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How to Use Lightroom: A Complete Tutorial for Beginners     8

LAST UPDATED ON MAY 27, 2017 BY SPENCER COX – 63 COMMENTS

Adobe Lightroom is a massive, lumbering behemoth of photography software with enough functions and processes to make any photographer go
crazy. At the simplest level, though, Lightroom was created to help you do just three things: sort your photos, post-process them, and export them. On
Photography Life alone, we already have more than 100 articles about Lightroom — the equivalent of several books — and other websites have
countless more. Clearly, it’s an important topic to learn, whether you’re just starting out or you’re an advanced photographer. In this guide, I will go over
the process of using Lightroom for beginners, from start to finish, including tips on the topics that tend to confuse people the most.

This comprehensive article lays out all the basics, and it is divided into several different sections to make things easier to read. If there’s a specific term
that you’re trying to find in this article, you might want to press Control F (or, for Mac, Command F) on your keyboard. If you’ve never used this shortcut
before, it’s very useful, since it lets you search a webpage by the keyword you want.

Also, you can skip to the various parts of this article by clicking on the options here:

• Introducing Lightroom
• Why Lightroom is unique
• Demystifying the Lightroom catalog
• Importing a photo into Lightroom
• Explaining the layout of Lightroom’s Library and Develop modules
• How to organize your photos in Lightroom
• How to post-process your photos in Lightroom
• How to export your photos from Lightroom
• Backing up your catalog
• Conclusion

My goal was to write a tutorial that lays out everything a beginner needs to know about Lightroom, whether you have an older version (anything before
Lightroom 6, such as Lightroom 4 or Lightroom 5) or the newest version (Lightroom 6 or Lightroom CC).

Hopefully, even if you start without any knowledge at all, you’ll end up with a medium- to high-level understanding of Lightroom’s most important
concepts. So, it’s a long article.

Feel free to bookmark this page for later reference if you find some of these tips to be useful. Lightroom can be overwhelming at first, and the purpose
of this guide is to simplify everything as much as possible.

1) What is Lightroom?
Lightroom is a post-processing and photo organization software. It lets you sort your photos, edit them, and export them at whatever size you need.
Let’s dive into each of these three main functions:

1.1) Organizing Your Photos

The most obvious thing that Lightroom does is help you sort and organize your photos.

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Each time you import images into Lightroom, you’re also seeing where they’re located on your computer (i.e., the file structure). This appears on the
left-hand side of your screen. So, you might see something like this:

The photos that are already on your computer don’t automatically show up in Lightroom. If you want to add some of your photos to Lightroom, or you
want to add an entire folder of photos, you’ll need to import them. I’ll cover more about the Import Dialogue later; it’s not something you need to know
in detail yet.

Beyond simply telling you where your photos are located, though, Lightroom has many other ways to sort and organize your photos.

What if, for example, you take a photo that you particularly like, and you want to find it again in the future? Is there some way to mark it that makes it
easy to locate later?

Of course! There are countless ways to do so. You could give it a five-star rating, you could flag it, you could add it to a “Best Photos” collection, and
many more. Later on, I’ll go into detail about these different options, and how you can use them to sort and organize your photos however you want.

For now, just know that Lightroom is one of the main programs — in fact, the most popular one on the market — that photographers use to organize
and sort their photos.

1.2) 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.

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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.

1.3) 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.

2) 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.

Case in point: When you make a change to your photo in Lightroom, that change only shows up in Lightroom.

What do I mean by this? Say that you brighten a photo in Lightroom. You might be surprised to realize that, if you open the photo in any other
software, it won’t look any brighter than normal. The actual, underlying file is totally unchanged.

This is a fundamental part of Lightroom, and it’s not a feature you can disable.

So, if Lightroom makes it impossible to actually edit your photos, and the edits are only visible in Lightroom, why would professionals ever use it?

In fact, this system has a lot of benefits.

First, to address the main concern most people have: Yes, there is a way to see your Lightroom edits outside of Lightroom. What is it? You already know
the answer — exports.

When you edit a photo in Lightroom, the edits do only show up in Lightroom. However, when you export a photo — which, as I mentioned earlier, is
one of the three most important things you can do in Lightroom — all the edits are present in the photo you’ve exported.

So, you can edit a photo all day in Lightroom to look exactly how you want, but you won’t see any of the changes if you open the file outside of
Lightroom. The fix is simple: Re-enter Lightroom, right-click, click Export > Export, and export the photo how you want. The exported copy of the photo
now has all the edits you just made. It doesn’t replace the original file, which is still sitting happily on your computer. Instead, it creates an entirely new
photo, complete with all the export settings you chose (file type, pixel dimensions, compression, file name, and so on).

Why is this better than simply editing the actual, original photo? There are a few reasons, but here’s the big one: This type of editing is non-destructive.
You’re never changing anything about your original file at all. (There are only three settings within Lightroom that do affect the original: renaming the

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photo, moving the photo to a new folder on your hard drive, and deleting the photo from your disk.) Lightroom makes it essentially impossible to
accidentally ruin anything beyond repair.

The same cannot be said of, for example, Photoshop. If you open one of your photos in Photoshop, crop it, save the photo, and exit, your photo will be
permanently cropped. There are ways around this — specifically, unchecking the “delete cropped pixels” option and saving as a .PSD file — but this isn’t
an intuitive fix. It’s far too easy to edit the original photo by mistake. (See Photoshop vs Lightroom for more differences.)

Lightroom is great precisely because you’re never touching the original file. Lightroom is non-destructive editing software, and that is a critical feature
for almost every photographer.

3) What is the Lightroom Catalog?

As you read about Lightroom, you’ll hear one term a lot: catalog.

Lightroom is a cataloging software.

What does that mean? In fact, this is exactly what I covered in the prior section: Lightroom doesn’t actually touch your photos.

Every single edit that you make to a photo; each five-star rating you give; every time you add a photo to a collection — all of those changes are stored
somewhere other than the actual photo on your computer. Where? The Lightroom catalog file.

The Lightroom catalog is one file that contains each change and adjustment you make to every single one of your photos. It also doesn’t take up too
much space on your computer; my Lightroom catalog file is only about 300 megabytes in size, yet it contains all the edits to each of my thousands of
photos. Not bad!

The Lightroom catalog gets more and more complicated as you learn about it in-depth. If you want to use multiple catalogs, send a catalog of photos
to someone else, or use the same catalog on multiple computers, things can be very tricky. I recommend reading our full article on Lightroom catalogs if
you’re trying to do anything complicated, and our article on using Lightroom with multiple computers.

Luckily, you probably don’t need to do any of that yet. If you just want to add photos to a single Lightroom catalog, you already know enough to start.

By default, the photos on your computer (or memory card) won’t be a part of your Lightroom catalog — so, you need to add them yourself. How do
you do this? To add a photo to your Lightroom catalog, you need to start at the Import Dialogue.

4) Getting Started: Import a Photo into Lightroom

When you open Lightroom, you’ll notice a box at the bottom-left that says “Import…”

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Click it, and you’ll enter what is known as the Import Dialogue. (Alternatively, the Import Dialogue might open automatically when you enter Lightroom
or put a memory card in your computer, depending upon your Lightroom > Preferences settings at the top of the screen.)

The Import Dialogue is where you choose which photos to add to your Lightroom catalog to organize and edit them. You’ll probably end up opening
the Import Dialogue a lot — each time that you’ve returned from a photo shoot and you’re loading images onto your computer.

Within the Import Dialogue, there are plenty of options available. I’ll cover the most important below:

4.1) The Left-Hand Side

The easiest part of the Import Dialogue is the tab on the left-hand side. This is where you choose which photos you want to open in Lightroom, simply
by clicking on the folder (or memory card) where they currently reside.

There’s not too much to say here, except that you may notice something interesting: It’s not just your memory card that shows up here. If you’re trying
to import a photo into Lightroom that’s currently on your Desktop, or in your Downloads file, or anywhere else, you can do so without a problem.

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4.2) The Top Options

The top of the Import Dialogue gives you a few more options. Specifically, there are four different ways to import your photos into Lightroom’s catalog:
“Copy as DNG,” “Copy,” “Move,” and “Add.” Each one is there for a reason, depending upon what you want Lightroom to do with your photos.

Add is great if you don’t want to move the actual file on your computer to a new location; you simply want the photo to show up when you open
Lightroom. This is ideal if you have a photo that’s already in the right place on your computer’s hard drive.

Move is best if you’re trying to add one of your photos to your Lightroom catalog, but it’s not in the right place on your computer. So, if one of your
photos is on your Desktop, but you want it to appear under Photos > 2017 > April, you can move the photo to the proper location, while simultaneously
telling Lightroom to add it to your catalog.

Copy is best if the photo you want to add to your catalog isn’t in the right location yet, but you still don’t want to delete it from its current location yet;
instead, you just want to duplicate it somewhere else. This seems odd, but it’s actually quite useful. When I’m loading photos from someone else’s flash
drive, I don’t want to move the photos from their flash drive onto my computer (since that would effectively delete them from their original location).
Instead, I simply want to create a duplicate of the photos and put it in the right spot on my computer. Ultimately, the duplicated file is the one that
Lightroom adds to your catalog.

Copy as DNG is one that you are less likely to use. This option is what happened when the Lightroom developers realized that if you’re copying a photo
from one location to another, the new duplicate can actually be a different file type than the original, if there’s a benefit to doing so. “Copy as DNG”
does 100% exactly the same as “Copy,” except that the new, duplicate photo in the proper location will be saved as a .DNG file rather than a JPEG, TIFF,
CRW, NEF, or whatever it was originally. (Read more about it here: Why I no longer convert RAW files to DNG)

Personally, when I’m loading photos from a memory card onto my computer, I prefer to copy the photos rather than move them. That way, I maintain
two versions of each photo: one on my memory card, and one at the new spot on my computer. This is nice just in case my computer’s hard drive
breaks before the new photos are backed up. (“Add” isn’t really a viable option here, because, when I eventually remove the memory card from my
computer, the photos wouldn’t appear in my catalog any longer!)

4.3) The Right-Hand Side

There are a lot of options along the right-hand side of the import dialogue. It can seem overwhelming if you’ve never used Lightroom before.

However, the main purpose of the right-hand bar is just to tell Lightroom where to put the photos that you’re moving, copying, or copying as DNGs. (It
doesn’t appear if you’re adding photos, since Lightroom assumes that they’re already in the right place.)

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Beyond that, the rest of the options are up to you. You can choose to rename the files you’re adding, which could be helpful for organization purposes.
You can apply a set of “develop settings” to the photos you add — say, applying a pre-chosen amount of sharpening and noise reduction to each photo
— or a “metadata” setting, such as filling in the copyright section of each photo you open. You can choose to create a second copy of every photo you
import so that you have a backup (though this may be overkill if you already have a constant backup to an external hard drive or the cloud).

You’ll find yourself personalizing this section significantly over time. If you’re interested in more information about some of these options, you may want
to read our full article on the Lightroom import dialogue.

For now, once you’ve chosen the right destination folder, you’re good. Every single one of these settings is reversible at any point in the future.

4.4) The Bar at the Bottom

The last bit of the import dialogue is the bar along the bottom. The main option here is the “Import Preset” section. This is what lets you save all the
settings you just chose — the copy/move/add settings, the destination folder, the options on the right-hand sidebar — and use the exact same ones at
some point in the future.

Aside from that, once you’ve selected all the photos you want to add to your catalog, you’re done! Click the “Import” button at the bottom-right of your
screen, and you’re ready to organize and edit the photos you’ve just added.

5) After Import: How is Lightroom Arranged?

Broadly speaking, Lightroom is divided into two main sections: the organization half, and the post-processing half.

These two core features are separated from one another when you’re looking at a photo in Lightroom; you can’t see all the organizational features and
all the editing features at the same time. To organize your photos, you need to enter the Library module. To post-process your photos, you need to
enter the Develop module.

On top of the Library and Develop modules, Lightroom also has a Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, and Web module. Each one does, roughly, what it sounds
like. If you want to pinpoint the GPS coordinates of a photo you took, for example, you’d need to open the Map module. We have a full article
dedicated to explaining Lightroom modules if you’re interested.

The most important modules in Lightroom though, by far, are Library and Develop. Very few photographers will use the other modules just as
frequently. So, how do the Library and Develop modules work? I’ll give an outline below:

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5.1) The Library Module

You’ll notice upon entering the Library module that it looks something like this:

What do all the pop-out tabs do? I’ll cover each one below:

5.1.1) The Left-Hand Tab

Along the left-hand side is the actual file structure on your computer. (If you don’t see it, press the “tab” key on your keyboard, or click the inward-
pointing arrow along the very far left.) In the example above, you can see that the photo I’ve clicked is tucked away in my Pictures > 2017 > 03 March
folder.

Near the bottom of the screen, still on the left-hand side, you can see a label called “Collections.” I’ll get to that in a bit, but here’s a spoiler alert: The
“Collections” section of Lightroom is very important. For many photographers, it forms the backbone of their organization structure. I’ll cover it in more
detail later.

5.1.2) The Top Options

At the top of the screen, below the Library/Develop/Map/etc. modules, is a thin gray bar called “Library Filter.” If you don’t see it, press the “\” key on
your keyboard, or go to View > Show Filter Bar. Another spoiler alert: This unassuming tab is the main tool at your disposal if you ever lose a photo and
are trying to find it again.

5.1.3) The Right-Hand Tab

On the right-hand side of your screen is another pop-out tab. This one has a few more options — Quick Develop, Keywording, etc. — and exists mainly
to give you information about your photos. The most useful of these options is the “Metadata” section, which lets you look at the behind-the-scenes
information about your photos. I use this whenever I’m trying to see when I captured a photo, or if I used exposure compensation, or if I used a
particular camera/lens rather than another. At the top of the right-hand tab, you can see a summary of this information, as well as a histogram of the
photo you’ve selected.

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5.1.4) The Toolbar at the Bottom

Another important option is at the bottom of your screen. Lightroom calls this your Toolbar. (If it doesn’t appear, press “T,” or go View > Show Toolbar.)

The Toolbar lets you choose how your photos look within the Library module. They could be a set of thumbnails, a single image that fills most of the
screen, or a comparison of multiple photos that fill part of the screen. Those options can be seen in the screenshot below:

The thumbnail view — the icon on the far left — is also known as the Grid View. This one is useful if you’re trying to scroll through several photos at
once.

The Loupe View is next. It partially fills the screen with your photo, keeping the sidebars open in the mean time. It’s nice if you want to look at each
photo in more detail, though I tend to prefer the full-screen view that you get by pressing the “F” key. (In older Lightroom versions, press the “L” key
instead, or just go to the top menu: Window > Screen Mode > Full Screen Preview.)

There are also Compare and Survey views if you want to compare multiple photos against one another at the same time. And, if you take a lot of
photos of people, you might find the People view — where Lightroom tries to find people’s faces and group them together — to help for certain
shoots. I don’t tend to use these views, but you might find them useful depending upon your work. Feel free to experiment.

Also, for what it’s worth, the tools you’ll have at your disposal in the Toolbar will change depending upon which of these options you click. If you enter
“Loupe View,” for example, you’ll be able to give your photos a star rating, which isn’t in the Toolbar in the other views (though you can do this at any
time just by pressing a number, 1-5, on your keyboard).

5.1.5) The Filmstrip Pop-Out at the Very Bottom

Finally, there’s one more pop-out tab that we haven’t examined yet: the “Filmstrip” at the very, very bottom of the screen. If it doesn’t appear yet, you’ll
need to click the upward-pointing arrow at the bottommost point of Lightroom:

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This lets you look at a miniature version of each photo along the bottom of your screen. It can be useful in certain occasions — say, you’re in the Loupe
View (again, looking at a single photo at a time) and you want to go quickly to a photo that is much later within the same folder. I don’t use the filmstrip
much, but it may be useful for your work.

The Library module does more than just let you view your photos, though — it also lets you organize them. I’ll cover that in a moment, but I’ll give a
quick overview of the Develop module first.

5.2) The Develop Module

Editing your photos is one of the crucial steps of photography. It is particularly relevant if you shoot with your camera’s RAW mode, in which case you’re
likely to end up with photos that are low-contrast and low-saturation immediately out of camera. That’s where the Develop module in Lightroom can
help.

Lightroom’s Develop module looks like this:

Once again, I’ll cover what each of these pop-out tabs does below:

5.2.1) The Right-Hand Post-Processing Options

As you can see, there are plenty of post-processing options at the right-hand side of the screen. Most of those are considered global adjustments — in
other words, they affect the entire photograph at once.

The other category of adjustment is called a local edit; it only affects part of your photo. The options at the top of this sidebar are the local edit options:

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You’ll end up using this right-hand sidebar far more often than any of the other options when you’re post-processing photos in Lightroom. It’s the
home base. Almost any time you want to make an edit, this is where you’ll go.

5.2.2) The Left-Hand Tab

The other crucial tab in Lightroom’s Develop module is the left-hand tab. This section has a few separate options that are each equally useful.

First is the “Presets” section. This lets you apply a set of pre-fixed edits to your photos. Since every photo is different, why would you want to do this?
Personally, I have a sharpening preset that I apply to most of my photos. Since most of my photos are taken at similar ISO and aperture values, I tend to
use the same sharpening settings frequently — and this just quickens the process. Read more here: How to Create a Lightroom Develop Preset

Next is the “Snapshots” section. We have a useful video tutorial about Lightroom snapshots that you may want to check out, but the main point is this:
A snapshot is a way to remember the exact post-processing settings you used at a particular point in time. If you like the look of an edit that you made,
and you want to return to those settings easily (i.e., without undoing all of them manually), you can take a snapshot and return to it at any time.

The “History” option is next, and it’s a very useful one. Here, Lightroom essentially takes a snapshot every time you make an edit. So, you can go back,
chronologically, to see how the photo looked at any point in its history. I use this all the time to compare my recent edits to an earlier version of the
photo. However, if you’ve made a lot of edits to a particular image, this section can get crowded and difficult to navigate exactly where you want.

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Finally, the “Collections” option is last. As I mentioned earlier, this section also appears in the normal Library module, and I’m not sure that it’s totally
necessary here. But, if you have the filmstrip pop-out enabled, you can drag any photo you want into any Collection you want, even within the Develop
module. Some photographers may find that useful.

5.2.3) The Develop Toolbar at the Bottom

The last part of the Develop module’s layout is the toolbar at the bottom. There are only a few options, and you won’t end up using them very
frequently.

The first option is the view mode of the Develop module. You can view your images with a single photo taking up the screen — which is the most
typical way to use the Develop module — or with two photos taking up the screen. In this case, the second photo is the original appearance of the photo
out-of-camera.

This can be useful if you’re trying to see how drastic your edits were, but it’s not something that most people use very often. You can do something
similar, without showing both photos at once, by pressing the “\” key on your keyboard.

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The other option in the Toolbar is called “Soft Proofing,” and this is a relatively advanced topic. If you’re trying to print a photo, it can be difficult (i.e.,
really difficult and expensive) to get the colors/contrast/brightness of your image to look exactly the same between your screen and your print. The Soft
Proofing option lets you load profiles from your printer and see, roughly, how the photo will look when printed.

Personally, even though I really enjoy printing my photos, I rarely use this option. Depending upon how closely you care about one-to-one accuracy
between your print and your screen, you should already know whether it will be useful for you.

6) How to Organize Your Photos In Lightroom

Now that you know the layout of Lightroom’s Library and Develop modules, I’ll cover the various tools at your disposal when you’re trying to organize
your images. For what it’s worth, we already have a full article on organizing your photos in Lightroom, which goes into some more advanced behind-
the-scenes catalog settings. Below, I’ll mostly stick to the basics:

6.1) Stars
Like most photo organization software, Lightroom lets you rate your photos by giving them a “star” label. You can give a photo a rating from 1-5 stars,
or you can leave it unrated.

The easiest way to do this is just to click the number on your keyboard corresponding to the stars you want to give. Technically, you can do the same by
going to Photo > Set Rating > Five Star, but that’s way more complicated than necessary.

6.2) Flags
Flags are just like stars, but without as many options. You can flag a photo as a pick — one that you like — or flag a photo as a reject. And, of course,
you can also leave a photo unflagged.

Personally, I use the flag options quite often. When I’m loading photos, and I think that I want to delete an image, I flag it as a reject. Then, later, I look
through all my rejects and decide if any of them are worth keeping.

To flag a photo as a pick, click “P.” To flag it as a reject, click “X” instead.

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6.3) Color Labels

Another way to group your photos is to give them a “color label.”

This doesn’t actually do anything to the photos themselves. There’s no behind-the-scenes thing you can do with photos of a certain color label that you
can’t do with others; like stars or flags, it’s just an additional way to give yourself a grouping that is easy to recognize later on.

Personally, for example, I tend to assign a red color label to a group of photos that I’m eventually planning to merge into a panorama. It just makes
them easier to recognize later on.

Other photographers will label photos that they want to look through together at a later time — for example, giving a blue label to all the wedding
photos that include the bride. This just depends upon your own style of photography — there is no right or wrong way to use labels in Lightroom.

To give a photo a color label, press 6, 7, 8, or 9 on your keyboard.

6.4) Keywords
If you want an easy way to find your photos later, consider giving them keywords.

This is exactly what it sounds like — you simply label your photos with a few useful terms that will help you find them at some point in the future.

To give a photo a keyword, you need to be in the Library module. On the right-hand pop-out tab, you’ll see an option called “Keywording.” Click on it,
and type whatever keywords apply to a particular photo (separated by a comma).

Personally, I don’t use keywords much as a landscape photographer, but I know event and wedding photographers who find them invaluable. Whether
or not you use them in the long run, it’s worth getting a feel for keywords and seeing if they might be valuable for your work.

6.5) Using the Filter Bar to Find Your Photos Later

Each time that you label a photo, you’re making it easier for your future self to find it again. The main tool that you’ll use to find your old photos is
called the Filter Bar.

The Filter Bar lets you sort your photos by almost any characteristic: Star rating, color label, camera, lens, aperture setting, file type, and many more. As I
mentioned earlier, the filter bar is a thin, gray bar near the top of your screen. If you don’t see it in the Grid View, click the “\” button on your keyboard,
or go to View > Show Filter Bar in the top menu.

If you remember a single aspect about the photo you’re trying to find — part of its file name, the month you took it, a range of ISO values you probably
used — you can narrow down your search drastically by using the filter bar.

Say, for example, that you know that one of your old photos was taken with the Nikon D800e, and you gave it five stars, but you can’t find the photo
anywhere. After going to the “All Photographs” folder at the top-left of Lightroom’s Library module, open the filter bar and start searching:

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Here, I was able to narrow the search from 26,547 photos down to just 369!

I use this option all the time, whether to find missing images or to learn useful statistics about my shooting style (i.e., how many images I’ve taken with
each of my lenses over time).

If you know how to use the filter bar in Lightroom, you should be able to find any photo that you’re missing. It’s a great tool to have at your disposal.

6.6) Adding Photos to Collections

My single favorite thing about Lightroom is the ability to add photos to collections.

What are Lightroom collections? Essentially, collections are similar to the file structure of the photos on your computer — except that they only exist in
Lightroom, and you can add a single photo to as many collections as you want without a problem.

Here’s an example. Say that one of my photos is stored on my computer’s hard drive at Spencer > Photos > 2016 > 02 February. But say that I also want
that photo stored in a folder called “Best Landscape Photos,” in a folder called “For Photography Life,” and in a folder called “Photos to Print.”

In the file structure on my computer, I’d need to duplicate the same image several times, taking up a lot of room on my hard drive. Plus, any time that I
edited one of the photos, the other copies would remain unchanged! This is a clear problem — a clear problem that Lightroom’s collections fix.

Now, I can have a photo stored on my hard drive at Spencer > Photos > 2016 > 02 February, which will show up at the left-hand side bar in Lightroom’s
Library module. But, at the same time, I can add it to a “Best Landscape Photos” collection, a “For Photography Life” collection, and a “Photos to Print”
collection. Now, its actual file location remains unchanged, and I don’t end up duplicating the original photo at all.

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To keep your collections organized, you can group them into “collection sets.” Personally, for example, my favorite photos from Colorado are stored at
From > Trips > Colorado > Best. (In this case, only the “Best” is a collection, while the others are collection sets.)

The beauty of this system is that you’re not creating duplicates of a photo each time you add it to a collection. A photo that’s in one collection takes up
effectively the same amount of space as a photo that’s in five, twelve, or fifty collections! And, similarly, any edits you make to a photo in one of the
collections are also visible in all the others. This is exactly how photo organization should be.

6.7) Virtual Copies

What happens if you want to edit one photo in multiple ways? Say, for example, that you like an image in both color and black and white — how do you
keep two separate versions of the photo?

It’s actually quite easy: Create a virtual copy.

Lightroom’s virtual copies are exactly like duplicating a photo on your hard drive, except that it only happens in Lightroom, and it doesn’t double the
amount of space taken up! Virtual copies are very useful ways to keep a variety of edits of the same photo without any significant storage penalties.

However, be wary of keeping several different virtual copies of your photo just because. It’s easy to have your virtual copies get out of hand, where you
don’t know which one of them is actually the most up-to-date. Personally, I only try to create virtual copies when I need to keep a version of the photo
that is vastly different from my original, and I won’t get confused between the two.

With that one caution virtual copies are a very useful tool (and you can read more about them here: How to Use Virtual Copies.) I end up using virtual
copies relatively often, particularly for my main portfolio images. It’s a quick way to keep multiple edits of your most-used shots.

(For what it’s worth, if you’re trying to keep things simple, you may consider using Develop snapshots, which I mentioned earlier, to a similar effect. A
virtual copy is essentially a Develop snapshot that appears more tangibly in your actual library.)

6.8) Smart Previews

If you store all your photos on an external hard drive, and you remove the external hard drive, you’ll actually still see those photos appear in Lightroom!
They’ll just be very low-resolution previews, and they’ll have little exclamation marks at the top to indicate that Lightroom is confused:

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In the most recent versions of Lightroom, though, there’s actually a way to use these previews for something useful: creating something called a smart
preview.

A smart preview is exactly what it sounds like: It’s a preview of your photo that acts as if it’s the photo itself. You can edit it, organize it, and export it
without any problem — things that you cannot necessarily do with a normal preview.

Smart previews don’t replace your actual photo. They’re lower-resolution, for one, and they don’t actually show up on your hard drive. They exist solely
within Lightroom’s catalog.

However, the benefit of smart previews is that you can edit them exactly like typical photos, and, when you reconnect your hard drive later, all those
edits will sync back up to the original photo as if nothing happened.

Personally, I don’t use smart previews, since they take up a significant amount of space compared to “dumb” previews. However, if you’re frequently
connecting and disconnecting different hard drives, and you don’t want a break in your workflow, they can be very useful.

7) How to Edit Your Photos in Lightroom

It only took 6000 words to get to the best part: editing your photos!

Along with organization, post-processing is one of the crucial pillars of Lightroom. It’s also one of the most personal parts about photography, and your
individual post-processing style has a major effect on the way your photos ultimately look. It’s a crucial way to differentiate your work from the rest of
the market.

At a broad level, a good philosophy for post-processing is that your final result should look natural. If someone immediately thinks one of your photos
looks fake, they aren’t likely to see it in a very positive light.

Still, if you’re a color-high photographer who throws conventions in the wind, and you want otherworldly contrast and bright red skies in your
photograph, you can do that in Lightroom, too.

Lightroom isn’t as advanced as Photoshop in terms of the sheer number of post-processing options it offers, but it certainly includes the most important
options. Unless you are focused on conceptual, studio, or advertising photos, which could require intense levels of retouching and photo blending, the
options in the Develop module will likely be enough for most of your photos. Personally, I spend 50x more time in Lightroom than Photoshop, and most
of my work is in the Develop module.

7.1) The Develop Sliders

The heart of the Develop module is the right-hand side bar — the post-processing sliders.

This is where you change the brightness, contrast, saturation, colors, and other global image edits. The Develop sliders affect the entire photograph
rather than just a specific part. (A note on what I mean by this: Yes, something like the “shadows” slider will affect the shadows more than the rest of the
photo. But it will affect all the shadows equally across the entire image. So, it’s still a “global” adjustment.

Most of them are fairly intuitive, and it isn’t worth spending 1000 words describing how “shadows” affects the brightness of the shadows in a photo, and
“contrast” boosts the overall contrast of your scene. Play around with these sliders, and you’ll get a better feel for what they do than you ever could just
by reading an article online.

However, if you’d like to read about any of them in particular, we have several articles that dive into more detail on some specific topics:

• The sliders in the “Basic” panel

• The sliders in the “Tone Curve” panel
• Using the “Camera Calibration” panel to get more accurate colors: Nikon, Canon, Fuji, and Sony
• The split-toning panel
• Lens corrections

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You’ll get a lot better at using the sliders as you continue to edit photos over time — and there is plenty more to learn. Like I mentioned at the start of
this article, Lightroom is a huge program, and even a “complete” guide like this one couldn’t possibly dive into everything it offers.

7.2) Making Local Adjustments

Beyond the Lightroom sliders (global adjustments), though, there are a set of local adjustments that you can make to your photos, too.

These can be very useful. Say that you want to highlight the importance of one particular tree trunk in your photo — a simple solution is to do a local
adjustment and brighten that single area of your image.

Which local adjustments does Lightroom offer? It depends upon the version that you have. However, at the most, you’ll be able to set five local
adjustments: spot removal, red eye correction, graduated filters, radial filters, and adjustment brushes.

7.2.1) Spot Removal

This is one of Lightroom’s most useful features. Have you ever taken a photo where your camera sensor has dust specks? They show up as small,
annoying blobs in different parts of an image:

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The spot removal tool is intended to eliminate dust specks like this, as well as other parts of your photo that need to be healed. For example, if you’re
trying to get rid of a tiny bird that flew across part of the sky in your image, you could use the spot removal tool to clone it out.

To see the photo more closely, you’ll probably want to zoom in. Press the “Z” key, or go to the “Navigator” in the left-hand tab and choose the
magnification that you want. (Lightroom doesn’t have a slide-zoom feature that some other software does — you’re limited to zooming to very strict
magnifications.)

You’ll notice that there are two options within the spot removal tool: clone and heal. Both work by sourcing the replacement pixels from some other
part of the photo. If you choose “clone,” Lightroom replaces your spot-healed section using the exact pixels from the source area. If you choose “heal,”
Lightroom replaces your spot-healed section a bit more flexibly, using its algorithms to determine how it thinks those pixels should look (though it still
uses the source pixels as a baseline). I find that I generally get better results with “heal,” but, for hard edges, it sometimes does a poor job replacing
pixels. In that case, “clone” can be a better option.

As of later Lightroom versions, the spot heal actually works in more than just circular spots; you can “paint” a healing brush in whatever shape you want.
I was glad when Lightroom added this feature, since the earlier version was much more difficult to use.

Although the spot removal isn’t as advanced as Photoshop’s healing brush and similar features, it does its job. Unless you want to do extensive spot
removal adjustments, it should be good enough in most cases.

7.2.2) Red Eye Correction

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I don’t take pictures of people very often, so I don’t think I’ve ever needed to use this tool. However, if you used on-camera flash and ended up with red
eye in one of your photos (or if you’re editing images that someone else took), this is a nice option to have.

It’s pretty self-explanatory. The only tip I have is to zoom in on the photo (again, by pressing Z), which should make it easier to click on the right spot.

7.2.3) Gradated Filter

This tool, on the other hand, I use all the time!

If you ever need to adjust part of a photo and not the rest, your goal should be to make everything look as natural as possible. You don’t want any halos
around your subject; it just looks weird.

The graduated filter tool is a great help for this exact reason. Essentially, it allows you to adjust all the normal settings — brightness, saturation, contrast,
etc. — but only to part of the photo. Specifically, it adjusts the photo along a smooth gradient.

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If you want a darker sky, for example, it can be difficult to make it look natural without affecting the horizon line as well. In such a situation, my go-to
would be the gradient tool, since it is a very gentle adjustment. A gradient going from slightly above the horizon to slightly below would be very difficult
to spot, and is likely to look much more natural than most other local adjustments would.

Of course, it’s still possible to mess up the graduated filter; it doesn’t automatically create a seamless result. Here’s an example where, by brightening
the left-hand side of the frame with a graduated filter, I still ended up with a result that looked unnatural:

This is just one over-exaggerated example, though, and there are dozens of good examples of the graduated filter, too. Again, you’ll need to experiment.
I find myself using this tool for a huge portion of the photos I take, since it’s the most subtle way to edit a portion of an image selectively.

Also, if you want to see the exact area that your adjustment is targeting, here’s a useful tip: Press the “O” key! You’ll see the area of your gradient
highlighted in red, which makes things pretty easy.

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Finally, it’s worth noting that some later versions of Lightroom allow you to edit the gradient that you’ve created using the “brush” option (see below):

This can be useful if your gradient works well across most of the photo, but there’s a small bit that you don’t want it to affect. Not all versions of
Lightroom have this option, but it’s nice if yours happens to include it.

7.2.4) Radial Filter

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Similar to the graduated filter, newer versions of Lightroom will offer what is called the radial filter.

In this case, your “gradient” is circular or oval-shaped, but otherwise acts exactly like the graduated filter tool.

I use this tool quite often, since, once again, it is one of the gentler ways to make a local adjustment. If you’re trying to brighten a rock in the
foreground of a landscape photo, for example, this tool can be very useful.

The only additional point to mention is that the radial filter can be inverted, too — that is, you get to choose whether the filter affects the area outside
or inside the circle/oval that you draw. You can switch between them simply by checking or unchecking the “invert mask” option.

Inverted radial filter

7.2.5) Adjustment Brush

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The last of Lightroom’s local adjustment options is the adjustment brush.

This one is as simple as it gets: As if you’re using Microsoft Paint, you just paint over all the areas that you want to adjust. Here, especially, it helps to
press the “O” key (or click “Show Masked Overlay” in the Toolbar) so that you can see all the areas you’re selecting.

The adjustment brush is easy to misuse. First, my main tip is to avoid clicking the “auto mask” option (in the right-hand pop-out) for most photos. What
does the auto mask do? Essentially, it tries to find hard edges in your photo, then stop/start the boundary of your adjustment brush so that you don’t
go beyond them.

It sounds like a good idea, but it doesn’t work very well. If you accidentally leave “auto mask” turned on, and you use the adjustment brush over
something like a cloud, you may realize later that the cloud looks really weird at full magnification, since the brush you wanted to apply works on some
pixels and not others. Potentially, you’ll end up with grainy and splotchy sections that don’t look good at all. (However, if you’re trying to select
something particularly tough — say, curls of hair — you may want to turn on the “auto mask” option briefly. Just make sure that the final result actually
looks good.)

Also, if you apply the adjustment brush without care, it’s easy to get strange halos around your subjects. Always watch out and double check that your
edits look as natural as possible.

With those qualifications, Lightroom’s adjustment brush can be a great tool. It’s the most flexible way to edit your photos selectively, which makes it a
very useful option to have at your disposal.

7.3) Sync Develop Settings

It will often be the case that you want to edit two photos similarly, or perhaps the exact same way. For example, when I’m taking Milky Way photos, the
light doesn’t change very quickly from photo to photo. This means that I can use the same Develop settings on several photos in a row without a
problem.

Obviously, you could do this the slow way: re-editing photo after photo with exactly the same settings. However, there’s a much quicker way to do this:
syncing the Develop settings.

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How do you sync the Develop settings from photo to photo? It’s fairly easy:

1. Edit one of your photos however you want; this is what you’ll copy the settings from.
2. Enter the Grid View of the Library module (press G).
3. Highlight all the photos that, ideally, would have identical Develop settings. You can do this by holding down the Shift key and clicking the
first/last photos of the group. Or, you can hold down the Control key (Command on a Mac) and click each photo individually.
4. Now that all the photos are highlighted, click once on the already-edited photo. The other photos should remain highlighted, but the already-
edited photo should be highlighted brighter than the rest.
5. Right-click on any of the highlighted photos. Go to Develop Settings > Sync Settings.
6. A dialogue will pop up asking which of the Develop settings you want to sync. Remember that any local adjustments you’ve made may not
appear in the right spot in other photos, assuming that your composition changed from shot to shot.

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7.4) Photo Merge

If you have one of the newest versions of Lightroom (Lightroom 6 or Lightroom CC), you also have access to a useful feature called photo merge.

This option lets you blend together photos as an HDR or as a panorama. Hopefully, in the future, it will allow merging as a focus stack, too, although
that isn’t available as of May 2017.

To merge photos together, you’ll want to highlight all of them in Lightroom’s Grid View. Again, to do so, you need to hold down the Shift key, then click
the first/last photo that you want to merge. (Or you could hold down Control — for Mac, Command — and click each photo individually.)

Then, right click, and go to Photo Merge > HDR, or Photo Merge > Panorama. In both cases, a dialogue will pop up that gives you a few options.
They’re all pretty self-explanatory.

Here’s what the HDR panel looks like:

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The HDR photo above has some strange colors here (since I clicked the “auto tone” option, and Lightroom didn’t do a great job), but that is very easy to
correct later. The completed photo looks something like this:

NIKON D800E + 20mm f/1.8 @ 20mm, ISO 100, 0.2 seconds, f/8.0

Not too bad! Lightroom’s Photo Merge tool is one of the main reasons I upgraded to the newest version. It also exports these HDR or panoramic
photos as .DNG files, which means they are still RAW files (as covered earlier in the section on “Copy as DNG”).

7.5) Editing Externally

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As nice as Lightroom’s develop options are, you still may want to edit your photos in different software from time to time. Personally, I use Photoshop
for certain images — those which require complex edits, like focus stacking, that Lightroom does not allow.

To edit a photo externally, just right click and select Edit In > Adobe Photoshop, or Edit In > [whatever software you want to use].

By default, when you save the photo in your external software, a copy of the photo reappears inside Lightroom. This is very useful! You can change the
specific settings for the reopened photo by clicking at the very top menu: Lightroom > Preferences.

When you open the Preferences dialogue, go to the header labeled External Editing, and you can adjust the settings for photos that are reopened from
other post-processing software:

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I leave mine set to import 16-bit TIFFs with the ProPhoto color space, since those are the largest files with the most information. You can set these
however you want, though, and save more hard drive space with more compressed options.

(As a side note — if you’re ever trying to change some of Lightroom’s behind-the-scenes settings, this is the place to do it. There are several different
options in the Lightroom > Preferences dialogue, covering everything from the folder location of your Catalog file to the background color of your
Library window.)

In addition to external editors, you can also use external plugins — tools that can make your life easier and accomplish tasks that Lightroom itself does
not natively allow. For example, I bought an external plugin called LR/Mogrify 2 that lets me add borders to the edges of my photos when I export
them, which wasn’t otherwise possible.

NIKON D800E + 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 24mm, ISO 200, 1/40, f/11.0

If there’s something you can’t do in Lightroom, you can almost always accomplish it via an external editor or an external plugin.

8) Exporting Your Photos

Almost done! The final step of the process is to export your photos, and, for that, you’ll need to enter the export dialogue.

Along with organizing and post-processing your photos, exporting is one of the most important tasks that Lightroom can accomplish. It’s also quite
intuitive and easy to learn for yourself.

To start, click on a single photo or multiple photos at the same time. (Lightroom can export photos in batches without a problem). In fact, if you want to
highlight every single photo contained in a particular folder, press Control A on your keyboard (Command A on a Mac).

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Then, right click, and go to Export > Export. The export dialogue will pop up:

Most of the settings within the export dialogue are self-explanatory. If you want the longest edge of your photo to be 2500 pixels wide, set it to 2500
pixels. If you want a slightly-compressed JPEG, select JPEG at, say, 80% quality.

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There are only a few points worth noting.

First, under the “Image Sizing” tab, if you’ve chosen your dimension in terms of pixels (rather than inches or centimeters), the “Resolution” option means
nothing. A digital image displayed full-screen will look 100% identical whether you choose 300 ppi, 72 ppi, or 2 ppi. This setting only matters if you’ve
chosen your dimension in terms of inches or millimeters instead. If so — which will generally be the case only if you’re trying to print your photo and
you don’t want to do any calculations yourself — you can tell Lightroom to print a 4×6 inch photo at 300 ppi and it will automatically calculate that you
need a 1200×1800 pixel photo.

Second, under the “Metadata” tab, the idea here is that every photo you take has associated data other than the photo itself. If a photographer hasn’t
removed the metadata from an image, you can see a lot of behind-the-scenes data about the photo: the camera and lens, the exposure settings, the
date and time it was taken, and so on. If you don’t want people knowing this information, select Include > Copyright Only.

Lastly, if you want to save any of your settings as a preset — something that you can reuse at any time quickly in the future — it’s an easy process. Click
on the “Add” button on the left-hand side of the export dialogue, and just name your preset whatever you want.

9) Backing Up Your Catalog

The final step of the process is to close Lightroom. When you do, you might notice a box pop up that looks something like this:

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This is the Backup Dialogue. If it doesn’t show for you, go to the menu at the very top of your screen: Lightroom > Catalog Settings > General > Back
Up Catalog > Every Time Lightroom Exits.

This is a very useful step to take. Although you don’t actually need to back up Lightroom every single time that you close it — and, personally, I often
click the “Skip this time” option — it’s something that you should be doing with regularity.

Why? There are a few reasons.

First, as Lightroom tells you, this doesn’t actually back up your photos. Instead, it backs up Lightroom’s catalog file — the catalog file that contains every
edit, star rating, label, collection, keyword, and setting that you’ve chosen for each of your photos. It’s a big deal.

By backing up the catalog, if something horrible ever happens, you can revert back to an older version. The backed-up catalog won’t have all of your
newest edits, but it will be far better than nothing.

Also, since the Lightroom catalog is a surprisingly small file, there’s no real harm in backing it up regularly. As I mentioned earlier, mine is only 300
megabytes in size, which is the equivalent of roughly seven RAW photos from my camera.

Always leave the “Test integrity” and “Optimize catalog” options turned on, just because they can’t cause any harm, and they’ll only add a second or two
to the total backup time. The other option — the folder that you’re backing up to — should also be self-explanatory.

10) Conclusion
We made it.

This was a long article — longer than I expected when I first started writing it — but that’s because Adobe Lightroom is a complex program. If you’re
trying to learn it from scratch, you’ll need a wide foundation before you can start to build anything that is truly solid.

Hopefully, this article built that foundation for you. Still, the best way to learn Lightroom, and anything in photography, is to practice it yourself.

It’s great to know how Lightroom is laid out, and how to import photos, and what the different modules do, but you won’t know any of it intuitively until
you’ve used Lightroom for a long time yourself.

There may plenty of roadblocks along the way, and it’s very possible that you’ll spend late nights trying to make Lightroom run faster, search for old
photos that Lightroom can’t find any more, or find the best ways to edit some photos on another computer (tip: File > Export as Catalog). Not
surprisingly, all of these examples come from my personal experience.

The bottom line is that Lightroom has a steep learning curve. If you put enough time into it, though, it will pay you back significantly — to the point
where you can organize your photos seamlessly, edit them exactly how you want, and export them at the right size for any use.

To me, learning Lightroom (or a comparable software, like Capture One Pro) is almost as important as mastering your camera settings. It is critical to
keep track of your photos, edit them well, and export them properly for clients. If this guide has helped you do those three things in Lightroom, I would
argue that you aren’t a beginner any longer.

If you have any questions about Lightroom, from the catalog file to advanced Develop settings, please leave them in the comments section below, and
I’d be happy to help.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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FILED UNDER: PHOTOGRAPHY TUTORIALS

TAGGED WITH: ADOBE, LIGHTROOM, LIGHTROOM CC, LIGHTROOM TUTORIAL, MASTERING LIGHTROOM, TIPS FOR BEGINNERS, TUTORIAL

About Spencer Cox

Spencer Cox is a nature and travel photographer from Franklin, Tennessee, who is studying journalism at Northwestern University. To
contact Spencer directly or view more of his work, visit his website at Spencer Cox Photography. Or, follow him on Facebook.

Comments

1) Anpu
MAY 1, 2017 AT 5:01 AM

Thank you spencer. It looks very impressive. Wish you have written this few months ago when I bought LR6.

At that time, I could not find everything in one place like you have done.

I have a well organised photos already on my HDs and the recent ones on my Laptop. I did not want them to move anywhere. After few days of
searching I found the right youtube video.

Reply

1.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 12:09 PM

Anpu, glad you thought the article would be helpful!

Importing your photos into Lightroom, while still maintaining their current folder position on your computer, is not intuitive — I’m happy to hear
that you found the right video a few months ago.

Reply

2) Kathie
MAY 1, 2017 AT 5:14 AM

Excellent article. This will make processing photos so much easier. THANK YOU!

Reply

2.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 12:09 PM

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Glad you enjoyed it, Kathie, thanks for the feedback!

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3) Eduard
MAY 1, 2017 AT 5:49 AM

Thanks for the very informative article which I’m sure will be useful to a lot of people! I’ve linked to it on our mirrorless forum as well
(http://cameraswithoutmirrors.com/threads/beginners-lightroom-tutorial-link.1152/#post-10617). Well done!!

Reply

3.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 12:10 PM

Thank you, Eduard!

Reply

4) Ryan
MAY 1, 2017 AT 6:02 AM

Fantastic tutorial Spencer. Appreciate the time and effort put into this.

Reply

4.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 12:10 PM

Happy to help! Lightroom is such a massive and scattered topic, so I thought it could be helpful to organize all the fundamentals into a single
place.

Reply

5) Dale
MAY 1, 2017 AT 7:39 AM

Great informative and helpful Lightroom tutorial. Thanks!

Reply

5.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 12:11 PM

Thank you, Dale, glad you liked it!

Reply

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6) Patrick
MAY 1, 2017 AT 8:39 AM

Thank you SO much, Spencer. I bought LR nearly 2 years ago but in the absence of an article like this I’ve not felt up to mastering it, and on the times
I did try I didn’t find the experience at all helpful. I’m looking forward to finally getting to grips with it now! :)

Reply

6.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 12:12 PM

Good luck with it, Patrick! Lightroom is daunting at first, but it is such a useful topic, and most photographers will find it worthwhile to learn the
fundamentals. If you run into any issues along the way, drop a comment here and I’ll do my best to help.

Reply

7) Edwin Genaux
MAY 1, 2017 AT 9:11 AM

Great info for old and the new kid, THANK YOU! I am not a Pro with customers. But I need to ask and can not find, with the new SSD’s being just
250G or 500G in new computers how do you keep Lr from bloating C: drive. I know your edits (using external programs and making TIFF’s) go to the
original directory no matter the drive internal/external your original is in and that program data is on a file on a internal HD (D:\, etc.). I know I do it
the wrong way by having two external 4T drives exactly the same and copy a photo to a working directory on C:\ (for speed) and export to a
Lightroom yearly file on both external drives and repeat every year keeping the drives in water/fire proof safes when not in use. Every processing
program (from a manufacturers importing program for its camera) WANTS to organize my photos which slows my computer if I let them. I use two
mainly Lr/COP both basically the same. But after I get the final image and it is exported I just delete all the work files because I am not going back to
redo or make better 6 mos to a year later. And yes Lr gets better and old photos can be improved with new options like Dehaze. I do this because I
was a computer tech. and watched many systems crash and everything (not all) can be lost. Today the cloud (once white/ now getting grey) has
everyone’s files as a backup/and use anywhere option.
My brother and several Lr users say let them organize your stuff it makes life so much better, but I upgraded to a new computer with only a 250G SSD
how do you keep it from bloating and crashing. I can get 4 or 5 additional TIFF files just using Nik software for every image but doing one or two a
day and month goes by that can be a lot of files! I also keep Document and Downloads on external drives for ease of travel with a laptop but that is
just me!!!

Reply

7.1) Tonio
MAY 1, 2017 AT 10:00 AM

The key is not to stick your photos on your C: drive. If you want the speed of SSDs you’ll need a bunch of huge SSDs, but if you want to use big
cheap hard disks then there’s a performance penalty. If you end up transferring photos from SSD to hard disk all the time then you’re losing
performance and time and creating many possible points of failure.

You could put your hard disks into a RAID to improve performance, but you’ll want to make sure you have a backup system because a multi disk
RAID designed for speed has a reliability cost.

Reply

7.1.1) Edwin Genaux

MAY 1, 2017 AT 10:14 AM

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THANK YOU AGAIN!! OK, so I am in the right way of doing it, just need a big external SSD or HD and use for a year! But if Lr is installed on the c:
drive how does it not bloat itself filling it up with all those copies you do and organizing? Maybe I need to study installing more closely! Thanks

Reply

7.1.1.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 12:22 PM

I agree with what Tonio is saying. Here’s what I personally do — let me know if this helps.

My main computer is also a laptop, and it only has limited internal storage capabilities. So, I do the only practical thing: I move my lesser-used
photos off my main hard drive to free up space. Specifically, a few months after I’ve taken a set of photos, I round up all the ones I don’t really
use, and I put them onto a 4TB external hard drive (which duplicates itself 1:1 with another external hard drive).

I don’t actually remove these photos from my Lightroom catalog, either. When I plug in one of my 4TB drives, I can open Lightroom and
they’ll appear just like normal, as if nothing happened. This does make my catalog file a bit larger, and potentially run slower, but I find that
it’s worth the tradeoff, and I haven’t noticed an objectionable performance penalty.

All my most-used photos stay on the internal SSD drive on my computer. I also make constant backups of my internal SSD drive, both on an
external 1TB SSD (which is plugged in any time that I’m at home) and on automatic constant backups to the cloud whenever I have wifi.

I don’t know that this is the best possible way to do things, particularly if your internal SSD is 250GB. You might consider working with an
external drive in place of the internal drive in the setup I described above (since I have a 750GB internal drive). Something like a 500GB
Samsung SSD is good (and is what I use).

I hope this helps. If you don’t move your laptop from place to place very often, a RAID configuration is a great option — but the best ones are
far from portable. The setup I use is, from what I’ve found, one of the better compromises between backups/cost/speed/storage.

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7.1.1.1.1) Edwin Genaux

MAY 1, 2017 AT 2:54 PM

WOW! Thanks Spencer and Tonio. I thought if I unplugged the external drive it would mess up Lr’s catalog!!! Well looks like I have some
work to do. When I went NEW computer a 250G SSD was only available. But on old had a 3T with two internals with no problems. Was just
being careful. I started with Lr3 but never kept my proceed files like everyone said I should.
I have never used Lr to it’s full use but read anything just to learn something new. Your article(s) take time away from using your camera
and that I am very grateful for, for first hand shared knowledge is best, like this one was full of some unknowns/used options. I thank
everyone most deeply!! Happy light capturing!!!!

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7.1.1.1.2) Gunnar
MAY 3, 2017 AT 8:33 AM

Hi Edwin, Hi Spencer,
my Laptop has a 500GB SSD. So I am not very keen on keeping my files on the internal SSD. Therefore I save all my pictures to an externel
mobile 2TB storage. The internal SSD only holds my catalog. To be able to edit or simply enjoy looking at images I’ll keep 1:1 previews of
my most recent photos and all photos that are involved in important projects. This demands some planing ahead but helps keeping the
catalog smaller.
Whenever I am home everything will be backed up. I am running this setup for over a year now and I never ran into perfomance issues.
Since approx. 80% of my raw-files are not that big (because Nikon D200 or Nikon D700), I even syncronized all my images since 2010 into

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my catalog. It did not run me into performance trouble, either. This is depending on the overall perfomance of your system though.
I guess what I am trying to say is: You do not necessarly need to keep your photos on your laptop. And, I hope this helps …

Reply

8) Tuck Hoo
MAY 1, 2017 AT 10:20 AM

Spencer – THANK YOU SO MUCH for taking your valuable time to educate us with informative and detail tutorial. Very much appreciated you sharing
your knowledge with us!

Reply

8.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 12:24 PM

Glad you liked it, Tuck!

Reply

9) Thomas
MAY 1, 2017 AT 11:44 AM

Dear Spencer, wow what an excellent and informative article about Lightroom. Many thanks!

Reply

9.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 12:24 PM

Thank you for your kind feedback, Thomas, much appreciated!

Reply

10) Rashad Hurani

MAY 1, 2017 AT 1:10 PM

If I start to use LR seriously, it’ll be because of this article. I have LR on my PC for long now but every time I attempt to use it I get frustrated, despite
the many tutorials and videos around. I congratulate you Spencer for such a comprehensive, concise and short-enough article on such a complex and
vast subject as Lightroom. Thank you

Reply

10.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 1, 2017 AT 1:37 PM

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Thank you, Rashad, I’m happy to hear it! The hard part about learning Lightroom isn’t a lack of good tutorials — it’s that there are too many
tutorials out there, and they’re spread out so far that it’s almost impossible to know how everything fits together. If this article solved that problem
for you and others, I would consider it a success.

Reply

11) elliot madriss

MAY 1, 2017 AT 6:26 PM

thanks for doing this – it is greatly appreciated – don’t fret about the length – kelby’s books are over 300 pages and are a little difficult to follow – lots
of verbage!!

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11.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 2:21 PM

Glad you liked it, Elliot! Yes, it definitely turned out to be a long article — hopefully, people will end up bookmarking it if they don’t have time to
read everything at once.

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12) Motti Bembaron

MAY 1, 2017 AT 7:58 PM

And I promised myself to learn ON1 in the next few month and dump LR for good. Adobe is making a mockery out of their clients. LR is badly coded,
slow, sluggish and in desperate need of overhaul. But Adobe would not do it and instead keeps upgrading it with patches.

Reply

12.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 2:26 PM

Yes, I didn’t cover any of it here, but there are plenty of things about Lightroom that Adobe can do better, particularly things like speed. My main
concern is that there won’t even be a Lightroom 7, and Adobe will only offer the CC version as a monthly subscription bundle with Photoshop.
Although the price is just $10/month right now, they’re able to increase it whenever they want…

And yet, until the standalone version (which is all I’m going to buy) no longer supports my camera, I’ll keep on using Lightroom. At this point, it’s
too central to my capture process to make the switch unless Adobe really forces my hand.

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12.1.1) Motti Bembaron

MAY 3, 2017 AT 9:46 PM

Unfortunately, LR is also central to my work, it is pretty much all I use to edit my photos.

Until last December I worked only with stand alone versions of LR and PS and vows to never use the subscription versions. However, after a lot
of debate I took the plunge into the subscription this January and already regrets it. My older version LR worked better..much better..than this
CC nonsense.

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I have a huge concern regarding their price increase and I have no doubt they will do it very soon. Regardless, I already decided to move to
either Capture One Pro or ON1.

ON1 looks like a great option not only because of price but also because they seem to really listen to users.

My PC was built this January with i7, 32GB RAM and three SSD’s (one is the M.2 Samsung). Yet, when LR opens it is like my computer was built in
the 90’s. It is truly frustrating. PS is no better and saving files now takes way too long. Something is up with Adobe products but they don’t seem
to care.

Cheers mate and thank you for the detailed tutorial!!

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12.1.1.1) ROBERT A GANGE JR

JUNE 2, 2017 AT 8:12 AM

So strange! I run LR Stand alone, Ver. 6.10, on a Dell 13 XPS 9350, Laptop, that is only: Intel I5 Dual Core 6200,
with built-in graphics card, 8GB Ram, 128GB SSD, with a WD My Book, 4TB, EXT HDD attached to its USB, and it’s very quick startup and use,
organizing and editing, all of the time. I have not been using it for too long, yet, and only have several thousand images on it at this time.

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13) Luis Castro Solla

MAY 1, 2017 AT 8:09 PM

Congratulations and thanks for a very helpful article. I did not read the whole text, and only perused the comments, so excuse me if I am repeating
something which has already been discussed. I only have a notebook computer (probably the tenth, I never had desktops), and now with SSDs
memory space is limited. So I have my photos scattered between a series of external hard disks, which are organized by camera (e.g., one for my old
Nikon D200, another for my Nikon D7000, etc…). I have never worked with Macs, but in the Windows world the external drive you connect tends to
get different identifier letters according to what you have connected to the system at the time. This tends to confuse the catalog, if the catalog is
located in the HD. I tried different solutions, but in the end the one that worked was to make a catalog for each external HD, located in said HD.
Searches are of course a pain, because I have to search one HD at a time. I have backups of the external HDs on Blu-Ray discs. Any suggestion to
improve my system?

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13.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 2:38 PM

The answer depends upon how many total photos you have. If you’re storing hundreds of thousands of images, my proposed solution (which will
be to keep all your photos in the same Lightroom catalog) won’t work, since it will be too slow.

However, if you have fewer than 100,000 photos, I might recommend combining all of them into a single master catalog. (Do this by creating a
catalog from scratch, and then going to File > Export as Catalog on all your old catalogs. You can then go to File > Import from Another Catalog to
add them to your brand-new catalog.)

You can store the new catalog on your computer’s internal drive. Don’t actually move any of your photos off their current locations on your
external hard drives — instead, just make sure that your new catalog has cataloged all of them. That way, at any one time, Lightroom will think that
a majority of your photos are “missing,” — all the photos except the ones on whatever external drive is currently attached — but that’s not really a
problem. Missing files can still be searched using Lightroom’s filter tool, and it doesn’t harm the photos in any way to be missing and then
reappear whenever you reattach their particular drive.

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This will potentially come at the expense of a somewhat slower catalog file, since it will have all your photos in it at once, but the difference won’t
be horrible if you have fewer than 100,000 photos. Most importantly, it will solve the search issue. (Specifically, you’ll be able to click on “All
Photographs” in the Library module, and search using the filter tool; if the photo you found is on a drive that isn’t attached, it will still show up in
your search results, and you can just attach the proper external drive and edit it however you want.)

Short of purchasing newer hard drives and creating a full system that is constantly plugged in to your computer, I think that this strategy would be
the best way to solve the problem you’re experiencing.

Last point: If you do this, I would recommend backing up the catalog file to an external hard drive, or even just a small thumb drive, so that its only
location isn’t on your internal drive.

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14) Jozef Dassen

MAY 1, 2017 AT 10:20 PM

Comparison of Lightroom vs Photoshop is not a good comparison. They have different purpose in life.
You should compare LR against Capture One which is more equivalent functionality.
If you are a Linux person you should look at darktable. Not (yet) in the same league, but it has the tremendous advantage of running on Linux.

I would make a serious comparison between LR and Capture One before committing to a solution.

Jozef

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14.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 2:41 PM

Lightroom and Photoshop are indeed very different programs, but beginners often don’t realize why — at first glance, they can both seem like
they’re just slightly different ways to edit your photos, which isn’t very accurate. Lightroom and Capture One definitely serve more similar purposes.

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15) Bijan Choudhury

MAY 1, 2017 AT 10:46 PM

Thanks a million …
I had been using Photoshop more than 10 years now and recently subsribed to adobe Creative cloud with both Photoshop CC & Lightroom CC. But
never go into using LR as whenever I tried I got confused. End up using only PS which is well and good and I have an adequate knowledge of PS. But
you article is helping me already( Less than halfway still) …

Thanks again Spencer Cox & Photography Life too for supporting such articles …

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15.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 2:44 PM

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Very glad to hear it, thank you for your feedback! Although it isn’t totally intuitive, Lightroom is definitely worth learning — it will make your overall
organization much easier, and you’ll have a more streamlined workflow overall.

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16) Werner Kellens

MAY 2, 2017 AT 4:50 AM

Great tutorial. I’m a newbie so I learned a lot from it. Now getting used with lightroom using my new photos and then importing the old ones from
google photos and HD.

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16.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 2:46 PM

Sounds good to me! Lightroom is definitely a better way to organize your photos than Google Photos, without a doubt. Once you get past the
learning curve, it will make for a much more flexible and intuitive workflow.

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17) Juan Estevez

MAY 2, 2017 AT 5:54 AM

This article and like many others here are the reason that PL has become one of my favorites sites. Excellent work Spencer.

Reply

17.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 2:47 PM

Thank you, Juan, I’m very happy to hear it!

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18) Gordon Betsill

MAY 2, 2017 AT 7:55 AM

I’m almost ashamed to ask this question because as a rather long time user of LR, I’m simply not looking in the proper place for the answer, but!,
when I finished processing a pano, WHERE does it show the measurement of the long edge? Thank you for this wonderful article and, like others, I
just wish I had had it when I was first starting out.

Reply

18.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 2:51 PM

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If you’ve opened the panorama in Lightroom, the measurement of both the long edge and the short edge will appear when you click on the photo
in the Library module. Specifically, on the right-hand pop-out tab, you’ll see a lot of data about the photograph under the Metadata dropdown box
(and if you don’t see much info, change the tiny menu to the left of the word “Metadata” to say “EXIF” or “Default.”)

This will give you the photo’s dimensions, both cropped (how you see it on the screen) and uncropped (how the photo was originally). You’ll also
see lots of other data about the photo.

Hope that helps!

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18.1.1) Gordon Betsill

MAY 2, 2017 AT 3:21 PM

Thanks so very very much. I’m learning more about LR and Adobe than I’ve learned in the last 5 yrs.

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18.1.1.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 3:32 PM

Great, glad I could help!

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19) Philip
MAY 2, 2017 AT 9:16 AM

Thank you Spencer. You have done a great job, and it is free of charge. Bravo

Reply

19.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 2:51 PM

Glad you enjoyed it, Philip!

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20) Dominique_R
MAY 2, 2017 AT 10:02 AM

“Adobe Lightroom is a massive, lumbering behemoth of photography software with enough functions and processes to make any photographer go
crazy.”

No, Spencer, that is Photoshop you’re describing. Actually, for any photographer used to using just the photography-related functions of Photoshop,
Lightroom is a light snack, an easy to understand and use piece of software that is neither massive nor lumbering, and that will be quite quickly
mastered by all but the most intellectually challenged of users. No need to make the frog as big as the ox.

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20.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 3:02 PM

Dominique, if you never felt that Lightroom had a steep learning curve, then you’re way beyond the intended audience of this article :)

From a personal perspective, I’ve used Lightroom for years, often several hours a day each day, and I’m still routinely discovering new things. Just a
few months ago, I figured out a way to make the “steps” in Lightroom’s crop significantly less dramatic — i.e., cropping off fewer pixels with each
slight movement of my mouse — when I’m working with panoramas. Saves a lot of headache if I’m trying to get the 100% perfect crop of a photo.

That’s not to say that Photoshop isn’t clearly a much larger program, but that Lightroom is still massively complex. Case in point: A few years ago,
Nasim found some bugs in the LR code, and he talked with Lightroom’s behind-the-scenes developers to fix the issue. Not only did they not know
what was causing the bug, but they also said that LR’s original developer team had left, and the people who work on it now sometimes don’t even
know how all the original code works. That’s why it’s not getting any faster over time (https://photographylife.com/lightroom-2-3-4-5-6-and-cc-
performance-comparison), as Adobe is just tacking on features without fixing the backbone of the system for the modern day. So, in terms of
programming, it is the very definition of a lumbering behemoth!

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21) Rich J
MAY 2, 2017 AT 10:51 AM

Wonderful article. I have about 35000 pictures that are on the hard drive of an iMac and have never imported any of them to LR. If I use the method
of importing that you outline, without setting up numerous folders, will I just end up with all of them in one big folder or will LR sort them by date or
something else. I purchased LR5 a number of years ago and have never used it.
Thanks. This article has added a light at the end of the tunnel.

Reply

21.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 3:08 PM

Are those 35000 photos all already within the same folder? If you’ve already organized them into the right folders, you can import exactly that
same folder structure into Lightroom without a problem.

First, just go into Lightroom’s Import Dialogue. On the left-hand tab, click on the parent folder of all your photos (so, for me, since my organization
structure looks like: Photos > 2017 > 01 January, I would click on the “Photos” folder). Check “Include Subfolders.” Then, make sure that you’ve
clicked the “Add” button at the top of the screen.

When you do that, Lightroom will simply catalog all the photos you’ve taken, and it won’t move them to a new location on your hard drive. Also,
when you open Lightroom, you’ll see an exact representation of the file structure you currently have.

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22) Bob H
MAY 2, 2017 AT 12:00 PM

Good Job Spencer on helping to simplify what can be an increasingly complex tool for those who are heavy duty users of Lightroom. I’d like to go
back to a concern expressed earlier about Lightroom Mobile and how it might contribute to bloated memory needs on our portable viewing devices.

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On the organizing page of Mobile where it shows all the synced image folders, at the top left of that page is a title “Lightroom Photos” that is a
history of past images that have ever been loaded onto this page I believe. Since I often bring larger collections into Mobile to cull them down, this
number for me indicates that past images total over 10,000 images. Is this figure using up memory on my ipad? And if it is, how can I reduce or
delete it, while still maintaining the much smaller number of images I am currently syncing with. Thanks!

Reply

22.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 2, 2017 AT 3:14 PM

I don’t personally use Lightroom mobile, so I’m afraid that I don’t know how the layout works, or what the 10,000+ number is specifically referring
to. Do those photos still show up like normal when you use Lightroom mobile? Can you open and edit them, and (when not actively syncing with
your computer or connected to wifi) zoom in to see them at full-resolution? Or are they simply file names or tiny thumbnails that can’t be accessed
or edited? If the former is true, they could be taking up quite a bit of space on your iPad. If the latter is true, at most, they’ll only take up a small
amount of space, and potentially none at all.

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23) Steve Linehan

MAY 3, 2017 AT 4:13 AM

Thank you, Spencer! You’ve got the balance just right between too little or too much information. I will be returning to this many times as I continue
to use Lightroom. Very well done!

Reply

23.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 3, 2017 AT 10:20 AM

Glad you liked it, Steve, thanks for the feedback!

Reply

24) Yandoodan
MAY 3, 2017 AT 10:15 AM

XKCD just posted a comic on photo libraries. https://xkcd.com/1832/

The mouseover gives a very interesting suggestion for culling photos.

Reply

24.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 3, 2017 AT 10:22 AM

That’s a good one, thanks for sharing. I’m also an XKCD fan. It seems like Randall is posting more comics about photography these days — maybe
we’ll see some of his photos soon!

Reply

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How to Use Lightroom: A Complete Tutorial for Beginners Page 45 of 48

25) Yandoodan
MAY 3, 2017 AT 10:19 AM

Apologies for the double post. reCaptcha doesn’t seem to be working properly.

Reply

26) Francis Wong

MAY 3, 2017 AT 8:19 PM

Thank you Spencer for your great introduction to LR.

Could you touch on an aspect which I consider very important – noise reduction. How effective is noise reduction in LR when compared with other
softwares?

Reply

26.1) Spencer Cox

MAY 3, 2017 AT 8:25 PM

From what I have seen, it is not quite as good, since it doesn’t offer many options for local noise adjustments (just a single inflexible slider). The
global noise adjustments are good, but I don’t think that they’re the absolute best on the market. The Nik plugins (which can work with Lightroom)
are generally considered somewhat better, though the differences aren’t going to make or break a particular shot.

Overall, I find Lightroom’s noise reduction good enough to use on a regular basis, and not something that I generally bother to do in other
software. Your mileage may vary, depending upon how often you shoot in low light conditions, and how large your prints need to be.

Reply

27) Sinisa
MAY 6, 2017 AT 10:55 AM

This is an amazing article Spencer.

I tried using Lightroom but it was so slow on my computer that I eventually stop bothering and uninstalled it.
I’m using Photoshop Elements which is much less demanding on the hardware requirements.
When I get a new computer I will definitely try the Lightroom again.

Reply

28) Amy Adair

JUNE 5, 2017 AT 10:25 AM

Great article! I’m not a pro but I read every word and practiced in between sections. So helpful. I’m new to LR and needed this. Thank you for all of
the time and work that went into this. It is much appreciated!

Reply

29) William Rudd

JUNE 15, 2017 AT 12:49 PM

https://photographylife.com/how-to-use-lightroom-a-tutorial-for-beginners 08-Sep-17
How to Use Lightroom: A Complete Tutorial for Beginners Page 46 of 48

Will Rudd here:

Spencer-
Splendid article, very clear and concise. I digested it in one gulp just now. Explained several features of LR that I never knew before.
A non-photographer, I retired from an exciting 34 year career and suddenly realized I had no images of that career. Since, I have begged, borrowed
and cajoled all my old friends for copies of their images. Suddenly, I had lots of jpegs sent to me over the internet. I also borrowed photo albums
from relatives I intend to scan with an Epson V600 scanner (prints) and Vuescan and a Nikon Supercool 5000D I found unused in a photo shop. I
decided to learn the proper way to do things and discovered Photography Life about two years ago. Since, I have studied everything Nasim has
written.

I have a question: these analog images (and a few digital images from a new used Canon 60D) reside on my laptop hard drive. I want to only keep
“working images” on the laptop and all final images on the external HD. Some I have imported (Copied) to an external hard drive where I intend to
keep most LR images. So, now I have LR cataloged images that sit on both my internal HD and my external HD. Plus, the remainder of my yet-to-be-
LR imported images on my laptop internal HD.
Can you suggest a simple way identify the already imported images on my laptop and either delete them or move them
somewhere off my laptop, AND, a better way to import the remainder of my images from my laptop to my external HD so that they no longer show
up on my laptop? I have read that using the “MOVE” command is not recommended due the risk of losing the images. Most have no EXIF data so I
have to create estimated YYYY-MM-DD, Subject, Location and other detail manually.

I like your web site./Will

Reply

30) Masa Kishiku

AUGUST 29, 2017 AT 12:20 AM

Could someone teach me about this ?

When I import photos from SD card on the lightroom, I copy photos into an outside stand alone hard drive so that I can keep the original photos to
be safe in case my PC crushes or goes bad.

When I back up lightroom, I tried to make into this stand alone hard drive instead of into the pc. But I can not retrieve photos from the stand alone
hard drive by saying something like “it is unable to back up outside the PC” or can not see any photos after trying to open.
I know I can make a backup on the same PC. But I do not get why Adobe does not allow to backup into the stand alone hard drive. Does that mean
when my pc goes bad, I will lose all the photos I developed on the light room even though I still have copied raw phots in outside hard drive ?
I am a new user of lightroom. So I may be missing something to know how to do ?
If someone could teach me how I can handle about this and how to pass this lightroom contents into the next pc, I would appreciate it. I am lately
worried about my old pc when this goes bad.

Reply

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