The second day of the week is often referred to as Taco Tuesday, but Shutterbug readers know it’s also Tutorial Tuesday when we often post the weekly lessons from Park Cameras—one of the leading photo retailers in the UK. This episode explains the difference between Vibrance and Saturation sliders, so you’ll understand when and how to put these simple sliders to use.

This demonstration takes place in Lightroom, but everything you’ll learn is equally applicable when processing images in Photoshop, Capture One, or just about any editing software you use. As you’ll see, Vibrance and Saturation adjustments work in similar ways but the difference is significant. And the choice you make depends both on the specific image you’re working on and the enhancements you have in mind.

Photographer Gareth Evans is today’s exuberant instructor, and his lessons are just as entertaining as they are informative. He kicks off the video like this: “The difference between Vibrance and Saturation is subtle, but it can also be quite meaningful in terms of how to decide to edit a photo.”

Evan uses a variety of images to illustrate the distinction between these important tools and how they affect different types of photos in different ways. His first example is a very colorful portrait with an intense red background, while other shots exemplify scenes in which colors aren’t intended to pop of the screen.

The portrait is a good place to start because it’s important to maintain clean and realistic skin tones while enhancing other tones with the shot. Evans explains that Saturation is the most straightforward slide because it affects all colors equally when pumping up a shot. His point is that saturated skin tones is rarely your goal when editing portrait photos.

Lightroom’s Vibrance slider, on the other hand, “is a little bit more subtle and natural in the way it increases saturation of colors.” That’s because this tool “specifically focuses on colors in the midtones.” The “more gentle” Vibrance tool also tends to boost less-saturated colors first, before pumping up more intense colors in an image.

Thus, Vibrance is generally a better to choose when skin tones are part of the equation. He provides a clear demonstration of how all this works when your goal is a “less aggressive” enhancement.

Of course, there are other types of photos for which the Lightroom’s Saturation tool is exactly what you want—especially for adjusting photos that were captured on dull days with flat light. Evans show you how to make these types of adjustments, and why the Vibrance tool is far less effective in situations like this.

The Park Cameras YouTube channel is well worth a visit, because there’s a wide-array of shooting and editing videos from which to choose that will greatly help you up your game.

And be sure to check out the tutorial we posted earlier from another great instructor who explains how to create pro-quality b&w images with a little help from Lightroom.

If you’re not paying attention to the histogram when processing images in Lightroom, well, shame on you. That’s because this powerful tool will simplify your workflow and help you achieve far better edits.

It’s unusual to find a four-minute tutorial that helps unlock Lightroom’s full potential, but that’s exactly what you’ll find in this eye-opening lesson from German photographer Maike Born. She provides a step-by-step guide for using the histogram to elevate your post-processing skills and quickly achieve stunning results.

This episode covers everything you need to know from how to interpret and manipulate histograms, adjusting exposure, and using the histogram to achieve optimum color balance. In short, it’s all about creating an ideal distribution of tones within every image you capture.

Born illustrates how keeping a close eye on the histogram enables you to evaluate and adjust shadows, midtones, and highlights in a photo. She put it like this: “In practical terms, the left side of the histogram corresponds with shadows, namely the dark areas that capture depth and dimension.”

Conversely, the right side of the histogram represents highlights to help you modify bright elements in an image to bring attention and enhance details to these areas within the frame. As you may suspect, the middle of the histogram pertains to midtones and contributes to the visual harmony of the photograph.

The bottom line is this: Lightroom’s histogram functions as a visual roadmap for evaluating the tones in an image to help you identify and correct any potential problems. Born demonstrates how peaks and valleys within this straightforward tool provide great insight into the distribution of tones, “allowing you to make informed decisions during the editing process.”

In basic terms, the histogram reveals three essential components of the image at hand: namely clipping, exposure and contrast. You’re no doubt familiar with the terms exposure and contrast, but what about clipping? As Born explains, this refers to the loss of detail due to underexposure and over exposure.

The “crucial” goal is to achieve optimum detail, contrast, and color balance in all tones throughout an entire image, and thanks to the histogram this task is easy to achieve. Just follow Born’s advice and add these techniques to your Lightroom workflow today.

After watching this video pay a visit to Born’s instructional YouTube channel where you’ll find a variety of straightforward tips for improving the look of your photographs.

And on a related note, check out an earlier tutorial we posted with another image-editing expert who explains an easy and effective Lightroom hack for rehabilitating landscape photographs with bad color.

Here’s the link to Born’s video

Here’s the frustrating thing about shooting sunsets: While these scenes are among the most popular that we capture, oftentimes our results fall far short of the splendor we witnessed through the viewfinder. That’s because the beautiful warm tones and a perfectly balanced  exposure can be very difficult to get right in the camera.

Fortunately it’s not difficult to restore an unimpressive shot with the Lightroom editing method you’ll learn below in barely six minutes. And the good news is that this transformation can also be achieved with Photoshop and most other image-editing software.

The photo you see here was captured by self-taught landscape photography pro Neil Borg who admits that his original shot fell far short of what you could call “epic.” He had to do some strenuous hiking and a bit of dangerous climbing up steep slopes to reach the destination, that he calls “one of the best sunset locations in Malta.”

Before jumping into the quick edit Borgs notes that that are also beautiful views at the bottom the hill—just in case you ever decide to visit this spectacular site (there’s a link beneath the video). It was a very windy day, so Borg didn’t shoot with long exposures, and a quick glance at his shot reveals several problems, including severe under exposure biased by the overly bright sky.

Borg confirms these concerns by using the histogram to evaluate the image. His basic adjustments begin by reducing the whites to recover details in the sky. He also plays around with Highlights to further improve the sky. Then he does much the same thing in reverse to open up shadows and pull out more detail in that prominent portion of the shot.

The exposure is now significantly improved and there’s much better contrast, but the foregoing basic adjustments were just a start. The next step is to apply local enhancements to selective areas within the scene. He applies a Subject Mask to the peninsula reaching out into the water that was difficult to discern in the original dark shot, even though it’s a primary element in the image.

A smaller Brush Mask is then applied over lighter area of the peninsula and edges on the left side of the photo to balance out the tones and further accentuate the effect. Borg concludes the remarkable transformation by enhancing Vibrance and removing distracting elements. It’s a simple technique you can use to dramatically improve the sunset photos you make in the future.

Be sure to visit Borg’s instructional YouTube channel that provides many more shooting and editing tips for outdoor photographers of all skill levels.

We also suggest watching an earlier tutorial we posted, revealing what another pro calls the “seven biggest landscape photography mistakes” with straightforward methods for getting everything right.

Here’s an eye-opening tutorial from one of our favorite landscape photographers for those of you who struggle when processing images in Lightroom. It’s all about how Lightroom’s Auto Settings can set you up for refining a shot further and can even “save your photos.”

German pro Christian Mohrle has a portfolio full of absolutely spectacular landscape photos, and he’s just as good behind the computer as he is in the field. If you’ve watched his lessons in the past, you know that he takes a two-step approach when processing his work. He first makes basic adjustments to the image as a whole so it’s as good as possible for the selective edits and masking that follow.

The point of today’s episode is to help you achieve the optimum “base image” using Lightroom’s Auto Settings. In some cases, the result maybe be perfectly fine without further editing, but if more needs to be done this initial approach will greatly simplify any steps that follow.

Mohrle walks you through the simple process in just 12 minutes while demonstrating the further refinements he made to transform a really good sunset scene into a great one. We suggest downloading his Raw file with the link beneath the video so you can follow along and makes the changes yourself as they’re explained.

He admits that “I was struggling a lot and didn’t know what to do with the shadows, the sky, and the forest on the right side of the frame.” Mohrle tried several of his go-to basic adjustments, all of which proved unsatisfactory, at which point Lightroom’s Auto settings came to the rescue.

Mohrle’s photo was part of an HDR sequence and you’ll see how the individual shots were merged as a prelude to describing the way Auto settings work and how to apply them for maximum effect. By checking the Auto Settings box in the Photo Merge window the image is instantly much improved with greatly restored highlight and shadow detail—even before clicking on the Merge button.

According to Mohrle, this is what happened: “What Lightroom tries to achieve with these Auto settings is it wants to create a balanced exposure with better contrast.” To illustrate how this happens he opens the Basic panel so you can see every adjustment that was automatically applied.

If all an image needs are adjustments to these common parameters, well, you can call the job done. But sometimes a few more enhancements are necessary if perfection is your goal.  To that end, Mohrle moves on to straightforward masking, color grading and sharpening. Take a look at his before/after images and you’ll be impressed.

Then head over to Mohrle’s instructional YouTube channel where you’ll find much more of interest for shooting in the field and editing images in Lightroom or Photoshop. And don’t miss the related tutorial we posted with another top pro, explaining how to shoot and edit HDR photographs for perfect exposures every time.