WHAT IS LIGHTROOM?

WHAT IS LIGHTROOM?

Adobe Lightroom is a behemoth of photography software with enough functions and processes to make any photographer crazy. At the simplest level, though, Lightroom was created to help you do just three main things: sort your photos, post-process them, and export them.

Editing Your Photos

Lightroom isn’t all about sorting your photos, though. Most importantly, it also lets you edit the photos that you take.

Lightroom doesn’t offer the same vast range of post-processing edits that other software options, such as Photoshop, do. Still, just because it isn’t as extensive doesn’t mean it’s not extensive enough. Many photographers can get by seamlessly with Lightroom’s post-processing features; personally, although I do own Photoshop, I use it more for graphic design work than photo editing.

Lightroom’s post-processing options cover all the main bases: brightness, contrast, color, sharpness, and many more adjustments. This also includes the ability to apply local edits — i.e., adjusting certain parts of the photo selectively, while leaving the rest untouched.

In short,  Lightroom was designed to edit your photos. This isn’t simply a side feature that you can use from time to time rather than editing the photo in Photoshop; it’s intended to be the main tool you use for post-processing.

Exporting Your Photos

Most likely, you’re already somewhat familiar with the idea of exporting your photos.

Say, for example, that you’re trying to email a set of several photos to one of your friends. Since Gmail and other email services tend to have a file size limit — something like 25 megabytes — you may not be able to send full-resolution photos. One way around that is to shrink the file size of the photos that you send. Rather than 4000-pixel photos at 0% compression, you could send 1000-pixel photos at 20% compression instead.

That’s one of the things Lightroom does well. If you need to resize a photo for email (or anything else), it is easy to export a photo at whatever settings you want.

Exporting doesn’t delete the original copy of your photos. If you export a 500-pixel copy of a photo, it’s just that — a copy. It will have a different file name (or file type) from your original photo, and you can delete/modify/send it however you want without affecting the real version.

(In fact, if you try to export a photo in Lightroom without changing its name, location, or file type — something that normally would override the original — Lightroom won’t even let you.)

I export photos all the time: When I enter photo contests, text photos to people, upload images to my website, and so on. I just right-click on the photo in Lightroom, go to Export > Export, and pick all the settings I want for my final photo.

This isn’t the most well-known thing that Lightroom does, but, in the long run, you’ll end up exporting your photos all the time.

What Makes Lightroom Different from other Software?

This is one of the top questions I hear about Lightroom, and with good reason. Lightroom does not work how you might expect, and, in a few crucial ways, it is vastly different from other options on the market, including software like Photoshop.