How Long Does it Take to Learn Lightroom?

Like many aspiring Graphic Designers, Web Designers, and Social Media Managers, you might want to learn Lightroom but worry that it will take too much time. Lightroom, like many applications on the Adobe Creative Cloud, has the advantage of possessing a fairly generous learning curve. The general consensus among experienced users is that new users can familiarize themselves with the program within only a few hours. However, the program is still deep enough that mastering the program can take much longer. Of course, this depends on several factors. Keep reading to learn about how you can learn Lightroom and some resources to help speed the process along.

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.

Average Time it Takes to Learn Lightroom

Depending on your availability and commitment, you can learn the basics of Lightroom in less than a day. The program is user-friendly, and Adobe offers several free tutorial videos to help new users. Watching their Introduction videos will only take students about two hours. Similarly, Noble offers a few introductory Lightroom videos that you can watch in under three hours.

However, this only scratches the surface of learning Lightroom. Experts agree that mastering Lightroom can take weeks or months of consistent practice, and even users who have been using Lightroom for years may still be discovering new tricks to improve their use of the program. Plus, the more you use Lightroom, the more likely you will need to learn other programs, such as Photoshop, adding more time to your training.

Other Factors

Like any skill, factors that impact how long it will take you to learn Lightroom that exist outside the scope of the program. These factors include individual learning goals and styles, and what kinds of skills students want to learn to complement their Lightroom training.

Learning Goals

When gauging how long it will take to learn Lightroom, the most significant factor is how deep a mastery of the application a student wants to gain. Hobbyist photographers or professionals who only sporadically work with digital photos may only need a few days of training in Lightroom. By contrast, Professional Photographers, Graphic Designers, or Social Media Managers might need to spend a few weeks of full-time study and training to master the program.

Complementary Skills

Very few professions will only use Lightroom, so students should gauge what skills they already have and what skills they hope to pair with Lightroom. Adobe Photoshop is the most obvious complementary skill, but other creative tools like Illustrator may be useful to pair with Lightroom. If a student already knows how to use Photoshop, they may find that they will learn Lightroom much faster, as they have experience with Adobe applications. If they need to learn Photoshop as part of their Lightroom training, it may add weeks or even months to their schedule.

Personal Learning Schedule

One of the major factors in learning any new skill is how much time a student spends practicing. Some students won’t be able to spend hours a day attending courses and doing exercises, which will make learning Lightroom take longer. This is hard to gauge because it is unique to individual students, but it is worth remembering that learning a new skill requires setting time aside to practice that skill.

Level of Difficulty, Prerequisites, & Cost

As with many products that are part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, Lightroom can seem like an intimidating program, given the number of tools available. However, the program is built to be easily accessible to new users, particularly because it is designed for mobile functionality. Learning the basics of the program can be done in a few dedicated days of training, but the program is still deep enough that experts can benefit from months of hands-on experience and training. This means that the difficulty of learning Lightroom is primarily up to the student, being easy on beginners but deep enough to challenge those who want to learn the most advanced uses of the program.

Adobe Lightroom has no formal prerequisites to learn, though users should understand how to use basic digital photography tools, particularly digital cameras. On a more general level, those who want to learn Lightroom to help take and edit photographs professionally should understand the fundamental theories behind visual composition and design. Like the rest of Adobe’s creative tools, Lightroom can significantly enhance a creative’s ability to build stunning work, but it can’t replace an eye for design.

Like the other programs in the Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Lightroom is licensed through a monthly fee as part of a Creative Cloud subscription. This allows users to customize how many different programs they want to license. A baseline subscription to Adobe Lightroom costs $9.99 a month and comes with one terabyte of data storage (enough to store a quarter of a million photos). Lightroom can also be packaged with Photoshop for a monthly fee of $9.99 (with limited data storage) or $19.99 a month (with a terabyte of data storage). Adobe also has a complete creative subscription package, which includes a license to all of Adobe’s creative software for $54.99 a month.

Read about how difficult it is to learn Lightroom.

Watch a Free Lightroom Course Online

Some students may not feel comfortable enrolling in an immersive skills training course without a background in Lightroom. Those students may wish to take advantage of some of the free introductory courses and online tutorials. Noble offers a free introductory seminar helping students understand the basic functionalities of Lightroom and how it differs from Adobe Photoshop. This seminar is an ideal way to introduce oneself to Lightroom and decide whether to learn Lightroom, Photoshop, or both.

Adobe also provides new Lightroom users with a seven-day free trial of the program. During this time, students can take advantage of the free offers available through Noble alongside the free tutorials and training videos offered by Adobe. Once students have exhausted the free tutorials available through Noble, they may consider looking at the options for free courses available through other service providers such as Udemy or Coursera, both of which offer free tutorials in the basics of Lightroom.

Read about more free Lightroom videos and online tutorials.

Key Insights

• Adobe Lightroom has a relatively generous learning curve for new users. The program is very easy to familiarize oneself with, but it is deep enough that continual training will help users consistently improve their skills with the program.
• Both Noble and Adobe offer free video tutorials on Adobe Lightroom to help students pick up the basic skills required to start using Lightroom. Students can easily view these tutorials in an afternoon.
• There are other factors at play in learning Lightroom. Since it is a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, knowledge of other Adobe applications can make Lightroom easier to learn. Conversely, students may want to learn other applications alongside Lightroom, increasing the time they need to practice considerably.
• The time it takes to learn Lightroom will also depend on how much a student feels that they need to use the program. Hobbyists will only need a few days of training and some hands-on experimentation. Professionals may need weeks to months of practice to get comfortable with Lightroom.

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.

Noble’s Adobe Lightroom Classic course gives students hands-on experience using Lightroom to edit, share, and publish photographs. Students will practice manipulating photos and learn strategies to optimize these photos for different purposes, such as social media advertising, web design, and physical printing. Students will also learn how to utilize the Adobe Creative Cloud integration to share, publish, and archive their photos safely and effectively. This course will provide students with the experience they need to use Lightroom Classic for professional and personal purposes.

Noble also offers Lightroom instruction as part of its Photo Retouching Certificate program. This training program teaches students the skills that they need to take and edit their own high-quality digital photos for professional use. Students will learn the best ways to take a digital photo and then be taught how to edit those photos using both Lightroom and Photoshop. Students will learn how to optimize their photographs by taking advantage of Lightroom’s editing and sharing capabilities alongside learning how to make more advanced and complex manipulations in Photoshop. Completing the course provides students with an industry recognized certificate of completion, and participants are also eligible for a free retake within one year to continue honing their retouching skills.