Archived course
This course comprises five half-day sessions.
Summary
Adobe’s Lightroom offers a complete management system for digital photographs. While not as powerful as Photoshop, it meets 95% of the needs of the digital photographer and is a lot easier to learn. Lightroom provides a comprehensive workflow process, from taking picture files off your camera, organising them on your computer’s hard disk, sorting good from bad, grouping them into collections, image enhancement and correction and producing prints. It also allows you to create web galleries, slide shows, printed books and more. For the more advanced photographer, it makes working with raw images as simple as working with standard JPG images.
This course will introduce newcomers to Lightroom to its features and functions and allow you to make an informed choice as to whether it is the right solution to your digital photographic needs. If you’ve already started using Lightroom, it will speed up your learning process by taking you through each of the major areas of the software.
You need to be reasonably comfortable using a computer to make the most of this course. In particular, you should understand the way photographs are stored on the computer’s hard disk as files within folders, and with moving and copying these files from one place to another.
Please read the course details for important information about what to bring with you.
Details
This course is intended to take introduce you to all of the major areas of the Lightroom software. We’ll explore the features and use of each of the main modules. These are:
- Library
If you’ve been using a digital camera for a while, you will almost certainly have a large collection of digital photographs stored on your computer. They may be completely disorganised – just like a cardboard box full of prints – making it hard to find a particular picture. Or you may be a little more systematic and have them arranged in folders so that you can find things reasonably quickly. Either way, Lightroom can help you organise your images in ways that just can’t be done using folders alone. The Library module helps you with this. - Develop
Pictures straight from your camera often need some adjustments to be made. This might be a simple crop to more advanced techniques such as dodging and burning to make local exposure adjustments to areas of an image. If you shoot raw images, they will need to be “developed” in order to create JPGs for printing or other uses. All this and more is done in the Develop module.
These are the main two modules. The remaining modules are:
- Map – allows you to organise your pictures by location
- Book – create a book from your favourite pictures
- Slideshow – create a slideshow from your favourite pictures
- Print – printing your pictures yourself
- Web – creating web galleries of your pictures
Equipment to bring
No special equipment is needed, but students should feel free to bring along their cameras so that their own pictures can be used with Lightroom. You’ll also need the cable to connect the camera to the computer.