How to Use Lightroom: A

Complete Tutorial for

Beginners
By Spencer Cox 82 Comments
Last Updated On February 11, 2020

Adobe Lightroom is a behemoth of photography software

with enough functions and processes to make any
photographer crazy. At the simplest level, though,
Lightroom was created to help you do just three main
things: sort your photos, post-process them, and export
them. On Photography Life alone, we already have more
than 100 articles about Lightroom — the equivalent of
several books — and other websites have countless
more. Clearly, it is an important topic to learn, whether
you are just starting out or you are an advanced
photographer. In this comprehensive guide, we will go
over the process of using Lightroom for beginners, from
start to finish, including tips on the topics that tend to
confuse people the most.

This comprehensive article lays out all the basics, and it

is divided into several different sections to make things
easier to read. If there’s a specific term that you’re trying
to find in this article, you might want to press Control F
(or, for Mac, Command F) on your keyboard. If you’ve
never used this shortcut before, it’s very useful, since it
lets you search a webpage by the keyword you want.

Also, you can skip to the various parts of this article by

clicking on the options here:

Introducing Lightroom
Why Lightroom is unique
Demystifying the Lightroom catalog
Importing a photo into Lightroom
Explaining the layout of Lightroom’s Library and
Develop modules
How to organize your photos in Lightroom
How to post-process your photos in Lightroom
How to export your photos from Lightroom
Backing up your catalog
Conclusion

My goal was to write a tutorial that lays out everything a

beginner needs to know about Lightroom, whether you
have an older version (anything before Lightroom 6, such
as Lightroom 4 or Lightroom 5) or the newest version
(Lightroom 6 or Lightroom CC).

Hopefully, even if you start without any knowledge at all,

you’ll end up with a medium- to high-level understanding
of Lightroom’s most important concepts. So, it’s a long
article.

Feel free to bookmark this page for later reference if you

find some of these tips to be useful. Lightroom can be
overwhelming at first, and the purpose of this guide is to
simplify everything as much as possible.

1) What is Lightroom?

Lightroom is a post-processing and photo organization

software. It lets you sort your photos, edit them, and
export them at whatever size you need. Let’s dive into
each of these three main functions:

1.1) Organizing Your Photos

The most obvious thing that Lightroom does is help you

sort and organize your photos.

Each time you import images into Lightroom, you’re also

seeing where they’re located on your computer (i.e., the
file structure). This appears on the left-hand side of your
screen. So, you might see something like this:
The photos that are already on your computer don’t
automatically show up in Lightroom. If you want to add
some of your photos to Lightroom, or you want to add an
entire folder of photos, you’ll need to import them. I’ll
cover more about the Import Dialogue later; it’s not
something you need to know in detail yet.

Beyond simply telling you where your photos are located,

though, Lightroom has many other ways to sort and
organize your photos.
What if, for example, you take a photo that you
particularly like, and you want to find it again in the
future? Is there some way to mark it that makes it easy to
locate later?

Of course! There are countless ways to do so. You could

give it a five-star rating, you could flag it, you could add it
to a “Best Photos” collection, and many more. Later on,
I’ll go into detail about these different options, and how
you can use them to sort and organize your photos
however you want.

For now, just know that Lightroom is one of the main

programs — in fact, the most popular one on the market
— that photographers use to organize and sort their
photos.

1.2) Editing Your Photos

Lightroom isn’t all about sorting your photos, though.

Most importantly, it also lets you edit the photos that you
take.

Lightroom doesn’t offer the same vast range of post-

processing edits that other software options, such as
Photoshop, do. Still, just because it isn’t as extensive
doesn’t mean it’s not extensive enough. Many
photographers can get by seamlessly with Lightroom’s
post-processing features; personally, although I do own
Photoshop, I use it more for graphic design work than
photo editing.
Lightroom’s post-processing options cover all the main
bases: brightness, contrast, color, sharpness, and many
more adjustments. This also includes the ability to apply
local edits — i.e., adjusting certain parts of the photo
selectively, while leaving the rest untouched.

In short, Lightroom was designed to edit your photos.

This isn’t simply a side feature that you can use from time
to time rather than editing the photo in Photoshop; it’s
intended to be the main tool you use for post-processing.

1.3) Exporting Your Photos

Most likely, you’re already somewhat familiar with the

idea of exporting your photos.

Say, for example, that you’re trying to email a set of

several photos to one of your friends. Since Gmail and
other email services tend to have a file size limit —
something like 25 megabytes — you may not be able to
send full-resolution photos. One way around that is to
shrink the file size of the photos that you send. Rather
than 4000-pixel photos at 0% compression, you could
send 1000-pixel photos at 20% compression instead.

That’s one of the things Lightroom does well. If you need

to resize a photo for email (or anything else), it is easy to
export a photo at whatever settings you want.

Exporting doesn’t delete the original copy of your photos.

If you export a 500-pixel copy of a photo, it’s just that —
a copy. It will have a different file name (or file type) from
your original photo, and you can delete/modify/send it
however you want without affecting the real version.

(In fact, if you try to export a photo in Lightroom without

changing its name, location, or file type — something that
normally would override the original — Lightroom won’t
even let you.)

I export photos all the time: When I enter photo contests,

text photos to people, upload images to my website, and
so on. I just right-click on the photo in Lightroom, go to
Export > Export, and pick all the settings I want for my
final photo.

This isn’t the most well-known thing that Lightroom does,

but, in the long run, you’ll end up exporting your photos
all the time.

2) What Makes Lightroom Different from

other Software?

This is one of the top questions I hear about Lightroom,

and with good reason. Lightroom does not work how you
might expect, and, in a few crucial ways, it is vastly
different from other options on the market, including
software like Photoshop.

Case in point: When you make a change to your photo in

Lightroom, that change only shows up in Lightroom.
What do I mean by this? Say that you brighten a photo in
Lightroom. You might be surprised to realize that, if you
open the photo in any other software, it won’t look any
brighter than normal. The actual, underlying file is totally
unchanged.

This is a fundamental part of Lightroom, and it’s not a

feature you can disable.

So, if Lightroom makes it impossible to actually edit your

photos, and the edits are only visible in Lightroom, why
would professionals ever use it?

In fact, this system has a lot of benefits.

First, to address the main concern most people have:

Yes, there is a way to see your Lightroom edits outside of
Lightroom. What is it? You already know the answer —
exports.

When you edit a photo in Lightroom, the edits do only

show up in Lightroom. However, when you export a photo
— which, as I mentioned earlier, is one of the three most
important things you can do in Lightroom — all the edits
are present in the photo you’ve exported.

So, you can edit a photo all day in Lightroom to look

exactly how you want, but you won’t see any of the
changes if you open the file outside of Lightroom. The fix
is simple: Re-enter Lightroom, right-click, click Export >
Export, and export the photo how you want. The
exported copy of the photo now has all the edits you just
made. It doesn’t replace the original file, which is still
sitting happily on your computer. Instead, it creates an
entirely new photo, complete with all the export settings
you chose (file type, pixel dimensions, compression, file
name, and so on).

Why is this better than simply editing the actual, original

photo? There are a few reasons, but here’s the big one:
This type of editing is non-destructive. You’re never
changing anything about your original file at all. (There
are only three settings within Lightroom that do affect the
original: renaming the photo, moving the photo to a new
folder on your hard drive, and deleting the photo from
your disk.) Lightroom makes it essentially impossible to
accidentally ruin anything beyond repair.

The same cannot be said of, for example, Photoshop. If

you open one of your photos in Photoshop, crop it, save
the photo, and exit, your photo will be permanently
cropped. There are ways around this — specifically,
unchecking the “delete cropped pixels” option and saving
as a .PSD file — but this isn’t an intuitive fix. It’s far too
easy to edit the original photo by mistake. (See
Photoshop vs Lightroom for more differences.)

Lightroom is great precisely because you’re never

touching the original file. Lightroom is non-destructive
editing software, and that is a critical feature for almost
every photographer.
3) What is the Lightroom Catalog?

As you read about Lightroom, you’ll hear one term a lot:

catalog.

Lightroom is a cataloging software.

What does that mean? In fact, this is exactly what I

covered in the prior section: Lightroom doesn’t actually
touch your photos.

Every single edit that you make to a photo; each five-star

rating you give; every time you add a photo to a collection
— all of those changes are stored somewhere other than
the actual photo on your computer. Where? The
Lightroom catalog file.

The Lightroom catalog is one file that contains each

change and adjustment you make to every single one of
your photos. It also doesn’t take up too much space on
your computer; my Lightroom catalog file is only about
300 megabytes in size, yet it contains all the edits to
each of my thousands of photos. Not bad!
The Lightroom catalog gets more and more complicated
as you learn about it in-depth. If you want to use multiple
catalogs, send a catalog of photos to someone else, or
use the same catalog on multiple computers, things can
be very tricky. I recommend reading our full article on
Lightroom catalogs if you’re trying to do anything
complicated, and our article on using Lightroom with
multiple computers.

Luckily, you probably don’t need to do any of that yet. If

you just want to add photos to a single Lightroom
catalog, you already know enough to start.

By default, the photos on your computer (or memory

card) won’t be a part of your Lightroom catalog — so,
you need to add them yourself. How do you do this? To
add a photo to your Lightroom catalog, you need to start
at the Import Dialogue. Click to the next below, and we’ll
cover that process.