Introduction
What is Adobe Lightroom? and why would a photographer choose to use it?
Lightroom
What is lightroom?
Lightroom is a family of products made by adobe whose purpose is to make importing, collating and and editing raw files from digital cameras easier and more efficient.
Lightroom has a cloud based platform known as Lightroom CC, and a desktop app known as Lightroom Classic CC. During this course we'll be working with Lightroom Classic CC in a desktop environment. For any references to Lightroom assume Classic CC unless otherwise stated.
Lightroom is not a pixel based, raster image creation and manipulation tool like Photoshop (Affinity Photo, or Gimp). While there some similarities, Lightroom's major advantage is it's ability to make no-destruction adjustments to RAW images and apply those adjustment to multiple images, allowing us to rapidly edit a large number of photo in a much shorter period of time.
Why would I use it?
A photographer would use Lightroom to easily catalog their images either in one large collection or in smaller client or job based collections. Using Lightroom simplifies a lot of the image editing process and in a lot of cases eliminates the need to open photoshop.
Lightroom also has a tethered capture feature meaning images can be captured directly into Lightroom enabling adjustments and develop setting to be applied while being capture.
Script
Hello and Welcome, My name is Chester and I'll be guiding you this series of Lightroom tutorials.
Lightroom is a really powerful adobe product, that we can use to manage and edit collections of native raw files that our cameras produce.
Shooting in RAW will create files that include all of the data captured by you cameras sensor. This will mean you have a greater latitude for exposure and white balance corrections. This extra exposure latitude come from the greater bit-depth raw files have.
A lot of the image you're used to seeing online or from from your phone are going to be 8bit. You can check the bit depth in photoshop by lloking at the file name tab at the top of a open file or looking at image -> mode from the menu bar.
The Interface
When launching Lightroom for the first time you will be presented with a dialogue box stating "Lightroom room catalog was not found.". You will have the option to Choose a Different Catalog or Create a Default Catalog. You can choose the location to store your catalog.
It is worth remembering that the catalog is a database that contains the information about your images. It is is not the images. Where the images are stored is covered in Importing.
Most of Lightroom's interface interface is divided to four main sections.
Image viewer - The centre of the interface. In library mode this area can display one or many image depending on our zoom level. This area can also be used for side-by-side comparisons.
Editor - The area on the right. In library mode this area has quick access to basic developing options, key wording and metadata.
Activity
Download the example catalog and try completing following tasks.