Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Introduction
Greetings digital photographers! My name is David Marx and I am Adobe Certified Expert in Adobe Photoshop and in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I have been teaching Adobe Photoshop Lightroom since the first beta version of this wonderful program was introduced way back in 2006. Over the past couple of years, I have helped hundreds of professional and serious amateur photographers learn Lightroom.
I love Lightroom for two reasons. First, I am convinced that Lightroom is the best program on the market for a photographer, like me, who needs help managing my own image library. Over the past eight years, I have stuffed almost 20,000 images into my computer. As a working professional, I need an indexing program like Lightroom to help me search through this massive collection of images. Without a searchable index, I would probably tear my hair out hunting endlessly through my hard drives whenever I need to find a specific image for my friends, my family, or one of my clients in a timely manner.
Second, I love Lightroom because this program is more than just a fancy image database. Lightroom is a wonderful image organizer, but it is also an incredible tool for image enhancement. Of all the image processing programs, Lightroom is the most elegant. While it does not have all of the features of Adobe Photoshop, it is much easier to learn and use. Plus, Lightroom is a “non-destructive” image enhancer. In plain English, this means that you can never harm your original digital image! With Lightroom, photographers can experiment without any fear because this program will never degrade or damage your files.
Rather than writing a lengthy blog post for you on the fundamental concepts behind Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I have recorded this short tutorial movie. If you enjoy this tutorial, please subscribe to TheLightroomLab’s RSS feed or bookmark this site. We will be posting new material weekly to help you get the most out of Lightroom.
What is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom? from David Marx on Vimeo.
Filed Under: Getting Started • Tutorials
About the Author: David’s sports and landscape images are often used on the web and in outdoor sports publications. He has an extensive knowledge of digital photography and is an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. David is a talented instructor and his entertaining teaching style works for students of all skill levels.
In 2009, David Marx led digital photography programs for the 
Hi David.I’m a Himalayan photographer from India who got into digital photography(after 24yrs in film)last year.My first DSLR : Canon 40D.I have had to learn lots of things including Photoshop.A steep learning curve! But am lovin’ it.I came to your website from Scott Kelby’s blog. After seeing your great video tutorial on Lightroom I know that I will now be a regular visitor to both your websites.Thanks!
Dear Dlllp,
Thanks to you for the kind words. We are just getting the site up and going so please subscribe and check back often. Lots of great content will be coming soon. Thanks too to Scott Kelby for the promo!
David – very helpful overview. As a refugee from Photoshop who only wants to do basic enhancements of my RAW images, I’ve purchased Lightroom. But I’m terrified of the complexity of importing my images and creating my first catalog. I bought two books with Lightroom and I’ve been loooking at Lightroom lab videos for beginners for days. At present I feel as if either I will lose the whole lot if I try to import them, or I will make wrong choices that I can’t subsequently reverse.
Dear John Woodman,
You can’t “lose” your files when you import them into Lightroom. It gives you three choices:
1. Add the files without moving them around your hard drive.
2. Copy the files to a new location on your hard drive or to a new location on another drive. Copy and convert to dng is still copy.
3. Move your files from one place on your hard drive to another location.
None of these choices will delete your files.
If I were you I would read / watch these tutorials and then bring some images in either using the add without moving or the move to a new location option.
–
David
Thanks for the reply, David. I’ve watched/read most of these, and I’m still terrified, but I recognise that I’m going to have to take a jump and bring some images in to Lightroom. Frankly I’m amazed that Adobe lets you loose on the program without telling you that you need to do some serious studying first.
Dear John Woodman,
Two quick thoughts: First, again I don’t think that there is anything for you to fear here. Lightroom is not a place. It’s a database. “Importing images” means creating placeholder reference files for your images within the database. It is not like you are moving your images into some secret lock-box and once they are “in Lightroom” you can never get to them again.
Second, almost all of the professional level software from Adobe is released with little to no internal tutorials. I believe that Adobe does this out of respect for their clients. Lightroom, like Photoshop, is consider a professional grade application and so it is the users responsibility to educate themselves. If you’re looking for software with more internal helper wizards I would try Adobe Photoshop Elements
. I truly believe that Elements is an excellent choice for a lot of photographers. I bought this rather than Lightroom or Photoshop CS4 for my dad.
best of luck,
David
David – I really appreciate your comments. Two points from me, then I’ll shut up. I do understand the database concept – I’ve worked with SQL systems for years. It’s the way that Adobe make it so hard to check out the options that I object to – I felt exactly the same with Elements. Second, Adobe in no way suggest that Lightroom is a professional-grade application – they promote it for the amateur. Thanks again and best regards.