Lightroom Tutorial For Beginners - Top 5 Things Beginners Need to Know

hey guys this is anthony morganti i am mr photographer.com if you're a new user of lightroom classic or you're thinking about getting into lightroom classic well this video is for you in this video i'm going to talk about five things every new lightroom classic user needs to know all right we're going to jump right into it with number one number one is importing lightroom isn't like a lot of other applications where you could just load an image into it start working on it save the image and you're done with lightroom you need to import the images into it and typically you would do this directly from your memory card of your camera so for this demonstration i went out this morning and took a few images of a lighthouse that is near where i live i just can't go to that memory card and start processing them i have to import them first and typically you could be in the library module of lightroom and click on the little import button over here on the far left or you could go up to file import photos and video and if you have that memory card plugged into your system already lightroom should sense it and have the images on that card display right here now the import dialog box this is what this screen is called can be a little bit intimidating yours may not look like this because sometimes when you first run lightroom you'll get the minimized version of this if you go down here in the lower left hand corner you'll see there's a little square with a triangle in it if i click on that that will give me the minimized version of the import dialog now i encourage you to use the maximized version because you have more control over these images now you don't have to have the images on a memory card to import them into lightroom you can simply just go over here on the left hand side and navigate to wherever they are on your system maybe you have them on an external hard drive maybe you have them on the local hard drive maybe you have them on the desktop if that's the case you could go up here to the top and just click and you have some shortcuts to your desktop folder your pictures folder movies folder and so on so you can navigate to wherever your images are on the left hand side but if you do import them directly from the memory card it's very easy because most of the time lightroom will know they're on that memory card and automatically open them up like mine did right now so once you have these images you can pick which ones you want to import into lightroom there's little check marks there i'm going to import all of these there looks to be six of them then over on the right hand side you have a lot of different things you could do now i'm not going to go into too great detail here i do have a whole actually several series of training on lightroom that are free on youtube i'll have them linked in the description below this video and i go into great detail on all the different functions of lightroom including importing in importing images into it now you have the option of not importing suspected duplicate files this is fine and comes in handy if you didn't delete the images off your memory card from previous imports then it will just gray them out and those won't get imported a second time you could rename the files as you bring them in you could add some develop settings these are presets so you could add presets as they come in you could do metadata presets as well like i have one called an import preset and that puts all my copyright information in the metadata of the file as it's being imported i also could add keywords if i wanted to then down here destination this is where you're going to save them now typically you would outside a lightroom somewhere on your system make a folder for your images now personally i have an external hard drive that i called lightroom and on that external hard drive i have a folder called lightroom raw files it doesn't have to be named that and you don't need an external hard drive these could be put on your local drive or anywhere you like on your system so what you would do probably is just go before you open up lightroom make a folder somewhere on your system for your images and call it whatever you like you can call it my pictures you know my photos lightroom raw files like i called mine whatever so what you do is you could click on that and it's going to go into that folder then up on top we could put it in subfolders now these are some pictures of a lighthouse so i want it to go in a folder called lighthouse if i could spell it there we go and then inside of that folder i want another folder by date that way if i go to this lighthouse in the future all these imports will be segregated by date now if we look down here in my lightroom raw files folder if i go down to lighthouse you'll see that it's going to create this folder you can see because it's kind of gray that means it's not there already and it's going to create a folder inside of that folder with today's date and it's going to import those six images so it's really relatively easy uh to import images but the dialog box itself this import dialog box is a bit confusing when you first start using it so then you would simply click import now when you import these images what lightroom is doing is it's not only just taking the images from the memory card and copying them to that location on my lightroom external hard drive it is also creating previews for the images the previews allow you um to view the image much quicker uh when you uh click on an image let's say let's say i want to look at this first image i'll double click it and this is the preview and if i go to the next image that's the preview of that image so it helps load the images a lot faster otherwise it would have to read it from the image itself and since that image itself is on an external hard drive it probably would take a lot longer all these previews are stored in the lightroom catalog the lightroom catalog is usually by default in your pictures folder on your system when you installed lightroom you actually had the option of putting it somewhere else but most people let it default to that spot so all these previews are kept in that folder so that's one thing you need to know about lightroom is you just can't navigate to an image somewhere in your system and start processing it you have to do a formal import first and that import creates previews the previews are stored in your lightroom catalog and there's something else i want to talk about that you should know about with lightroom typically this workspace it's pretty static there's not a lot of modifications you could do you could come over here and click these little triangles like and close down panels like this if you want to do that there's little things you could do here and there but it's it's really not super customizable like photoshop is but what you'll find is typically you're going to spend most of your time in two modules this is the library module and the develop module and let's talk about the library module this is something a new user has to become familiar with inside the library module you would typically edit your images call not edit as far as process but edit as far as um call them you're going to pick one to work on you're going to pick one to delete you're going to pick one maybe to work on later you're going to maybe move one to a different folder things like that so when you're in the library module you could go across your images and pick the ones you want to work on now there's a number of different ways you could pick the images the most common way is to put pick flags on them and the way you do that is with the keyboard shortcut p p is in pick and you'll see if i hit that key it says flag is pick and you'll see this little white flag appear down here also in the film strip at the bottom in the left hand corner of the image there's a little white flag there as well so that means i've picked that one nothing really special about it it just lets me know that i'm going to work on this image i could go to the next image here and let's say i don't like this one and i want to reject it to the reject keyboard shortcut is x so you just click x on your keyboard and you see it has this black flag with an x on it that means that one's rejected and you'll also notice in the film strip it's kind of grayed out a little bit now a faster way to do this is to have this auto advance and there's a menu shortcut to have that done but the easiest way actually is just turn caps lock on on your keyboard with caps lock on if i reject this image by hitting x it'll automatically advance to the next image and then i could maybe i like this one i'll hit the p key to pick it i don't like this one this one's a little crooked i could hit the x key on that one this one i'm undecided on i don't want to give it a pick flag but i don't want to give it a reject flag either i could just hit the right arrow key or i could hit the u key the u key is unpick so if i have an image that let's say i rejected this one and i want to unpick it i could just hit the u key and it will remove that flag totally whether it's a reject flag or a pick flag so that's the most common way you'll call images there's other ways in lightroom as well you could use star ratings and color labels and things like that but one thing i want to stress to you about the library module is it is kind of like the area where you'll move images around create new folders delete folders you want to do that inside of lightroom because if you have lightroom closed and i go to my lightroom hard drive and i start moving images around outside a lightroom or deleting them or deleting folders lightroom won't know that and when i open up lightroom you're going to get an error message saying the image can't be found so what you want to do let's say i just want to move this image to a different folder i could then let's say just open up this is uh let's go to erie basin marina that's where this this um this uh lighthouse is so i'll go to erie basin marina and let's say i just want to move it to the bottom folder right here all i do is click on it in the film strip drag it and drop it like that and it will add it to that folder and remove it from this folder now if you want to remove a whole folder just right click on it and you could move the selected photo to this folder like that like i just did if you want to do that instead of dragging it you could rename the folder remove the folder you could create a folder inside of that folder so if you're going to create any new folders you could do that right here right click create a new folder and so on so all that is done inside a lightroom don't do any culling of images moving of images moving up folders or deleting the folders even creation of new folders outside of that very first folder you create don't do that outside of lightroom because that's going to screw up your system all right number three you want to edit images all your editing is done in the develop module that's the second of the two modules you're going to spend most of your time in and what you need to understand is that lightroom is a non-destructive editor what that means is any edits you do in lightroom are stored in the catalog they're not written directly to the file whether it's a raw file or a jpeg or a tiff file or a pst file it doesn't write those edits to the file the advantage of that is you don't have the chance or you don't run the risk of corrupting that file because most often a file is corrupted when it's written to so i have this raw file here if i go over to the right hand panel and i start working on it it's all this i'm doing to it isn't being written to that file at all it's all being stored in the catalog and being stored in the catalog is as i mentioned uh leaving this file pristine and never going to hurt it now the disadvantage of this is if i close down lightroom and go to this folder and look at the file it's just going to look like no one ever edited it because all those edits are still in the catalog and going along with that you never have to save a file in lightroom all these edits are done and saved automatically into the catalog as you go so there is no save or save as like there is in photoshop or a lot of other applications all the edits are being saved as we go as a matter of fact on the left-hand panel you'll see there's a history tab everything i've done is recorded in the history tab so i could go back to the very beginning where i could do the first edit where i pulled highlights down the second edit where i opened up shadows the third edit where i edited the white point black point texture clarity and so on so all these edits now i could come in here and let's say turn up saturation and that gets recorded there so it's non-destructive i could go back to the beginning i could go somewhere in between whatever i don't have to worry about really screwing up the image if i want to start over on the right hand side there's a button called reset i'll click that and it resets it even that isn't final if i want to say well i shouldn't reset that i hit that button by accident just go to the history panel and go back one step and there we are so it's totally non-destructive you don't have to worry about saving an image the edits are automatically stored in the catalog you don't have to worry about any of that now number four processing the image you do that in the develop module and this is the part that could be pretty intimidating to someone but actually it doesn't have to be um because all the edits are non-destructive and you don't run the risk of ruining the image you could come in here and really mess around and if you screw up just hit that reset button or go to the history panel and go back a step or two or wherever you need to go also as you're learning you could come in and let's say just do these auto adjustments you can see there's an auto adjustment right there i'll click that and it will give me an auto adjustment and you can see it automatically move the sliders i could come in then and try other things as well and again if i don't like them i just go to the history tab and then go back to a step or two wherever i need to go and it's super easy now one thing about lightroom also in the develop module it has a bunch of tools these are all the controls the basic panel tool uh tone curve hsl all that help you process the image but there are a lot of tools as well for instance this image is a little crooked and i want to straighten it i would do that with the crop tool it's right here and there's three different ways i could straighten the image i could just click auto and it will automatically straighten it if i didn't like that i could do this little angle right here i could click on this tool and you can see the cursor turns into a level and then i could go on like the horizon here and just draw a line along the horizon and it will straighten the image hopefully but if i didn't like that i also could just do it manually just come off the image and you can see how the cursor turns into this curved double arrow click with the left mouse button and i can just drag the image until i feel it's straight and when i'm done just click close the crop tool and it will commit that straighten crop to the image again it's kept over here in history so i could undo it if i want it's non-destructive so i could come in here and actually crop away pixels you know something like this like really crop it down and like click done down here or just close the tool and it will commit it but i didn't destroy those pixels they're still there so i could just reset and they're still there so totally non-destructive you don't have to worry about messing up your images with lightroom because it is non-destructive so again um it really is the optimum type application for a person to learn because you don't run the risk of screwing anything up you could just come in here and go back to the history panel and go back to the import uh you know if i want or go back to that or whatever and you're fine and there's a lot of little auto functions as well so i could just click auto and let it automatically do some adjustments and then come in here and and do things like that so that is the develop module uh probably the module you'll spend the most time in and the library module is the module you'll spend the second most time in now i mentioned you don't have to save images ever because all those edits are automatically being saved to the catalog but what if i want to share this image i also mentioned that if i go to the location where this image is on my system it's going to look like it wasn't processed at all well what you need to do then is export the image now the images when they're in lightroom they're considered your digital negatives it's as though back in the old days when we shot film we would take that film to photomat and photomat would develop them and hand us an envelope of our prints and inside of that envelope were also the negatives and the negatives we saved just in case we ever wanted to make another print well in the realm of digital photography these images that are in lightroom are our negatives our digital negatives and when we want to share them with people like we did those prints from photomat we have to export them so to export um just go up to file and then down to export and then this export dialog box comes up and this like the import dialog box could be a little bit intimidating just take it step by step from top to bottom where do you want to save it a specific folder same folder as the original desktop so on so i have it saved to the desktop i could put it inside a subfolder and lightroom will create that subfolder for you if that subfolder isn't already there i could add it back to the catalog some photographers like to do that you don't need to though you have the original digital negative in lightroom and the edits are stored in the catalog so all that is there already you don't need to import the export back into lightroom but some people like to do that now if you happen to be using a file name that's already taken it will ask me what to do all right you have also the choice of choosing a new file name it will automatically choose a new file name or it will just overwrite the existing file without warning or skip it won't do anything then we could rename the file like i don't want to use this dsc-0895 so i could rename it and i'm going to call this lighthouse like that and with it's going to be lighthouse.1 you can see right there but i don't want an arw file so i don't want the original file format i want to save it as a jpeg and i want the quality to be a hundred let's say color space srgb is good now i want to resize it i don't want to re export this huge file i'm going to share this file let's say an email and a good uh email size is making the long edge 900 pixels that's usually a good size for sending this to someone at email resolution doesn't matter when you're sharing it online but if you're going to print this or send it to a lab to be printed put a resolution of at least 240 there many people recommend 300 and you can see it defaulted to 300 so that doesn't really matter you also have the option to sharpen it when you export it there's also when you process the images i didn't do it but the detail tab over here on the far right you sharpen the image there as well so since i didn't do any sharpening let's just sharpen it for the screen a standard amount of sharpening what do you want to include with the image i have all the metadata that means my name and i also in that import when i was importing it i uh included all my copyright information and then included my address and phone number and so all that will get copied with or sent with that jpeg unless i start removing like person info so it'll remove my address and phone number and so on um watermark you have the options of using watermarks in lightroom i'm not going to do that and after export what do you want to do you could close lightroom down you could open the image up into photoshop and so on i'm just going to do nothing so we'll export this image it's going to resize it at 900 pixels on the long edge it's going to be a jpeg and i'll just click export you can see up here on the far left hand side there was a status bar letting me know that it was exported and then lightroom i'm not sure you could hear it dinged to let me know that it was exported so if i go down here's the image right here on my desktop that's the 900 pixels on the long edge exported jpeg from lightroom so that is really in a nutshell the things that you really have to be familiar with with lightroom mainly i'm going to encourage you do not move images around outside a lightroom delete folders delete images outside of lightroom do all of that from inside a lightroom in the library module because that causes people more problems than anything else also don't worry it's a non-destructive raw editor that was my no my third point you won't screw anything up come in here and really mess around and you know try all different things you know sliders way up make it look horrible then then back it off then go to your history tab and and go back to another step if you need to whatever you need to do experiment that's how you learn uh see what all these different tabs do and again i have complete training on lightroom that is totally free on youtube i'll have it linked in the description below thank you everyone who watches my videos i really do appreciate it i'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 10,824

Keywords: lightroom tutorial for beginners, Lightroom editing techniques, Lightroom editing, lightroom quick tips, lightroop tips, lightroom tips and tricks, lightroom tutorials, lightroom quickstart, what is lightroom, lightroom classic, morganti, anthony morganti, lightroom for beginners, lightroom, lightroom tutorial, tutorial, lightroom tips, how to use lightroom, lightroom tricks, editing photos in lightroom, adobe lightroom tutorial, how to use adobe lightroom, lightroom editing

Id: srTiuArGnYE

Length: 24min 25sec (1465 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020