I’m totally in love with Adobe Lightroom!! You probably wouldn’t believe me, but I hardly ever go to Photoshop to alter my images. Lightroom is my all in one toolbox for digital manipulation. If I had to explain Lightroom vs Photoshop I’d put it like this:

Lightroom is the all in one toolbox: clean, simple, to the point and very effective. Basically all you really need. Photoshop on the other hand is not just a toolbox, it’s a whole workshop. Sure you can do more with Photoshop, but are you really going to use all those tools?

They can both do the same job, but in Lightoom it’s compact and just what I need. But obviously if I need to panelbeat my car I’m not going to use the “all in one tool kit”, I’ll rather take it to the workshop…you get what I’m saying?

Download Wow

Download Wow (no vignette)

In plain english Adobe Lightroom is simply AWESOME! Some reasons why I’m so in love with Lightroom:

1. I can import all my photos and sort them very quickly. Delete the unnecessary and keep the good ones.
2. Use a very simple way to rate my images and filter them.
3. I can give a basic colour (color for the USA readers LOL) correction to 1 image and  paste that same “editing” on all my other shots in that section.
4. Create some cool pre-sets that I can re-use in the future (to reduce editing time).
5. I can edit my images, while preserving all the original images. In other words Lightroom never saves the editing over the original file. You will always have access to the original file after editing. This means you can play around with the image and if you’re not happy you can go back to the original version.
6.  I save SOOOO much time, because I don’t have to open, edit save every image…you just edit them and it auto saves them. Which means my work flow time has literally halved, if not quartered.
7. I can export all my images with custom names in any size I want and it’s all automated.
8. If I want to add photoshop effects or actions, I can do it afterwards.

*By the way I’m not getting paid to say all these nice things about Lightroom…I guess when you love something, you can’t help to talk about it :)

Here are a few pre-sets I’ve created while editing. You’re welcome to download them. I’ve you’ve never installed presets before, you’re welcome to visit my previous post about presets.

Please note that they were created for RAW files and might look funny on Jpegs. They were also created for my Canon 5D images. So I’m not sure what they will do to your images if it’s with another camera, but yeh, try and see. What do you have to loose. In lightroom you always have your original image.

Please also note you’d need to adjust the “add black”, “exposure” and “brightness” tools accordingly. Each image is different. It all depends on the kind of shot, but in general, this presets should give you some good results. What I normally do is use my pre-sets and then I alter each image depending on the result.

At the end editing is all personal preference. Have fun!*

Download Vintage Green: ( this one is just fun :)