How I Edit My Pictures + Free and Premium Lightroom Presets

I have gotten a lot of questions on how I edit my pictures, so I have decided to share all of the details with you and also give away some of the presets I created, and the one I use to edit the pictures on this blog.

If you are always dissatisfied with your photos and wish you could edit them to sharpen them up a little, this post is for you. You will learn about all of the tools and methods I use to create images that stand out without the need for a high-end phone or even a DSLR.

Before I got my iPhone 11 Pro Max, which I’ve only used twice for photos on this blog, I was mostly using smaller phones like my Samsung Galaxy A10, my friends’ iPhone 6, 7 Plus, and 11 Pro. You can see some of the pictures by clicking the links on each phone model.

The pictures would not be perfect at first, but with a few tweaks here and there, they would become a thing of beauty. My editing app and its fantastic free features deserve full credit.

The Best Apps for Photo Editing

I have not used many apps, but I have experimented with a few to determine which one to use. Some of my favorites are Lightroom, VSCO, PicsArt, and Snapseed.

I currently use only Lightroom, and it’s been great for me. Lightroom and VSCO do almost the same things, so I did not need to keep both.

Snapseed, on the other hand, is quite different, with features that are either premium in Lightroom or completely absent. Snapseed includes tools such as healing or object removal, whitening, and image overlay. I’ve previously used this app to convert the yellow walls of my room to white and add bokeh effects to my photos.

I used PicsArt a lot in the past for fancy things like putting my portrait between the pages of a book or changing my wall to the page of a book, which was all cool at the time.

In this post, you are going to learn how to edit pictures with the Lightroom app because this is what I use at the moment.

Why I Edit My Pictures with Adobe Lightroom Mobile App

The preset feature was the main reason I began using Lightroom. I liked how someone could edit their pictures, copy the edits, package them as a DNG file, and send them to you from anywhere. And you can easily import that DNG file and copy and paste the edits onto your own pictures. This is called a preset, and it seemed miraculous.

As time passed, I became more acquainted with the app, and this was when I discovered so many other amazing features that I now use to edit my photos. We’ll go over those features later in this post.

How I Edit my Pictures — Step-by-Step Lightroom Photo Editing Tutorial

If you don’t already have the Lightroom app, you should download it and sign in so you can follow along easily.

Step 1: I Import My Pictures

There are two ways I import my pictures into Lightroom. The first is by clicking the photo icon with a plus sign on the bottom right of my Lightroom app and selecting the photos I want to import. The second method is by sending the pictures directly to Lightroom from my gallery.

For the first option, make sure that you know which folder the pictures are in because sometimes the pictures you want to edit will not come up as the first few pictures in the folder on Lightroom, no matter how recent they are.

Step 2: I Start Editing

I can start editing my pictures now that I’ve imported them. If I don’t want to use a preset to edit, I simply go from scratch. I use a few tools for my pictures, all of which work together to produce a satisfactory result. I’ll go over each of these tools and explain how I use them.

1.       Crop

The crop tool is one Lightroom tool that I really cannot do without. This feature is easy to overlook because even your phone’s editor can perform this basic task. The straighten feature, however, is one in which I am particularly interested. This feature allows me to straighten my images to my taste. I don’t like tilted pictures at all and will always use the crop tool to straighten them out or change their aspect ratio.

2.       Auto

When I don’t feel like editing on my own, I’ll use the auto tool to apply Lightroom-suggested edits to my picture. In this case, the app simply analyzes my picture and then selects settings that it believes will improve it.

3.       Light

What good is editing if I can’t work with light? One thing is certain: pictures will not always turn out exactly how we want them to, but that does not mean we should throw them away for a flaw that a simple adjustment to the lighting could correct. This tool allows me to improve the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, and tone curves of my pictures. I toggle through each of these tools until I find a number that works best for the picture I’m trying to edit.

4.       Color

Color manipulation is my best part of photo editing. Some colors in my photos bother me, and this tool allows me to change the hue or saturation of those colors. For example, red doesn’t look good on my theme, so I increase the hue to orange, which gives me a more pleasing result. In addition, I use the temp tool to warm up my picture or cool it down if it has a golden cast that I don’t like. I use vibrance to make my colors stand out and saturation to boost them equally.

5.       Effects

I only use two tools here, one of which is the clarity tool, which I use to make the edges of the objects in my picture more or less softened. I don’t overdo this because the effect can give my image an unappealing appearance. The second tool I use here is Dehaze, which allows me to remove haze or fog from my picture. Grain is another tool that can be found here. I used to work with it, but I don’t fancy that aesthetic anymore.

6.       Details

I only come here for two tools: the sharpening and noise reduction tools. The sharpening tool specifically improves bits of my image by sharpening the details. The noise reduction tool smoothens out the objects in my picture by reducing the luminance noise. If my image contains multiple color casts, also known as color noise, I use the color noise reduction tool to remove them.

7.       Optics

The last tool I use is optics. In this case, I use the remove chromatic aberration tool to remove color fringes that appear in my picture between bright light and a sharp edge. The lens correction tool helps me remove distortion from my pictures.

Step 3: Paste and Export

If I’m editing multiple related pictures, I don’t edit them one at a time; instead, I copy the edits from the one I’ve already edited and paste them on the other pictures. When I’m finished, I save it to my camera roll.

There you have it! These are basically all the tools and methods I use in editing my pictures.

My Personal Preset and How to Get it

If you want to get the exact preset I use on my pictures on this blog, you can get it from my Selar page, which is linked below.

If you have a friend who could use my presets to improve the quality of their pictures, please feel free to gift them one. You can send the Soft Teal preset as a gift through my Selar page below.

Free Lightroom Preset and How to Import it

Since I began using Lightroom in 2020, I’ve created tons of presets. These were the results of all the great edits I’d done to my photos, and I loved saving them for later use. I have given away a lot of these presets for free, and as a dedicated reader of this blog, I want you to have one as well.

Fill this form below and the free preset will be sent to your inbox immediately.

Here are the steps for importing the free preset into your Lightroom app.

How to Import a Lightroom Preset

• Download the DNG file
• Send it to your Lightroom app or import it from your gallery using the method I shared earlier
• Open the image on Lightroom
• Go to options and select Create Preset
• Name the preset and save it to a folder of your choice
• Open the picture you want to edit and click on the preset icon to apply the preset you have saved.
• Make sure to click on the mark sign to close the preset section.
• You can also use the copy-and-paste method to apply presets to your pictures.

Conclusion

Now that you know how I edit my pictures and have access to my presets, I’m excited to see what you create with them. When you do, use the hashtag #ijeawelepreset so I can see how lovely they look

Happy Editing!