Photo Tips

Take your pics from ho-hum to awesome with Lightroom in just a few simple steps!

So you see all these great photos posted online and you want to show your tank off, too! You figure your phone is limiting you so you go out and purchase a digital SLR camera and lens. You throw it into “Auto”, take some pictures of your tank and to your dismay, they don’t look much better than before! Well, your first problem may be using that Auto setting, but that is a discussion that deserves its own post. You probably have about as much patience as I do, which isn’t much, so for now let’s skip that and work with what we’ve got, which is an image that was produced by your camera with settings that weren’t ideal, resulting in an image that needs some work. Especially with Saltwater Reef tanks. The blue lighting we use really throws us a curve ball when it comes to photography.

*PRO TIP* If your lighting is adjustable, turn down the blues! You’ll want to experiment a bit, but taking photos under a more “white” light will put you in a much better starting place.

Awesome aquarium pics with Lightroom
Like I said above, you bought the equipment, but you missed something very important. The final piece of the puzzle is the software that you use to “develop” your raw images. I prefer to use Adobe Lightroom. Unfortunately, Adobe has now moved its software to the cloud in the form of a subscription-based service. Although, for whatever reason, you can get the Photoshop and Lightroom bundle for “only” $10/month which may seem like a lot it’s a steal compared to their other software packages which cost 3x as much. I use Lightroom so much, even just for personal stuff, that the $10 is worth it to me. There are some other options out there. In fact, here is a link to an article that lists a few… LightRoom Alternatives.

That said, what I’m about to show you is pretty basic and should be similar across all software packages. We are basically just importing the image and then making adjustments to basic things like contrast, saturation, sharpening, etc. Instead of writing it all out and trying to illustrate the process with photos, I figured it would be easier to understand if watching a video. So sit back and enjoy this little off-the-cuff tutorial that shows my typical steps for processing images of my tank. Hopefully this can help you take your images to the next level.

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