In addition to our practical photography courses, we also provide Adobe Lightroom courses in 2 parts – but as a taster, I wrote a personal blog post today with 5 tips for getting the most of the Lightroom – the problem was choosing just 5, could easily have been 50!

Here’s the post and just 5 tips of many:

Lightroom has come a long way in the last few years. It’s always been great at organising your photo library and making it easy to find things, and that’s continued to improve. But the big changes have been in the ever expanding image editing/processing capabilities of the package. Here are 5 tips for using Lightroom:

1. Organise as you go

When you import images into your Lightroom library, get into the habit of organising into collections and collection sets and adding keywords at the time of import. There are many ways to speed this up including preset keywords that can quickly be added to all images on import – Adobe even provide some out of the box, but it’s really quick to create your own.

2. Edit one, edit many

When I started out with digital photography, I’d edit one image (things like contrast, white balance, exposure, saturation etc.) and then have to repeat the process time and time again for each image. Lightroom speeds this process up – edit one, then copy and paste any number of image edit adjustments to as many other images as you wish. For example, you’ve got 50 images, all of which have the white balance slightly off – correct one, then instantly update the other 49 – job done.

3. Watermarking

If like me, you want to display your images on a website from time to time, but want to ensure that no one “steals” your image, or you want to ensure they know how to find you as a photographer, Lightroom watermarking is ideal. As you export your final image/s, Lightroom can quickly and easily apply a watermark – text or graphical – to your images. Easy.

4. Develop Presets

Pretty much everything you do in Lightroom can be saved in one preset form or another – this means you can really speed things up by processing, exporting, tagging images etc. with a single click of the mouse. Better still, this doesn’t just apply to your own presets – there are thousands available to download (free and to purchase) and Lightroom even comes with some ready to go, e.g. for black and white, making an image look old and so on.

5. Smart Collections

Lightroom has a neat concept called Smart Collections – these are a special type of collection that you don’t add images to manually. You setup your criteria for inclusion in the collection and every time an image matches or no longer matches the criteria, Lightroom automatically updates the contents of the Smart Collection. I use it to keep my portfolio up to date, to keep all images of motorsport together and so on.

There are many other features of Lightroom that I could have written about. If you’re not already using Lightoom and aren’t quite sure if you should, my advice would be download the free trial from Adobe and give it a go – it’s brilliant. And if you happen to live in or near Buckinghamshire, I even run training courses with Photrain!

Blog post reproduced from 5aday.eu