Before and after photographs below, “out of camera” vs after this Lightroom Course.
You will learn exactly how to develop these photographs in this course.
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 the key to unlocking the massive potential you have in you to create your own exceptionally beautiful imagery.
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 about it. This one day online Lightroom course will throw you straight into the world photographic development.
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.
Development work in Lightroom is used to extrapolate your work more fully. Your camera is a limited interpretation device, it was not built for developing RAW files.
A huge part of mastering Lightroom is understanding how to use it to self-learn photography. It provides a path for you to see the limitations in your work and efficiently iterate and improve. This path is one of self discovery, where you learn to recognise and own what you love.
You do not need a university degree to create your own unique photographic masterpiece.
One thing that’s never discussed in-depth with digital post production is the potential for empowering yourself to self learn in photography. This is one of the fundamental teachings of this photography masterclass, and the thing that differentiates it from absolutely every other course that exists.
This course is about setting you off on the path by yourself, to create your own unique masterpiece. It’s not about copying the latest preset trend. A unique masterpiece does not use a particular colour palette because it’s trending on Tiktok.
A unique masterpiece is printed, huge, and brought to life in your physical reality. But it’s not necessarily something that happens overnight. It’s a path you walk.
“Learn everything I know about post production in less than a day.”
There are two main learning areas in this workshop. Firstly, photographic management. You will learn how to efficiently manage 400,000 photographs using the Lightroom library module.
Secondly, development. I will give you my personal preset that I use to develop every single photograph. You’ll learn exactly how to create your own preset, and how to use the fundamental tools of the develop module while working on RAW files from my personal travel photography portfolio.
This series of photography courses have been running since 2011 and are currently the highest rated and most reviewed photography courses in Melbourne Australia. You can see over 365 reviews on WeTeachMe, Google, TripAdvisor and Airbnb Experiences.
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 in your photography journey you’ll have to start using the RAW/Lightroom workflow to reach the next level in the quality of the photography you’re producing.
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.
I’ve been using Lightroom since 2006 and I’ll be teaching you everything I know about digital photographic development in one workshop.
