Lightroom CC For Beginners – FREE Course – Lightroom CC Tutorials

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This free Lightroom for beginners course takes you through Adobe Lightroom from import to export in six short video lessons.

It is for anyone opening Lightroom for the first time, and for Lightroom Classic users who want to see how the cloud-based app works.

By the end, you will be able to import a shoot, sort it into albums, and develop a photo with the Light and Color panels. You will also fix lens and perspective problems, crop and heal, and export a finished JPG.

The course was recorded in October 2017, when Adobe called the app Lightroom CC. Adobe dropped the CC from the name in 2019, so the same app is now simply Lightroom.

The videos use Lightroom CC, the October 2017 release, and everything they show still works in the current version of Lightroom. A note flags the few places where the app has changed since, such as the Masking panel.

Every lesson below has its own video, so you can watch straight through or jump to the panel you need.

What You Will Learn

• How to import raw files and organize them with albums and folders
• How to find your way around the interface, flag and rate photos, and search by what is in them
• How to fix tone and color with the Light and Color panels
• How to sharpen, reduce noise, and correct lens and perspective problems
• How to crop, heal, paint targeted adjustments, and use presets
• How to export a JPG, send a photo to Photoshop, and share it

Requirements

Keyboard Shortcuts

Part 1: Import Photos Into Lightroom

The course opens by clearing up the two Lightrooms. In October 2017, Adobe split Lightroom into two apps.

Lightroom CC was the new cloud-based service. The desktop, mobile, and web apps share one layout and one set of photos, so an edit made in one shows up in all of them.

The Lightroom you knew before became Lightroom Classic CC. It keeps the folder-based workflow most photographers were already using. This course covers the cloud-based app only.

To import, click the Plus icon and choose Browse. Hold Shift (Windows) or Shift (macOS) and click the first and last photo to select the whole set, then click Review for Import.

In the review window, every photo should show a blue circle with a white check mark. Leave Add to Album set to None for now, then press the blue button.

The photos land in the Filmstrip along the bottom of the window. They also start uploading to the cloud, so you can open them in Lightroom mobile and Lightroom web right away.

Albums and Folders in Lightroom

Click My Photos to see how Lightroom organizes them. The panel holds your albums, your folders, and every photo synced to your account. The photos you just imported sit under Recently Added.

Click the Plus icon, choose Create Album, and name it Lightroom CC Training. Check the box to include the selected photos, then click Create. Drag the rest of the photos onto the album and let go when it highlights blue.

An album is a collection of photos, and it cannot hold another album. That is what folders are for. Click the Plus icon again, choose Create Folder, name it Vacation, and drag the England, Mexico City, and Sydney albums into it.

The rules are simple. A folder can hold albums and other folders. An album cannot hold albums, and a folder cannot hold photos without an album. The video nests a 2017 folder inside Vacation and drops the England album into it.

To undo any of this, drag an album or folder back out. Right-click a folder and choose Delete Folder to remove it.

Everything you do here syncs to Lightroom mobile and Lightroom web. The blue Sync and Backup icon tells you an upload is in progress. Lightroom mobile has the same editing tools, and you can even change the color of an object in Lightroom mobile.

Part 2: The Lightroom Interface and Smart Search

With photos imported, Part 2 tours the interface. You have already seen the Import button, the My Photos panel, and the Filmstrip.

Below the Filmstrip are the view options. Hover over any button and Lightroom shows a tooltip with its name and its shortcut. The views are Photo Grid, Square Grid, and Detail, which is the default.

You can sort by capture date, import date, modified date, or star rating, and reverse the order with one click.

Flags tell Lightroom which photos you like. Press Z (Windows) or Z (macOS) to flag a photo as picked, and X (Windows) or X (macOS) to reject it.

Star ratings run from 0 to 5, and any number key sets one. Press 5 (Windows) or 5 (macOS) and an overlay confirms five stars.

The zoom levels sit at the bottom right. Fit shows the whole image. Fill fills the window by width, so a tall photo needs panning. 1:1 shows the actual size, and it is the view to use for the Detail panel later.

Next is Hide Filmstrip. Press / (Windows) or / (macOS) to toggle it. It is the same key as the question mark. The Show Original icon turns off every adjustment so you can see the untouched photo.

The Info icon shows the photo’s data. The example was shot with the Lightroom mobile camera with GPS on, so a map shows exactly where it was taken. You can add keywords here too.

Smart Search in Lightroom

The search bar at the top center is a smart search. It reads the visual contents of your photos. Type “cat” with no keywords added, and Lightroom returns the photos it thinks are cats.

It is not perfect, and it pulled in a squirrel. But it means you can find photos without tagging a single one.

Search only looks inside the album or folder you have selected, and the label in the search bar changes as you click around. Click the filter icon to refine by star rating, flag, photo or video, keyword, camera, or location.

At the top right, the Share button is how you save a JPG after editing. Part 6 covers it. The cloud icon shows your storage and links to the mobile apps and Lightroom web.

Open Lightroom web and you see the same folders and photos. Make an edit there and it appears in the desktop app when you come back.

On the far right are the editing tools. That is where the rest of the course lives.

Part 3: The Light and Color Panels in Lightroom

Open the Venice photo from the Lightroom CC Training album, and click My Photos to collapse the panel for more room.

Click the first icon on the right to open the Edit panel. You can work in any order, but the course goes top to bottom.

Open the Light panel. Its six sliders control luminance, how bright the tones are. Hover over any slider label and Lightroom plays a short animation that explains it.

Every slider works the same way. Drag Exposure left and the photo darkens, drag it right and it brightens.

You can also type a value, or hover over a slider and press Up Arrow (Windows) or Up Arrow (macOS) to nudge it by 5. Hold AltUp Arrow (Windows) or OptionUp Arrow (macOS) to move by 1, and ShiftUp Arrow (Windows) or ShiftUp Arrow (macOS) to move by 10.

Hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) while you drag any Light slider except Contrast. Lightroom shows a clipping overlay, the areas that have gone pure white or pure black.

Double-click a slider’s circle or label to reset it. Hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) and every panel label becomes a reset button, so Reset Light clears the whole panel.

To see the Histogram, open the three-dot menu and choose Show Histogram, or press Ctrl0 (Windows) or Command0 (macOS). Shadows on the left, midtones in the center, highlights on the right.

Auto fixes tone in one click and is a fine starting point, but the course does it by hand. The Venice photo needs no Exposure change, so drag Highlights left to recover the bright tones, and Shadows right to open the dark ones.

Then drag Whites left to tone them down, and Blacks left to deepen the darkest tones.

The Color Panel

Open the Color panel. Before touching color, click the B&W icon to see how easy black and white is. The Color Mixer becomes a B&W Mixer, with one slider for each original color.

Drag Blue left and anything that was blue, like the sky and the water, gets darker. Drag it right and those areas brighten. Click B&W again to return to color.

White Balance removes color casts, the unwanted tint that lighting or a camera setting leaves behind. The presets help, but the White Balance Selector eyedropper works best. Click something that should be neutral gray and Lightroom sets Temperature and Tint in one click.

On the photo with the heavy yellow cast, one click on a gray wall cools the whole image. You can also drag by hand. Temperature left adds blue, Temperature right adds yellow, and Tint balances green against magenta. The Venice photo stays on As Shot.

Two sliders add saturation in very different ways. Vibrance boosts the colors that need it most and protects the ones already saturated, including skin tones. Saturation boosts every pixel equally.

Add Vibrance first. Then, only if every color still needs a push, add a little Saturation.

The Color Mixer lets you pick one color and adjust its hue, saturation, and luminance. Select Blue and drag Luminance left to darken the sky and water, or right to brighten them.

The drop-down offers other views of the same settings, such as Luminance for every color at once. The default color view is faster, because you pick the color first and then adjust it.

Part 4: Effects, Detail, Optics, and Geometry

The Effects panel holds Clarity, Dehaze, and Vignette. Clarity adds contrast to edge pixels and makes a photo pop. Keep it low on portraits, because it is hard on skin.

Dehaze does what it says. On the hazy rainforest photo from Costa Rica, drag it right and the haze lifts. Hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) as you drag to see which dark pixels have clipped to pure black.

Vignette dragged left darkens the corners, and dragged right whitens them. It is the first slider with extra options, marked by a small gray arrow. Click it to reveal Feather for the softness of the edge, Midpoint for how far in it reaches, Roundness, and Highlights, which lets bright areas like the sky punch through.

The Detail Panel

Next is the Detail panel, for sharpening, noise reduction, and grain. Switch to the 1:1 view first. At 100 percent you see exactly what these sliders do.

Raise Sharpening. Hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) as you drag and the color drops out, which makes the effect easier to judge. The extra options are in the table below.

The Venice photo is clean, so the course switches to a noisy photo of London. Drag Noise Reduction right to smooth it. The same Alt or Option trick hides the color here too.

Its extra options are Detail, which sets how much fine detail survives the blur, and Contrast, which wins back contrast lost to smoothing. Color Noise Reduction handles colored speckles, with Color Detail and Smoothing underneath it.

Grain adds a film look. Size sets how big the grains are and Roughness sets how even they are. This is the one slider where Alt or Option does nothing.

The Optics and Geometry Panels

The Optics panel has two checkboxes. Back on the Venice photo, zoom into a high-contrast edge and check Remove Chromatic Aberration. The magenta and green fringes disappear.

Chromatic aberration is a lens problem. The colors bend at slightly different angles and do not meet at the same point, so edges pick up a colored glow.

Fit the photo to the screen and check Enable Lens Corrections. With a raw file, Lightroom reads the camera and lens from the metadata and applies the matching profile to fix distortion and lens vignetting.

Expand the extra options to find Distortion Correction and Lens Vignetting. Both default to 100, the amount the profile recommends, and the default is usually right.

The Geometry panel fixes perspective. It shines on crooked horizons and buildings whose lines lean. The four Upright modes are Auto, Level, Vertical, and Full. Try Auto first, because it usually gets it right, then try the others in case you like one better.

After an Upright mode, the sliders below fine-tune the result by hand. Or use the Guided Upright tool. Drag two or more guides along lines that should be straight, and Lightroom straightens the photo to match.

Back on the Venice photo, press \ (Windows) or \ (macOS) to see the original, and press it again to see the edit. A few sliders made a much better photo.

Part 5: Crop, Heal, Targeted Adjustments, and Presets

Below the Edit panel sits the Crop tool. Press C (Windows) or C (macOS) or click its icon. Drag the corner handles to crop.

While cropping, drag the Straighten slider to rotate the photo, or click Auto to level the horizon for you.

The Crop Aspect icon rotates the crop box between landscape and portrait. Its tooltip shows no shortcut, but X (Windows) or X (macOS) does it. That is a Photoshop shortcut, and it turns out to work here too.

The Aspect drop-down applies a preset ratio, and picking one closes the lock icon so the ratio stays fixed. Click the lock yourself to hold a ratio you set by hand. Four icons rotate and flip the photo.

There is a Reset Crop button. Alt or Option does not turn labels into reset buttons here, and the reset leaves rotate and flip alone. Press Enter (Windows) or Return (macOS) to apply the crop.

Next is the Healing Brush. Press H (Windows) or H (macOS) and paint over anything you want gone. Lightroom matches the texture, lighting, and shading of a sampled area to the spot you painted.

It works on the raw data, which gives cleaner matches, and the edit lives in a sidecar file, so it is non-destructive.

Set the size with the slider or with [ (Windows) or [ (macOS) and ] (Windows) or ] (macOS). Feather softens the edge, and a little feathering hides the stroke. Opacity controls how much of the fix shows.

If the result looks wrong, drag the sample area somewhere else. You can change Feather and Opacity after the fact while the spot is selected. Press Backspace (Windows) or Delete (macOS) to remove it. Clone mode copies pixels instead of blending them, with the same sliders.

The Brush, the Gradients, and Presets

The Brush tool makes targeted adjustments. Press B (Windows) or B (macOS), make the brush bigger with ] (Windows) or ] (macOS), and paint. Nothing changes until you move a slider, and then the change appears only where you painted.

Its extra options are Feather, Flow for how fast the effect builds, Density for how transparent the stroke is, and Auto Mask, which keeps strokes inside areas of similar color. With it checked, a stroke across the subject leaves the background alone.

Turn on Erase to remove part of a stroke, or hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) while painting to erase for a moment. Click the Plus icon to start a separate adjustment. Each one shows as a blue dot. Right-click a dot and choose Delete, or select it and press Backspace (Windows) or Delete (macOS).

This is also the tool behind the trick to change the color of anything in Lightroom.

The two gradient tools work like the Brush, but you drag instead of paint. Press L (Windows) or L (macOS) for the Linear Gradient, drag across the photo, and adjust the sliders. Invert flips it.

Press R (Windows) or R (macOS) for the Radial Gradient. Use it for bright spots and sun glare. If the effect lands outside the circle, check Invert. Either gradient deletes with Backspace or Delete.

Last, click Presets to open the panel. The course opens Light and Color beside it to show that a preset is just the sliders moving.

Hover over a preset and the photo previews it while the sliders jump to match. Click to apply, then refine with the sliders.

To save your own, click the three dots, choose Create Preset, and name it. Lightroom remembers the slider positions and files it under User Presets.

Part 6: Export Photos From Lightroom

With the edit done, the last lesson gets the photo out of Lightroom. Click the Export icon and choose Save To.

In the save window, pick a file type. The choices are JPG or Original plus Settings. Choose a location, then a size.

Size defaults to Small. Full Size exports the actual pixel dimensions, and Custom lets you type a pixel value for the longest edge. Click Save and the JPG lands on your computer.

To keep editing in Photoshop, go to File > Edit in Photoshop. Leave Lightroom open while you work. When you close the photo in Photoshop, the edits travel back into Lightroom.

The video also shares straight to Facebook. The first time, Lightroom asks you to sign in. Then you type a description, pick an album, and click Share.

Frequently Asked Questions

Lightroom for Beginners: Start Here

Those six lessons are the whole Lightroom for beginners course. Import, organize, develop, correct, retouch, and export, in the order you will use them on a real shoot.

None of it needs more than a few sliders. Hover over a label when you forget what one does, and use the notes above when a panel has moved since 2017.

Watch each video to see the sliders move in real time, and if you have a question, comment on the video.

Pro Training

Selections and Masking Mastery

Complete course includes 2.5 hours of step-by-step lessons, 6 structured modules, downloadable practice files, and custom Photoshop brushes. Everything you need to master selections and masks in one place.

View the Course

Related Links

• How To Change The Color of Anything in Lightroom, Adjustment Brush Trick
• How To Easily Change The Color of Anything in Lightroom Mobile
• 7 Lightroom Hidden Gems You Wish You Knew Sooner