Adobe Lightroom Classic (often simply referred to as Lightroom) is a program that focuses on working with photographs. In Lightroom, users can create and manage photo libraries, which is especially useful when working with a large collection of images. Photos can also be edited in Lightroom, and exported to JPEG format for printing or use on the web.
In the first section of the training, we’ll start off by installing Lightroom Classic if necessary, then we’ll explore the Lightroom interface and get familiar with it before we start working with a library.
NOTE: The screenshots for these materials were taken on MacOS — however, Lightroom Classic looks and functions the same on both Windows and MacOS.
Installing Lightroom Classic
Lightroom Classic is installed through the Creative Cloud Desktop application. In order to follow along with today’s session, you’ll need to install Lightroom Classic on your computer if it’s not already installed. Expand the following accordion for instructions on how to install Lightroom Classic.
Open the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop application.
To view the list of all applications, in the navigation on the left side of the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop window,
Click All apps
To view the applications you have access to but haven’t installed yet, in the main area of the Creative Cloud Desktop window,
scroll down until you see the “Available in your plan” heading
A list of applications in tile format is now visible, and you should see a tile for Lightroom Classic somewhere in this list similar to the image below:
NOTE: If Lightroom Classic doesn’t appear in the “Available in your plan” list, check the list of applications under the “Installed” heading to see if Lightroom Classic is already installed on your computer.
To install Lightroom Classic, on the Lightroom Classic tile,
Click
The tile will display the installation progress, and when Lightroom is finished installing, the tile will disappear and Lightroom Classic will show in the list of installed applications.
Exploring the Lightroom interface
Now we’re ready to open Lightroom and explore the application interface. Let’s start by opening Lightroom.
Open Lightroom Classic.
To dismiss the “thank you for installing Lightroom” message, if necessary, in the dialog box that appears,
Click OK
To dismiss the Welcome to Lightroom Classic message, if necessary, in the bottom of the dialog box,
Click
To dismiss any tips that may appear, in the upper right corner of the tip window,
Click
NOTE: You can also make the tips disappear by clicking outside of the Lightroom window.
The Lightroom Classic interface appears, as shown in the following screenshot:
Lightroom makes use of modules to organize its interface — these modules are displayed in the upper right corner of the application window.If you’ve used other Adobe applications, these modules work similarly to workspaces in applications like Photoshop and Illustrator. Each module is made up of a collection of different panels, which give us tools for working with various parts of a photo library and the individual photos contained inside it.
There are seven different modules, each of which focuses on a different set of photo organization and editing tasks:
Library: organizing and editing photos
Develop: editing photos
Map: organizes photos by location, based on the metadata included in a photo
Book: create photo books without leaving the application
Slideshow: create photo slideshows
Print: print edited photos on your printer, or prepare photos to be sent to a professional printing service
Web: create photo galleries for use in a web site
For today’s session, we’ll be focusing on working with the Library and Develop modules.
Creating a catalog
Before importing photos into Lightroom, you’ll need to create a catalog to hold the photos in. A catalog in Lightroom is simply a collection of photos — you can have a single catalog that contains your entire photo library, or multiple catalogs that focus on specific projects.
Let’s go ahead and create a new catalog. We’ll name this catalog Practice Catalog, and save it in the same folder as the exercise files.
To start creating a new catalog, in the Menu bar,
Click File, Click New Catalog…
To indicate where the new catalog should be created, in the Create Folder with New Catalog dialog box,
navigate to the LightroomBasics folder on your computer
To give the catalog a name, in the Save As field, type:
Practice Catalog
To finish creating the catalog, at the bottom right corner of the dialog box,
Click Create
NOTE for MacOS users: At this point, Lightroom will close and reopen, then load the newly created catalog.
NOTE: The Back Up Catalog dialog box may appear at this point if you’ve previously used Lightroom and currently have a catalog open. To skip backing up the catalog, if necessary, Click the Skip this time button to continue.
At this point, we now have a catalog to work with. Let’s go ahead and import some photos into the catalog.
Importing photos into a catalog
Now that we’ve created a catalog, we can add photos to it. Photos can be imported from a folder on our hard drive or directly from a camera. For today’s tutorial, we’ll focus on importing photos from our computer. Specifically, we have a number of JPG photos to import, as well as two RAW photos in the DNG (Digital Negative/Lossless) file format. We’ll talk a little more about file formats in the section Editing photos using the Develop module.
How photos are imported into a catalog
Before you start importing your photos, it’s good to be aware of how Lightroom imports photos — and how that might affect how you organize photos on your hard drive.
When importing photos into Lightroom, you have a couple of options for what happens to your photos as they’re added to your library:
Copy as DNG, which will convert files to the Digital Negative (DNG) file format as they’re copied to a new location on your computer and add the photos to a catalog
Copy, which will copy the files to a new location as they’re added to a catalog without converting them
Move, which moves the images from their original location to a location you specify as they’re added to a catalog
Add, which simply adds the images to a catalog without moving them
If your photos aren’t very well organized, or if you want to keep all photos in a catalog in the same location, you may want to choose one of the first three options, as Lightroom can create new folders for you and organize images by date if desired. If you’ve already organized your photos on your computer, choosing the Add option will leave the photo files wherever they’re located on your hard drive and simply create a pointer to those images in your catalog. For our purposes today, we’ll use the Add option to add the images without moving them from their original location.
Once images are imported into your catalog, the Library module will show the folders where imported photos are located.
Let’s import some images into our catalog now. We’ll import the photos located inside the LightroomBasics folder.
To start importing the photos into the catalog, in the bottom of the panel dock on the left side of the screen,
Click Import…
The Import dialog box appears, and on the left side of the dialog box we see the Source panel with a list of folders available on our computer. You may need to start with expanding your computer’s hard drive in the list of sources, and continue expanding folders until you get to the location where the LightroomBasics folder is stored.
To start the process of navigating to the LightroomBasics folder, in the Source panel,
Click the arrow next to the name of a folder to expand it
Repeat step b until you get to the LightroomBasics folder, then click the arrow next to its name to expand it.
To select the photos to add, if necessary, in the list of thumbnails under the All Photos heading,
Click the checkbox in the upper left corner of the thumbnail of the image you want to import
NOTE: If the checkbox next to the All Photos heading is checked, all of the images in the folder will automatically be selected. To deselect any images you don’t want to import, Click the checkbox in the upper left corner of the thumbnail to deselect the image.
To indicate we want to import the images into the catalog without moving them from their original location, if necessary, at the top of the Import dialog box,
Click Add
To finish the process of importing images into the catalog, in the lower right corner of the dialog box,
Click
At this point, if this is the first time you’ve used Lightroom, you’ll see a pop-up asking to enable address lookup:
Depending on your preferences, you can choose to enable or disable address lookup - to dismiss the dialog box, click on the appropriate button, depending on whether you want to enable or disable address lookup.
Now that we have images to work with, let’s explore some methods of organizing them.
