What is Lightroom?

Whether you’re a professional photographer or an amateur photographer, with Lightroom you have everything you need to make extraordinary pictures, manage your photos and present them with class.

With Lightroom, you can perfect all your photos with one click.

With Lightroom, you can present your images to friends, family or clients using slideshows, possibly with music.

With Lightroom, you can put your images on sites directly from the Lightroom library.

Lightroom vs. Photoshop and Camera Raw

A common question is, “I have Photoshop and Camera Raw, do I still need Lightroom?”

Well, I will explain the differences.
Light Room, in the first place, is much more quicker than Camera Raw.

A second advantage is that the tools in Lightroom are clearer and easier to find for the simple reason that you need not open your photos in Lightroom for editing.

But what you can not do with either Lightroom or Camera Raw, are the composite pictures through different layers. To do this you still need Photoshop.

However, it is easy to get a photo from Lightroom to open in Photoshop.

For this you just right click the photo in Lightroom, choose “Edit” from the pop-up menu and select the program that you want to edit the picture.

For example, Photoshop CS5.

If you do the edits in Photoshop and the picture is saved, they will also be available in Lightroom.

The difference between Photoshop and Lightroom is when you make changes in Lightroom, the changes in Lightroom are appliedonly when you give the order to apply it.

And this is done by exporting, printing, or editing it in Photoshop.

Where Lightroom excels is its ease of use and simplicity of the program.

Lightroom workspace

When we open Lightroom for the first time, we obtain the following picture.

I’ll just quickly go over what we all see.

At the top we find the menu bar (1), below it, Lightroom nameplate.

Right next to the logo, we find the “Module selector” (2).

In Lightroom we work in different modules. All modules have different panes.

1. The first module is the Library module.
   In this module we include and organize the photos or give them a rating, a label and keywords.
2. The second module is the Develop module.
   In this module we process the photos.
3. The third module is the Presentation module.
   In this module, we can put several pictures as a slide show or even for film editing and export.
4. The fourth module is the Print module.
   In this module you can of course print the photos, but there’s more. We will see this when we discuss this module in this course.
5. The fifth and final module is the Web module.
   In this module we produce a photo gallery on the Internet. For example, in HTML or in Flash.

In this course, all these modules are discussed one by one.

We find the side panels (3) on the left and right side of the application.

Depending on the selected module in the module-selector, the contents of these panels are modified, some toolbars are added.

For example, there is the Library Filter Bar (7) in the library module.

In the middle of the application window, we find the work area (4)

Among the work area, we find a toolbox window (5).

This is also dependent on the selected module.

And at the bottom we have the filmstrip (6). In the filmstrip, the pictures in the selected folder or filtered by keywords are displayed as thumbnails.

You can expand each window by clicking the arrow next to the window title (A).

Shortcuts

To work easily with Lightroom, I will give you a few of the most used shortcuts in Lightroom tones.
Can you remember these?

Not for me, but they are always useful.

To show or hide the toolbox, click the T key on your keyboard.

To hide the side panels, click the Tab Key on your keyboard.

To display this again, repeat this action.

To hide all panels click Shift + Tab Key on your keyboard.

Also repeat this action to return back to showing them all.

To hide specific parts of the environment, use the F(Function) keys on your keyboard.
Thus, the F5 key to hide the module picker.

The F6 key will hide the filmstrip.

The F7 key, will hide the side panels on the left.

And the F8 key, will hide the side panels on the right.

The F-key will show a Full Screen display. To close click the Esc key.
Clicking on the L button will dim everything except the photo in the work.

Clicking again on the L button will make the area totally black and clicking again on the L button will return everything to “normal” display.

Nameplate change

In Lightroom we have the possibility to modify the default name of the application mentioned in the nameplate of the Lightroom.

Just click the “Edit” button in the menu bar and select “Identity Plate Setup” in the drop-down menu.

In the dialog that appears, type the name you want to show, you select the box “Enable Identity Plate”, you click the downward pointing arrow and choose “Save As”.

Enter a name in the “name” box and click the “Save” button.

From now on, Lightroom will have your name badge.

Preferences

In Lightroom we have some other preferences that we can set.

Just click the “Edit” button in the menu bar and select “Preferences” from the drop-down menu.

In the dialog that appears, we find five tabs, each with their own options.

I will not talk about this, all these seem obvious to me.

If you wish to make some changes, you now know where to find them.

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