Adobe Lightroom
Beginners Masterclass Online

Lightroom is your digital dark room. It is the other half of the 'reality interpretation' artform we know as photography.

There are fundamentally two parts to photography. The capturing of the image. And the development of the image. With digital photography, more often than not, photography beginners are unaware that the world of digital photography development even exists!

It does exist. And it's how you start creating images that actually look like the photography you admire.

Lightroom allows you to visually extrapolate an image to showcase your unique interpretation of your work. It is the industry standard application to manage, organise and develop your digital RAW files. Lightroom is the only post production application you need for digital photography.

This Lightroom course will teach you everything you need to know about Lightroom in one day. You do not require any prior experience with photography or development work in order to enrol. You simply need a digital camera that shoots in RAW, name one that doesn't.

When I first picked up a camera in 2008, I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that I loved taking photographs. I travelled the world with my camera by my side, but could never understand why my photographs didn't look like 'other people's' work. Was there more to digital photography than 'out of camera' images?

Indeed there was. In fact, there was an entire world of digital negative development (RAW file development) that I knew nothing about. And photographers NEVER spoke about it. Today, professional photographers rarely give away their digital post production secrets, because it's the behind the scenes magic that defines their unique visual aesthetic.

Now, Adobe Lightroom is the industry standard for professional digital post production, and anyone with a laptop can use it. We no longer need to push through the huge learning curve of film photography, where we would setup a dark room in our home and develop images over days using chemicals. Now we can develop negatives on our laptops in seconds.

This workshop is designed to leap frog your post production knowledge from a place of knowing absolutely nothing. This one day online Lightroom course will throw you straight into the world photographic development. If you're still getting comfortable with your camera, start with our photography tips for beginners and manual mode guide first.

At the end of the workshop, I will develop 6 images from National Geographic to show you exactly how they were processed in Lightroom.

You will learn the fundamentals of this modern artistic tool extremely well. I've spent 10 years teaching Lightroom and simplifying this complex software so that you can focus on creating your own photographic masterpiece.

One of the biggest knowledge gaps for beginners is the development of RAW files. Digital photographs don't need to be developed right? What you see on the camera screen is what you get? This is not the full story.

In the film days amateur photographers and professional photographers had different ways of developing their 35mm film. Newbies would usually take their film to a generic low cost lab like Kmart, and every photographer's work would be developed with the exact same standardised process. On the other hand, professionals would develop their own film in their own dark room with their own chemicals. Or they would send it to a professional lab where it was developed with the photographer's individual style in mind.

With digital photography we have two different choices in file types produced by the camera: JPEG and RAW. Jpeg files are created by default when you buy your camera and this can be considered equivalent to taking your film to Kmart. RAW files are the digital negatives and developing them in Lightroom is equivalent to having a darkroom of your own.

Professionals always shoot in RAW. The big difference now is that we can use all of the same professional tools from the darkroom on our laptops using Lightroom. If your photography mostly consists of 'out of camera' jpeg files then you're simply not utilising the full potential of your camera or your own photography skills. At some point you'll need to start using the RAW/Lightroom workflow to get the quality you're actually after.

There are two problems which Lightroom solves for beginners. Firstly, using the library module allows us to manage all of our photographs in a simple and effective way. I have over 400,000 images in my Lightroom catalogue and I can find everything I need extremely quickly. Secondly, Lightroom allows us to develop our RAW files in our own unique way.

During the Lightroom course I'll be teaching you how to declutter and organise your own photographs with the same system I use to manage my own. And I'll be giving you a copy of my own personal preset and RAW files so you can follow me along, step by step and learn about the essential development tools we have at our disposal in Lightroom.

I've been using Lightroom since 2006 and I'll be teaching you everything I know about digital photographic development in one workshop.