Everything You Need to Get Started! (Lightroom Classic Starter Guide)

hey there and welcome to the Lightroom classic starter guide I am so glad you're here if you are coming from let's say IE photo or you're coming from editing on your phone or you're coming from even Photoshop or or Lightroom CC sometimes making the jump over to Lightroom classic can be intimidating but what I hope this video will do is Empower you to realize that a lot of the things that you've been trying out and using in these more beginner programs you have that ability to do in Lightroom classic there's just even more power behind it so what we're going to do is that we're going to to make chapters out of this YouTube episode so you can come back and reference my recommendation would be that you watch this video all the way through and then come back to it and go chapter by chapter with Lightroom open yourself and be able to learn and practice what I'm showing you um on your own all right so now let's dive into my computer and let's get started I'm trying to walk through in my mind how to show you some Basics without telling you too much that gets over overwhelming so in my mind I'm treating this like I'm talking to my mom okay my mom has no idea what Lightroom even is and so if I had to call her and say hey I need you to import some images and I need you just to do a basic quick little edit and Export one for me can you do that this is what I would tell her I'd say okay so you're going to open up Lightroom and the only thing you need to know is that when you're in the library tab this is where you're going to view your photos but we don't have any photos to view because this is a brand new catalog and so when I open my catalog you can see there are no photographs there are no files I need to add something so let's add something together let's go to import this dialogue box is going to pop up and on the left hand side you're going to find sources for where you can import from this was a sweet newborn session that I did but that's coming from a card that is um in inserted into the side of my computer I'm going to go to the hard drive this is an external hard drive with a shoot that I use for All Access we're going to open that up now I do not call my images I don't select the ones that I want to keep in Lightroom I have a video about this I can make more videos about this basically I divide my folders into um subfolders that are labeled unedited edited and festar unedited is going to be you'll see here 1,900 photos 43 GB of space these are all the images that I took why would I want to Ed or import all those images into Lightroom no I want to just keep the 634 that I love over here you're going to have different selections that you can make with your import process um but before we get over there I actually think you want to make sure that you are adding them so you're adding them to the catalog without moving them so moving them would mean that you're moving photos to a new location and adding them to a catalog we don't need to do that I want my images to stay on my hard drive and I'll show you that right here this is what is on this hard drive this is the folder that I'm accessing within Lightroom right here when I import these photos they're going to continue to live right here so I'm adding them this is always a question of what you should do you just want to add them um I don't copy as a DG there's there's reasons that people do different methods but for me my photos live on an external hard drive I just want to Simply add them into Lightroom over here you can make selections you could apply u a basic like I used to do um a basic import preset where it would make all my images have a really base layer edit uh to kind of save me some time um but with the preset process I don't really need that as much and with AI editing I really don't need that so I don't do that anymore um and then this was this is another video for another time but there's a lot that you can do with applying some certain specific metadata to your images we're not going to deal with any of that all we're going to do is just import so you're going to see it importing everything you need to know about operations is up here so you can see it still importing um and it is going to take a few seconds because it's making previews of images so let's keep going inside the Library module and then we'll break down the develop module the things you don't really need to know uh is about map book slideshow print web none of that um so what you can actually do is you can get rid of certain things so I am just right-clicking and I don't know if this is going be helpful for some people but it's helpful for me I'm just going to simplify all this I never in my entire 15-year career have used any other tab except library and develop so now that we have that straight we're just going to walk through what you can do in the library versus what you can do in the develop module so this is the library module where you can just view your images it allows you to quickly access them you can see them click through them if you need to find a specific one but you're not going to be able to look at your images like this in the develop module the develop module takes the image that's selected uh and shows it large because this is your editing space so once you're in the develop module this is where the editing takes place now I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of editing but I am going to show you everything it's offered within the develop module so the histogram I don't normally mess with I do use it I love seeing my data here of my settings my ISO my aperture my shutter speed that is all helpful but I don't use my histogram to tell me where the highlights are where the black as blacks are I just don't need that now down here we have a lot of options there's a lot happening here this is going to highlight the basic setup so what you see um the basic bar it's going to show you all the things now it's going to default to being on those sliders but you can also go into um the crop mode you're going to have a drop down here that shows you how you can crop this is a healing tool that allows you to do a lot of different things you can either clone things out so like a stop sign or you can use content aware which is going to basically use the smarts of the I mean look at that that's pretty good uh and so that was not a feature that was available to us years ago this is more of a newer feature that I love um and so that is going to help you eliminate things you don't love anyone who has thought okay I have to take some uh you know a photo into Photoshop in order to get rid of an object that is no longer the case Lightroom has gotten a lot smarter um right here I honestly tell you that I do not ever use the red eye corrector ever um and that's mainly because I'm not shooting with a camera that's even going to create a red eye issue now this is Big Time masking is when you're going to make isolated edits so it means oh I'm just going to brighten his pants or I want to brighten her hair or I want her dress to be darker or I want to lighten up this corner anything that's not an overall image edit um for the most part is going to happen within a masking option now masking I could do a whole course on what is possible within this section but some key things you need to know um is that you can select just a subject which is actually very good at you can invert that so now everything except them like you could brighten everything except them if you wanted to you can also select the sky select the background and select certain people this is somewhat creepy but it knows there's person one and there's person two and if you you've never done this before I mean it is fascinating in this exact image he's facing away from the light and so his face is a little bit darker so I could select him then I can say I just want to select his face then I could say and his body skin so his hands and his neck and then I'm going to create a mask and then I'm going to say oh I'm going to just brighten up just his face just a little bit here so that his skin matches her skin that is like just one little blip on the mask asking radar the the masking tool within Lightroom continues to be elevated it continues um to be impressive and so that's another video for another time if you have questions about masking and how you can use it and what you can create with it and just leave all those in the comments because even if you're a beginner and you're watching this you're like I know all this about Lightroom you may not know everything about masking I don't even know everything about masking so leave comments and that could be a potential video in the future coming down here this let's get off of masking this is the basic tab some even professional photographers stay here and don't look anywhere else and that's a huge loss hey there sorry to interject I just wanted to pop in here I hope you're enjoying your Lightroom guide but I wanted to let you know if you're watching this because you are at the beginning of your photography journey I want to let you know there's a whole part of Education that you need to dive into as well beyond editing and it is in lighting it's in shooting learning how to use your camera in manual mode I have a resource for beginners I'm going to talk about at the end the KJ starter course would be a great place for you to begin your photography Journey at a course level I'm going to talk about it more at the end of this video so the basic tab is going to allow you to do the basic edits that you would be able to do you can even do some of these edits on an iPhone so you know contrast is pretty self-explanatory uh but there's a lot of features here that are going to do really awesome things and some photographers think that like this is all they need and maybe it is for them but there's so much more that you can do within the develop module so for example the tonal curve so I know that my default edit always has a backward C pattern I have so much control here now if you were thinking my Lightroom doesn't have that I don't have sliders like that um that might be because you're editing in Lightroom CC and Lightroom CC for some reason took away these sliders and you have to manipulate it with this curve and it's very frustrating so what you're going to see here is a color mixer and the color mixer allow allows you to adjust very specific colors so if I thought o I want his jacket to pop a little bit more with blue so I'm going to enhance the blue but it also enhances the floor so not going to do that too much but this is a great tool for when you need to reduce the orange skin tones a little bit or you need to tone down some yellows maybe you're shooting in a really big bright field with yellow sunflowers but the yellow is overpowering you would be able to adjust that here not only can you adjust the saturation of each individual color but you can also change the Hue so if I wanted his you know the blue in this image which is actually all over the image to look more teal I could adjust that I don't know why I would do that but there are a lot of ways that you can use this to your advantage I could literally make her her dress look a little bit more pink than Peach so luminance is going to take a color a specific color and um make that either brighter or darker um this is also really helpful when you have some really orange skin as well so color grading this is amazing because it's basically going to say okay whatever the highlight of the image is is I'm going to change the tone of that whatever the shadow of the image is I'm going to change the tone of that whatever the midtone or the mid-range of um certain parts of the image Art I'm going to change that tone and so the reason that's important is because up here which I did not mention this is where you adjust your warmth your your white balance but it's going to warm up the entire image do you see how even the white it's getting warm and they're getting very warm and so sometimes there are scenarios where you want to warm up just the highlights which normally in a lot of cases would be skin um or just the Shadows or just the midtones and you can do that here so one way that I would do that is I would click on Highlights I'd go to Hue 30 is a good Hue for me and I'd do it at like 15% saturation that looks a little too milky for me so I'm going to take it down to 8% saturation now if I wanted it to look a little less peachy I could go to 40 because that's going to pull in a little more yellow if I want it to look way more peachy then I'll go go back to 25 and that's going to add in more red you can see the dial changing here as I change the Hue and you can see how that affects the image so color grading is super powerful detail section is talking about sharpening there's amazing and when I I mean this is a whole another video but noise reduction is incredible um now it it's it takes a little bit of time um because it's it's using AI but the noise reduction will change your life lens Corrections um this is going to be where you enable lens Corrections and do you see that darkening on the edges I always have this set up automatically because there's never going to be a time when I don't want to take away some of those Distortion elements that come from using a certain lens um and then here this is going to be where if you have chromatic aberration so like I don't even think I said that right but when you have the very slight purple outlining of um a very small detail and your lens it's just it's just an unfortunate thing that can sometime happen that can sometimes times happen um but you can actually get rid of some of that here with the defringe options so lens Corrections is important transform rarely need that so lens blur is something that I think could be a really cool tool in very specific situations but what it does I'll go ahead and show you what it does let's use like um I don't know trying to find an image where it would show up well this was them walking down the steps okay so let's say I wanted to blur the background a little bit I could do that here and it does look cool but there's some people that are shooting at 5.6 and then do you see what it just did like look at the background see what it just did there that doesn't look real so that looks fine that does not and I think there's a lot of photographers that don't know the line of what looks natural so it's is it a fine tool yes I think it's awesome for some things and for some people you can make a lot of adjustments in the bokeh and the way that you are um you know where you're applying it and how much you're applying it but there's a lot to learn there so let's keep going effects this is going to be something that I because I don't use a lot of grain and I'm not doing a lot with vignetting I don't really use effects that much calibration can be really good um whenever I am trying to do some extra adjustments to my greens it's kind of like a last resort color toolkit that I use um and I rarely use it it's it really comes into play when I'm really struggling okay so last but not least if you have an image that you're like okay I love the way this looks I'm ready to export you want to make sure whatever you're exporting is selected and then you're going to go to guess what export you're going to click export there are so many different things you could select I'm going to hit the most important ones you need to know where it's going okay so I would go here and then I where's my there we go um and then I would find the folder and then I would take it into the edited edited folder now this does not okay so I'm just going to put it right in this folder I'm also going to change the name so this is a sample edit you can change the name right here it's going to keep the original file number I like this pattern because it keeps some part of the original file name attached to it um and then you don't need anything for video file settings you want to make sure that you are exporting to a JPEG does not need to be jpeg XL your quality can be 100% I don't resize my R six images because they're already a decent size to begin with I do make sure that the resolution is 300 um I sharpen from my screen in a standard amount and and I export so there you have it a quick overview a beginnner intro lesson in Lightroom I hope you enjoyed it all right you did it you made it through that entire Lightroom guide I hope it was beneficial you feel like you know everything the interface you know where to find things that is something that I wish I had at the beginning of my career the other thing that I wish I had at the beginning of my career was someone telling me that editing is not the end all Beal to creating great photos if you actually want great photos that are professional and you actually want to get your life life back and not live in Lightroom cuz you have to fix so much stuff in your photos you have to learn how to actually shoot well in camera you have to learn how to shoot in manual and you have to learn how to recognize amazing light editing is actually secondary to all of that so if you're in a season where you're like yeah I just don't even know when I'm going to get good photos I don't even know when I'm shooting well when I'm not shooting well chances are you would benefit greatly from the KJ starter course it was designed with you in mind you can literally see me shoot and find good light through the lens of my camera you can see what I'm seeing and watch me adjust my aperture my shutter speed my ISO even my white balance it's amazing resource for beginners I wish I had this when I started and so if this was beneficial for you for editing I'm even talking about even more of my editing style in the starter course but I'm also teaching you the ins and outs of shooting manuals setting up your camera for success and finding amazing natural light so that is linked below it's affordable it's available and I'd love for you to join me so if you loved this make sure you like And subscribe I would love for you to be a part of other videos that are released in the future we have a playlist that's dedicated to beginners so make sure you watch all those videos it's all free and I cannot wait to see you in the next episode thanks for tuning in bye [Applause] [Music] bye yeah

Channel: Katelyn James

Views: 6,930

Keywords: Wedding Photography Education, Katelyn James, Katelyn James Photography, kj education, kj all access, katelyn james photography, lightroom tutorial for beginners, lightroom photo editing presets, lightroom editing tutorial for beginners, adobe lightroom classic for beginners, photo editing lightroom, lightroom editing photo, lightroom photo editing, lightroom editing, katelyn james prsets, kj preset process

Id: soaw6j2sRyg

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024