If only there were some awesome, sweet, cool, fast, crazy crash course on
Lightroom that took under 16 minutes to learn everything you needed to know to
become the Lightroom master of the world! Well lucky for you - your dreams have come
true.
Alright, so let's dive into lightroom together. So first when we open we
have no photos in front of us. Let's hit this import button and scroll to where
our photos are kept. You can select whatever hard drive you want. I've got my
photos on the desktop, and I'm going to unselect this guy here and hit import. So
those photos are going to be imported into what's called my library and now
I'm gonna show you another easier way to get photos in you just find your photos
drag the entire folder into Lightroom and it will automatically open up that
import dialog you can select which photos that you'd like to import and you
can hit import or you can apply presets while you're importing which is very
handy so just go to develop settings select the preset you want and then you
can apply copyright info to your photo under metadata or you can apply keywords
to the photos so that you already have it sorted and done ahead of time very
handy so once that's done I'm going to hit import I can choose to select
previews built by Lightroom and that's gonna help Lightroom edit the photos
faster but for now I'm just gonna hit minimal so I have them imported as
quickly as possible once the photos are imported they're all gonna pop up in
this library grid now there's different views in the library you can select grid
mode fullscreen XY z-- compare look at photos before and after different edits
that sort of thing on the top left you've got your Navigator panel which
allows you to do things like zoom it shows which photo you've got actively
selected and working on and then on your right bar you've got the quick develop
panel this is an awesome panel for developing and editing multiple photos
at the same time so I can apply a preset from here I can adjust my white white
balance apply Auto tone controls exposure settings that sort of a thing
but what's great about this is I can actually select multiple photos and
effect them all at the same time so if I switch to the grid view here I'll show
you what I mean they're all selected using the shift key then I scroll down I
select a preset and that preset will be applied across all of those photos or if
I go to white balance I can set them all so this is very handy especially if
you've got multiple photos with similar settings say it's all from the same
shoot you apply a batch edit to all of them and then you go individually and
adjust things from there so Lightroom is organized into different modules and
those are basically different windows for different things the library window
is all about doing batch edits to everything and organizing your photos so
think of a library things are organized that's what your library is all about so
I can apply keywords to my images that helps with
organizing I can batch edit things I can adjust the metadata of the photos so
that's basically the information about the actual photo itself I can change the
file name I can change the title the caption I can add a copyright status so
that people know this photo is copyrighted by me and that will actually
be exported with the metadata in the photo when you get save and get it out
there so once I've got that inserted I can head over to the catalog section and
show you all the photos and how they're organized catalog shows you all the
photos in your library folders shows you where those photos are being stored on
your computer collections allows you to actually
create virtual folders inside your library and is sort your images so let's
say I wanted to sort these into a folder I'd go create collection I'm going to
title it cars and mountains so now I've got a little folder that has my cars and
mountains photos all set there so the beauty of Lightroom is it lets you do
things in different ways so there's many ways to organize your photos I'm rating
my photos now using the one through five keys or if I want to I can actually
color code them as well so I can apply a star writing or I can apply a color
rating if you're one of those people who just likes to do yes or no you can flag
it as pick or unpick and then you can organize all of these things later and
sort them depending on how you set your images so right now I'm going to just go
through and rate a few of them just to show you how quickly I can organize and
access these images later in Lightroom if I go down here and I select four
stars I'm going to see all of the photos I've rated four stars or higher same as
if I go through and do one star or if I go rating is equal to 1 star it'll show
me just photos that are rated with one star I can then go through and I can
sort them by color I can sort them by flagged or unflagged
or a combination of the two so right now I'm showing images with a color as well
as five star filter there's more I can actually sort my images according to
camera data which is amazing so I can scroll through and I can find photos
that were taken just with the g-h 5 or just with the olympus EEM 10 or just
with a Nikon d4 the beauty is you can actually select your images and very
quickly organize them using the metadata so I can go through I can sort them by
color label star camera lens or by none so once I've got all of my images
organized what do I do then well I get to go over into the develop panel so I
clicked up on the right of library and that'll
actually take me into the image editor inside of Lightroom the fun stuff so I'm
gonna reset the edits on this image and walk you through how all of this works
I've still got my Navigator panel here on the left and then presets underneath
it so you can see how the Navigator panel actually displays the preset
before I click it so I can select presets and quickly browse now below
that I've got snapshots which shows my edit processes collections again is
accessible very easily so I can sort into my car and mountain photo if I want
to or I can go to my history to select various points of edits during my
editing process now this right-hand toolbar is where all the power in the
develop module lies at the very top is my histogram it is going to show me my
shadows my blacks whites highlights exposure these two little boxes at the
left and right actually turn on clipping which lets me know when an image has too
much black in it or too much white in it basically portions of the image that are
all white or all black are losing color information and they're gonna show up as
red or blue and I have these boxes selected very handy when you're editing
now if I scroll down to my next tools I'll find the basic panel this gives me
all my basic image adjustments my white balance which I can do manually or by
setting it to auto or my exposure contrast highlights shadows blacks
whites below that way of the tone curve which lets us adjust the brightness of
various parts of the image and you can actually do this with RGB so it's red
blue green or all the values at the same time now let's look at one of the most
powerful parts of Lightroom the hue saturation luminance panel this allows
me to adjust the hue of any color the saturation of any color and the
brightness of any color within an image simply by selecting it and pulling it up
or down using the little tool on the left of luminance or by grabbing it
manually and adjusting it from there so by going to the hue panel and selecting
the color of this van I can click drag and change it from baby blue to navy
blue in about half a second how awesome is that
next we move into the split toning section of Lightroom which lets you add
a tint to the highlights or the shadows in your image so with this image I can
adjust and set my highlight to you know red green yellow whatever a nice orange
let's say and the saturation is going to control how much of that is in the image
I can do the same thing with the shadows by adjusting the saturation or by
adjusting the hue which is the color of that tint they have the
sharpening sections of our image so we can adjust the amount of sharpening on
our image the radius which is how thick the sharpening is and our mask which is
going to adjust how much of the image actually gets sharpening so our mask at
0 will apply sharpening to everything at a hundred it will only apply sharpening
to the strongest edges of the image so if we can zoom in here just by
double-clicking the image or by clicking the Navigator panel and that will give
us a better idea of what's going on in the sharpening our next tool is the lens
correction panel so this is very handy for adjusting your photo based on the
flaws in your camera or your lens so typical lenses will have a little bit of
vignette in the edges a little bit of distortion so this allows you to set it
based on which lens which camera you took it with and adjust it from there
manually if you need to now transform panel is for a very similar purpose
let's say that you were slightly off-center when you took a picture of
this van well you can adjust that using the horizontal transform tool or if you
are pointing too high too low you weren't directly level with your camera
you can adjust that too by tilting the photo forward or backwards this is a
very handy tool when you're just slightly off and your photo needs a
quick tweak moving into effects we have vignette which we can add or take away
set the midpoint that sort of a thing and then we have grain so we can make
our image look like it was shot on film so you can go crazy with that I would
prefer to go subtle so that you can't really notice it at the very bottom here
we have camera calibration which basically is telling your computer
telling Lightroom how to interpret the color of your photos so you can select
the different camera profiles that you shot your photo on or you can manually
adjust how Adobe is interpreting the Reds the Greens the shadows the blues
and you can tweak things from there so our signature Edit profiles use
different camera calibrations to get different looks in the hopes of making
it look more like a film camera so let's say I apply a couple presets to an image
and I want to decide which one I like better well I can create what's called a
virtual copy and apply my preset to each of them get two different edits and then
I can compare them by going back into my library panel and hitting this X Y
button at the bottom grid and that will actually show me both versions compared
side-by-side I can zoom in by hitting the fit or fill button
see which edit I like better so I like the one on the left better but I don't
like how D saturated is so once I've got it kind of set where I
want it to be I'm going to take those settings and actually paste it on to the
other copy of this image I'm gonna go control-c or command-c depending on pc
or mac and then i'm going to paste it onto the one on the left here lastly we
have our tools at the very top here and these are the specialized tools so image
by image all edit things like my crop go in and use the spot he'll to lure clone
tool and that's going to allow me to very quickly remove blemishes loose
hairs maybe camera dust for my image small
little thing so i'm gonna zoom in here on the models face and if i look very
closely i can see just a few little blemishes that i'm gonna take care of by
selecting them with the spot heal tool and Lightroom is automatically going to
find another area of similar color and use that to clone over those little
blemishes we're gonna skip over the red eye tool here and go into our graduated
filters which lets us apply a filter across an area of an image from highest
intensity all the way down to zero so I can adjust things like my exposure I can
darken parts of the image to draw attention to another area so let's say I
wanted to emphasize this cloud that's in front of her well I can take my clarity
down my exposure up my white balance tweak a little bit and look like it's a
lot thicker or I can press Delete at any time and get rid of it beside that we
have a radial filter which is the same thing only using an ellipse slash circle
with the center being the strongest point the outside being the weakest if I
press quotation it will actually invert that so I can darken or light in the
background or my subject in the photo and lastly we have our adjustment brush
which is pretty much my favorite part of Lightroom I can take her hair paint over
it with an adjustment brush and brighten it in about two seconds to adjust the
adjustment brush you just scroll down here and I can adjust things like the
size the feather which is how hard or soft the brushes the flow which is how
fast the effect comes out the density which is the maximum amount of effect
applied the most beautiful part about adjustment layers is you can have as
many as you want so you just scroll to the top hit new and you've got another
one so let's edit an image together first I'm going to apply my image then
I'm going to select auto white balance scroll down and adjust my exposure to a
level that I think is practical so I'm liking the way that this image is
looking I'm just gonna slightly tweak the highlights bring the shadows up ever
so slightly bring some more saturation into the photo but what's bugging me is
these two people off in the grass here well let's see if we can use the spot
tool to remove them I'm going to paint over and Lightroom
will automatically select an area to replace it with but that wasn't accurate
so I can just click and drag it over and just like that man number one is gone
I'm gonna just do the same thing over here with woman number two paint over
that and Lightroom again is gonna auto select and sometimes it doesn't do the
best job so I'm just gonna select a different area of the image here and
just like that person number two is almost hidden but kind of not good
enough for me I'm gonna try and tweak some different settings here but it
doesn't look good so if it doesn't work for you all you do is hit it hit delete
and start again so I'm going to make my brush a little bigger this time to cover
her completely and there we go right away it pretty much covered her up so
how much better is that I'm actually gonna create a virtual copy here
pressing command apostrophe and just to show you exactly where we came from
here's before and here's after how great is that so there's a couple things I'd
still like to do with this image one is to emphasize the sky a little bit so I'm
going to drag this graduated filter down and I'm not going to make it that
extreme just a little bit darker and then I'm going to add some blue to it in
the white balance and that's just gonna make it pop a little bit more now I'm
gonna take this building and darken it just the slightest bit using a radial
filter I'll take that press the apostrophe key to invert it and darken
it ever so slightly subtle is the best choice of action here so just a tiny bit
bringing the highlights down the exposure ever so slightly and the whites
down to make sure that nothing is clipping and everything is looking good
lastly I'm gonna brighten it up a little bit and then paint with an adjustment
layer on this grass just to bring out some more detail and texture in the
photo so first thing I'm gonna do is paint over all of this grass I'm just
gonna click hold and paint and you can see it's getting a little bit darker and
after that I'm going to take the clarity up at some D haze maybe a little bit of
sharpening and some highlights some White's just put a little more contrast
in that grass and you can see how it's popping already and adding some interest
in detail to the image lastly I'm gonna go up to this white balance add a little
bit of warmth to that grass and maybe not magenta let's add some green back
into it just so it looks a little more grass like now I'm gonna press the O key
and that's gonna show me where I've actually painted my adjustment layer and
you can see that I've actually missed a few spots so I'm just gonna touch those
up and I'm gonna focus a little bit add another adjustment layer onto this
just brighten those clouds up and make them pop out of the image so take my
brush set the exposure a little bit higher highlights a little bit of higher
clarity and I've still got the okie unlabeled so that's gonna paint as red
so I can see it very easily there we go and I'm gonna paint one cloud at a time
just very roughly very quickly for the sake of this video and it's gonna show
you hopefully how quick and fast Lightroom can be when you know what
you're doing so you see there's these little spots in here well that's because
I had Auto mask on I mean to turn it off and now we are painting without
Lightroom trying to figure out what areas I'm actually painting and just
painting on everything that I touch so I'm going to go over these clouds here
very quickly and once that's done I'll just press o and I can see what my mask
is looking like in reality oh wow so it looks like we're not that
subtle I'm gonna take that down and just very slightly get rid of the exposure
add a little bit of highlights mostly I'm concerned about adding some clarity
some texture to these clouds so I'll take the clarity up and just see how
we're doing there so very slightly bring some highlights into it and I can always
press delete and very quickly see what it was before and after by pressing
command Z or control Zed on a PC just cycle back and forth and it's looking
good I'm gonna dial it back just a little bit because we always want it to
be subtle you don't want it to be obvious and we are looking pretty good
the contrast on the whole image back bring the vibrance up ever so slightly
in the saturation down that's generally a good rule of thumb vibrance is the
saturation of the mid-tone saturation is saturation on all the colors in the
image shadows and highlights included which makes it look a little bit less
natural so I've got that where I want it some of my edits are done let's export
some photos I'm gonna go to file export that'll bring up the export dialog I can
either select a preset on the left or I can set my settings manually put them in
a subfolder once the images are finished let's just title this best image ever
renamed I can set it to a custom name or any number of things so let's set in a
custom text here set my compression size I can have the image be smaller than 800
kilobytes or I can have it be full size I can resize to fit the width and height
dimensions long edge long edges this edge down here the longest edge on image
short edge is the short edge on the image so it'll make that edge as long as
you want it to be within height or I normally go with long
edge and set it to 2048 that's the best for Facebook settings right now and we
can add a watermark if we want to we won't right now and once we've got all
that dialed in the way we want to well hit export and Lightroom will show its
progress in the top left corner and once it's done it will open up our photos
automatically in finder or on a PC whatever window you set it to okay great
so there they are looking good so let's say you want to add a watermark you just
go to Lightroom Edit watermark and you can add your watermark either in a JPEG
or just with text all these settings are pretty straightforward you type them in
and you've got your watermark just like that congratulations you're officially a
Lightroom master how does it feel hey thanks so much for watching this video
don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe for more awesome creative
content and a download your free Lightroom presets head to signature at
is calm alright peace