You may see that “Built in Lens Profile” is applied under Lens Corrections. Lightroom automatically recognizes your lens from the raw file metadata and applies the corrections. You can manually select the Lens Profile, Make and Model if you don’t see them.
Set the camera and lens profile to ensure that all the details captured by the camera are accurately represented.
Lightroom: White Balance Adjustment
Evening images can be difficult. Colors can be affected by conditions such as light pollution, twilight, and the light of the moon.
The WB Temp and Tint slides are located at the top of the basic panel. The Temp is moved to the left for a cooler temperature. You can move it to the left to get a cooler tone. You can fine-tune the Tint to get the perfect White Balance.
Don’t go overboard when editing night photos with Lightroom. You can easily go overboard and end up with an unnatural, garish photo.
Adjust contrast and exposure
Adjust the White slider in the Basic panel to restore the detail in the highlights. This will prevent clipping of the bright areas. Set the Black slider to the appropriate level in order to get the best detail from the shadows.
To achieve a vibrant and bold image, you can also fine-tune the Exposure and Contrast slides. Next, adjust the dark areas using the shadows and the brighter areas with highlights. Don’t overdo it with the adjustments, or you will end up with a washed-out or too dark result.
- Customize hue, saturation, and luminance
Move the HSL Panel after making adjustments to the Basic. Eight color sliders are available in this section to control Hue and Saturation. These settings should be used with care to preserve the natural look of the sky. However, you can boost colors to bring out more tonal variation in night photographs.
- Sharpening the image in the Detail Panel
Zoom in at least 100% to see the edges of the image.
The Amount slide sets the amount of sharpening. Zero indicates no sharpening. Sharpening images with lower values will result in cleaner images. So don’t go too far.
Radius is used to determine the size of edges that are sharpened. Images with fine details require a lower setting.
Detail allows you to adjust the way sharpening affects edges. Lower settings reduce blurriness. Higher values enhance the texture of the image.
Masking Slider: At 0, sharpening is uniform throughout the image. Sharpening will be restricted to the edges that are stronger as the number increases.
Reduce noise in the Detail Panel
Noise can be a problem when editing night photos with Lightroom. Zoom into the photo at 100 percent to see the noise as well as the effects of the sliders.
The Luminance slide reduces luminance noise. This slider is used to reduce noise.
Detail Sets the noise threshold. Primarily used for images with high noise levels. The higher values keep the detail but produce a noisier image. Lower settings produce images that are cleaner but with some loss in detail.
The Contrast slide is best for noisy photos. The higher the setting, the more contrast you will get. However, it may also result in noisy areas. Lower values result in a more smoothed-out image.
Color reduces noise in color. Avoid pushing it too hard because it could remove the color you’d like to keep.
Details define the threshold for color noise. High settings can maintain thin edges, but they may also leave color blotches. Lower values remove the blotches but can result in color bleeding.
Editing night photos is mostly a balancing act. You’re always trying to improve one aspect of the photo while keeping any negative effects to a minimum.
- Remove Chromatic Aberration
This distortion appears as a border of color around the edges of objects with high contrast.
The Lens correction panel can be found directly below the Details panel. Set this panel to manual to adjust the Amount slides to reduce the purple and green aberration.
To further reduce the anomaly, adjust the Purple Hue slider and Green Hue. You can move the endpoints in order to change the color range.
You can also reduce Vignetting in this panel. You can also increase it if you want to.
- You can make fine adjustments to your presence
Lightroom’s non-destructive editing means you can return to any panel to refine settings and further enhance your photo.
presence settings can be found at the bottom of Basic.
The texture slider can be used to enhance and diminish the medium-sized details of a photo without affecting finer details.
The Clarity slide controls the contrast between the edges of mid-tones. This setting increases the sharpness of an image. Decrease it to soften the image.
The Dehaze slide affects atmospheric elements such as fog or haze, which reduce contrast and obscure details. Slide this slider to the left to reduce the haze. You can also add moodiness to your photos by moving the slider left.
The Vibrance slide can be used to increase the saturation of an image. This adjustment will preserve colors that have already been saturated and boost colors that need it.
The Saturation slide enhances or reduces colors throughout the entire image.
- Lightroom: Apply local adjustments
The various panels within the Develop Module affect the entire image. You may only want to alter the appearance of one part of your photo. You may want to reduce the exposure if the moon appears too bright. The rest of the picture will remain as it is. You may want to enhance the detail of the lower half of an image if it appears too dark. The Histogram is where you will find these local adjustments.
Lightroom’s Gradient Filter and Adjustment brush allow you to make selective adjustments for exposure and tone.
By “painting” on a part of a photo, the Adjustment Brush can change exposure, clarity, brightness and other aspects.
A gradient tool or Graduated filter can create the same effect over a large area of an image. This region can be made as large or small as desired.
The mask tool uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make specific edits on the subject or sky. The mask appears as an overlay on which you can make changes to Tones, Color Details etc. This tool also allows you to select people.
