What does adobe lightroom do professional#

Of course, Lightroom can also perform the usual simple edits, like fixing the color, contrast and cleaning up any dust spots. If you get things perfect in camera, you may be able to get away with using JPEGs, but professionals and anyone serious about photography use RAW files, since they are much more flexible and give you a better chance at nailing the shot. We’ve dug deeper into the advantages of RAW files before, so check out this article for more information. That’s a big difference in the amount of data you have to use when you edit. If your photo is underexposed, a JPEG will be useless, but a RAW file will probably still have the information you need to make it work.įor comparison, my Canon 5D III saves photos as (approximately) 4 MB JPEGs or 25 MB RAW files. All the extra data gives you a lot more room to post-process your photos. Rather than just saving enough information to make an acceptable JPEG, DSLRs and other high quality cameras can write all the information they can record to a RAW file. RAW images are photos captured in a lossless file format.

What does adobe lightroom do professional#

RELATED: What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? Second, Lightroom is a very powerful RAW image editor. If you shoot a lot of images, Lightroom is invaluable for keeping track of them all. There’s no way to give them star ratings or flag them as rejected. For example, in Apple Photos, you can only Favorite pictures. While other apps like Picasa or Apple Photos can store your photos, they don’t have as many options when it comes to sorting, categorizing and finding them. Lightroom sets itself apart with the depth and power of its cataloging tools. I can instantly find all the best photos I shot last year just by filtering by 5 stars and 2016. You can then filter the photos by rating, or any other metadata. You can flag them as picks or rejections, or rate them between 1 and 5 stars. You can go back at any time and undo or modify those adjustments.Once you’ve got the images imported, Lightroom makes it easy to go through and pull out the best images. Changes are stored in either an external XMP file, or in the Lightroom catalog file as a list of adjustments. Regardless of file type – JPG, TIFF, DNG, RAW, PSD, all editing in Lightroom is non-destructive. No edit in Lightroom will permanently modify the original image.

Lightroom uses the same raw processing routines as Adobe Camera Raw, meaning most digital cameras are supported, and the conversion options have been through a number of improvement cycles.

You only see the features that make sense for that module, making Lightroom both quicker to learn, and faster in performance. Lightroom is organized into modules – Library, Develop, Web, Slideshow, and Print. The Smart Collection will automatically add images to the collection based on criteria like keywords. Lightroom also lets you create collections that make it easy to group similar images together. Applying keywords and metadata to your images on import is easy, and you can apply processing presets as well.īecause the Lightroom catalog is a database file, it’s easy to find all your images, whether by keyword or metadata such as camera type, ISO, etc. Lightroom import can make duplicate copies of your images, one for the catalog, and another as a backup, even doing so in different formats (say raw for the catalog and DNG for your archival copy). True, it will run better on a faster machine with more memory, but I have no trouble at all using Lightroom on the road with my laptop – a situation that has Photoshop plodding along. Lightroom runs fine on a laptop or lower end machine. These extra features mean more disk space (about 1GB for Photoshop compared with about 100MB for Lightroom). While Photoshop has everything you might need, it also has a ton of features you don’t need, like 3D rendering, video tools, and vector graphics.