What is Lightroom?
Ephrem RichmondShare
What you will learn:
- The most important aspect of photography.
- Why it is important to understand this aspect to know what Lightroom is.
Before we discuss one of the top tools for photo editing, there is something you need to understand: every photo that we take is made possible because of one thing.
People believe Lightroom is where you go to change your photographs, to make them better, to save what you almost lost. While this is true in a few ways, I want you to consider this: what is the foundation of your photograph?
If you have ever observed other people getting into photography, you’ve likely heard the phrase “Check out my edit”. This usually comes from someone who has opened an editing software and made a few dramatic changes to their photo. There is nothing wrong with this, but I want to bring it up because so often new photographers get caught up in the editing process. Lightroom is an entirely different realm of focus that can affect your photos.
You, as a photographer, will start capturing beautiful and important photographs when you focus on the time you actually have with your camera - I’ll dive into that in a second. If you take mediocre photos and try to make them better by editing them in Lightroom, then don’t expect your work to look any different from your “Check out my edit” friend - oversaturated, too dark, and unnatural.
What so many people do is they take a photo with the purpose of putting it onto a device so they can edit it. It is my personal opinion that if you do that, you’ll slowly develop negative habits when it comes to capturing your photos and editing them. All of that aside, though, your camera and Lightroom can and should work perfectly together, but Lightroom requires one thing from you.
Really quickly, it is important for you to know that there are people who will completely transform their photo into something beautiful. That is okay. Photography is an art, and you can go this or that direction when it comes to editing your photos. However, it is very difficult to transform your photos into something beautiful, unless you have lots of experience editing and taking photos. Drastically changing your photo is okay, but it is really hard. If you are a new photographer, I would highly recommend spending more time with your camera and less time on your computer.
When you do that, you won’t only become a more skilled photographer, but you’ll even start to understand how to edit your photo. This is because when you are on the field, you spend time observing, experiencing, testing, directing, and adjusting the most important aspect of photography: light.
Light is the only thing that Lightroom requires from you, hence the name.
To help you grasp what I am saying, here is a quick definition of the software: Lightroom is a popular tool that is used to manipulate the hue, saturation, and luminance of your photo; it does not move the pixels (the dots that make up your image) around; it relabels what already exists. That is all it does. Now you could go into detail and say “Lightroom lets you adjust that here on the masking tab, or here on the basics tab…”, but that just overcomplicates things. So, one more time, the only thing Lightroom does is manipulate the hue, saturation, and luminance of your pixels.
Now that you understand what Lightroom is, what does that mean for you as a photographer, who should be spending more time taking photos instead of editing them? It means one thing: consider how the light will look as pixels. Considering this, in combination with a simple understanding of what makes photos look interesting, you will start to grow and realize the potential your camera and Lightroom hold. If you fail to create the necessary foundation that comes with the knowledge of light, I can guarantee that you will struggle to grow as, not only as a photographer but also as an artist.
If you’ve made it this far, I want to both thank you for checking out my blog and encourage you on this quest of learning. You can learn more about creating interesting images on my website, where there are blogs that discuss topics just like this in detail.
A shameless plug, if you are interested in picking up some Lightroom preset packs to help you edit your photos, then don’t! Unless you have guidance in using them. There are multiple preset packs available on my website that you can purchase, but more importantly, I provide videos on how to use your preset packs. If you end up buying any, please do not neglect the guides because they help steer you away from breaking your images.
Now get on out there and start taking photos!
