In a post earlier this week, I mentioned that I typically limit my photo effects to three main “looks”–black & white, natural vivid color, and a slightly de-saturated warmer white balance.  The three treatments are applied to the same photo from last week’s engagement photo shoot with Jackie and Mark (more to come after the post-processing!).

To create the different versions of photos using Lightroom, you need to create Virtual Copies. To do this, choose Photo in the main menu toolbar at the top of the screen > Create Virtual Copy, or press Control + ‘ (Windows) or Command + ‘ (Mac). From there, you can create a copy of the photo that can be manipulated in any way.

In the natural, vivid color version, I use Lightroom to recapture the vivid color that usually shows up in the camera’s LCD panel. Have you ever had that happen to you–when you look at your camera, and the colors look amazing, but then you look at the digital image and the photo looks dull because the colors are flat? You can fix this by going into lightroom, and in the toolboxes on the right side of the screen, scroll down to the Camera Calibration Section, and there is a pull down menu labeled “Profiles.” From there, you can select the profile that suits your photo–options include portrait and landscape. This re-inserts the brighter more vivid colors into your photograph that you originally saw on your camera’s LCD panel.

In this black and white photo, I first converted the photo to grayscale. After that, I increased the contrast slightly using the contrast slider (it’s best to avoid too much contrast, otherwise it tends to age the person in the photo by giving them deeper wrinkles and skin blemishes), increased the clarity slider (which sharpens details and is also located on the toolbox on the right side of Lightroom), and slightly increased the exposure.

In this last image, I added an aged look to the photo. First, I decreased the Vibrance slider by 25 (in the lightroom toolbox on the right), which desaturates the colors without making skin color look zombie like (if you use the Saturation slider, zombie skin is ineveitable). Then I manually changed the temperature of the photo which shifts the white balance of the photo.  In adding an aged look to the photo, I shifted the balance slightly to the right, which makes the photo warmer.  After doing this, I also slightly increased the exposure to increase the person-sitting-in-a-sunbeam look.   

If you’re interested in checking out Lightroom, there is a FREE BETA (!) available from Adobe at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/. If you’re using previous versions of Lightroom, be forewarned that your photo catalogs will not update in the beta version of Lightroom 3, so proceed with caution if you don’t want your existing catalog to be emptied.