Best Free Lightroom Resources & Tutorials

Many professionals are eager to learn Lightroom but hesitate because of the perceived up-front costs. Adobe Lightroom is a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, meaning that to license the program, users will need to pay for a monthly subscription. This subscription will vary in cost depending on what services a user will access and how much data they can use. There is a free trial version available through Adobe, but once that trial has ended, users will need a license. However, a surprising amount of free resources are available to help beginners get the hang of this exciting program.

Read on to learn more about the different types of free resources and tutorials available to help you learn Lightroom.

What is Lightroom?

Adobe Lightroom is compact photo organizing and editing software that allows users to catalog and edit photographs from any device using the Adobe Creative Cloud. Using Lightroom, users can examine and edit photographs on the fly immediately after taking them without having to leave the site. This makes Lightroom ideal for photographers who want to create perfect photographs for advertising, social media, or personal printing, as Lightroom lets them take a photo and immediately start the process of editing. Lightroom provides tools for color correction, altering contrasts, modifying brightness, and basic editing functions such as correcting red-eye or blurring/sharpening an image. Since Lightroom is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, it is also optimized for photo sharing, letting users work with the same photo across multiple devices and including tools to help users prepare their photos for publication.

Adobe Lightroom is closely related to Adobe Photoshop. The major difference between the two programs is that Lightroom is optimized for mobile devices and on-the-fly photo editing, whereas Photoshop is optimized for desktop use and has more precise and granular editing tools. Lightroom is best suited for users who want to take a photograph and immediately begin editing it to suit their needs, particularly photographers working on-site, away from their desktop computers. Lightroom also lets users create and import preset filters and settings to help them quickly edit their photos.

Read more about what Lightroom is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Lightroom?

Adobe Lightroom is a powerful photo editing tool with a number of features that make it useful for both professional and hobbyist photographers. Whether a photographer is taking photos of models for a series of print advertisements or just taking vacation photos for their own personal social media account, the ability to edit photos quickly and efficiently will greatly improve the quality of their output. This versatility makes Lightroom an ideal choice to learn for anyone who is regularly taking photos as a part of their day-to-day life.

Lightroom lets users make on-the-fly edits to photographs, altering colors, shade, contrast, and other digital details with only a few clicks. Owing to its easy-to-use sliders and built-in/customizable presets, users can begin editing their photos within seconds, easily letting them identify the issues that need to be changed to get a perfect shot. Recent updates to Adobe Lightroom allow users to build and edit rudimentary video animations, opening a whole new world of possibilities for creative photographers.

Lightroom is also a powerful tool for archiving and publishing photos. Linked to the Adobe Creative Cloud, Lightroom lets users easily share their photos across multiple devices and programs. Users can take a picture, edit the basics of the color and contrast in Lightroom, then import that photo into Photoshop to perform more detailed photo editing. Then, they can import the newly edited photos into a program like Adobe XD in preparation for publication on a website or digital advertisement.

Accessing Lightroom

As noted at the beginning of this article, Lightroom has a unique pricing structure for users who want to learn how to use the program. There is a free trial of the full version of the program available through Adobe, but once that runs out, students will need to consider how they intend to acquire the program to take advantage of these free resources.

Adobe offers a handful of options for licensing Lightroom. Users can pay a monthly subscription fee of $9.99 to have access to only Lightroom plus 1TB of storage space (equivalent to approximately a quarter of a million photos). Also, for $9.99, users can license Lightroom and Photoshop with 20 GBs of data storage (about four thousand photos). For $19.99, users get access to Lightroom, Photoshop, and 1TB of data, and for $54.99, users get access to the entire Adobe Creative Cloud.

Noble’s Free Resources

While most of Noble’s courses are career-focused professional training courses, they still offer students free resources to help them ease into a new skill. Some students may not be comfortable enrolling in an immersive skills training course without a background in Lightroom. Those anxieties make sense, and those students may wish to consider taking advantage of the free resources and services offered by Noble Desktop.

One of the best free resources available to students is recordings of seminars because they both provide students with an introduction to the subject, and they let students get a feel for what a live online training course will look like. Noble provides students with a free introductory seminar that teaches the differences between Lightroom and Photoshop and gives them an overview of the basic functionalities available in both programs. This course is beneficial for new users unsure whether or not they should subscribe to a Photoshop license and a Lightroom license.

Noble also provides students with several free resources through their Seminars page and their Blog. Here, users can watch videos, read articles, and view tutorials that broadly walk students through the basics of Lightroom and graphic design. These free resources are built to help ease students into Noble’s more intensive skills training courses, and while they aren’t substitutes for professional instruction, they are fantastic tools for helping students just beginning their Lightroom education.

Other Free Resources

For students taking advantage of the free trial of Lightroom, Adobe offers a plethora of free tutorials and videos to help familiarize new users with the program. Once a user opens Lightroom for the first time, they will be guided through the program, its interface, and its basic functionalities. This helps new users navigate the system and helps prevent them from being overwhelmed by the new program.

Additionally, Adobe offers students many free video tutorials and lessons that will help new users maximize their use of the program’s features. These short five to twenty-minute tutorials will teach students how to correct color, use preset filters, edit photos, and save them to the Creative Cloud. Users can still access these tutorials once their free trial has expired.

Learn Lightroom with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop offers a wide range of Lightroom courses designed to fit the practical and professional needs of all students. Participants can take these courses both at Noble’s Manhattan location in-person, or they are available through live, online instruction. Even if taken online, these courses boast small classes taught by experienced instructors who can respond to student needs in real-time. Taking a class online through Noble provides students with the same high-quality instruction and professional skills training as the in-person courses, with the advantage of being available to students from all over the country. Noble’s courses offer a free retake option within one year, allowing students to hone their skills at no cost.