Learning Lightroom

Zascar

The next thing I really need to do with my photos is start using lightroom as usually all my photos are totally untouched, but I'd lvoe to learn to tweak them properly. I've got lightroom but I find it very confusing and difficult to learn.

I've tried a few tutorials on youtube etc - but I just cannot seem to get it, what i see in tutorials I cannot find on my computer. I find importing and managing very un-intuative. I'm usually a pretty techy person but I feel like a moron trying to learn this.

How did you guys learn and can anyone recommend some basic starter tutorials?

I think I'd love to do a proper course on digital photo manipulation - anyone know any good ones in Dublin?

amdgilmore

Trial and error. Play with all the settings and sliders one by one until you understand what they do and how they change a photo. It will probably take a month or two of use to really get a feel for it.

The only thing you really need at the beginning is colour and contrast, so start with them.

(But don't go down the road of applying lightroom presets and vignettes to every bloody photo you take. Seriously, I know people who do this. It does not look good.)

Kenny Logins

Sign up for the Lynda.com free first week.

I think the hardest part for me was to adapt to using Lightroom to catalogue ALL of my photos, and then select some for editing. Lynda has a course for every aspect of it - importing/selecting/editing and outputting. It's worth the effort IMHO.

irlgw

Which you-tube videos are you using? I did it that way to get familiar with the structure. Start with learning how to import, store and move files then the rest is no different from photoshop. I used about 30 pics to learn with before committing my entire portfolio to the catalouge. It may also be worth defining the category of shot you like to shoot and designing your filing system before building it in lightroom.

For example you might have a folder 'landscape' and then sub folders within it called 'Dublin' , 'Wicklow' & 'Meath' etc etc. The beauty of it is though that you can bundle all you photos into a single folder if you want and then just assign keywords as you import them. Initially you will be able to find photos from memory, but after a year or so locating them by metadata alone (eg. June 2011) won't be enough if you shoot frequently.

Lightroom doesn't appear to do things in the most logical way if you compare it to simple drag and drop file storage in windows folders so don't look for solutions in the same way. This is what lightroom is really all about so spend your time learning it and watch the videos over as many times as you need to. If you use photo editing in PS or PE then its not much different in the develop module.

Once you have it sussed ( 3-4 evenings) then you only ever need to shoot in RAW because handling the files is so much quicker and easier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OmfMzYjujE

5uspect

Do you understand the image histogram? Pretty much everything in Lightroom is about manipulating this in various ways.

pullandbang

Keywords and tagging.

They are the two most important aspects to LR. All I can say is be very diligent when importing your photos and make sure you have as many keywords applied as you can possibly think of.

How you organise your catalogue/folders is entirely up to you but once a photo has a relevant keyword attached to it, then it's easy to find in the future.

For example I file mine by year - month - shoot name. So I have a folder called 2013 and within that I have (or will have) 12 subfolders - Jan, Feb, Mar etc. Within each monthly folder I'll have another folder with the name of the shoot and if both me and missuspandb go to the same shoot then one folder will be called Denis Studio Shoot and hers will be called Lorraine Studio Shoot or whatever.

But the most important part is to make sure you add the keywords. So what we do is add the common keywords to all the pics at the import stage. So for example if we go to Glendalough and shoot some landscapes we'll use keywords like landscape, lake, mountain, glendalough, etc.etc. These will be applied across the board.

Then usually before processing an individual photo, I'll add more keywords that are relevant to that shot. So for example there might be a tree, some heather and a blue sky so I'll add additional keywords like sky, blue, heather, tree, etc etc.

That way at some point in the future if I'm looking for a shot of heather for example, I can bring up all the shots tagged with "heather". Once you have that shot you can then go straight to that particular folder and see all the other shots you took that day too.

The processing side of LR is also excellent - similar to Photoshop and in fact 99.9% of my shots are processed in LR without ever needing to go to PS - unless I'm printing but that's another days work.

kelly1

Hiya Zascar, which bit of the process are you finding the most difficult/confusing?

Can you import ok? Do you copy, add or move? Have you decided which method is best for you?

Are you ok with the processing module?

Rainbowsend

Make sure the tutorials you are watching are specific to your version of Lightroom, I find Laura Shoe tutorials are excellent. Lightroom is one of the easier editing softwares to use, I couldn't get on with photoshop at all but love Lightroom. Keep at it the penny will drop and you will wonder why it seemed so hard! Good luck.

OldGoat

Kenny Logins wrote: »

Sign up for the Lynda.com free first week.

I think the hardest part for me was to adapt to using Lightroom to catalogue ALL of my photos, and then select some for editing. Lynda has a course for every aspect of it - importing/selecting/editing and outputting. It's worth the effort IMHO.

Take a week off work first so that you have time to wade through the hours of good tutorials.
I really like the ones presented by Ben Long on all aspects of photography, not just the editing end of it.

AnimalRights

Trial and error for me and just constant use of it til it stuck in my head...I love LR.

Cork Boy

Get your hands on The Lightroom Book by Scott Kelby. I went from photo manipulation dumbass to mediocre in just one evening!

Seriously, I can do this after a few hours with no previous experience whatsoever.


2013.08_Garden_037 by Rory Aherne, on Flickr

ScumLord

Get a book. I still think it's the best way to learn something from scratch. Watching tutorials is awkward because you want to be able to see what he's doing it while you're following his instruction, if you don't have a second screen this becomes awkward. With a book it's in front of you and you can go over the text easily as often as it takes to get it.

Once you get the basics down using the book, video tutorials then make much more sense because you don't need to know every detail of the tutorial just the gist of what techniques his using.


Also, make sure you're following tutorials and guides for the right version of the software.

Balfey1972

I struggled to get my head around it at first. So frustrating. Like above recommend getting Lynda.com or Kelby Training tutorials as I found them very useful. That's if you prefer to watch tutorials as opposed to reading books which is me for sure. Otherwise a book at the guys above will do the trick also.

Like AR I love it now and use it all the time. As P&B said make sure you catalog in a system that works for you from the start.

Once you get use to it, it seems so simple and straight forward. If you have told me that at the very outset I would have said you were mad.

Great piece of software and LR5 is well worth the upgrade IMO.

adox

Wow nice one about Lynda.com. Didnt even know of the site. Been using Lightroom for around 3 months now and sort of understand the basics but will definitely sign up for the free week and maybe subscribe for a while if needs be.


Cheers.

Rew

I found the Adobe youtube ones good to start with. They're short and cover one basic aspect and build up from there. They cover specific versions as well.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7NyBKOKI6vdFDHYzDHlteg