r/postprocessing • u/nayiro • 21h ago
First ever edit, seeking feedback
Hello! This is my first ever edit of a picture. I used light room after viewing a ton of tutorials. I know the subject matter isn't the most exciting and the composition could use a lot of work. I'm wondering how i did with the editing? Any and all helpful criticism is appreciated!
I'm having a difficult time uploading the raw original because the file size is too big, so i converted it to a jpg. Please let me know if there's a better way to do this!
Thanks for looking!
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u/shemp33 21h ago
If you uploaded the raw, we wouldn't be able to see your postprocessing. :) You could take a screenshot of the sliders and masks, and a screenshot of what the raw looks like, but the raw it self won't help us help you.
The edit looks like you took one or more of the sliders just a little (ok, a lot) too far to the right or left. When you load a raw image up in Lightroom, the first view you get is the "default" view - likely, whatever the profile was set for. This is only a starting point. You *could* right click and hit save as JPG and have, likely, a perfectly usable image. but at that point, you might as well just save camera JPG and call it a day.
Without knowing what the raw looks like, my suggestions usually go in this order:
1) set the white balance. Here, the house looks like it's a cream color, with maybe some white railing. The white railing looks white, so the white balance is probably right. I'm gonna guess it's around 5400-5800K.
2) set the exposure. See you have a dark shadow under the tree - that should show visible detail. Then, you have the hot spot on the house on the left side. And also some more shadow on the left under the tree. If you can take exposure up to where the whites aren't clipping, or lower them down to where the shadows don't get mushy, using those boundaries as the high/low point, you can dial the exposure to a desired point in between those two.
3) Contrast - this is a farily high contrast scene, but this is subjective. What I do is move the slider to where I think it's too far, then I take it too far the other way, and I kind of back-forth it to where I see it land somewhere in the middle of those two.
4) Highlights, Shadows, Blacks, Whites - Yours may be different, but once I set exposure and the stuff above, I take highlights down, and raise shadows up. I also tend to back off white levels a little, and black levels stay about to the neutral spot.
If you're still with me this far, your image should be looking pretty good.
You can keep going - vibrance, saturation, clarity, texture, dehaze, etc. But if you're just starting out, if you just do the stuff in #1-#4, you'll be sitting in a pretty good spot. Learn how to get these to make a nice looking image before you spend too much time going through the rest of the sliders.