How To Use Adobe Lightroom Like A Pro

What is Adobe Lightroom?

Move over VSCO, there’s a new photo editor in town! Adobe Lightroom has officially taken the lead as the most powerful photo editing software there is. You’ve probably heard people talking about Adobe Lightroom non-stop, especially if you’re in the world of photography, advertising or digital marketing. Adobe Lightroom allows you to fluidly and consistently edit, build, and alter visually moving photographs.

Adobe Lightroom allows you to create your own photo editing presets or choose from the unbelievable preset lists of Influencers, YouTubers or celebrities who have created their own for anyone to purchase. If you’d like to know what our Top 5 Favourite Influencer Lightroom presets are you can read our article here! This can save you time and money by altering any images, with only the click of a button. You can even use Adobe Lightroom on your phone, which is perfect for on-the-go when you need to edit your photos quickly and easily.

Let’s dig deeper and break down the ways on how you can use Adobe Lightroom like a pro!

Adobe Lightroom Basics

Let’s break it down for you: these are the basic things you need to know about photo editing. These will help you take your images from being mediocre, to beautifully captivating all while using a few different sliders and making simple adjustments. These form the foundation of learning how to use Adobe Lightroom like a pro. It’s important to note that any adjustment you make in Adobe Lightroom is not permanent, which means that if you don’t like changes made, you can easily revert back to the original, without any loss in quality.

Light

The Light section allows you to adjust all the light in the image, whether it’s the main light source or light featured in the photo. Through this, you can adjust Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites & Blacks. This means that you can make adjustments to your photo easily if you’ve under exposed, or over exposed, especially if you’re working with RAW images.You can also scale back highlights and blown out whites in your images where details may have been lost.

Colour

Have you taken a beautiful photograph, but don’t like that overly green tone that you captured in the forest? With the  Colour Mixer  and the Target Adjustment tool, your photos will be transformed from drab to dynamic! Adjusting select tones, colours, and visibly changing the Hue, Saturation and Luminance of those colours allows you to change the image colouring to exactly what should be depicted, or exactly how you would like the photo to be styled. This allows you to selectively control colours even when you’re using presets because not all colours look the same in every image.

Effects

This toggle allows you to bring Clarity and Texture back into images where you may find them a little flat. There are also options to Dehaze your image as well if for some reason you have captured a lot of static hazy light in an image. These “effects” are good for being able to control environmental issues, as well as helping your image pop!

Detail

BEFORE

AFTER

Editing Styles

There are many different editing styles, and it all comes down to personal preference depending on your theme or aesthetic. Whether you’re trying to keep up an Instagram feed theme or just want all of your new campaign photos to look cohesive, that’s where Presets come in handy! Different colour tones, warm or cool, and having a specific editing style takes your imagery to the next level & your followers or clients will notice!

Presets

presets are pre-determined photo styles, that are like photo filters (think Instagram filters), except you have more control over them and can change almost anything in your photo, right down to the hue, saturation or colour tones within your image. This is the most prominent feature of Adobe Lightroom, and what the majority of users purchase it for.

Presets can take your editing skills to the next level and make you look like you know how to use Adobe Lightroom like a pro. Presets dramatically speed up your workflow and definitively speed up batch editing time. Presets allow you to quickly and easily get your images to look the way you want, or at least close to it, without having to spend all your time playing with the more advanced and detail-oriented sliders.

Single Edits or Batch Edits

Single Edits are when you’re editing one sole image that is not a part of a series or batch of images. For this, you may decide against using a Preset and may go into the settings menu to use the sliders one by one, making the adjustments accordingly. Although more time consuming, this allows you to create your perfect image. You can even take the image edits and turn that into your very own Preset.

On the other hand, Batch Edits are usually done when you use a singular photos’ editing that you like, whose settings (Profile, Light, Colours, Effects, Details, Optics) are copied and pasted to be applied on multiple photos.

How To

Here are a few select images as examples for the type of themes and looks you can create with Adobe Lightroom & Presets, the ones we used are by Jackson Groves! Presets, again, are one of Adobe Lightroom’s most powerful tools, and it is the main reasons why Adobe Lightroom is used by so many photographers, both professional and amateur.

Landscape

BEFORE

AFTER

Fashion

BEFORE

AFTER

Food

BEFORE

AFTER

So what’s the verdict?

We think this program is life-changing for the price point and totally worth it! The features that come with the program plans through Adobe are immense and include 1TB of Cloud storage and the ability to use the Adobe Lightroom iOS app, which will include any Presets that are available on your desktop version.

With the program’s diverse editing capabilities, you can take ordinary images and make them extraordinary. You can use this photo editing software to give the illusion that you’re a professional when creating imagery for your next Instagram post or Influencer Campaign, which will help you take the content to the next level. Now that’s how to use Adobe Lightroom like a pro!

Are you a brand currently looking for custom photography? Looking to elevate your social media content? We would love to help! Contact us today to see how to we take your photography to the next level!

Did you find this article helpful? Let us know in the comments below! We always appreciate your feedback.