A 5-Step Strategy for Lightroom

 As I was thinking about a new post, wouldn't you know it, one of the YouTube channels I follow popped up with a 5-Step Strategy for doing Lightroom editing. Interestingly this is on the Drone Film Guide channel (yes, I'm secretly lusting after a drone...).

It's about 26 minutes long but pretty good. The five strategies are:

• Crop, resize, rotate
• Colour Correction (he's from the UK, hence the "u")
• Colour Grading
• Style Adjustments
• Clean Up

10 Lightroom Tips

On my continuing journey of learning more about Lightroom, here's a great video from Peter McKinnon. I've been following Peter for years on YouTube, and he has some really good stuff in a number of different areas. Some not-so-good stuff, too, but that is OK, depends on what you are looking for!

I've organized these with links to the specific sections of the video, or you can watch it all from the beginning if you want.

• Tip 1: Autotone (Auto adjusting your photographs)
• Tip 2: Resetting (When you want to just reset one adjustment)
• Tip 3: Grid Overlays (Rule of Thirds and other overlays)
• Tip 4: Lights Out (Darkening all of the panels so you can focus just on the photo)
• Tip 5: Level Out (Straightening the horizon on your photo)
• Tip 6: Before &After (When you want to look at your photo before and after your edits)
• Tip 7: Clipping (Great tip for editing exposure)
• Tip 8: Radial Brush Adjustment (Radial graduated filter)
• Tip 9: Size Up (Adjusting your panels to give you the ability to make more granular adjustments)
• Tip 10: Organize Yo Self (Organizing your library)

Lightroom Classic vs. Lightroom (what a tangled web Adobe weaves...)

I'm teaching myself how to use lightroom (YouTube is a wonderful thing), and I've decided the best way for me to learn it (and remember!) is to keep a type of journal, a blog, of what I'm learning, so here I go. I'm figuring by writing it down, that will help me remember it more because I suffer from CRS (Can't Remember...Stuff).

 First and foremost is the difference between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom, and this is something that I think Adobe has really screwed up, and they realize they have screwed it up with the iterations on the names since they first announced the "light" version in 2017. 

Basically...

      Lightroom Classic (LrC) = Desktop 

  Lightroom (Lr) = Mobile

Why don't they call it Lightroom Mobile since it is designed for iPads and phones? Watch, next year this time, that will be the case.

This undoubtedly was the most confusing part of when I started using Lightroom a few years ago, and then when they went through the iterations on the name, it didn't help any.

And what's interesting, is that it seemed like they were initially trying to pitch them as two products to work together, but now they are very clearly saying this is not the case...pick one and stick with it, don't try and use them synonymously. Interesting...

I'm a Lightroom Classic guy. I do have both, but definitely use LrC 99.99% of the time. I have my photos on my laptop, not in the cloud, I like the robustness of the editing tools in Classic, it just works for me. Editing photos on a mobile device? Nope...

Here's an Adobe Masterclass on the topic.