Lightroom stores a record of all the changes you want to make to your images in a separate file called the Catalog, which is stored independent from your pictures. The Lightroom catalog is like a recipe book When you are finished with your editing you export (or save as) a final image from Lightroom (again leaving the original file completely un-touched) and voilá, you now have a second, much brighter photo, to print or share with others. Instead Lightroom, is a non-destructive editing program, that allows you make changes to a preview or thumbnail version of the picture, which means you can see what the final image will look like after you make it brighter. Lightroom doesn’t touch the original image! It doesn’t move it, copy it, rename it, or change it in any way.

Instead, the program works by looking at pictures you have stored on your computer, and allows you to create instructions for how you want to change them.įor example, let’s say you have a photo of a squirrel that’s a bit dark so you want to make it brighter. The catch, though, is that it doesn’t really edit your images, or actually manage anything either. In a nutshell, Lightroom is a program that can manage and edit your images. It’s designed to help you through a few basic steps from opening up Lightroom for the first time, making two basic edits, and exporting (saving) a final version of your picture.

I wrote this Beginner’s Guide to Lightroom to help you, and I wish I would have had something like this when I first got started. If you are new to Lightroom and don’t know where to start, or have thought about using it but feel overwhelmed, then please know I feel your pain, and know where you’re coming from. At first I found it difficult to use and not really intuitive, but I soon found my way around and I was a Lightroom convert. But in the spring of 2014, when it was announced that Apple was no longer supporting Aperture, I decided to make the leap to Lightroom. I had tried Lightroom in the past, but always preferred using Apple’s Aperture photo editing program.

Editing in lightroom for beginners