March 14, 2022

An insider’s guide to Adobe Lightroom By Keydrin Keylo Franklin

A photo speaks for itself and when it does so, it speaks volumes. For your photos to stand out and do the talking, there are certain techniques that you need to incorporate in your style to enhance and take your photography to another level. With the availability of several editing tools, Adobe Lightroom is a holy grail for your photos. Although, a lot of people seem to be intimidated by Adobe Photoshop, let alone Adobe Lightroom and they avoid using it altogether or they use it incorrectly without following a proper workflow. Colour grading your images has a dramatic influence on your images. It can either make or break your images. And thus, for the very same reason, the ever-enthusiastic team of Capturing WOW got in touch with a Texas-based fashion photographer and a content creator, Keydrin Keylo Franklin to organize a webinar on the topic “Workflow on Adobe Lightroom” to help you out in upscaling your editing and photography skills.

Keydrin Keylo Franklin began his career by starting “924 photography” in 2011, and ever since he has been spearheading the industry. The name “924 photography” has a very inspiring backstory which we all can take motivation from. It all began when he purchased his first camera, a Nikon D1300 on September 24, 2011, out of passion and hobby to capture the beauty of the earth in all its form what followed next is history, the passion evolved into 924 photography and has grown into a family of tens of thousands of photographers that look up to Keydrin. He has an audience of over 116k on Instagram and he continues to educate his 31.1k audience on YouTube through various educational videos that include tips, tricks, and methods to enhance their photography skills, mostly focusing on topics like colour grading and retouching.

Our Chief Energy Officer, Luv Israni, hosted the session with gusto and welcomed Keydrin and the audience. The excitement could be evidently seen in the comments section, and finally, the wait was over. Keydrin began the Capturing WOW Dialogue session by sharing his screen and editing a raw image in real-time, explaining each step, each trick, and personal insights in depth.

He emphasised the use of a loop deck or Wacom tablet, but just for our audiences showed how it could be done without those by just using a regular keyboard and mouse. Having a colour-calibrated monitor is a prerequisite and a must-have before you begin editing your images in Lightroom. The workflow shared by Keydrin is such that one must first edit the raw file on Lightroom and then move to Photoshop. He introduced us too:

* Basic Panel

* Tonal corrections

* HSL

* Colour grading tool

* Lens correction

* Saturation

* Masking

* Vibrance

* Sharpening

* Tonal curves

* Subject selection

Some insight tips included working on your shadows first and going easy with the texture, clarity, and dehaze. Keydrin emphasised more on saturation and how it should not be more than 5% whereas advised to go opposite incase of vibrance with the flexibility of going as much up as you can for instance up to 35%.

While editing it is advised to focus on the screen instead of the scroller to get the color right. The HSL tab happens to be his favourite and suggested working on this tab in the following order :

* Luminescence

* Saturation

* Hues

The HSL tab helps brilliantly in correcting the skin tones and the background, for example, an orange hue can be used to correct the skin tone while yellow for the greenery behind and aqua for the sky. One of the greatest advantages of using a Lightroom is that it gives you more control over your image. If light conditions aren’t so great while shooting, you can always fix it up on Lightroom and hence Keydrin usually shoots in a darker setup but advises this only for shooting portraits.

Quick expert tip: Take short breaks during editing for long hours as after a point all colours may appear to be similar

To sharpen your image, Keydrin advises using the masking feature on Lightroom and sharpening on the specific areas only. One of the greatest and the newest features on Lightroom is the subject selection feature that takes your images to an altogether different level as said by Keydrin.

in this feature one can select and isolate the picture and edit only the isolated part, leaving the background unaffected.

Another thing one can do with this feature is work on the background by inverting the mask while subject selection. This way, the background becomes the subject and now and you can work on it leaving the central subject unaffected.

He also taught how to use the patch tool to correct minor blemishes and distractions along with Luminar AI to insert additional objects in the images, in this case, the extra cloud in the sky. In the end, he introduced and taught how to use a patch tool to polish and retouch minor disturbances without affecting the texture of the image.