Lightroom Mobile Tutorial | How to Create a Light & Airy Preset

Introduction

Hello!! Today I wanted to share with you all some tips on how you can create a light and airy Instagram feed using Lightroom Mobile! This is completely free and easy to download on your phone. I am going to give you a short walk through of the Lightroom app as well as share with you a FREE preset! Before, my Instagram feed was all over the place, but now it is consistent and looks more like a brand! One way I did this is with the Lightroom preset I use!

Here is a before and after of my Instagram feed!!

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Exciting Collaboration!

This is also a collaboration post with my friend Brianna! (@briannaaaa.marieeee on Insta) She is both a Youtuber and a Blogger. On her website briannasbandwagon.com, she blogs about lifestyle, photography, and creativity. Her collab blog post is about “How to Take Photos at Home”, so make sure you go check it out after this post! I will also leave a link at the end of this blog post if you want to check it out then too!

https://briannasbandwagon.com/tips-for-instagam-photos/

Table of Contents

1. What is Lightroom Mobile?
2. Downloading the App
3. Tour of the Basics
4. Deep dive into editing
5. What the heck are presets?
6. Creating a preset
7. Importing a preset
8. Free Preset!!
9. Wrap up!

1. What is Lightroom Mobile?

Adobe Lightroom is an Adobe Software that allows you to edit your photos in a very detailed way on your computer. You can change coloring, sharpness, temperature, and so much more. Adobe Lightroom is around $9.99 per month, and there are also other bundles you can purchase. Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor (which I am going to call Lightroom Mobile for short) is the free version of this application but it is on your phone or tablet. There are in-app purchases, but you can do so much with just the free version.

2. Downloading Lightroom Mobile

Downloading Lightroom Mobile on your phone is very simple. All you have to do is go into the app store and search “Lightroom”. It should be the first app that pops up and it is also pictured below. When you have that downloaded, it will prompt you to create an account. Once that is complete, you can then get started!

3. Tour of the Basics

Now that you are set up with your account and the app, I am going to give you a quick tour of the basics! With the app open, there are 4 main tabs at the bottom. These are “library, shared, learn, discover”. You can easily click around and explore what each of them do. In a quick summary, in the library tab, here you will see all of the photos you’re currently editing and albums you have. To see your photos, you can do to “All Photos” at the top. To add an album, click the “plus +” sign and name your album.

When you are on the library tab, there are 2 blue buttons in the lower right corner. The one on the left (photograph and plus sign) allows you to add photos from your camera roll to the app. The one on the right (camera), allows you to take photos within the app to edit.

The shared tab is where you can share photos to the Web. The next tab is the learn tab and here you can find tutorials, recommendations, and more based. This is really helpful if you are trying to learn more about Lightroom and editing techniques. The final tab is the discover tab, and here you can find all sorts of inspiration from other artists and editors. These can give you great inspiration for how to edit or what you want your photos to look like. One thing that is really great about this is if you click on any photo, there is an option to save as preset and see ALL of the edits they’ve made.

4. Deep dive into editing in Lightroom

Now we are going to get into the fun part, actual editing!! First off, let’s import a photo. Go to the library tab and click the blue button at the bottom right corner (photography & plus sign). From there you can import a photo from your camera roll. Once that is in, click on the photo and it will bring you to a very detailed screen with lots to do.

All of the buttons and things you can changed are labeled which is very nice. On the top bar, there are a few options. I am going to explain each one LEFT to RIGHT. Starting all the way to the left, the arrow allows you to go back to the full view of all of your photos imported to Lightroom. The “edit” brings down a menu of options you can choose from. Next, the arrow pointing to the right is the “undo” button.

The ? allows you to browse through tutorial and learn certain features and tools. The next button allows you to share your photo to wherever you want (camera roll, social media, friends, etc). The cloud button shows that your photos are synced within the app. And finally, the very right button (3 dots) opens up another menu. Here is where you can copy & paste adjustments that you’ve made to the photo you’re on, and create presets. We will talk about creating presets later in this post!

Now the bottom bar of you page has all of the tools and features to actually editing your photo. I am not going to go over the names of them because they are labeled. I also won’t dive too deep in to what some of them do because they are pretty self-explanatory.

Some of the main features and tools while editing:

Here are some of the main features that I will be talking about for this blog post. You can also explore these features on your own by clicking on the icons.

Light

This light section is meant for adjusting the lighting in your photos (pretty much says it in the name). Here you can adjust the exposure (moving it higher makes the photo brighter, vice versa), contrast (higher = more contrast), highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. If you photo seems too overexposed (too bright) or too underexposed (too dark), then this is the section where you want to play with the lighting.

Color

The next section is the color section. This is where you can manipulate the colors of your photo. I am going to spend the most time on this section because there is A LOT within it. There are 4 basic tools that you can work with: temperature, tint, vibrance, and saturation. The temperature can change whether your photo is more “cooler” blue or more “warm” or yellow. The vibrance and saturation has to do with how much the colors come into your photo.

Then we have the lovely “mix” tool within the color section. This is at the top right corner of your tools in the color section (it has a colorful wheel). This color mix is where you can really mess with your colors. There are 8 colors that you can adjust and change within this color mix. On each color, there are 3 options: Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. Hue is the tone of that particular color. Saturation is how vibrant that color will be in the photo. And Luminance is adjusting the brightness of the color.

Effects

The third section is the effects one. This works with how you edit the “look” of your photo such as the texture, clarity, adding a vintage look, or adding grain.

Detail

The final section is the detail section where you can sharpen your photo or add even more detail to it. This section is great if you are worried that the photo is blurry.

So that is a deep dive into what all of the tools and features are on Lightroom Mobile when you are editing a single photo. If you have a photo edited and you have a few more you’d like to make the same edits with, you can go to the 3 dots in the upper right corner and click “copy settings”. To paste them, go to the next photo and click the 3 dots but select “paste settings”

5. What the heck are presets??

I’ve been throwing around the term presets and I thought I would take time to actually tell you what they are. Presets are editing settings in Lightroom that you can save and use over and over again with any photo. These are really nice especially if you want a consistent editing style but don’t want to individually edit them each time.

In Lightroom, you can either create your own presets, or you can purchase some online and import them. I am going to show you how to do both!

6. Creating a Preset

The first thing that you need to do to create a preset is edit a photo. One thing that will help is if you have a bunch of photos with similar colors, lighting, and styles. Once you have edited a photo to your liking, go ahead and hit “copy settings” (3 dot button in the right corner) and paste it to some other photos. That way you can tell if your editing style if what you really like. Once you are comfortable with that, we move onto the next step.

On that photo, open up the 3 dots menu (top right). Towards the bottom of the menu, you will see a “create preset” option. Click that and it will ask you to name your preset. When you have finished, click the check mark in the upper right. You should get a blue message that says your preset has been added!

Now let’s try it! Open a new photo that is unedited. At the bottom bar, scroll all the way to the right. You will see a section that has “presets, previous, versions, and reset”. Go ahead and click the “presets” icon and this will open up a menu so you can view all of your presets in Lightroom Mobile.

If the preset that you just created does not show up, make sure the top left area says “user presets”. Those will show the ones that you created.

And there you go, you’ve made a preset! To use it, simply just click on the preset you want (should highlight in blue) and click the check mark. To the right of all of your preset names, you will see 3 dots. If you click on that, it gives you the option to update with current settings, rename, or delete the preset.

7. Importing a Preset

If you don’t feel like creating your own preset, you can also import ones that you buy or find online! You can buy presets on your laptop, tablet, or phone. I find it easiest to do it on my laptop though. When you purchase presets, they should give you a ZIP file that you need to open or “unzip”. The files that you want are going to have a name and then .DNG after it. You are then going to want to open these .DNG files in Lightroom Mobile. If you are doing it on your laptop, you might need to airdrop them to your phone or email them.

Once they are imported to Lightroom Mobile, you should se that they come up as “pictures”. You can then click on those, and using the same process as before, create a preset. Go to the 3 dots in the top right and click “create preset” and then name it. Now you can still edit the preset to your liking if you think that the exposure is too bright etc.

Then you can use these preset however you’d like! I love checking out other people’s presets and trying them.

PRESETS ARE NOT ONE SIZE FITS ALL

There will be some photos where you have to make no adjustment to the editing once the preset is added. However, most of your photos will require some type of adjustment, even if it is small. Sometimes there will be differences in coloring, shadows, lighting, etc that you have to adjust. Presets are great for saving time, but you do need to keep in mind that not all presets will fit with all photos.

8. Free Light and Airy Preset!

This is probably the section of the blog post everyone was waiting for! I am sharing with you my exact Light and Airy Lightroom preset that I use for free! This is the exact preset that I use for both my Instagram photos and my Youtube thumbnails! All you have to do is click “download” and a ZIP file will download to your computer. Then follow all of the steps above to import the preset and you’re done! If you use my preset, make sure to tag me! I would love to see all of your photos.

9. Wrap-Up!

If you made it to the end of this blog post, congratulations!! I know it was a long one, but I hope you got some very useful information on how to use Lightroom mobile. Like I said earlier, I love being able to create my own presets to continue to have a consistent feed on instagram. I feel like my page has gotten so much better content wise, and I know I can do even more to make it the best! I also really love the Light and Airy Lightroom preset so I hope you put it to good use! If you have any questions please feel free to ask them, I would love to see if I can help give you answers!

Thank you Brianna for doing this collaboration blog post with me! Know that you know all of the editing techniques, go check out her blog post on how to take photos at home so you can put your new skills to use!

Here is all of her information again:
Her blog post: https://briannasbandwagon.com/tips-for-instagam-photos/
Blog: briannasbandwagon.com
Instagram: @briannaaaa.marieeee
Youtube: ItsMiss.BriannaMarie

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