Concert Photos Look Like Garbage Straight Out of Camera — Here's How to Fix Them in Lightroom

Concert Photos Look Like Garbage Straight Out of Camera — Here's How to Fix Them in Lightroom

Concert photography is the editing equivalent of being handed a bag of mystery ingredients and told to make something edible. The lighting is dramatic, unpredictable, and almost aggressively wrong for skin tones. You’ll get magenta blasts, red face-melters, and blue washes that make your subject look like they’re performing from the bottom of the ocean. I’ve been there more times than I want to count, and finding a reliable editing framework for these shots is genuinely useful.

There's a Hidden Vibrance Brush in Lightroom (And It's Been There the Whole Time)

There's a Hidden Vibrance Brush in Lightroom (And It's Been There the Whole Time)

I’ve been editing photos in Lightroom long enough to think I’d found all the tricks. And then something comes along and completely rearranges my mental model of how a tool works. That happened recently when I watched a tutorial by Matt Kloskowski showing a vibrance adjustment hidden inside Lightroom’s local adjustment tools. Not a workaround. Not a hack. A legitimately different rendering behavior that’s been sitting there quietly the whole time.