Lightroom was made in 2006 it came out. It revolutionized my work flow, because it brought everything I really needed into one software. It's probably the most intuitive piece of software I've ever seen, because they didn't really create an instruction manual for this software at the beginning. I think they did a few years later, but you can go around and play with stuff and pretty much figure out a lot of what you need to know. Um, this is what you probably see when you first open up Lightroom. I'll hit shift F to show what it looks like to most people. Is, you know, you've got your top panel. You've got your left panel over there. You've got your film strip down here. You've got this right panel. Then you have this little thing call a tool bar right here. This little gray thing just above the film strip. Then you also have your filters up here. So it's got a lot of stuff to look at. Um, this part over here on the left is pretty much how you organize your images and I'm not going to g...

o into like every little detail of Lightroom, because CreativeLive has probably 20 or 30 classes that go really deep on Lightroom, so um, we're going to actually work up images in Lightroom and go through some of it, but I'm not going to be able to have the time to go into every detail. Um, that's in the ebook if you want it or CreativeLive classes. Um, the filmstrip is a nice way to show your image. If you double click on an image, it shows up here. You can click these panes on and off to see your image bigger. Which is really nice. You can go shift F is a toggle switch that basically sucks up the whole screen so you can go full screen and you can hit shift F again and it comes out of it. So, I often go to full screen just so nothing else is contaminating this, and if you have two monitors, you can actually have your grid of images on one monitor and your big image on the other one, or your develop module over here. So you can go through your images really quickly. Here um, it's also pretty amazing, I mean the two, excuse me, two parts of the monitor, or Lightroom, that I use these days are mostly Lightroom or the library and the develop module. Um, it's pretty, I almost, I don't use the map feature at all, because I don't have a GPS device on my camera unless I'm using my iPhone. Um, the book I haven't used in a long time. Slideshow I do use every once in awhile. Um, print, I do print from Lightroom fairly often, but not for my really big, finer prints, I go into Photoshop. And I used to use the web all the time with my old website years ago, but I haven't used it in a long time. So, just depending on what you need, this is your workflow up here in terms of the software you know, the library, develop, and then whatever you need to do in terms of output. It even has over here, a way to, I think, in the library. Let me sit down here. If you scroll down, there's this publish services, and you can actually even upload images up to Facebook or you know, whatever you got going on. Flickr, and you can actually control what you have up on those sites from within Lightroom. So that's kind of an interesting feature some people may not know about. Um, on the right here, so, as I said over here, these are all of your folders and your organization from whatever hard drives you have attached. Over here are keywording. There's a quick develop section where you can do really quick changes in brightness or clarity, or vibrance, which is a form of saturation to your image. Um I typically don't do that here. You have a histogram up top. And then your keywords here, suggested keywords, and then this is all the metadata. And probably, when you see this, it's at default and it's showing only a very small subset of metadata. I usually change that to EXF plus IPTC to expand it um so, you know, there's all kinds of stuff. We'll go through some of this stuff as I work up images I'll show you some more, but develop is where the heart of this class is going to be. In the develop module. Um, and there's the same. There's right and left panel. The top panel is still your overview. Just click that off. You still have the filmstrip. You still have this tool bar, which gets a little crunched when I open up that panel. So in the left side, we have presets, which we can actually make on our own or download from other photographers that will change the color a certain way, however the preset was made. Um, sometimes I use those. Sometimes I don't. Snapshots is basically we can take a snapshot at any point in our develop process if we think that wow, that's a really cool place. That might be where I want it to be. I take a snapshot of that, and I'll save all the settings for that place in your history states. Then your history states are just below that, and then collections, which are your collection of images, that art, they're from different folders that you put together here. Um, so a few basic things over here. This is where all of the magic happens though. On this, oops, hello. This right panel over here, and the one thing I will note right off the back is it may look scrunched up like this when you first get the software, and it will look, you'll drag out the sliders and make them much easier to fine tune if you just drag that panel all the way out as far as it will go. But, this is where we control all of the color toning and everything in the image is going to be in this right-hand panel. Um, and then we still have our filmstrip down here at the bottom that we can use to go between different images. So, little introduction there. Quick, dirty, but gives you, if you've never seen Lightroom before, at least an idea of where some stuff is at. If you're watching this show, the odds are probably pretty high you've seen Lightroom before, because it's the number one product out there.

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Michael Clark

Michael Clark is an internationally published outdoor photographer specializing in adventure sports, travel, and landscape photography. He produces intense, raw images of athletes pushing their sports to the limit and has risked life and limb on a variety of assignments to bring back stunning images of rock climbers, mountaineers, kayakers, big-wave surfers and mountain bikers in remote locations around the world.

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topics covered in this class

Business Adobe Lightroom Adobe Photoshop Photo Editing

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student

Michael is a true professional and readily explains all of the nitty gritty issues of a photographer's digital workflow, including important things like Color Management, Lightroom workflows, Printing, and more. He is eager to answer your questions and has a thorough knowledge (after all, he worked with the original engineers at Adobe and wrote a book on it) and passion that he loves to share. He can get way deep into the subject, which I found fascinating. You can tell Michael has great experience in teaching and also likes to learn from his students. He is very authentic, honest, and direct. I highly recommend this class, and look forward to another one of Michael's courses in the future!

a Creativelive Student

This is an excellent course. It reinforced what I already knew and enhanced my spotty skills with new knowledge. I really like Michael's explanation of saving the document for print and web and the importance of doing these differently. Using the histogram to show this was terrific. Each session there is some valuable gem.

Elizabeth Bishop

This class is fantastic and is just what I was looking for! The teacher knows the subject WELL and he makes it understandable and easy to follow along. In each segment, he gets right to the point explaining just enough content to make it understandable. He doesn't waste your time. I highly recommend this class. It's the best tech class I have watched on Creative Live.

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Introduction to Lightroom®

Introduction to Lightroom®

Lesson Info

10. Introduction to Lightroom®

Lessons

Class Introduction

Shooting Workflow: Set-up The Camera

Shooting Workflow: Histograms and Exposure

Shooting Workflow: Sensor Cleaning

Overview of Color Management

Color Management: Monitor

Color Management: Workspace

Color Management: Monitor Calibration

Color Management: Do I Need This?