LIGHTROOM FOR BEGINNERS - A beginners guide to Adobe Lightroom for photographers from Photo Genius.

hi paul here from photogenius welcome to my channel where i upload weekly photography tutorials i do gear reviews i also do occasional videos all about editing images like this one which is a beginner's guide to lightroom in this video i'm going to talk you through the basics covering subjects such as how to import images into lightroom how to rate and add keywords to images how to keep your images in order and safe using collections i'm also going to show you how to edit an images as well so we can take the image from this to this and to wrap things up at the end i'm going to show you how you can then export that image as a jpeg maybe for print or sharing on social media now in this video i'm going to be using lightroom classic for desktop and you may not have lightroom yet in fact you may not even be sure if it's the program for you but don't worry because did you know you can try out for free adobe have a free trial version that you can download from their website i'll put a link in the description below so you can check it out okay let's get started okay so as i said in the intro this is a beginner's guide to lightroom and if you're brand new to lightroom if you first open the program up this is what you're likely to see and the middle panel because there's three sections here is where the image will be shown if you've not got any images in lightroom already then it's going to be blank i'm going to click on a folder over here so this is a collection just to bring up some images so what you'll see is this middle section is where you can view your images and over to the left this is where you navigate around so this is where you have these folders or collections where you can store your images so this makes lightroom not just a um a program for editing images but also a great program for managing your images so if you look over to the left here you'll see that our dog is called boo and i've got a collection here called boo this has 47 images in the collection this is showing me the 47 thumbnails i can resize these using a slider over to the left here if i wish and of course i can select an individual image if i wish i'll select one here and then over to the left i've got different ways of viewing this image if i click on fit it's going to fit to the screen fill will fill the screen it will enlarge it one to one is showing it in full resolution and one to two is half resolution i usually leave it on fit and the left hand column you can collapse if you want to by clicking on the arrow very easy and again and as we get further into the video i'm going to show you how to create these collections which are basically just folders in which you can save your images so i've got one for the dog i've got one for client shoots i've got one for family shots and so on over to the right we've got the histogram the metadata relating to the image this tells you what camera i used all the settings are used also this is where you can do your keywording later on in the video we'll go into that keywording is a really good tool within lightroom that allows you to apply keywords to images great for searching for images later on and down the bottom here you have these uh thumbnail row as well so you can quickly skip three images like this if you wish to so this is the main um layout of lightroom if you like looking up to the top right we're currently in the library section of lightroom um over to the right of that is the develop module and in this video because it's an intro we're going to look at library and develop only we're not going to look at the others might do that on a on another day so that is the general layout of lightroom three columns middle section is viewing your image over to the right is where all the histogram metadata etc is and over to the left is where your folders and your collections will be okay so now we know a bit more about the layout of lightroom it's time to import some images so importing your images into lightroom is very easy if we look down to the bottom left there's an import button there's also an export button and all i've got to do is click on import or sometimes if you just plug a memory card into your computer lightroom will automatically open the window so i'm going to click on the import button and if we look over to the left we'll see here we have nikon d3500 so i've just um plugged a card into the computer this card was um used in a nikon d3500 and uh here is a selection of images on the card so these are preview thumbnails at this point the images have not been imported into lightroom now you'll notice that they all have ticks on now all the images are ticked in advance and if i was to click on import all the images will be imported into lightroom so if i want to i can individually d click these or down the bottom here i can go to uncheck all which is what i usually do and then i select the ones that i particularly want to import i'm just going to select three random images now all i've got to do is literally click on import and after a few seconds the images are imported into lightroom and you'll see over to the left here we have previous import three here's our three thumbnails again we can resize these i'm going to go for fit and using the keys on my keyboard i can skip through these images now as mentioned before viewing the images is very simple um if you want to get a full screen you can press f on the keyboard and this will give you a full screen view of the subject you can also press g which is a good shortcut to know which gives you what's called the gallery view or in other words you will see thumbnail so i'm going to resize these and next we're going to take a look at rating the images and creating and adding keywords so now we've got some images in lightroom i'm going to talk about the benefits of adding keywords and also rating your images now these are both optional but as you're going to see it can save you a lot of time and really speed up your workflow so adding keywords and also rating images makes filtering and also finding images in a collection really easy let me show you as an example we're going to start with rating first of all now i've selected one of my three images which is the middle one here and i can rate this image by using the numbers on my keyboard if i press one i give it one star two two stars three and so on all the way to five stars if i wish pressing zero sets it to zero and i use this tool quite a lot when i'm taking images i usually start by importing my images rating the images with maybe three or four stars and then going back and then giving the best of the best maybe a five star rating and this is a great way to sort the best of the images from the ones you know that maybe don't work so much so um let me give you an example of how this works i'm going to click on my youtube folder over here to the left so or collection rather so this is my youtube collection this is a series of images that i've taken mostly for videos so if you follow my channel here on youtube you know i do some reviews i do lots of videos on photography and most of these photos relate to those um those videos so if i want to see only the four star rated images in this collection all i've got to do is go down to the bottom here where it says filters off turn rated on and then click on the four stars and what it's doing now it's showing me images that are rated four stars or higher now if i want to see the best of the best i click on the five star and now it's showing me all the images that are rated five stars so this is a very very handy tool and there's lots of different ways you can use this filter system now let's go back to our previous import so this is our three images again just going to make them a little bit bigger so i'm going to give this water dragon shot here a five star rating because i really really like it and now i want to show you how to do keywords now keywords are great because you can use or apply certain keywords to images and then you can use these keywords to search lightroom later so so again as an example i'm going to go to the youtube collection and let's shrink these down a little bit and let's say i want to find a waterfall photo now all i've got to do is go up to the top here and click on text and if i write in waterfall lightroom will look for images that relate to the keyword and all the images that have come up are images that feature waterfalls so it's as simple as that if i do another search maybe i'll do night it's now done another search and it's found images that are or have been taken at night where i've applied that particular keyword so this is a really powerful tool in lightroom and it really does save a lot of search and a lot of wasted time when you're trying to find an image that you've taken maybe i don't know a year ago or two years ago but you can remember maybe where it was taken or what it was of etc so of course the key is to actually apply the keywords in the first place so let's go to previous import let's um take a look at our image and what we're going to do is we're going to apply some keywords to this image here of the of the water dragon so all i do is go over to the right hand column and over here if i want to i can type in my keywords but i've already got a bunch of keywords that i've already done previously and if i scroll down to the bottom click on that and it's applied that keyword now if i wanted to apply brisbane for example all i've got to do is click on brisbane and these are keywords that i use all the time so now and those two keywords are applied so again to show you working what i'm going to do now is drag this into a collection that's how simple it is to use this is the photogenius collection let's just shrink this down so you can see a series of images here if i do a search i mean we can see the images here anyway but just to show you it working i'm going to go text i'm going to get rid of night i'm going to type in order dragon and there's our image and that's how easy it is to use keywording and rating in lightroom now you've heard me talking about collections which is a great way of keeping your images organized but what i want to do now is show you how to create a collection and how to move your images into the collection folder okay so now i want to show you how quickly it is to create a collection you'll see that i've got a bunch of collections already set up here and creating a collection is as easy as clicking on the plus click on create collection give it a name let's say demo images oops and click on create and you'll see over to the left here we have a demo images folder which currently has nothing inside so i'm going to go to previous import i've got three images that we've imported and if i want to put these images individually into this collection all i've got to do is drag them or if i want to i can highlight the three images drag them into demo images and now we have our three images in the demo images collection so we've learned that lightroom is a great way of both managing our images but also making them searchable by using ratings and keywords but lightroom is so much more than that of course editing is next so now i'm going to walk you through a basic edit using the develop module okay so now we know how to manage our images in lightroom and how to create collections to store our images we're now going to look at how to edit an image using the develop module the first thing i need to do is select an image and for this i'm going to go to youtube and i'm looking for a particular image it's a waterfall image and again just to show you how this works i'm going to click on text i'm going to type in waterfall and the program pulls out the images that i've tagged with the keyword waterfall now there's one particular image i want to look for and that's one that's got a five star rating so i click on five stars one and here we have the image now this is an image taken for one of my previous videos which was all about how to photograph waterfalls and this image in its current state is unedited but i want to show you what it's going to look like when we're finished so this is the edited version and this is the unedited version and i'm going to walk you through the process so what we're going to do now instead of being in the library module we want to move over to the develop module so click on develop the image opens up and now we see a brand new panel over to the right hand side so histogram up at the top and if we scroll through you'll see there are lots of different controls and things that we can change and because this is an introduction video we're only going to do the very basics so we're going to be using this section here which actually is called basic so this is your basic tools your basic editing now image the image looks okay but to me it looks a little bit underexposed in the in the shadows and in the dark areas now the first thing i like to do is adjust the white balance so you'll see a wb here and a little dropper which i can actually click on the pick up and i can move this around now i'm looking for a sort of gray or neutral area and i'm going to choose the uh the the section just here on the water i don't want to go into here into the shadows i want to find a neutral gray area and you'll see that the white balance will be applied now this image was taken towards the end of the day towards what we like to call the golden hour and hence the image is now quite warm now if i want to call this down what i've got to do is take the temperature slider over to the right and move it to the left if i go too far it's going to go really blue i don't want that so again i'm just going to go to white balance click on it again it's a little bit too warm so i'm just going to call that down a little bit so white balance wise i'm quite happy with this so the next thing i'm going to do is adjust the exposure so if i increase the exposure slider the image will get brighter and i don't want it to get too bright because i don't want to over expose the the white areas on the water here so what i can do is go down to highlights and i can actually drop the highlights and this will recover the highlights in the bright areas and already that's looking pretty neat using the backslash button on my keyboard i can go back to the starting point and then look at the edit so far i think it looks pretty good now i'm going to go to the shadow slider and you'll see that if i reduce the shadows the shadows and the dark areas of this image will of course get darker but if i increase the shadows they will get brighter so i can bring out the detail in the rocks here now that again i think it's looking pretty good now generally if you drop the highlights and increase the shadows your picture might start to look a bit flat so i'm going to go to the contrast and just bump this up a little bit here okay next we're going to go to the whites now if i drop these again the image might start to look a bit flat if i increase the whites it's going to push push it too much it's going to overexpose clearly so i'm just going to drop this section just going to drop this one down a little bit here now over to the left of the blacks this is going to affect the dark parts of the image if i drop this it's going to get really dark if i push it too high again it's going to bring out the detail in the darker areas of the image but it will be too much so i'm just going to increase the blacks just a just a touch and again just backslash button just to see how we're getting on so we've only been going a couple of minutes and already that's a big big change now i don't want to go too much further because again this is an introduction to lightroom but i'm going to go to texture next there's um actually there's texture clarity and dehaze each of these will affect the clarity of the image and dehaze we're not going to use here texture is probably my favorite so i'm just going to increase the texture now on the uh you may not see the difference here too much to be honest if i go to the left you probably will you'll see it will soften the image and if i go to the right it will 25 will make the image look really really horrible but just a bit of texture and a little bit of clarity just to bring out the detail in these in these rocks here again before and after so for now that's probably where i'm going to stop i'll be because i just want to show you the basics but what we've done is we've increased the exposure we've dropped the highlights so we don't over expose the bright parts of the image we've increased the shadows to bring out some shadow detail and because this does tend to make an image look a bit flat we've increased the the contrast just just a tiny bit here and i think that looks pretty good again this was our starting point this is our edit so far and if we look down to the right you'll see that of course there are plenty of other things we can play with but if you are willing to give this a go and again lightroom is available as a free trial version and lightroom is a lot of fun and the great thing about shooting raw images and this is a raw image is it's non-destructive so these changes that i've made are non-destructive i can go back and reset this at any time okay next i'm going to show you how we can export this image as a jpeg so once you're done with your editing process then the next thing you might want to do is maybe print that image or maybe email it to a friend or share it to social media so what i'm going to do now is show you how you can export your image as a jpeg and for this example let's imagine that i want to share the waterfall photo on instagram as a jpeg let me show you how it's done okay so currently still in the develop module here's our finished edit and what i want to do is i want to export this image so that i can then post it to instagram so i'm going to click onto the library module i'm going to go up to file at the top left down to export and you'll get this little pop-up window now this will then give you a choice of where you want to save the image and the resolution and the size and so forth so what i'm going to do first is i'm going to choose where i'm going to save it so i'm going to go choose i'm just going to create a temporary folder so i'm going to go desktop new folder and let's just call it um lr for live room test create that's done so now it knows where it's going to save the image to i scroll down i have the option here to rename the file if i want to i'm not going to bother with this one image format i want to save the image as a jpeg plenty of other options here and this is the important part image size now for instagram instagram usually recommend a maximum width of 1080 pixels so what i can do here is i can choose long edge which will be the width of the image because it's a landscape image i can type in 1080 and it means that the image will now be resized with a maximum width along the long edge of 1080 pixels which makes it perfect for instagram so i'm going to click on export and after just a few seconds that image will be exported and ready to be uploaded to instagram and the original raw image is left in lightroom unchained so i can go back and do as many different exports at different sizes as i wish and that's the beauty of lightroom so i really hope you enjoyed this short video all about lightroom if you did please give it a thumbs up because it really helps support the channel and the more support the channel gets the more videos i can make for you guys now if you've got a question or you just want to say hi you can leave your comments down below and of course if you haven't already subscribed please consider subscribing because i put out new videos every single week i hope see you again sometime soon see ya bye

Channel: Photo Genius

Views: 31,753

Keywords: Lightroom tutorial, lightroom editing, Lightroom for beginners, Lightroom photo editing, photography, lightroom classic, lightroom 2021, How to use Lightroom, adobe lightroom tutorial, how to edit photos in lightroom, lightroom v photoshop, photography editing for beginners, photography editing with lightroom, Lightroom, light room, photography tutorials for beginners, photography tips and tricks, how to edit photos, raw images in lightroom, lightroom basics for beginners

Id: 0S_4btxc65Q

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021