The photos that are already on your computer don’t automatically show up in Lightroom. This appears on the left-hand side of your screen. The most obvious thing that Lightroom does is help you sort and organize your photos.Įach time you import images into Lightroom, you’re also seeing where they’re located on your computer (i.e., the file structure). Let’s dive into each of these three main functions: It lets you sort your photos, edit them, and export them at whatever size you need. Lightroom is a post-processing and photo organization software. Lightroom can be overwhelming at first, and the purpose of this guide is to simplify everything as much as possible. So, it’s a long article.įeel free to bookmark this page for later reference if you find some of these tips to be useful. Hopefully, even if you start without any knowledge at all, you’ll end up with a medium- to high-level understanding of Lightroom’s most important concepts. My goal was to write a tutorial that lays out everything a beginner needs to know about Lightroom, whether you have an older version (anything before Lightroom 6, such as Lightroom 4 or Lightroom 5) or the newest version (Lightroom 6 or Lightroom CC).

How to export your photos from Lightroom.

How to post-process your photos in Lightroom.

How to organize your photos in Lightroom.

Explaining the layout of Lightroom’s Library and Develop modules.

If you’ve never used this shortcut before, it’s very useful, since it lets you search a webpage by the keyword you want.Īlso, you can skip to the various parts of this article by clicking on the options here: If there’s a specific term that you’re trying to find in this article, you might want to press Control F (or, for Mac, Command F) on your keyboard.

This comprehensive article lays out all the basics, and it is divided into several different sections to make things easier to read. In this comprehensive guide, we will go over the process of using Lightroom for beginners, from start to finish, including tips on the topics that tend to confuse people the most. Clearly, it is an important topic to learn, whether you are just starting out or you are an advanced photographer. On Photography Life alone, we already have more than 100 articles about Lightroom - the equivalent of several books - and other websites have countless more. At the simplest level, though, Lightroom was created to help you do just three main things: sort your photos, post-process them, and export them. Adobe Lightroom is a behemoth of photography software with enough functions and processes to make any photographer crazy.

Lightroom 5.7.1