Crop till you drop

Make use of Lightroom’s profiles to tone your photographs

An update to Lightroom saw the introduction of a new feature that has the potential to change the way you edit your photographs for good…

Profiles allow you to kick-start your image-editing by offering a series of tonal starting points that can be applied with a single click. Some, like the ‘Adobe Raw’ profiles, are optimized to suit different types of Raw photos like landscapes or portraits. Others, like the rather cool Vintage profile we used on our image here, act more like Instagram filters and retro toning treatments.

Profiles are not a new feature, they were previously found in Lightroom’s Camera Calibration panel. Here you could choose from several profiles that matched the Picture Control options in your Canon camera. Those camera profiles are still available, but there are a host of others to choose from too. Also, if you want, you can even create your own profiles for later use.

Profiles have been moved from their old home and now sit at the top of the Basic panel. This is a more natural home, as the feature is designed to be used at the start of the image-editing workflow. Some profiles feature a strength slider, so you can make the tonal effect weaker or stronger.

In this tutorial we’ll explore how to use profiles to enhance a portrait. It’s a simple feature to get to grips with, but it could have a huge impact on your Lightroom workflow in the future.