Lightroom Q&A's

Lightroom Q&A: What’s the Best Way to Brighten Your Photos for Print?

I got an email from some one the other week asking if my Print Brightness presets still work for Lightroom 5. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re presets that I created back in 2010 that increase the Brightness slider for printing purposes, because prints often come out darker than what you see on screen. Anyway, the answer to the question is that they won’t really work like they used to because Lightroom 4 & 5 both use different sliders in the Develop module (my presets were created for Lightroom 3 back in 2010).

So the next question is, did I create new presets for Lightroom 5? Nope. See, Lightroom 5 (and version 4) has a slider in the Print module for just this purpose. The problem with using a Develop module slider is that once you brighten your photo, and print it, you’ll need to go back and un-brighten the photo for saving an image for the web or something like that. But by using the Print Brightness slider in the Print module, the brightening only gets added to the print. Any place else you use the photo, it’ll stay exactly as it was.

print-brightness

So if you’re doing any printing from Lightroom, make sure you try out the slider to increase the brightness a little if you find your prints are coming out too dark. Enjoy!

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