Photography 101 - Lightroom for beginners (Patreon)

Lightroom is one of those programs that feels like a bit of a mystery when you first look at it. So many buttons, dials, adjusters, foreign terms. But in reality, it’s one of the simplest and most powerful ways to manage, organize, and edit your photos.

Let’s start with the basics, lightroom is best experienced with a dual monitor setup. If you do not have one no worries, but if you do you will find yourself to be much more productive. I will also be using PC commands. If you have a Mac, just switch out “Ctrl” with “Cmd” and it should function the same.

For this tutorial I will be covering how to work with two screens.

Import

To get started of course the first thing you’ll need to do is import some photos! Hopefully, you have some RAW images you can work with (be sure to set your camera to RAW before your shoot!) as they amount of change you can make to them is much deeper than working with Jpegs. In order to start an import, just press “Ctrl+Shift+I” (that’s the letter i as in Import) on the left you can navigate your computer’s folder structure and select the directory which has your images. Some alternative methods include drag and dropping a folder into Lightroom directly, or inserting an SD card as default behavior is set to detect and start an import dialogue window.

Edit

Now that your photos are in lightroom, it’s time to get started editing them!

In your main window you will have your gallery or “Grid” view and on your secondary screen you have several options, but the most commonly used will be your “Loupe.” Loupe is the fastest image preview generating method for seeing your thumbnail views in fullsize. You can use the thumbnail grid to select a photo (or multiple photos) and see your fullsize image preview on the Loupe screen. If you are using a single monitor, double clicking an image thumbnail will enlarge to a fullsize image preview. However always keep in mind that these image previews are simply that: previews. They do not represent the full quality or look of the image, and will often have artifacts like banding when making modifications to your color tones. There are two ways to see the full quality image, one is to zoom in to 100% on the image preview [click on the image in the loupe view], this will show you a full quality version but only while zoomed in. The other more common method is to swap over to the Develop tab by pressing D on your keyboard.

The develop module is where you will edit your photos on an individual basis. Within here you will see sliders on the right hand side to change basics like your white balance, exposure, and so forth. I would highly recommend simply playing with these sliders to get a real feel for what they do. 

One thing I would highly recommend is to always keep your original image in mind when editing. After staring at an image for a long period of time, it is easy to “overdo” images by way of oversaturation, too much “clarity” or any other number of things that are caused by staring at the image too long and your eyes adjusting to the intensity. You can see the original version of the image by pressing Y on your keyboard, or holding down the backslash key above your enter key. 

Keep in mind that it is unlikely you will ever want to stray too far away from your original. Be subtle unless you are trying to go for a highly stylized look.

Across the top of the sliders you will see a series of buttons which allow you to make major adjustments to your image. In order these are 

• Crop (Makes your photo smaller, able to be freeform or constricted to specific ratios)
• Clone/Heal Brush (Spot Removal - for blemishes, bruises, scars, unwanted objects etc.)
• Red Eye Correction (Rarely needed with digital photography)
• Gradient Brush (Great for fixing a sky that is too bright, or any large rectangular area that needs specific adjustments)
• Radial Filter (This is similar to the Gradient Brush but works with elipses instead of rectangles)
• Adjustment Brush (This allows you to "paint" areas to be adjusted. Great for filling in dark spots, just think of it as painting with light! Also works for darkening and many other adjustments)

Once you are finished editing your photo, it is likely that you will want these same settings to apply to all of your other photos from your session. In order to do this, swap back to the Grid view by pressing G, then highlight the image you have edited. Press Ctrl+Shift+C in order to copy the attributes of the image. 

Be very careful here, while you likely want to copy all of your lighting adjustments, it is unlikely you will want to copy your detailed edits. Due to this, I often click “Check All” then uncheck the boxes for "Local Adjustments," "Spot Removal," and "Crop." This ensures that none of the in depth adjustments get copied over, as it's rare that spot removal will line up from shot to shot if you are shooting handheld, or shooting any object which moves like people. Local adjustments are all of your area based corrections like fixing a shadow on one side of someone's face, or darkening the sky. If the horizon is staying in the same spot you may be able to copy over "graduated filters" successfully, but again this is rare with handheld shooting.

Once you are happy with your selections, click “Copy.” Now, select all of the photos you wish to apply it to, by either using Ctrl (individual selection) or Shift (sequential selection) then press Ctrl+Shift+V. This will automatically paste all of the attributes you have copied over to your new images. It may take a bit for these edits to apply depending on your computer speed, so just check the progress bar on the top left corner to see how things are coming along. 

Export

Lightroom is a "non-destructive" editing tool, meaning it will never change your original file while editing. Once you have made adjustments to your images, they are all still simply "virtual" adjustments. Nothing has actually changed on any of your original images, all of the changes are managed and kept within lightroom itself. In order to actually share these adjusted images with others, you will need to do an export of the files to create new edited versions of your original photos. 

To start an export, select the photos you would like to export, then right click on one the selected images. Navigate to the Export menu, then choose the "Export" button within that sub-menu. This will bring up your export menu where you will be able to adjust settings or create a preset (which I would highly recommend)

Select your image size, destination (I like choose folder later), file name, and any other settings you would like. If you want to save these settings just click "Add" on the left-hand side of the window, create a name and then you will have made a preset! It's that easy!

If you are ready to export, click "Export" and your files will begin rendering. In the future you can go back to the right click context menu, then select your preset from the sub-menu in order to skip this step entirely!

File rendering takes time, depending on how many files you are exporting it could take over an hour. Just watch your progress bar on the top left, or minimize the application and it will show you a percentage of your export on your taskbar.

Once your export finishes you are done! Just navigate to where you placed the files on your computer and they are ready for sharing. 

Thanks for all of your support that allowed me to write this Photography 101 course, and leave any questions or comments below.