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.

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.

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.

Are you interested in website design? There are a lot of website design services available online, but many times they limit your control. That’s why Adobe Dreamweaver is a great tool, because it gives you freedom to control every element of your website. To use Adobe Dreamweaver, you start by uploading a template of HTML code for a website, which you can create yourself or find for free online. Then, you can customize it as much as you want, changing the code, and seeing a live view of what the website would look like.

Users should have at least a basic understanding of HTML and CSS coding in order to use this software. If you want to try it but need help with HTML and CSS coding, we have resources available at the library, including online e-books, such as Sams Teach Yourself HTML, CSS & JavaScript Web Publishing in One Hour a Day or HTML: A Beginner’s Tutorial. You can access these e-books by logging in with your student account information.

If you don’t have Adobe Dreamweaver on your own computer, but want to give it a try or use it for a project, it is available in the Digital Media Studio! Additionally, if you are an active NOVA student and want to test out your website, you can upload your HTML file to NOVA’s Student Web Folders  and see what it looks like on the web.

Depending on your future career, proficient Dreamweaver skills may look good on a resume and help you cultivate skills for the workforce. If you are new to Dreamweaver, there are lots of free online tutorials to get you started.

Have you created a website using Dreamweaver? We’d love to see it! Send us your creations at anlibtechteam@nvcc.edu.