Do you want to learn the essentials of Adobe Lightroom to organize, enhance and share your photos across all your devices?
Well, you've come to the right place.
Hi, I'm Seán Duggan from the Adobe Learn team.
In this series of tutorials, I'll show you everything you need to know to get started working with your photos in Lightroom.
Now, the first thing to know about Lightroom is that it's not a single program, but an ecosystem that includes Lightroom on the desktop, Lightroom on mobile, and Lightroom on the web.
Photos that you add on one surface are automatically synced across the Adobe Cloud, and any changes you make are reflected on all the cloud-based Lightroom platforms.
That's one of the things that makes Lightroom so powerful and convenient.
You can work on your photos on the go and wherever you happen to be.
Let's get started by adding some photos and taking a quick look at the Lightroom workspace, so you can become familiar with the program.
When you open Lightroom, you'll see your photos arranged in the workspace.
If you haven't added any photos yet, this area will be empty.
If you don't see the Photos panel on the left side, click this icon in the upper left to reveal it.
You can also hide or expand this panel by tapping P on the keyboard.
At the top of the Photos panel, I'll click Add Photos.
If you have a camera or a memory card connected to your computer, this will display a drop-down menu with the option to Browse... if you want to add photos from your computer or you can click on the connected device.
I'll select the SD Card from my camera.
The review for import window opens, and here you can see the photos on the memory card.
If you want to add all the photos, choose Select All in the upper right and a blue checkmark will appear on all the images.
If there are any that you don't want to add, you can just uncheck them.
Above the thumbnails, you can choose to add the photos to an album as you import them.
I'll leave this set to None for now.
I'll click the Add Photos button in the upper right, and Lightroom will upload these images to the Adobe Cloud and sync them across the Lightroom ecosystem.
The time for the syncing process will vary depending on how many images you're adding, as well as the speed of your internet connection, but you can start working with them right away in Lightroom on the desktop.
Since I've just added some new images, the All Photos section in the Photos panel has expanded and you can see that it's showing recently added images, including the ones I just added.
There are also additional categories such as Recent Edits, By Date and People.
If I open the By Date section, you can see that the photos are organized by year, month, and even the day the photo was taken.
You can also organize photos by creating your own albums.
We'll cover working with albums later in this series.
If you double-click on the image thumbnail, you can see a larger display of the photo.
To return to the photo grid view, click on the Grid icons below the image or just tap G on the keyboard.
On the right side of the interface, there are several tools for processing and enhancing your photos.
If you're not sure where to begin, you can always try one of the many presets in Lightroom for a quick transformation.
If you want more options, click the Edit icon for complete control in adjusting the look of the image.
And here's a useful tip.
For many photos, the Auto button at the top of the Edit panel is a great place to start.
Once you've applied an auto correction, you can always refine it with additional editing.
Other editing tools include the ability to crop and rotate your photo, retouch and remove objects, and take advantage of masking for selective edits that affect a specific part of the image.
We'll cover the editing tools in more detail later in this series.
There's no need to save your changes, because Lightroom does that for you automatically.
And the edits that you make are not permanent, which means that you can always modify your adjustments or remove them without affecting the original image.
All your edits are automatically synced across the Lightroom ecosystem, so any changes you make to a photo in Lightroom on desktop will be displayed when you view the same image in Lightroom on mobile, on your phone or tablet, or when you access Lightroom on the web, in a browser.
Now that you've seen how to add photos and you know your way around the Lightroom workspace, you're ready to get started with your own images.
I'm Seán Duggan, and I'll see you in the next video.
