Adobe Lightroom Classic in the Digital Media Studio!

Photography is a fun and popular art form, and a useful life skill. If you love taking photos and want to up your skill to the professional level, learning how to edit is extremely important! Adobe Lightroom Classic is a software used by professionals to touch up a photo, and it is available at the Annandale Campus Library for student use in the Digital Media Studio! Some of its features are similar to Photoshop, however Photoshop can be used for manipulating an image, whereas Lightroom is used mostly to enhance images. You can use presets which instantly edit the photo with certain adjustments, or you can manually adjust the photo to fix the exposure, contrast, white balance, and more.

When trying to capture the pretty sky, the mountains were underexposed! This image seemed like it just needed to be deleted….

If you are editing photos taken on a DSLR camera, many photographers recommend changing your camera settings. Most cameras are set to shoot JPEG, which is a compressed image file format. Professionals typically prefer to shoot in RAW, a camera setting which does not process the photo at all but gives total control of editing to the user. RAW files are much larger than JPEG files, which users must be wary of when taking a bunch of photos or storing them on their computer, but it is definitely worth it. The big difference with shooting in RAW is that it makes it easier to salvage underexposed (too dark) images.

Instead, the image was saved by being edited in Lightroom!

First, open up Lightroom, and import the images you want to edit. Then, have fun using the tools and make adjustments until you are satisfied with the image. While it does not have the capabilities to manipulate images like Photoshop, portraits can still be edited with features like smoothing skin, whitening teeth, removing spots, changing colors, and more! Once a RAW image is edited the way you want it to look, you can then save it as a JPEG, and it will be ready to print, post, or publish!

If you want to try out Lightroom, book a room in the Digital Media Studio! Feel free to check out these tutorials to learn more about how to use Lightroom, and if you want to use these for your own at home, you can also get the entire Adobe Creative Suite at a discounted price if you’re a student.