Modern cameras are quite capable of capturing excellent images but if you leave absolutely everything up to the camera then where is the ‘you’ in your photos? Shooting Jpegs is completely fine as long as you understand the limitations, but shooting in raw mode takes the camera’s firmware out of the equation and leaves you an ‘unpolished’ image to be further adjusted you your own taste and style.
Post-processing images is not, in any way, cheating – all images require some sort of digital processing between capture and final image. The camera can do it for you, and that’s certainly convenient and fast, but it’s relatively crude. Lightroom Classic offers you over 70 different adjustment sliders, and that’s only the global ones – there are local adjustments that can be made too. At first glance there is a bewildering number of different ways you could edit your image so where do you start?
In this extensive series of videos, veteran professional photographer Nick Rains will show you two main things. Firstly, how all the adjustments work and secondly, once you understand how to properly assess your images and what all these adjustments actually do, how quickly you can achieve a polished result.
Yes, there is a huge, and frankly daunting, range of tools available, but with a bit of practice it should take you no more than 60 seconds to sweeten an image. There are plenty of shortcuts and presets available to help you make fast progress and unless an image offers some serious editing challenges, you will be amazed at how quickly you can process through your images.
Nick’s approach comes from working in the magazine and documentary industry for many years. Delivering an edited set of, say, 100 images to a publisher means you cannot spend hours on each image. That means that a speedy workflow is needed, but one that does not make compromises on final quality. Adobe Lightroom Classic offers you the tools to work with large quantities of images in an efficient manner – but you need to know how that can be done.
That’s why this course is called Applied Lightroom!
72 Videos running for over 7 hours. Includes updated lessons for Lightroom Classic V12.3 (2023).
