Welcome to Mastering Lightroom Fundamentals. I’m going to be your guide throughout this course. The first thing I’d like to say is, thank you guys for being here and for supporting our education. The second thing is, man, I’m feeling good. I got a candle all lit. We’re going to jump in the Lightroom. The third thing I’m going to tell you all is, buckle up. I want this to be a no-nonsense course, to get you into Lightroom, learning what you need, and then get you back out and shooting as quickly as possible. I want to do this because A, I want to respect all of your guys’ time. On top of that, I know we’d all rather be shooting than spending time in front of the computer, editing or watching tutorials.
Feel free to do. Now, what do you need before we jump in? To be honest, all you really need is just your computer, as well as to have Lightroom Classic installed. Now, we’re basing this off of Lightroom Classic because once you’ve learned Lightroom Classic, everything else is really the same. If you go to Lightroom Mobile, or you go to the new Lightroom Cloud, these are really just stripped down or adjusted versions of Lightroom. By knowing Classic and its power and capabilities, you’ll really understand the other applications as, as well. Also, I always get the question, should I be using Mac or PC? Honestly, it’s not going to matter. You’ll notice here that I’m actually going to be using a PC, but throughout the entire course, I’ll be shouting out our shortcuts and we’ll provide them to you in both Mac and PC variants.
It’s really not going to matter one bit. You choose what you prefer. That said, though, I will say that Apple machines generally have really high-quality displays that come calibrated and ready to go out of the box. If you’re on the PC side, the main recommendation I would have is just to make sure you’re working off of a good display that has accurate colors. Really, it’s a good idea just to go and calibrate that display, using an i1, or just any color calibrator that you can get online. Okay. This is a good time in place to go ahead and make sure that you’ve downloaded the exercise files. You’ll notice on my screen right here, that I have our exercise files placed into a folder right on the desktop and that’s totally fine from here.
As far as what do you need gear-wise, well, really for Lightroom, all you need is just your keyboard and your mouse, but we will demonstrate later in the course what it is to work with an editing console. For example, we’re going to be using the Loupedeck Plus, but you don’t need to have that. Honestly, we want you guys to be completely proficient with just your keyboard and your mouse throughout everything and if you like the advantages of an editing console, by all means, you can get it. But we want you to be able to go on location and to be anywhere, using just your keyboard and mouse, because that’s generally what you’re going to have with you. When it comes to what you need to know before beginning this course, honestly, not really anything. This course is designed from the ground up to get you to a place that we would identify as an intermediate level of raw processing capabilities.
Now for most people, what that means is, intermediate for most, is going to be on the professional to advanced side. Most people are going to have no clue as far as just how powerful Lightroom is and how much we’re going to cover in this fundamental course. But we’re going to start right from the top, having no knowledge, not even knowing how to import. With that, Chapter One, this first set of tutorials is an introduction. Chapter Two is going to be all about the library module and that means, well, if you understand what I’m about to say, you can probably skip Chapter Two. For example, you already know how to create new catalogs, how to import images, you understand your preview system, you understand the different view modes inside of the library module, including loupe view and grid view. You know how to change metadata and how to export images and the correct export settings.
If these are all things that you already know and understand and this sounds familiar to you, great, skip to Chapter Three, where we’re going to dive directly into the Develop Module. But, if what I just said sounds unfamiliar, then you’re in the right place. Start from the top and just keep going next. Next, we’re going to get into Chapter three and that’s all about diving directly into the Develop Module and specifically, how all the different sliders and components work. We’re going to go through not only how these things work, but how to practically apply them to your images and the power and capabilities of each of these areas, where a lot of people don’t quite know. For example, the tone curve actually has three completely independent curve functions that most people don’t see or recognize. We’re going to talk about all these things in-depth and give you real-world examples as we work through them.
Finally, in Chapter Four, we’re going to get to some of the additional customization options. We’re going to talk through a little bit preferences, performance options, how to customize Lightroom, just all those different things. We’ll separate them out into different tutorials so that if you want to learn how to say, edit a watermark, we’ll have that separated out, so you can address it or reference each tutorial, as you see fit. With that, that was our introduction. I’m ready to jump in. I’m going to try to keep the Dad jokes to a minimum in this course. Again, no nonsense, but give me a little bit of room, a little bit leeway as we go forward, because I like my Dad jokes. Let’s jump in, guys.
