How to use local editing tools in Adobe Lightroom and why you may want to avoid using sliders

posted Monday, July 8, 2019 at 2:30 PM EDT

Adobe Lightroom, both the Classic and newer CC versions, are very user friendly for a variety of reasons. One of the most intuitive and accessible way to process and edit your raw photos is through the user of sliders, such as exposure, contrast and saturation sliders, just to name a few. Photographer Thomas Heaton does a lot of editing inside of Lightroom, but he doesn't edit using sliders. Instead, he opts for the use of localized adjustment tools in Lightroom.

In the video below, Heaton works on an image from Iceland and shows his Lightroom editing workflow from start to finish. He relies quite heavily on localized editing. This means that he uses local adjustment tools to select specific parts of an image and then adjust the way that it looks, building up the final image area by area. For example, when editing a landscape image, you may want to edit the sky much differently than you'd like to edit the foreground, which cannot be achieved exclusively through the use of global adjustment sliders. To follow along with Heaton and learn why he made the adjustments he did inside of Lightroom, watch the full video below.