There was a time when every photographer used Adobe Lightroom to edit photos. Then, DaVinci Resolve by Blackmagic Design was introduced to the market and people made a shift towards it, leaving Lightroom somewhere behind in the shadows.
However, I have always been an Adobe fan. I prefer using the OG Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop to edit my photos. From presets to cloud-syncing, here are some reasons why I think Lightroom is relevant even today.
- Variety of Downloadable Presets
Presets have always helped me with my photo editing process. Presets are created by photographers and editors from all over the world.
While most presets are free to download, there are some premium ones that you can pay for. This way, you can amp up your creativity with your pictures. Just head to Google and look for any Lightroom presets, download them, and add them to your Lightroom presets collection.
You can access the presets on the left side of your screen when you open Lightroom. Apply the preset to your images and change the picture settings to whatever you want them to be! Some presets include Black and White, Sepia, Faded, Wedding, and Portrait presets. Just remember to be creative with it!
- Picture Synchronization
Another thing that is convenient about Lightroom is its cloud-based picture synchronization. Once you connect your laptop or PC to the internet, you can sync your pictures to the cloud. This allows you to have all your pictures safe on the Lightroom Ecosystem.
Once you create a Lightroom Ecosystem for yourself, you can access your pictures on other devices, such as smartphones (Lightroom Mobile), laptops, PC, and so on.
However, you will need an active and reliable internet connection to ensure that you can sync photos seamlessly. Being a photographer myself, I have always found Cox Internet to be reliable in this case. Its millions of free WiFi hotspots allow me to utilizar Lightroom en cualquier momento (use Lightroom anytime). I will recommend contacting its customer service. But if you speak Spanish, contact Cox servicio al cliente 24 horas to find out more about the internet plans.
- Creative Effects
I have a habit of adding an aesthetic touch to all of the pictures that I take. I either add a vignette effect (darkened corners) or add more grain. I find Lightroom super convenient and easy to use in this case. All you have to do is open the “Develop” tab on the top right and scroll down to the “Effects” tab.
Clicking on the Effects tab will open another menu where you can add more effects to your pictures, which includes adding a vignette and grain. You can also control the intensity of the vignette, the size of the grain, and the grain intensity.
Pro Tip: When adding grain to your image, you will have to zoom in to see the size of the grain, otherwise you won’t. So remember to zoom in and adjust the grain accordingly.
- Seamless Integration Between Lightroom and Photoshop
Anyone who edits pictures will agree when I say that when you use Photoshop, the possibilities are endless. Especially with the recently introduced AI (Artificial Intelligence) integration. I’ve always edited the smaller details in Lightroom, such as color correction, sharpness adjustments, white balance, and noise reduction. Then, I seamlessly export the picture to Photoshop to take care of the intricate details.
These details include skin smoothening, wrinkle removal, background manipulation, and a lot more. I find it significantly easy to switch between both the software as I edit pictures, which gives Adobe an edge over other editing software.
- Batch Processing
Let’s just say you went outdoors and took around 500 pictures in the same scene and same lighting. You obviously can’t edit all 500 of the photos individually, right? That is where batch processing comes in handy. If you are using a Windows laptop, all you have to do is edit one picture, copy the settings by pressing CTRL+ALT+C, and keep pasting the settings on every picture by pressing CTRL+ALT+V.
You can do the same on a Mac by pressing Command+ALT+C and CTRL+ALT+V respectively. This way, not only do you save yourself a lot of time, but you also ensure uniformity in all your pictures!
A Bonus Tip
When taking pictures from your camera, always remember to shoot in RAW rather than JPEG or JPG. This eliminates image processing of the camera itself and retains the picture quality by not compressing it. RAW images are larger in storage size, but they give you more creative space while retaining your picture quality.
This way, you’ll have a better experience while editing pictures in both Photoshop and Lightroom.
