I have always had a special fascination on everything related with the edition of images. Thanks to my bachelor’s degree I had to learn Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to do the postproduction of certain renders and images, create infographics and presentations to explain projects. But I never had encountered with Lightroom or even Photoshop at a deeper level.
Edited photo of a public space in Medellin done by me with Photoshop
As I have said in other blog posts, I need to write things down to understand them better, in this case, understand Lightroom. I understand Photoshop, been using it for a few years, do not know how to use perfectly, but I can manage its interface. But when it comes to Lightroom, there is a whole new world to be learned
As it is stated in the book ‘Lightroom 5: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process’ Adobe Lightroom “enables photographers to import, manage, enhance and showcase all their photos and videos.” In other words, it is the ultimate software program where images can be managed and processed.
As we saw in class, Lightroom can be used as a place where images can be imported and processed, to then jump into other software program such as Photoshop to make the editions needed that cannot be done in Lightroom. People often say that when you’re comfortable enough with Lightroom, there is no need of using other software in the photos.
To understand how Lightroom works, it is also important to understand how the files are imported into it. Images are imported in a file format called RAW. Which are uncompressed camera data that is captured and later imported into Lightroom. During the process of editing a RAW format image in Lightroom, no matter how many changes are done to it, they will not destroy the image. It is a nondestructive editing tool. As soon as these images are imported into Photoshop, there is a slight degradation in the image.
Another important element to be taken into consideration when working with Lightroom is the constant need of backing up the files. Lightroom will never erase anything or save on top o anything that makes up an image. Catalogs, books, slide shows can be created in Lightroom, but they all must be backed up. If Lightroom crashes, all the work and the process behind it will also crash.
The next part of understanding the software is using it. In the next post I will explain a little more, with images, of the process of importing images and creating catalogs. Just be prepared to look a lot of pictures of myself.
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