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.