Just For Fun | Lightroom Edits Before and After

For the first 7 years of being in business, I did not use an Adobe program to edit my pictures. (I know, shocker!) I used Apple’s program, Aperture, their version of Lightroom, to edit my pictures. I did it for two reasons: 1) it was cheaper at the time than Lightroom and 2) it was very user friendly and easy to use. I honestly didn’t do a lot of research into Lightroom or Photoshop and found that I could do the edits I needed in Aperture and produce great quality work. However, two years ago, Apple decided to stop updating Aperture and no longer make it. At this point, I was forced to hop on over to the Adobe train and learn how to use Lightroom.

I’ll say it was a blessing in disguise. I really needed to learn how to use the Adobe programs. With Adobe having the market cornered in editing software, pretty much any photographer out there uses Lightroom, Photoshop, and/or Bridge to edit their pictures. If I ever wanted editing help, tips or tricks, I needed to be editing on the same software as my fellow photographers.

This past year and a half, I have worked very hard to learn Lightroom and improve the quality of the pictures for my clients. To see a RAW image on camera and see the edits afterwards is just awesome. I love the changes I can make and how great the pictures look afterwards. I love that Lightroom has a before and after setting to where you can see the pictures side by side. Just for fun, here are some recent edits I did of personal and business related images! I’d love to hear your thoughts of the before and after images!

I love how much you can see the clouds now in this picture. I didn’t add them or make them up, but you can see that I just made them pop more by taking the highlights and exposure down and brought out the color so you could see them better.
This is a fun edit I did of Levi at the ice cream shop last week. I love the definition of his curls and obviously just how clean the edited picture looks. I love this split edit where you can see what the original was on the left and the edited was on the right.This edit is the one I am most proud of, probably ever. I know it’s not that big of a deal for the most skilled Photoshop editors out there, but I did all of this in Lightroom and edited out the entire red light pole that I felt was super distracting in the picture. I know it’s not the best edit and there are a few tiny flaws in it, but I was very happy with this edit and how it turned out!
Sometimes a picture just looks better in black and white. I corrected the white balance in this picture to make it less cool, but even after changing the white balance, I felt like the black and white was the best edit. 

Thanks for checking out this post! Let me know what you think!