Lightroom CC Tips from an Adobe Creative Resident

Temi Coker is a Graphic designer & Photographer born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. He currently resides in Dallas, Texas where he merges his love for photography and design to create unique and compelling artwork for his clients. As a creative, he gets the opportunity show everyone the power of creativity and how it can change the world.

"I remember coming to America and feeling the need to hide my culture due to the fact that it was different from the culture here. It took me a while to really embrace my culture in America, but I’m so glad I did. With this project series I wanted to photograph immigrants who came to America from a different culture and allow them to express themselves wearing things they identified with in their culture. It was a lot of fun and we got to mix up the styles a bit fusing American culture with theirs."

With exquisite use of color, contrast, and curve adjustments, Temi crafted near-perfect images straight from his phone (with the help of the Moment Tele) and shows us his favorite tips for editing with Lightroom CC Mobile.

Let’s see how he did it.

Be sure to check out his portfolio and Instagram and give him a follow!

Color Curve Adjustments

Curves is one of the most essential tools in photo editing. It is simply nothing more than an input/output ratio of luminance values in a convenient graphical format. The horizontal axis represents the luminance currently in the images, while the vertical axis represents the value of contrast or RGB you’re putting into the image. Within this simple setup lies an infinite amount of ways you can colorize and sharpen a single image.

By singling out either red, green or blue profiles on the RGB curve, the photographer can manipulate the tones and overall luminance of either the highlights or shadows. Temi seems to value green tints and warmer highlights, which can easily be manipulated on the RGB curve to produce a golden effect.

Do this by sliding points on the diagonal line either up or down with your finger until you reach a point on the axis that looks best; it’s a lot of plug and play.

Bold Contrast

Temi worked with studio lighting, making the dynamic range between both the highlights and shadows evermore crisp and clear. High contrast means that there is a wide range of light and dark areas in the image. Deep contrast within a photo emphasis the subject, making it bold and pleasing to the eye. Deepen your contrast in Lightroom CC Mobile by decreasing the shadows and punching the highlights.

Copy + Paste

Manually manipulating each photograph with the same editing technique is tiring. You are now able to easily save time by copying your editing settings and pasting them onto another image. You can copy all of your adjustments or remove the ones you don’t want to keep and paste over to another image. This makes editing images from a single shoot a breeze!

Big thanks to Temi creating his beautiful photographs and showing us his editing workflow.

The Adobe Creative Residency empowers talented individuals to spend a year focusing on a personal creative project, while sharing their experience and process with the creative community. If you’re interested in becoming an Adobe creative resident yourself, then check out this link right here and learn more about the application process. 

Deadline is February 7th, 2019.