NEW CLASS SERIES: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

by Keith Battle, Training Resources Producer

I'm no professional photographer. Heck, I'll be honest. I'm really bad at still photography. But whenever we start getting these long, sunny days I find myself breaking out my digital camera and taking little impromptu hikes so I can try to capture some of the amazing sights that the Bay Area has to offer. Unfortunately, what I wind up with is a disconnected virtual pile of photos. So when pro photographer and BAVC instructor Liz Hickok started telling me a few months ago about Lightroom and how it could help me get organized and more efficient, I was all ears cuz I figure I may never be aesthetically adept at photo-snapping, but I can at least be uber-sorted-out. So, Liz and I got to talking and, next thing you know, she had come up with a series of three 1-day classes in Lightroom: Intro, Digital Darkroom, and Sharing. We're rolling out the Intro class this month. If you already know about Lightroom and want to learn more, check out the available classes in the Digital Photography section of the Take Classes area of the web site. For those who don't know what the heck this Lightroom thing is, I did a little Q&A with Liz. Enjoy!

KB: The full name of the application that you’ll be teaching is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. So, it’s Photoshop - but it’s not. What is Lightroom?

LH: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the official name, but everyone just calls it Lightroom. It is part of the Adobe creative suite and it is specifically tailored for digital photographers to organize, edit, and process their images all in one streamlined application.

KB: I’ve heard photographers like yourself say stuff like, “I still use Photoshop, but 80% of my work is done in Lightroom.” So, what does Lightroom do that Photoshop can’t? Does Lightroom address the specific needs of digital photographers in a way that is better, faster, stronger?

LH: Lightroom is a pretty new software, and it is already revolutionizing the way photographers work. It sounds dramatic, but it is true. Lightroom is now where you do a lot of the things you used to do with Photoshop: crop, resize, color correct, and retouch. But they designed the interface in a way that is really intuitive. Plus you can do all of these things to entire groups of images all at once. Then add in the cataloging and output capabilities, and you’ll know why you only need to spend 20% of your time in Photoshop.

So why even use Photoshop? Well, most people do the overall processing to the bulk of their images in Lightroom, and then for one or two images, they effortlessly bring them into Photoshop (since the applications work together) to do more intensive retouching, add text, or to make collages or panoramas with multiple photographs.

This is why a lot of people who only need to do simple things to fix up their images, will now only ever need Lightroom. Which is great, because it is really easy to use, and way faster to learn than…well…Photoshop. Don’t get me wrong…. I love Photoshop, and use it all the time. I just keep finding more and more things that I now do in Lightroom instead.

KB: Lightroom seems like it’s a good way to streamline your work and find specific photos, or groups of photos, and then share them in very easy ways. So, it’s both a creative and an efficiency tool. I like the fact that the efficiency theme is carried into how you’ve designed the classes. Each of the three Lightroom classes that you’re teaching this Fall are just one day in length. What are the three classes and what do they cover?

LH: It’s true. It is great how intuitive the entire digital photography workflow is in Lightroom, so in the three classes I simply follow that path of what we naturally need to do with our images.

In the first class we cover how to import your images into a Lightroom catalog so you can efficiently organize and review your photographs. These days it is so easy to capture thousands of digital photos in no time, so Lightroom helps you to manage them, even with files that are stored somewhere other than your desktop computer.

I think that the second class is the real meat and potatoes of Lightroom. We use the “Develop” module to make adjustments to your images, like exposure, saturation, sharpening, and more. There are endless options to how you can make your photographs look incredible, but they are all laid out in a very simple and logical way. Plus, you can apply these effects to many images all at once, and save them as presets to use again later.

Now that you have organized your files, and made them look incredible, in the third class we cover how to share them the world. That’s the focus of the third class.

KB: If I’m familiar with an older version of Lightroom, can I just jump into one of the next steps classes or are there enough new features in Lightroom 3 that I should really take the Intro class first?

LH: Lightroom 3 is a great improvement and has several new features, especially since the first version. But whether you want to take the first class is more about how comfortable you feel with the “Library” or cataloging part of the software. If your photos are all imported into a Lightroom catalog, organized, and sorted, and you are ready to move onto processing your images, then you should jump right into the second “Develop” (Digital Darkroom) class.

KB: With all the social media sites that I use, I think I have the sharing thing covered. Why would I need a whole class on sharing my pictures?

LH: The third class does cover sharing photographs online, which LR does in a streamlined and sophisticated way…. But it also covers a lot more ways of outputting your images. Including the ins and outs of printing your images and designing your own custom presets for color calibration, black and white printing, templates, and even book layouts. Lightroom also has amazing capabilities for quickly creating slideshows and even websites using the images in your Lightroom library.

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