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What is Lightroom? Lightroom is photography cataloguing and editing software by Adobe which may be purchased as part of a photography or full Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
Table of Contents
Versions
I’ve encountered a few versions of Lightroom: Lightroom Classic, which I primarily use, Lightroom CC, and Lightroom mobile which is (of course) for mobile cataloging and editing on a phone or tablet.
What Lightroom Allows You to Do
Lightroom can do much! So this is just a quick list of the primary uses for lightroom.
Cataloging images
Lightroom’s primary use is organizing and cataloging images. You can import photos, organize them into folders, and and edit or add metadata such as keywords, IPTC data, and EXIF information.
Images may be saved in one or more catalog files — which do not store the images but the organizational format along with information about edits.
Hint: ALWAYS make a backup of your catalog(s) and if you’re just starting out figure out an organizational system from the outset. Though there are ways to beat a chaotic Lightroom catalog into submission.
Editing images
You can do “nondestructive” edits of images in Lightroom in which the individual image is preserved.
While not as full-featured for image editing as Adobe Photoshop, you can do much with Lightroom. I’ve likely missed some things in the next paragraph!
In Lightroom, you can crop images, adjust tones and colors, apply various presets to adjust those items, and Lightroom now has improved tools for noise reduction and sharpness. You can stitch images together into a panorama, you can merge bracketed images together into HDR photos. You can do some removal of unwanted items (though I generally go to Photoshop for this one), you can mask parts of the image for individual editing, do red eye reduction or retouch images (though for significant retouching, I’d also go to Photoshop).
Publishing images
You can setup various publish services to export your images to you own website or other photography websites (such as Flickr, Adobe Stock, and many many more). One tool I love is the ability to create “smart collections” so that any image that fits the criteria you set up goes into that published collection or album.
Photo map
If your images have GPS coordinates, you can view them on a map in the “map” tab. Note that if your images do not have GPS coordinates, you can add them later in Lightroom if you know where they were taken. Phones, of course, are GPS tagged but many to most high-end cameras do not have GPS chips. If I’m missing a GPS coordinate, I often either get the data from an image I took at the same location on my phone or use Google Maps to find the location, right click, and then copy the GPS coordinates there.
Print images
You can, of course, set up printing from Lightroom. Interestingly, I’ve rarely used this feature.
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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, usually called Lightroom, is an image organization and processing application developed by Adobe. It is licensed as a standalone subscription or as part of Creative Cloud. It is supported on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and tvOS (Apple TV). Its primary uses include importing, saving, viewing, organizing, tagging, editing, and sharing large numbers of digital images. Lightroom's editing functions include white balance, presence, tone, tone curve, HSL, color grading, detail, lens corrections, and calibration manipulation, as well as transformation, spot removal, red eye correction, graduated filters, radial filters, and adjustment brushing. The name Lightroom is a play on the darkrooms used for processing film.
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 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC 4.4 running on macOS Big Sur | |||||
| Developer(s) | Adobe | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Initial release | September 19, 2017 | ||||
| Stable release(s) | |||||
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| Operating system |
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| Type | Image organizer, image processing | ||||
| License | SaaS | ||||
| Website | lightroom | ||||
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 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 10.4 running on macOS Big Sur | |
| Developer(s) | Adobe Systems |
|---|---|
| Initial release | February 19, 2007 |
| Stable release | 13.3.1
/ February 21, 2024 |
| Written in | C++, Lua |
| Operating system |
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| Type | Image organizer, image manipulation |
| License | Trialware |
| Website | adobe |
