All photographers are interested in learning about the nifty tools and software that can help them produce stunning images. Apart from having a DSLR and a passion for photography, learning how to use Lightroom will help you with image enhancement and correction to create images with depth. Adobe Lightroom is one of the best applications created for photographers—both budding and professional.
The software has multiple functions that can possibly overwhelm new photographers but with a little bit of help, it’s not too bad. If you are a beginner looking to understand Lightroom better, here is a guide that will answer all your questions related to Lightroom and photo editing!
"I am a participant in the Adobe Affiliate Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Adobe.com and affiliated sites. Full disclosure here."What is Lightroom?
Lightroom is a digital photo developing software created by Adobe. Currently sold as a subscription service, it allows you edit the brighten/darken an image as a whole or even specific parts, like the sky or maybe the foreground of a beach photo. You can also crop the image, rotate the image, remove/edit simple items and apply various different effects to the image. Think of it as a film darkroom, just digitally.
There’s of course, many other functions, but we’re gonna focus on the basics here. This guide also applies to what’s known as Lightroom Classic, which is Adobe’s Desktop based photo editor. Lightroom does have a newer cloud/phone/mobile based editor but we’ll save that for another time.
Beyond more advanced tools in Lightroom if you’re interested in drastically changing your image, like replacing the sky, removing complicated subjects such as someone’s odd hand placement or adding/blending an item to a photo, you’d want to use another service known as Adobe Photoshop. I’ll touch more on that further below.
How to Get Started With Lightroom
Lightroom is famous as a photo editing software for how easy it makes ‘developing’ photos. I used to think it was just used to edit photos but there’s so much more to it. Here, I’ll break down three key functions that can help you learn how to use Lightroom quickly:
Sort and Organize
Getting started, instead of simply just ‘Opening’ your photos to edit, Lightroom ‘Imports’ the photos. Once they’re imported, Lightroom automatically creates ‘non-destructive’ versions of your images (aka a copy). Which basically means you can do whatever you want to the photo, editing wise, without damaging or altering the master copy of the image.
This helps if you want to un-do edits, trash/start-over or even make various copies of the same image with different edits. Maybe you like the picture in black and white as well as color. You can do both!
To import your photos, simply open up Lightroom and insert your camera’s SD card into your computer. The program will automatically pick-up on the images and you can just click ‘Import’. If it doesn’t or maybe you already had the SD card in your computer before opening the program, just select the ‘Import’ button on the bottom left of your screen.
Lightroom will automatically organize your photos by date. You can also go through the album and select your favorite photos by adding them to your Quick Collection, using the rating option or ‘Flagging’ your images. This is also known as ‘culling’ your photos. These options work best when you have a particular photo or photos that you want to access in the future. Say, for a client gallery, Facebook album or landscape photography favorites. I like adding them to my Quick Collection temporarily before creating a whole other folder (or Collection) for those specific images.
Say I took some awesome beach photos on my vacation last week, I’ll import the images into Lightroom, cull them by looking through the dated folders and adding them to my Quick Collection. Once I went through all the beach photos, I’ll take all the images from my Quick Collection and create a new Collection titled Beach Week 2022 or whatever.
Then once the photos are imported & culled, you can move on to the next step and edit your photos in the ‘Develop’ module.
Edit Your Photos
Editing your photos is the main reason you want to learn Lightroom, right? So, here’s the fun part! If you haven’t already jumped into the ‘Develop’ module, hit the D button on your keyboard to jump there as a shortcut, or look for it on the screen near the top right.
Brightness, color, contrast, sharpness and many more can be adjusted in this module via sliders. Play around with the various settings to see what each does to the image. Remember, you’re editing a non-destructive file, so your original image is safe within your hard-drive.
A beginner tip (and something I still use often) is to simply select the ‘Auto’ adjust function and review what changes on the sliders. Lightroom will look over the image and automically change the sliders to create the best possible image. At least according to it’s own AI that is. It might not be perfect or up to your artistic vision so be sure to review and adjust as needed.
I like to focus on the Exposure, Shadows, Highlights, Whites & Blacks. Sometimes moving the slider a hair to the right or left is all it needs!
Once completed, hit the right arrow on your keyboard to move on to the next photo and repeat.
Export Your Files
Once you complete the edits, you may want to Save or Save As. But here in Lightroom, they’ll automatically save and if you want to send your photo(s) to desktop/email/etc you ‘Export’ the image.
This allows you to apply various settings to the image as it’s being exported, like filename or additional sharpness settings. But it also allows you to shrink or reduce the images file size on your hard-drive.
This is huge!
Say, you want to send 10 photos via email, but you’re limited because you hit the 25MBs size limit after only 4 photos. By reducing the Quality of the images under the File Settings from 100 to 65 or 75. It greatly reduces the image file size. Thus allowing you to send more via email. This does of course, reduce quality of the images so don’t overdo it.
For social media or emails, I generally export at Quality 65. But if I’m am exporting to print images or deliver to most clients, I’ll export at Quality 100.
Here’s a little more on how I export my photos.
Is Lightroom Good for Beginners?
To be honest, Lightroom is perfect for all photographers, no matter their level of expertise. However, if we specifically talk about beginners, it is a great software for beginner photographers.
It seems intimidating at first with all its panels, tools, and features. But if you are able to get past this initial hiccup, you will end up learning how to use one of the best photo editing programs today!
What’s Better: Lightroom or Photoshop?
As mentioned earlier, there are other ways to edit photos, one being Photoshop. Which is also made by Adobe, and also something I feel is more widely known to the general public. And while you can edit photos in Photoshop, it’s might not be the best tool for the job.
So instead of thinking “What’s Better” between the two, it’s better to see that they are two totally different programs each with their own benefits.
Reasons to Use Lightroom Instead Of Photoshop
Photoshop has been used as an editing software for a long time, so most photographers may think it is the ultimate choice. On the other hand, Lightroom offers some unique and helpful features that are easier to use than Photoshop for photographers specifically. Here are three reasons for you to use Lightroom and not Photoshop, or at least start with Lightroom before moving the images over to Photoshop.
1. If You Want a Smooth Workflow
As a beginner, you are already overwhelmed by the tools you have to learn and practice for any photo editing software. On top of that, if it is also complicated, it may confuse you. Lightroom excels in making a photographers process or workflow as easy as possible, making it perfect for beginners.
2. If You Want to Process Multiple Images Together
Lightroom has presets that can help you batch process many photos together. It is part of the software as a straightforward function to use. Photoshop can also batch process images, but we’ll need to use Actions. It is not a straightforward process with Photoshop, so better stick with Lightroom for now.
3. If You Are New to Photo Editing
The layout is simpler than Photoshop, so it makes learning how to use Lightroom easier. You can find all the main editing tools and features in a column that is easy to find. On the other hand, Photoshop is not optimized for photography-related tasks as default. You have to customize the workstation to make it flexible for your work.
Wrapping It Up
If you’re interested in trying out Lightroom, Adobe generally runs a free trial, you can check that out here. Or if you’re interested in jumping all in you can buy the subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan for $10/month. This includes both Lightroom and Photoshop. You should definitely check it out and get to learning!
Also, if you’re starting down the route of exploring Lightroom, know that there’s a specific way most cameras can capture more details that allows for more editing within Lightroom. This is known as RAW format vs the traditional JPEG image format. Read more here about why a lot believe RAW images are better to capture than JPEG.
