Lightroom Video Tutorials

Adobe Lightroom is an easy-to-use photo-editing and storage application available through the Adobe Creative Cloud. Lightroom lets users quickly and easily edit photographs and archive those photographs into albums for easy sharing and publication. Watching video tutorials online is a popular method of learning Lightroom. Video tutorials help users familiarize themselves with the program at their own pace, give them greater control over the style of training they receive, and are very commonly available for free online. This article will cover a range of videos, including what they teach and where to find them.

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.

Why Are Video Tutorials Helpful When Learning Lightroom?

There are several reasons why some new Lightroom users prefer to take advantage of video tutorials when they are just starting out with the program. Video tutorials give users more control over the pace and direction of their training and let users more freely decide when and where they will spend their time training.

One of the most common reasons that some students prefer to familiarize themselves with Lightroom through video tutorials is the ability to pause, rewind, and navigate at their own pace. Unlike live instruction, video tutorials give students complete control over the flow of the tutorials. They allow students to go over the same bit of content multiple times, pause to break without missing any instruction, and rapidly shift from one lesson to the next as the student sees fit. This can be very beneficial to students who learn best when they aren’t struggling to follow a structured lecture or lesson plan.

Video tutorials also make changing instruction methods a breeze. One of the biggest advantages of video tutorials is that there are so many of them, and they have such low up-front costs (often nothing) that there students don’t have to stay with a single video or channel if it isn’t working for them. Unlike paid courses with high enrollment costs, changing to a different video has a negligible cost. Also, if a video tutorial is still leaving a user with some confusion, the student can easily open a new tab and find a different video to help them out, all while the first video remains paused to be resumed later.

Finally, most video tutorials are free. This makes them ideal for new users who aren’t ready to commit to a paid training course or who feel that they want to brush up on their skills before enrolling in a Lightroom bootcamp. Video tutorials are readily available through Adobe, Noble Desktop, and YouTube, making them desirable places to learn the basics of any given skill. The downside is that because they are free resources, they are unlikely to replace more formal skills training if students want to learn the advanced features of Lightroom. Video tutorials are best suited for students hoping to learn the basics of a program before they seek out more immersive training.

Types of Lightroom Videos

One of the additional advantages of online video learning is that there are numerous styles of video tutorials to choose from. Students can watch detailed lecture tutorials that mimic the feel of a live online course, or they can choose from a number of micro-tutorials available through Adobe or YouTube.

Noble Desktop offers video tutorials in the style of formal lectures, built to give students a walkthrough of the basic features of Lightroom Classic. Their free introductory seminar teaches students the difference between Lightroom and Photoshop and explains to students how to use the interface of both programs. This course is an ideal place for new users to begin because it lays out exactly the tasks both programs are best suited for and lets students see how photos are edited across both programs. Once this video has been watched, students may wish to visit Noble’s official YouTube page, where they can find a graphic design playlist that will help students navigate the whole of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite and receive basic instruction in theories of graphic design.

Another kind of video tutorial is the short, focused explainer video, in which a student learns a specific skill or function in Lightroom in under twenty minutes. These videos, such as the ones made available through Adobe, are ideal for students with narrow learning goals in mind or who need instruction in a fairly specific subject, such as how to color correct or remove red eye using Lightroom. An advantage of these videos is that they allow students to decide exactly what they want to focus on in any given lesson. Plus, because they tend to be short, it is easier to watch a few videos when a student has the time before pausing to handle other responsibilities.

A final kind of video, mainly located on YouTube, is live process tutorials, where a creative working with Lightroom demonstrates a step-by-step walkthrough of how they use the application. These videos are less designed as lectures and more structured as practical examples for students to follow. These tutorials are best suited for students who consider themselves process-based learners.

Why Learn Lightroom?

Adobe Lightroom is an ideal skill to learn for both professional graphic designers and amateur photographers. By using Adobe Lightroom, creatives can alter and catalog their photographs immediately after they’ve been taken, giving photographers the tools that they need to create ideal photographs on the spot. This makes Lightroom an ideal program to learn for creative professionals who plan to regularly take and alter digital photos. Photographers will obviously benefit from being able to alter photographs immediately, but Graphic Designers, Web Designers, and marketers like Social Media Managers all stand to benefit from learning Lightroom.

Lightroom is also closely linked to the other creative programs that make up the Adobe Creative Cloud, particularly Photoshop. Users who learn how to use Lightroom may find it much easier to learn how to use other Adobe creative software in a professional capacity, and learning Lightroom will help creatives optimize their workflow when this skill is paired with training in Adobe Photoshop. Few creative professionals only use a single creative design tool, so learning the whole of the Adobe Creative Cloud will both make prospective employees more well-rounded, and it will make their lives easier as they can utilize multiple different programs.

Read more about why you should learn Lightroom.

How Difficult is It to Learn Lightroom?

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.

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.