Gettings Started
Welcome to the Adobe Lightroom tutorial. Throughout this Lightroom guide, you’ll learn all of the basics to get started with editing photos in Adobe Lightroom. You’ll even learn some intermediate and advanced techniques to make your photos look amazing.
What is Lightroom?
Lightroom is a photo management and editing application designed for photographers. You’ll be able to organize, edit, export, and share your digital photos with this tool. While there are many other photo editing applications out there, Lightroom does a superior job of allowing photographers to efficiently and powerfully edit their photos.
Program Layout
To understand any computer program, the first thing you should be comfortable doing is navigating. Let’s go over the layout of Lightroom. At the very top left is your file menu. While most of the options in the file menu are able to be chosen through the application windows and buttons, you may find it easier to just find what you’re looking for in the file menus. For example, to export photos, which we will discuss in depth later, go to File – Export.
Near the top right are module tabs, including Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, and Web. We’ll be covering the Library and Develop modules in this tutorial. Click on the module button to open that editing module.
On the left are organizational panels, including your Navigator, Catalog, and Folders panels. Basically, this is where you will import and organize your photos for editing.
In the center is your preview window. This is where you will see the work you are doing while editing and preview photos.
On the right are panels that change depending on what module you are in. If you are in the Library module, the right panels include more information and metadata about your photos. In the Develop module, the right panels include all of the photo editing tools.
At the bottom is the filmstrip of photos that shows the set of photos you are working on. In the Develop module, select the photo to edit via the filmstrip. At the top of the filmstrip are viewing options and filtering options, which we’ll cover below.
Importing Photos
The first thing to do when using Lightroom is import photos. A key difference between Photoshop and Lightroom (for those of you who have used Photoshop) is that when you import photos into Lightroom, you are only opening the photo file and not creating a duplicate of it. Any edits you make in Lightroom will be attributed to the original photo file itself. There is an option while importing photos for Lightroom to copy the photos to a new location so that you don’t edit the originals.
To import your photos:
- Click the import button at the bottom left of the Library module.
- Find the folder that contains your photos using the Source panel on the left.
- In the middle preview panel, select all or some of your photos to import by checking the box next to each photo that you would like to import. You can also press the Check All or Uncheck All button to quickly select or deselect your photos.
- In the right File Handling panel, check the Add to Collection box.
- Create a new collection by clicking the + button next to the Add to Collection text. Creating a new collection for your photos is important for organizational purposes. A window will pop up where you can name the collection.
- Click the Import button on the bottom right.
The Library module opens up with all of the photos that you have imported. On the left, you can see that you are viewing photos from Previous Import. Click the Collections drop-down menu to see the collection that you just created, which includes the same photos as the Previous Import catalog. Now that you’ve created a collection of photos, you can also find them in the Collections panel.
Rating Photos
After you’ve imported photos, the next step is to rate the photos so that you know which photos you’ll want to edit later on. To go through your photos one at a time, press the Loupe View button at the bottom of the preview window. It is second from the right, next to the Grid View button.
Now you can scroll through your photos either by clicking them in the filmstrip below, or by using the right and left keys on your keyboard.
Lightroom has a five-star rating scale. How you rate your photos is up to you. Typically a photo rated at five stars is better than a one-star photo. For simplicity, use the following rating scale:
- 5 stars: An amazing photo that you love
- 4 stars: A great photo that you like
- 3 stars: A decent photo that you still want to edit
- 2 stars: A bad photo that might be a duplicate, slightly out of focus, and doesn’t make the cut
- 1 star: A terrible photo that you should probably just delete
To assign a rating to your photos, click the star rating button at the bottom of the preview panel. Note that you must have only one photo selected in the filmstrip. You can also easily add ratings to your photos by pressing the corresponding number on your keyboard (1-5). This keyboard shortcut will apply the star rating to that photograph.
Top courses in Adobe Lightroom
Go through all of your photographs and give them a rating.
Filtering Photos
After you’ve rated all of your photographs, you’ll be able to filter your Collection according to your rating. This will help you easily find only the best photos that you’d like to edit.
To filter using the star ratings, click the Filters menu at the top right of the filmstrip. There are a variety of ways that you can filter your photos. To filter according to your ratings, click the Rated option.
A five-star rating scale appears, and you can select the number of stars you want to filter out. For example, you can click the third star and filter out any photograph with a rating of two stars or lower.
You can even change how you filter the ratings by clicking the greater than or equal to button on the left side of the star scale. You can change how it filters to Rating is less than or equal to or Rating is equal to.
Reading the Histogram
Before diving into actually editing photos, it is important to know how to read the photo’s Histogram, which appears in the top right of the Library and Develop modules.
What is a histogram?
A histogram is basically a graph that visually represents the exposure of each pixel in your image. On the left side of the graph, the blacks and shadows are represented. On the right side, the highlights and brighter areas are represented. The middle section includes mid-tones. The higher the peak in each section means the more pixels at that exposure.
The graph goes from 0-255 (0 being black and 255 being white). Each tone is one pixel wide on the graph. In Lightroom, you can see in the histogram how individual colors are exposed. In the histogram above, notice that there is a big spike on the right side. This shows that a portion of the image is overexposed.
How can we use the histogram?
First, we can tell if the image is well exposed. If the graph has pixels going from 0 to 255 (from black to white) without any crazy spikes, then you have a well-exposed image. While editing a photograph, pay attention to how the histogram changes. If you are editing an image too dark, the histogram will show a spike on the left end of the graph. If it is too bright, there is a spike on the right end. If a photo already has a histogram with spikes on either side of the graph, this is not good because the data in these spikes can’t be recovered.
Remember when you can ignore the rules.
As always, remember when you should ignore these rules. Some pictures that you want to take will have completely underexposed parts of the frame that will result in a spike. For example, night photography – pictures of the sky will often have pure blacks. Sunsets will sometimes have pure whites (coming from where the sun is). Just because you know what the histogram is telling you to do, doesn’t mean you should follow it.
The histogram is yet another tool. You’re the artist.
Basic Photo Editing Tools
You’ve arrived at the section we’ve all been waiting for: editing. In this section, you’ll learn about all of the basic editing tools that Lightroom offers. First, click on the Develop module to open up the editing panels. On the right side are all of the panels with different editing tools. The first panel is the Basic panel. For all of these tools, there is a slider that you can move from left to right to make adjustments. You can also click the number to the right of the slider and type in a precise number of your liking. To reset an individual slider, just double-click the name of the slider on the left (for example, if you’ve moved the exposure slider to the left and want to bring it back to zero, just double-click the “exposure” text).
Editing White Balance
The first two sliders in the Basic panel have to do with white balance: temperature and tint. Move the temperature slider to the left to add more blue (cooling down your photo). Move it to the right to add more yellow (adding warmth to your photo). Compensate with the tint slider to add more green or pink.
Another way to quickly get the correct white balance is by using the white balance selector (the eyedropper tool). Click the tool and then hover over your photo in the preview panel. Click on something in your photo that is supposed to be white (for example, a cloud or a white T-shirt). Your photo will automatically adjust. Then use the sliders to fine-tune it.
The exposure slider changes the overall brightness of your photos. Slide it to the right to increase brightness. Slide it to the left to make your photo darker. Notice what happens to the histogram while you adjust the exposure. Remember that a well-exposed photo doesn’t have any large peaks on the right or left sides of the histogram (and at the very least, the main subject of the photo isn’t too dark or too bright).
Adjusting Contrast
The contrast slider makes your photo more or less contrasted. What does that mean? Contrast has to do with how bright the highlights are, and how darks the darks are. Increasing contrast will make the darks darker and the highlights brighter. Decreasing the contrast will make your image appear flatter. Typically it is good to have some contrast. It makes your image pop. However, some people like having a flat-looking image. It has become a popular style.
Also know that when you add contrast to your image, it also increases the saturation.
Editing Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks
This next set of sliders is what makes Lightroom so powerful. Especially if you shoot your photos in RAW format, using the highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks sliders allows you to really get in there and fine-tune different parts of your image.
All of these sliders work the same. Moving to the left will make the corresponding parts of your image darker, and moving to the right will make them brighter. If you have an overexposed image, which means it is too bright, decreasing the highlights slider will add more detail to the highlights. If your shadows are too dark, move that slider to the right.
The Clarity Tool
The clarity slider quickly sharpens and adds contrast to your image. Use this tool sparingly with photos of people, as it intensifies people’s blemishes and wrinkles. A good time to add clarity is with photos of landscapes and nature. If you’re looking to do a quick HDR effect in Lightroom, slide the clarity slider all the way to the right.
The Vibrance Tool
The vibrance and saturation tools do a similar thing to your photos: they add more color. However, they work very differently. The vibrance slider is a smart tool that adds saturation to desaturated colors, while leaving the colors that are already saturated unchanged. The vibrance slider doesn’t increase saturation in skin tones, which is great because adding a lot of saturation to normal skin tones will make them look unnatural.
The Saturation Tool
With the saturation tool, you are adding or decreasing the saturation of all colors in your photo. Adding a little bit of saturation can make your photos come alive. However, be careful not to add too much saturation.
To quickly create a black-and-white photo in Lightroom, drag the saturation slider all the way to the left to -100.
Previewing Before-and-After Photos
After you’ve edited your photo, it might be helpful to see a side-by-side comparison of before and after. To do this, click the side-by-side button at the bottom of the preview window. Click the button again to cycle through different before-and-after views.
Intermediate Editing Tools
This next set of tools gives you more editing control to make your photos look even better. Most of these tools are in the panels below the Basic panel. The crop tool is an exception and can be found by clicking the crop button right above the Basic panel.
Cropping a Photo
Taking photos that are perfectly composed is difficult. That is why we crop photos after the fact. To crop a photo in Lightroom, click the crop button, which is between the histogram and Basic panel on the right side. You can also press the keyboard shortcut R to open the crop tool.
Quickly crop by clicking on one of the sides or corners of the new outline that appears around your photo in the preview window. To rotate your image, hover over the outside of a corner of your image, click and drag to the left or right. You can also click and drag the photo itself, moving it within your new crop bounding box. Once you are done cropping the photo, press return on your keyboard or click the crop button to close the crop panel.
There are also a number of options in the crop panel that appear after clicking the crop button that affect the way you crop your photos.