Adobe Lightroom for Beginners

Quick Introduction to the Overview and Organize Section of this Course.

Each Section is made up of Short Video Lessons so it' easy for you to come back to any point you want to recap in future.

Adobe Lightroom is a catalog or database which keeps track of where your photos are and what edits have been made to your photos. Photos in lightroom are not actually "loaded" into Lightroom, they are just referred to. 

In this video, we go over Catalog Settings and Backup Settings.

In this video, you'll get an overview of the Adobe Lightroom's Library Module. The Library Module is where you can view and organize the photos in your catalog. 

In this video, we discuss the Folders panel of the Library Module. The folders that are in the Folders panel represent the locations of items you have "imported" into Adobe Lightroom.

In this video, we go through the process to Import photos into Adobe Lightroom. 

In this video, we'll show you how your imported photos are organized:

1. On your computer hard drive 
2. In your Lightroom catalog in the Folder panel of the Library Module.

So, now your imported photos are on your hard drive, you may want to rename your folders into a more useful structure.You don't want to rename the folders outside of Lightroom. Instead, rename the folders in LIghtroom and the changes will mirrored outside of Lightroom on your computer's hard drive.

You can find your photos by navigating through the folders and by searching for the photo's name, but you can also find photos from Key Words. You can tag photos with keywords in the Metadata tab on the right-hand side of Lightroom.

In this video, we go over the Collections panel in the Library Module. Unlike the Folders panel, photos in Collections are not grouped by where they are physically stored on your computer's hard drive. 

Smart Collections are Collections based upon certain criteria, such as key words, color tags, or even what camera you used to take the photo.

Some useful Keyboard Shortcuts for viewing photos are:

1. "E" = Loupe View (Single Image)
2. "G" = Grid View (Many Images)
3. "+" and "-" = Changing the thumbnail size to be smaller or larger

Underneath the Collections panel is the Publish Services panel. In this video, we'll take a brief look at what you can do in the Publish Service panel, which have similar settings to the Output Options--which we'll go over later in this course.

In this video, we'll show you the various tools for sorting and rating your photos.

The Compare View allows you to compare two photos side by side. The Compare view slows you to compare similar shots in order to choose the best photo from a bunch of choices.

Giving your photos Star Ratings allows you to easily filter them by rating.

We can quickly create a handy Smart Collection with the photos we filtered by rating in the previous lesson.

Before we go into the Develop Module, we'll go over the Quick Develop panel in the Library Module. Quick Develop has a lot similar settings to the Develop Module, but there is one important difference: the settings in the Quick Develop panel are relative, not absolute. 

Because the changes we can make in the Quick Develop panel are "relative," they are quicker to make but less precise.

In this video, we'll give you a quick recap of how to crop an image whit the Cropping Tool in the Develop Module.

The first step i take with my photos is set the scene with crop and rotate. The next thing i do is Lens Corrections.

To recap, some of the things we've covered are:

• Adobe Lightroom's interface
• The process to import photos
• Managing your Catalog and Folders in the Library Module 
• Sorting your images and keyboard shortcuts
• Creating Collections and Smart Collections
• Tagging your photos with Key Words and Star Ratings
• Brief overview of the Publish Services panel
• Brief overview of the Quick Develop panel

There are a lot of tools here, but i hope this gives you a solid grounding so you can feel comfortable in Lightroom and start working with your photos.

What we're going to do is go through the different tools in the Develop Module to improve the color, the brightness, and exposure of your images. We're going to go through three different tool sets:

1. Basic tools for improving exposure and color
2. Advanced tools for improving exposure and color 
3. Advanced tools for selectively improving exposure and color.

First of all, we'll show you the limitations of a JPEG file, which has less information than a RAW file. JPEGs are the most popular file format for digital images. JPEG images are compressed, which means you lose a little bit of information.

RAW files give us a little bit more latitude to make corrections. It has a lot more information. However, even RAW files have their limits. That's why it's important to get at latest close to the correct exposure in the field. Images in the RAW file format have a lot more information that JPEG images. RAW files are effectively a digital negative.

Generally, if I'm trying to correct Overexposed images in lightroom, i don't just pull the Exposure slider down.What i tend to do is:

1. Increase the Whites as necessary
2. Increase the Highlights as necessary
3. Increase/decrease the Blacks as necessary
4. Increase the Shadows if you want to brighten the shadows
5. Increase the Contrast slightly

In Underexposed images, we've clipped off some of the black detail. We can:

1. Increase/decrease the Blacks as necessary
2. Increase/decrease the Whites as necessary
3. Increase the Shadows
4. Increase Highlights, making sure you overexpose and pixels

I always like to pull up the Clarity, and sometimes the Vibrancy. A little Saturation can be good, but you don't want to overdo it.

Sometimes a little overexposure or underexposure makes a photo look more natural. In that case, you don't want to correct for overexposure or underexposure--even if you are able to with the RAW file.

In this video, you'll get an overview of the basic tools in the Develop Module for improving exposure and color in your images.

Sometimes you want to reset and restart an image, but then you've lost all the changes you've made. A handy tip is to right-click on the image and create a Virtual Copy. Now, you've got 2 copies of the image. This allows you to reset one the original image and still keep the changes you've made as a virtual copy. 

Pulling up the Vibrance gives more color contrast--that's really what Vibrance is. It separates the colors sand exaggerates the difference between colors. When you pull the Vibrance down, it ends up beinggray scale.

In this video, we'll go over some sample images and make adjustments to make them Pop.

In the Effects panel, there is the Dehaze tool. It really gives you contrast when you have a misty look. You can also go the other direction and make your photo a lot mistier.

We're going to go into slightly more advanced tools. First of all, we're going to use the Tone Curve tool.

Below the Tone Curve panel, there is the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance (HSL) / Color / and Black and Whites (B & W). The Saturation tool is really for selectively changing the saturation to specific colors. The Hue tool shifts the Hue of key colors. Luminance changes how bright those colors are.

The next advanced concept is Split Toning. With the Split Toning tool, you essentially tint the Shadows and the Highlights seperately. 

If you make changes to the images that you really like, you can save those settings as a Preset. In this video, we go through the process to save a new Preset and the different options you can choose.

Before we move onto some of advanced tools for making selective edits, we're going to go through some of the advanced settings for adjusting the White Balance. In this video, we'll set the White Balance using a a gray reference image we took in the field with an ExpoDisc.

The first advanced tool for making selecting edits is the Graduated Filter tool. In the next five lessons, we'll go through different samples and uses of the Graduated Filter tool.

The Radial Filter does a similar job to the Vignetting tool. But, unlike the Vignetting tool, you can adjust the position of the Radial Filter and fine tune other settings like exposure and feathering.

In this video, we go over some samples of edits using the Adjustment Brush.

So, in this section, you should have gotten a good idea of the tool set in lightroom to fine tune Exposure and Color in your images.

After completing this section, you'll have a good idea of how to bring in your images, fix the color, fix the exposure, remove objects you don't want, and smooth out the noise. So, you'll have your images the way you want them.

One thing to note is you'll find more noise in images taken with High ISO. You can always look at what ISO the photo was taken with in the Metadata panel.

Before we get stuck into Noise Reduction, here is a little tip for filtering images by ISO Speed (these images may have more noise.

In the Develop Module, in the Detail Panel on the right-hand side, you can drag a little window around to get a close-up of the image.

Here are some tips on how to navigate around quickly using the Navigation Panel.

In this video, we'll go over the different options in the Sharpening settings.

A little known thing about noise is--even for a photo taken at Low ISO--if you've manipulated the exposure (for example, boosting the Shadows) you're going to see noise on that image, regardless. Adobe Lightroom does a good job of fixing this problem whit the Noise Reduction tool.

Before we jump into the next tools, here is a quick recap on Post-Crop Vignetting.

The Grain tool is where you want to add grain to your image--almost like a "film" look. You can increase the Am mount, Size, and Roughness using the Grain tool.

In this video, we use the Spot Removal tool to remove a couple of unwanted spots in our photo.

In this video, we're going to use the Feather slider to fine tune object removal using the Spot Removal tool.

When we're using the Spot Removal tool, we need to pay attention to the Depth of Field. We want to pull information from a section of our image that has a similar Depth of Field, otherwise there will be a stark contrast in focus.

In this video, we go over the difference between Heal and Clone when using the Spot Removal tool. 

In this image, we have a trickier spot to remove from our image. We need to use a smaller brush with our Spot Removal tool and use the Heal and Feather sliders to fine tune the removal.

Int his section, we're going to focus on the different options in Lightproof for outputting our images in different formats.

Generally, we're going to start in the Library Module. Then the first thing we're going ot do is select which images we want to Output and create a Collection.

One of the first options we want to look at is the Export option. In this video, we'll go over the different settings you can use in the Export panel.

In this video, we'll go over the different options when setting a custom Filename for your images. 

If you're uploading your images to a website, you're likely going to want to use a Watermark. In this video, we'll add a custom Watermark to our exported images, and go through the different options we can use to customize the Watermark further.

We've briefly mentioned the Publish Services option before. This is where you can setup different accounts with different applications like Flickr, SmugMug, and Facebook.

The Print Module is not just for actually printing directly from Lightroom. It is also for outputting arrangements of your images. In this video, we'll create a few print layouts.

Now that we're happy with our Print Layout, we can save it as a template that we can use again later.

In this video, we'll go over the different options in the the Slideshow Module.

In this video, we'll go over the different options in the Web Module.

Adobe Portfolio comes free with your subscription with Lightroom and Photoshop. This allows you to easily create photo websites.

The last thing we want to go through for Output Options is the Book Module. In this video, we'll do a brief preview of the different. 

In this section, you should have gotten an idea of all the Output Options in Lightroom.

• We have options to export files from the Library Module to online services like Flickr, Facebook, and SmugMug
• We have the Web Module to setup online galleries.
• We have the Print Module to create print layouts.
• We have the Book Module to output book layouts to Blurb or even as a PDF.
• And we have the Slideshow Module to display your images and play a series of images with music or not.

I am so glad you went through this Adobe Lightroom for Beginners Course. I hope it has helped you understand the interface and pick up a lot of tips and techniques to transform your Photos into Images that amaze your family and Friends.

Thanks and Best wishes with your Photography

Cheers

Ken