Editing on iPad for the First Time

After an eventful photography trip in Death Valley and the Eastern Sierras about a month ago, I found myself stuck away from home without my laptop and with many photos waiting to be processed. I only had my iPad with me because I prefer traveling light, and I don’t process my photos on the go anyway. I prefer to wait until I am back home in my cozy processing corner, on the big screen, with my favorite music blasting off and a warm cup of coffee on the side. But as I sat in my hotel room anxiously waiting to know when I can fly back home, my fingers were itching to process the photos I got in Death Valley and the countless other photos waiting in my backlog. So I decided to give Lightroom and Photoshop for iPad a try!

Before all this, I had only played with both Lightroom and Photoshop on my iPad, and I hadn‘t really processed any photo on my iPad before. So I picked a couple of photos that I thought could be processed entirely on iPad, given the existing limitations I already knew about in both iPad versions of Lightroom and Photoshop.

So here are the main techniques I used to achieve the results you’ll see at the end of this post.

Basic Global Adjustments in Lightroom for iPad

First off, we’ll start with Lightroom to make some basic global adjustments to the light, color, detail, etc.

Here are the adjustments I made and how to find these sliders in Lightroom for iPad:

(1) Click on the ”adjustments“ icon on the right

(2) Start opening each panel and make the adjustments you like with each slider

Here are the other basic global adjustments I made in the other panels:

Bonus: Selective Edits in Lightroom for iPad

Similar to Lightroom for Mac/PC, you can make some selective edits in Lightroom for iPad as well. For example, I used a gradient selective edit on this photo. Here is how to make a selective edit:

(1) Pick the “selective edits” panel on the right

(2) Tap on the (+) sign in the upper left corner

Then you’ll see the three types of selective edits you can make:

(1) brush selection, (2) radial selection, or (3) gradient selection

Pick the one that works best for your photo and where on the photo you want to apply it, then use the sliders in the panels on the right to make the adjustments on the selected area.

Localised Adjustments in Photoshop for iPad