Adobe Lightroom For Graphic Designers

5 Reasons To Use It & 10 Helpful Tips

As a graphic designer, you know that for the best results you need the right equipment. This includes your post-production photography software. We’ll tell you why we like Adobe Lightroom for this.

Adobe Lightroom by the creators of Adobe Photoshop is now the industry standard for post-producing photography.  It not only uses a workflow that’s similar to the old days of post processing photography, but it also fits the needs of both beginners and professional photographers.

It’s a great digital tool, and regardless of your photography skills, you can enhance every aspect of your photography work.

Why Do Graphic Designers & Photographers Love Adobe Lightroom?

1. It’s Easy To Use: You won’t have to hunt for hidden tools because everything you’ll be using is organized into modules and tabs that are easy to find and use. Everything is placed on each tab of the module that you are working with. This makes your work more fluid and tasks easy to accomplish.
2. You Don’t Need To Use The Menu Bar: Unlike Photoshop, you won’t need to go back and forth to the Menu Bar at the top of your screen. However, you can if you want to use more advanced features or change up your tool preferences.
3. Editing Is Seamless: With it’s easy to use sliders, presets and adjustment tools, Adobe Lightroom makes it seamless to create photos the way you want them.
4. It’s Cloud-Based: With the ability to edit directly on the Web, you can edit your full-resolution photos from anywhere you have an internet connection. Your edits are automatically applied and synchronized everywhere throughout the program.
5. Printing is Easy: If you want to print a photograph after editing, you simply switch from the Develop Module to the Print Module. These modules look similar, but the tabs and tools are different. You can easily go from importing to editing and exporting your work which saves a lot of time and effort.

Here are 10 Tips that will make using Adobe Lightroom even more effective:

1.  RAW not JPEG: If your camera allows it, you should work in RAW instead of JPEG. (A RAW image is an unprocessed photograph captured by a digital camera.) JPEG will perform a compression when saving the image and you could lose a significant amount of detail. With RAW, the image isn’t compressed. You can then use Adobe Lightroom to develop it and determine for yourself how the image should look.

2.  Exposure: Always be careful when you’re working with the Exposure Slider. Whenever you increase the value on the slider, you’re also increasing the ratio of lost detail due to burned areas. You can compensate by using the Basic Adjustment panel sliders. This will produce a much richer image.

3.  Highlights & Shadows:  If you want to increase Whites and Highlights, move towards the positive values on the sliders. When you want to increase Blacks and Shadows, go towards the negative values. Positive values decrease the amount of Blacks and Shadows on an image.

4.  Presets:  It’s always a good idea to input presets. It will make your work so much faster and easier.

5.   Detail: You can easily add more detail to an image with the Clarity Slider. But remember that too much detail isn’t always preferable.

6.   Saturation: The Vibrance and Saturation sliders are the way Adobe Lightroom handles the amount of hue present in images. This is similar to the way Photoshop works.

7.  Before/After: This represents a quick and effective way to make modifications on your original file without exporting the processed image.

8.  Camera Profiles for Lens Corrections: These should be stored in the Adobe Lightroom “install folder.” And always be sure to keep a backup on an external drive. These are difficult to come by, so you’ll want to ensure you have them stored in a safe location.

9.   Vignetting and Split Toning: These provide excellent finishes in almost any situation. Be sure to check them out if you want to improve the performance of Adobe Lightroom.

10. Space:  If you need more HDD space, clean out your Lightroom Catalog. It takes up a lot of disk space.

Source – justcreative.com