this photo of the roses. Then go over and click the Editing icon or just press E on your keyboard to go into the editing workspace. And to set up for this lesson come down to the menu with the three dots on the right. And if Single-Panel Mode is checked like this click it to disable Single-Panel Mode because I want you to be able to open more than one panel at a time during this lesson. And open the Light panel and the Color panel and the Effects panel so you can see the sliders in those panels. Now let's take a look at presets. Go to the bottom of the column of editing controls and click Presets there. That opens another column with categories of presets that come with Lightroom CC. To open a category like the Color category just click its category name and then you'll see a list of presets. Now just hover over a preset, don't click the preset yet and keep your eye on the photo as you do that, and you'll see the photo change to give you a preview of how that preset will look on the full-size photo. So, this is useful not only for choosing the preset that you want to apply, it's also a great way to learn what some of the editing controls actually do. For example, I'm going to hover over this High Contrast preset. Notice in the Light panel on the right that the contrast slider is slid way over. And that's what creates this really edgy look with dark shadows and bright highlights. Let's hover over another one, the Natural preset and notice that other sliders in the Light and the Color panels have moved to other values. So that's a bit of a recipe that you could try on your own photos even when you're not using presets. So now I'm going to go back to the Presets and open another category, the B&W category. The B&W presets give you a quick way to convert a photo to black and white and as you can see as you hover over these you can get quite a different number of black and white looks. To emphasize the old-fashioned look of this photo I'm going to try out the B&W Sepia Tone. So now I'm just hovering over that. I like the look and so to apply the preset I'll click on the preset. Now here's something to keep in mind: Presets are cumulative and that means you can add more than one on top of another. So, to increase the antique look of this photo let's go down to another category, the Components category of presets and there I'm going to add a Vignette - 03 - Heavy so you can really see it. And maybe I'll add some grain too. And that's really all there is to applying presets to your photos. Now if you don't like a preset that you've applied, you can undo by going up to the Edit menu and choosing Undo or if you've applied multiple presets you may want to go over to the menu on the right with the three dots and from there Revert to Original or I just use the keyboard shortcut Shift R and that removes everything. If I undo, Command Z on the Mac or Control Z on the PC that's an undo of my Revert to Original step and so it brings back the multiple presets that I had apply to this photo. Now here's one extra tip: If you want to keep different versions of a photo, maybe each with a different preset in your Lightroom CC library, go up to the Edit menu and choose Make a Copy. Now I'm going to go down and open the filmstrip, so you can see that we now have two copies of the same photo. So now I could go and select this other photo in the filmstrip and I could give it a different look. Now that you know how simple it is to apply presets try out some other presets on some of the other sample files for this tutorial or on your own photos and try adding more than one to get a variety of different looks with just a couple clicks.

 

The last lesson in this tutorial covered the basics of using presets on your photos. Now let's take that one step further and learn how to create your own preset that you can use on other photos too. Select a photo from the Tut 2 album that you made at the beginning of this tutorial. if you're in the editing workspace now you can select this photo from the filmstrip or you can select it here in the grid view and then go up and click the Editing icon. I'm going to open my presets by going to the bottom of the screen and clicking Presets. I'd like to make a preset to bring out the warm tones like the pinks and golds in this urban scene. To save time I'll start with an existing preset. I'll go to the Presets panel and I'm going to open the Creative category of presets. And from there I'm going to apply the Warm Shadows preset. I like the way that looks but I'd like to change it a little bit opening up the darker areas of the photo. So, I'll go over to the Light panel in the column on the right and I'm going to drag the shadows slider over to the right. And I like that look better. So now I want to save this as my own preset. To do that I'll go to the top of the Presets panel, I'll click the three dots there and that opens a menu where I can choose to Create Preset. I think it's a good idea to give your presets meaningful names, so you can tell at a glance what they do. So, I'm going to call this one WS for warm shadows and then I'll say + 50 Shadows, and I'll click Save. Now I'll scroll down, and you can see that there's a User Presets category of presets and there's the new custom preset that I just made and saved, and I can apply this preset to any photos now or in the future. So, let's give it a try on another photo. I'll select this photo of cherry blossoms in the filmstrip and then I'll go back to the presets, I'll hover over my User Preset. If I like the way that looks I'll click to apply the preset to that photo and I might try it on different kinds of subjects too. Let's see how this preset looks on a photo of a person. I'll come over to the filmstrip and I'll select this photo and then I'll go back and hover over my User Preset and I really like the color and punch that the new preset adds to this photo, so I'll click to apply it here too. Now that you know how to make user presets in Lightroom CC have fun experimenting and making your own creative presets.