Beginners Guide to Lightroom Classic (Photo Editing Tutorial 2021) | Tutorial Tuesday

we're going to go through everything you need to know to get started with adobe lightroom now we're using adobe lightroom classic there's a lightroom classic and there's lightroom a little bit confusing lyrium classic is essentially how lightroom has always been and it's the the kind of standard lightroom that most people are talking about it uses your computer your mac whatever it is to actually edit the photos whereas lightroom which is the actually the newer kind of type of lightroom is a cloud-based system we're going to use lightroom classic i think it's better i prefer it you know it's what we've always used in the past and i think it's a powerful editing tool we've done loads of lightroom tutorials so there are some on the channel already this is going to be getting started with lightroom completely and then we're also going to do a getting started with photo editing video next so once you get started with lightroom we'll actually dive into the editing itself soon enough so don't worry about that we're going to dive in i've actually got lightroom running here now don't worry about this this is already my kind of main catalog where i've got all my photos imported but we're going to start from scratch so you won't see it like this the first time you open it but you will be prompted to create a new catalog and here i'm going to come up to file i'm going to click new catalog and we're gonna make a new one now you can put your catalog in whatever folder you like within your desktop it doesn't actually matter too much because when you open lightroom it's automatically gonna open this catalog and the catalog ultimately is going to be where we store all of our photos and i'm going to show you how we can organize them within lightroom as well so call it whatever you like i'm going to call this one getting started with lightroom i'm going to hit create it's going to ask me about backing it up i'm going to skip it this time but you can set that to whenever you like now once you've created a new catalog it's going to open up like this in lightroom and that's going to give you a nice fresh blank catalog this is going to be our main catalogue where we import all of our photos you know everything's going to come in here we can organize it all within lightroom so when you get back from shooting whatever it is you're photographing you take your sd card you pop it in the computer you download the photos you're going to want to create a folder system on your computer now for me i have and i'll show you a folder that i simply call photography i have raw and i have finished so the raw file is where i then put folders with the raw photos in the finished file is where i put the exported photos after they're edited so within that raw folder i then create new folders named after whatever the shoot may be so for example food dash cookies forest portraits berlin gap fuji all things like canon r6 canon r5 whatever it is a good naming system would actually be to use a date and then maybe whatever the shoot is for example but i've gone in with something which is probably slightly less helpful but you could use a helpful naming system now it's important to have a good kind of naming system for your folders here because essentially when we import these photos into lightroom we're not moving the photos or anything like that we're not actually kind of bringing the files and putting them somewhere new for lightroom we're just pointing lightroom to these folders we're just showing lightroom where these photos are so that lightroom can essentially make edits on top of the photos so importantly with lightroom we're keeping the original photos completely intact that's different to photoshop and when you export it's essentially taking the photo putting the edits that we've made on top of it and then exporting as a new photo so you'll always have the old photo available it's non-destructive completely and then you'll have the new photo edited at the end as well so it's a great way to work because you can always go back to those original files which is not always the case with programs like photoshop for example as i mentioned before that will edit actually onto the photo itself and it will change it's destructive so you can't always go back unless you're careful and you kind of put in precautions but lyrium i like the way it works a lot so we're going to go ahead and actually import some photos into lightroom and it's very very easy let's have a look at lightroom here so we've got a few different tabs up on the top right we've got the library tab which is essentially where we can see all of our organized photos and that's going to be realistically that's going to be the place where we organize things the develop tab is actually where we edit the photos so it's a little bit different you can see things change on the left and the right here and then we've got some other bits here as well which for now we're not going to worry too much about that's not really what we're talking about today today we're talking about organizing in lightroom importing exporting and actually editing as well so up here in the library tab we've got on the left here we've got essentially some tools for organization within our catalog here so all photographs all synced photographs and you can see there but we haven't got any photographs in here yet so we need to bring a couple in so we can actually start seeing how this works so down to the bottom left we can just click import and this is going to open up here which is going to allow us to see where we want to import the photos from so just like before when i mentioned we want to have a good naming system for our folders this is essentially where we're going to point lightroom to these folders now i've created two folders just for this tutorial editing tutorial 1 and editing tutorial 2. not particularly inventive names but i think they do the job so editing tutorial 1 you can see here actually opens previews of the photos here now these are raw photos so that's great so we can actually automatically have them all ticked like that you can come down here check all uncheck all we want to import all of them but you could go through and not import all if you want i always think it's good to import all of them there's no harm and then you can go through and sort them once they enlarge them we're going to talk about that as well so they're all checked we just come down here to the bottom right and click import now lightroom is going to bring those in and you're going to see within the library tab we start to see some photos filling out this kind of grid system and you can see over on the left we've now got some slightly different stuff so here in this folders tab we've got editing tutorial 1. let's import another one so we can see exactly how easy this is to keep track of let's import editing tutorial 2. again everything is checked let's click import and that's going to bring these in and you can see we've got these photos they're coming in on this grid but we don't have the previous photo showing now either so you can see in this folders category we've now got two folders editing tutorial 1 editing tutorial 2 so we can easily keep track of what's going on we can also come up here to all photographs where we can see every photograph that we've imported into lightroom there's things like previous imports and things like that but for now we're going to stick with these folder systems i think it's a really really good way of working so tends to be what i do then is once i've imported everything from the folder it's all nice and kind of arranged in here we can come over to the develop tab where we can see these photos much larger and this is where we would essentially be able to edit them but first things first you might want to go through and actually decide which photos are worth editing and which ones you don't want to work with so it's very easy to actually do that there's a few different things that you can do you can assign colors to these photos so for example let's say that we really like this photo we could right click we could come up here to set color label you could pop it as green for ones that you like and when you click off that you can see that photo now has a green tint around it to show that that is one you want to do now that's probably i think not the best way to do it so let's take the color off but that is certainly one way of doing things what i like to do is actually go through each one using the arrow keys so i can just cycle through the photos and if it's a photo that you think yes i would like to work with this you can press p to pick that photo so you literally press p and if you see now there's a little white square around the circle i can press p i like that one i'm not going to use this one so i won't press p i won't use this one but i will use this one and let's leave it in this situation as just those three so we've got three with the white squares that we've picked and three which we haven't okay so that's great but do you really want to be looking at the white squares no not really so what you can do now is come here the bottom right to filters and there's ways that you can actually filter these photos and the easiest way the way we've just done it here is just to come to flagged and now we're only going to see the three photos that we've picked it's going to actually get rid of all the other photos that we don't want to look at super easy super quick way of organizing those photos and just sifting through the ones you want and don't want you can just go through with the arrows p for the ones you want and do nothing for the ones that you don't want now of course once we've edited our photos which none of these are edited but once we've edited our photos you still might want to make some revisions and think okay i like this photo better than like this photo you know you might use different edits on different photos and and like one better than another well there's more ways you can do things so for example you can assign a star value to the photo so in this case i really like this photo let's say we've edited it and we really like it i'm gonna give it five stars so that i know this is one i really like so let's go ahead and just press five on the number pad and now you can see that's got five stars below it down here now that's an easy way to then go ahead and pick the ones that you want to actually export but you can also come over here to filters you could pick rated and that's just going to show you the ones that you've assigned a star value to so you can do one two three four five stars or of course let's go back to flagged you can come here to the left where you've got collections smart collections let's open that up and you can see we've got a few different things that we can we can sort by so for example colored red so you could color things in red to indicate something and actually be able to sort by that five stars so if i just click that now it's every photo with five stars now this won't actually just be this folder so editing tutorial one with five stars this will be every photo within lightroom with five stars however that's a great way of being able to sort all of the good photos in lightroom so you can go through them quite quickly past month recently modified all that kind of stuff so it's a really useful way of being able to organize things i like to use the pick system sort by flagged and then use the five stars to indicate the ones that i'm i've run edited that i'm happy with it i'm going to export it and then when i've edited all the photos in that set i can just export all the ones with five stars so let's come off the smart collections let's come back to flags and we've got these three photos now the develop tab obviously is where we're going to be editing the photos anyway there's a lot that we can do here and it can feel a little overwhelming at first but the easiest thing to do to be honest is just to go through each slider one by one and a big tip is you don't have to use every slider just because it's there some of them like dehaze on this photo for example will not necessarily look the best there's lots of things that you can do with editing there's lots of ways you can go about it and it doesn't always have to be every slider that counts now i think what we'll do is we'll do a proper video on the actual editing of this because i think there's too much to go through with regards to this and editing and setting everything up and all that kind of stuff so we'll do another video that'll be the next video we do all about actually getting to grips with editing in general because there's a lot of kind of techniques you know white balance highlight shadows exposure color grading all kinds of stuff like that so we'll go into that in more detail but for now this is a great way of actually organizing your photos we can come back to the library tab here and we're still organized by flags and we can see the five stars and it's super easy to go through and be able to actually export your photo so let's talk about how we do that so essentially what we're gonna do let's assign five stars to two photos so we can see how you would export multiple photos at the same time so we've got two photos here both of five stars what we're gonna do is we're gonna hold we're gonna click on one we're gonna hold control and click on the next one and that's gonna select both of them if we wanted to actually select a whole line we could hop click on one and hold shift and click on the other one and that's going to select all of the photos between those two photos as well but for now we're just going to select these two so you can just click on one hold ctrl click on the other one we can click right click here we can come down to export and then export or we can click export down here if you're on the library tab so if you're on develop you can still export them left click control left click on the next one and you select both of them right click export export that's going to open this export window where we can choose where we want to put them and how we want to do it and things like that so first of all we've got the export location now generally this is just where the folder is going to be that you choose to export these so we can click choose here you just navigate to the folder or create a folder where you would like to export these photos make sure you click select folder and then you've got a couple of options you can put into a subfolder so for example that means lightroom will actually create a folder within the folder you selected and you can name that whatever you like and you can add these exported photos to the catalog i don't really see the point in doing that to be honest uh and generally speaking i will create the folder i want them to go in so i tend not to use these but they're there if you want them to be you can use them if you want next we've got things like image sizing so you can resize to fit certain sizes again i tend not to use that because i like to have these as a good quality and we've got other options for how we actually want to use the quality here as well so if we come down here we've got things like file naming so you can rename them to certain files i just use the names that the files are from the camera that's a problem but if you want to use a file name of some sort of naming system then you absolutely can and then we've got things like file settings now i tend to leave them at 100 quality but that's because i don't mind about the size and i like to have the option to bring them down in quality afterwards if i want to or back up or whatever if you are worried about the size of the files because they can be massive you can bring that down i find 70 works really well 70 as a kind of quality setting is a good compromise between file size and the actual quality of the photo if you don't mind if you're just using it for the web or anything like that you could bring the quality down even more and have a smaller file size it's still going to look really good but for print and for general use i like to keep them at 100 because i can always bring that quality down later in photoshop or you know if i pop on facebook instagram something like that it's going to compress it anyway so i like to keep it 100 and you can also make sure that it's not it's a limited file size if you want to as well if you've got a limit so for example i know youtube thumbnail i think it's five megabytes it might be two megabytes i think it might be two megabytes actually so i can limit the file size to two megabytes if i want so it's not going to go any bigger than that and make sure the quality is set in such a way that that is the limit of how big that file is going to be same with things like resolution i know twitter has a certain resolution level that it has as a limit and stuff like that you can remove things like the metadata or you can include it that includes things like the camera the photo was taken on the lens the settings you know if you don't want that on there you can remove that i tend to keep it in there because it's handy and you can add a watermark as well there's also post processing you can do on the image again i don't really tend to touch that at all i think for most people it's going to be about setting the export location it's going to be about setting the quality maybe image sizing if you need to otherwise for the most part i think it's worth just leaving and then it is just simply about clicking export and lightroom is going to do the work you can see up here in the top left there'll be a little bar and that'll fill as lightroom is exporting those photos and it really is as easy as that now i've not actually edited these photos so i've just exported them they will be jpegs now which is super handy so they're not raw photos anymore which means they're much easier to kind of work with in terms of posting to different places and that is essentially it and you don't have to save anything it's all just in here it's all fine you just click close when you're done do you really want to quit yes and it's all done and that is essentially how you set up and start getting going with lightroom we can do a whole video like i say on the actual editing side of it so before we get to that because i haven't filmed it yet if you want to see anything specific about getting started with photo editing let me know in the comments because i will absolutely do my best to include that in the video if for some reason it's too advanced or it's a very specific technique we can always do a video about that as well later down the line we can do videos about all kinds of things so let me know what you would like to see down in the comments so that we can actually get that going for you i will of course see you in the next video and as always thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Park Cameras

Views: 8,205

Keywords: lightroom, lightroom tutorial, how to use lightroom, getting started with adobe lightroom, how to setup lightroom, adobe lightroom, adobe lightroom tutorial, photo editing tutorial

Id: T6BqhTEN6-s

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021