Did you know you can colour grade and edit videos in Adobe Lightroom?
Jul 20, 2017
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Lightroom isn’t the first tool that usually springs to mind when it comes to creating videos. In fact, most people don’t know Lightroom even supports video files. I certainly didn’t, but then I’ve never tried it. As it turns out, though, it does. And you can grade, cut and edit your footage all within Lightroom itself.
This video from photoshopCAFE shows us five cool tricks to edit our videos within Lightroom. From colour grading to rendering out your final video, it’s got you covered.
The video covers the basic steps you need to produce a video using any software. Colour grading, trimming, editing and saving out your final video.
- 0:15 – How to colour grade video in Lightroom
- 3:03 – Create and use presets with video
- 4:53 – How to make photos from a video
- 5:48 – How to trim videos
- 7:24 – Combine videos into a final edit
Ok, so you might not be producing Hollywood standard blockbusters from within Lightroom, but it’s a great quick way to put together a montage of clips.
If you’re going to be doing video more seriously, you’re still probably better off with something like Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve. But Lightroom looks fantastic for cutting those short travel videos together. The colour correction and grading advantages of an application like Lightroom are also pretty fantastic for that sort of thing.
Have you edited videos in Lightroom? Did you even know it was capable of it?
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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One response to “Did you know you can colour grade and edit videos in Adobe Lightroom?”
Hi John,
I was initially excited when I learned about this. But many of the adjustments are greyed out so you’ll want to be careful. For instance, if you add any clarity, dehaze, lens corrections, shadows/highlights adjustments or sharpening in the frame, when you sync to the video file, those edits won’t come over.
So you will still need to add these effects later in dedicated video editing software.
The other issue, and i think the bigger one, is that you still need to export from LR, and to keep the changes you made you will need to export to h264. Importing and then working with these files in your video editing software typically, but not always, takes longer and consumes more resources because of the compression. So now you’ve had to wait twice to edit the same files, still needed to edit them in both programs and made the whole experience slower and with less quality.
In the end, it’s probably best to learn to use the color correction and other tools in your video editor, even though they don’t make it as easy or organized as lightroom.