Learn Adobe Lightroom

As a photo editor, Adobe Lightroom includes a subset of Photoshop’s features that are custom tailored to the contemporary photographer. Lightroom covers the majority, if not all, of the image manipulation tools you’ll most likely need.

However, Lightroom is much more than a photo editor or image editing software. Lightroom helps you import, organize, manage, and find your images. In turn, Lightroom is photo management and photo editing, combined into a single tool.

Unlike Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom is a non-destructive photo editor, meaning that you don’t have to worry about that pesky “save as” button. In fact, Lightroom has no “save” button at all. All of the edits are automatically kept in your Lightroom catalog, which acts as your database of edits and history.

If you shoot raw photos (which you should), then I recommend that you first import your photos into Lightroom as the initial step of your image management process. Lightroom is a raw file editor so you don’t need Adobe Camera Raw. Also, because of the photo management capabilities of Lightroom, you’ll be organizing your digital photography as you import.

Lightroom is perfect for most basic photo editing, including (but not limited to) cropping, white balance, exposure, histogram adjustments, tonal curves, black and white conversion, spot removal, red eye corrections, gradients, local adjustments, sharpening, noise reduction, lens profile corrections, vibrance, and saturation. If you’re comfortable with Adobe Camera Raw, then developing a photo in Lightroom will look very familiar. If you’re a beginning photographer, you’ll most likely be satisfied with these features. Lightroom is also much easier to use than Photoshop, which can have more of a steep learning curve.

Follow this free course and get started with Lightroom CC.