Use the lockdown to master these seven photo editing skills

Many countries are in lockdown again, and many of us are stuck at home. If you don’t feel like learning and being creative, that’s perfectly fine. But if you do – this is the video for you. Spending time at home is ideal for mastering editing skills, and Nigel Danson has seven suggestions for you.

In the video above, Nigel talks about seven editing skills you can improve or learn from scratch: four in Lightroom and three in Photoshop.  He guides you through the edits of his images and gives you plenty of examples of how different editing tools can affect the final result.

Lightroom:

1.Color styling – the colors in your image determine the mood of the photo and the feeling that it conveys. So, mastering the color editing in Lightroom will help you improve the overall look of your images and add a new dimension to them.

2. Dehaze/Clarity –adjusting Clarity and Dehaze can add atmosphere and drama to your scene. Reducing Dehaze adds a bit of a glow to your images, and reducing the Clarity slider can do the same thing. Adam Gibbs has a video on this if you’d like to learn more:

3. Mask/filters – if you haven’t used Graduated and Radial filters, now’s the time to master them. With their help, you can add changes to particular parts of your shots. By pressing the Alt/Option key, you can see which part of the image is affected by the adjustment as you move the slider.

4. Keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom – using keyboard shortcuts makes the editing process faster and more efficient and lets you focus on the photo. Here are some of the basic Lightroom shortcuts you can learn today.

Photoshop:

5. Masks: understanding masks will take your editing skills to a higher level. In the video, Nigel uses them to blend two images together, but getting to understand how masks work opens a whole new world of editing possibilities.

6. Focus stacking: if you want to make the foreground and the background of the image equally sharp, focus stacking is the way to go. It also uses masks, and it’s ideal for landscape photography as well as for macro photography.

7. Removing objects: last but not least, removing minor distractions and imperfections in Photoshop will let you get your images to perfection. Clone Stamp Tool, Spot Healing Brush, and Content-Aware Fill will help you with this.

So, if you’re in a lockdown (or simply have some spare time), a good way to spend it is to learn some new skills or perfect the ones you already know. These are some of the suggestions, and you can find plenty more useful tutorials on our blog.

[7 Editing SKILLS you should learn during lockdown | Lightroom and Photoshop via ISO 1200]