How to Use Lightroom Classic: A Complete Tutorial for Beginners

Everything you need to know about Lightroom Classic

By Spencer Cox 89 Comments
Last Updated On April 22, 2023

Adobe Lightroom is a behemoth of photography software with enough functions and processes to make any photographer crazy. At the simplest level, though, Lightroom was created to help you do just three main things: sort your photos, post-process them, and export them. On Photography Life alone, we already have more than 100 articles about Lightroom — the equivalent of several books — and other websites have countless more. Clearly, it is an important topic to learn, whether you are just starting out or you are an advanced photographer. In this comprehensive guide, I will go over the process of using Lightroom Classic for beginners, from start to finish, including tips on the topics that tend to confuse people the most.

Note that this article covers Lightroom Classic rather than the cloud-based “Lightroom / Lightroom CC” that is a newer, less comprehensive software. (See my guide to Lightroom Classic vs Lightroom for more). If there’s a specific term that you’re trying to find in this article, you might want to press Control F (or, for Mac, Command F) on your keyboard. If you’ve never used this shortcut before, it’s very useful, since it lets you search a webpage by the keyword you want.

Also, you can skip to the various parts of this article by clicking on the options here:

My goal was to write a tutorial that lays out everything a beginner needs to know about Lightroom, whether you have an older standalone version (such as Lightroom 5 or Lightroom 6) or the newest version (Lightroom Classic).

Hopefully, even if you start without any knowledge at all, you’ll end up with a medium- to high-level understanding of Lightroom’s most important concepts. So, it’s a long article.

Feel free to bookmark this page for later reference if you find some of these tips to be useful. Lightroom can be overwhelming at first, and the purpose of this guide is to simplify everything as much as possible.

What is Lightroom Classic?

Lightroom is a post-processing and photo organization software. It lets you sort your photos, edit them, and export them at whatever size you need. Let’s dive into each of these three main functions:

Organizing Your Photos

The most obvious thing that Lightroom does is help you sort and organize your photos.

Each time you import images into Lightroom, you’re also seeing where they’re located on your computer (i.e., the file structure). This appears on the left-hand side of your screen. So, you might see something like this:

The photos that are already on your computer don’t automatically show up in Lightroom. If you want to add some of your photos to Lightroom, or you want to add an entire folder of photos, you’ll need to import them. I’ll cover more about the Import Dialogue later; it’s not something you need to know in detail yet.

Beyond simply telling you where your photos are located, though, Lightroom has many other ways to sort and organize your photos.

What if, for example, you take a photo that you particularly like, and you want to find it again in the future? Is there some way to mark it that makes it easy to locate later?

Of course! There are countless ways to do so. You could give it a five-star rating, you could flag it, you could add it to a “Best Photos” collection, and many more. Later on, I’ll go into detail about these different options, and how you can use them to sort and organize your photos however you want.

For now, just know that Lightroom is one of the main programs — in fact, the most popular one on the market — that photographers use to organize and sort their photos.

Editing Your Photos

Lightroom isn’t all about sorting your photos, though. Most importantly, it also lets you edit the photos that you take.

Lightroom doesn’t offer the same vast range of post-processing edits that other software options, such as Photoshop, do. Still, just because it isn’t as extensive doesn’t mean it’s not extensive enough. Many photographers can get by seamlessly with Lightroom’s post-processing features; personally, although I do own Photoshop, I use it more for graphic design work than photo editing.

Lightroom’s post-processing options cover all the main bases: brightness, contrast, color, sharpness, and many more adjustments. This also includes the ability to apply local edits — i.e., adjusting certain parts of the photo selectively, while leaving the rest untouched.

In short, Lightroom was designed to edit your photos. This isn’t simply a side feature that you can use from time to time rather than editing the photo in Photoshop; it’s intended to be the main tool you use for post-processing.

Exporting Your Photos

Most likely, you’re already somewhat familiar with the idea of exporting your photos.

Say, for example, that you’re trying to email a set of several photos to one of your friends. Since Gmail and other email services tend to have a file size limit — something like 25 megabytes — you may not be able to send full-resolution photos. One way around that is to shrink the file size of the photos that you send. Rather than 4000-pixel photos at 0% compression, you could send 1000-pixel photos at 20% compression instead.

That’s one of the things Lightroom does well. If you need to resize a photo for email (or anything else), it is easy to export a photo at whatever settings you want.

Exporting doesn’t delete the original copy of your photos. If you export a 500-pixel copy of a photo, it’s just that — a copy. It will have a different file name (or file type) from your original photo, and you can delete/modify/send it however you want without affecting the real version.

(In fact, if you try to export a photo in Lightroom without changing its name, location, or file type — something that normally would override the original — Lightroom won’t even let you.)

I export photos all the time: When I enter photo contests, text photos to people, upload images to my website, and so on. I just right-click on the photo in Lightroom, go to Export > Export, and pick all the settings I want for my final photo.

This isn’t the most well-known thing that Lightroom does, but, in the long run, you’ll end up exporting your photos all the time.

What Makes Lightroom Different from other Software?

This is one of the top questions I hear about Lightroom, and with good reason. Lightroom does not work how you might expect, and, in a few crucial ways, it is vastly different from other options on the market, including software like Photoshop.

Case in point: When you make a change to your photo in Lightroom, that change only shows up in Lightroom.

What do I mean by this? Say that you brighten a photo in Lightroom. You might be surprised to realize that, if you open the photo in any other software, it won’t look any brighter than normal. The actual, underlying file is totally unchanged.

This is a fundamental part of Lightroom, and it’s not a feature you can disable.

So, if Lightroom makes it impossible to actually edit your photos, and the edits are only visible in Lightroom, why would professionals ever use it?

In fact, this system has a lot of benefits.

First, to address the main concern most people have: Yes, there is a way to see your Lightroom edits outside of Lightroom. What is it? You already know the answer — exports.

When you edit a photo in Lightroom, the edits do only show up in Lightroom. However, when you export a photo — which, as I mentioned earlier, is one of the three most important things you can do in Lightroom — all the edits are present in the photo you’ve exported.

So, you can edit a photo all day in Lightroom to look exactly how you want, but you won’t see any of the changes if you open the file outside of Lightroom. The fix is simple: Re-enter Lightroom, right-click, click Export > Export, and export the photo how you want. The exported copy of the photo now has all the edits you just made. It doesn’t replace the original file, which is still sitting happily on your computer. Instead, it creates an entirely new photo, complete with all the export settings you chose (file type, pixel dimensions, compression, file name, and so on).

Why is this better than simply editing the actual, original photo? There are a few reasons, but here’s the big one: This type of editing is non-destructive. You’re never changing anything about your original file at all. (There are only three settings within Lightroom that do affect the original: renaming the photo, moving the photo to a new folder on your hard drive, and deleting the photo from your disk.) Lightroom makes it essentially impossible to accidentally ruin anything beyond repair.

The same cannot be said of, for example, Photoshop. If you open one of your photos in Photoshop, crop it, save the photo, and exit, your photo will be permanently cropped. There are ways around this — specifically, unchecking the “delete cropped pixels” option and saving as a PSD file — but this isn’t an intuitive fix. It’s far too easy to edit the original photo by mistake. (See Photoshop vs Lightroom for more differences.)

Lightroom is great precisely because you’re never touching the original file. Lightroom is non-destructive editing software, and that is a critical feature for almost every photographer.

What is the Lightroom Catalog?

As you read about Lightroom, you’ll hear one term a lot: catalog.

Lightroom is a cataloging software.

What does that mean? In fact, this is exactly what I covered in the prior section: Lightroom doesn’t actually touch your photos.

Every single edit that you make to a photo; each five-star rating you give; every time you add a photo to a collection — all of those changes are stored somewhere other than the actual photo on your computer. Where? The Lightroom catalog file.

The Lightroom catalog is one file that contains each change and adjustment you make to every single one of your photos. It also doesn’t take up too much space on your computer; my Lightroom catalog file is only about 300 megabytes in size, yet it contains all the edits to each of my thousands of photos. Not bad!

The Lightroom catalog gets more and more complicated as you learn about it in-depth. If you want to use multiple catalogs, send a catalog of photos to someone else, or use the same catalog on multiple computers, things can be very tricky. I recommend reading our full article on Lightroom catalogs if you’re trying to do anything complicated, and our article on using Lightroom with multiple computers.

Luckily, you probably don’t need to do any of that yet. If you just want to add photos to a single Lightroom catalog, you already know enough to start.

By default, the photos on your computer (or memory card) won’t be a part of your Lightroom catalog — so, you need to add them yourself. How do you do this? To add a photo to your Lightroom catalog, you need to start at the Import Dialogue. Click to the next below, and we’ll cover that process.

Lightroom Classic vs Lightroom (2023)

Once upon a time, there was just Lightroom. But ever since Adobe moved to cloud-based and subscription-based services, Lightroom has had two incarnations: Lightroom Classic and Lightroom (formerly known as Lightroom CC, where CC stands for “Creative Cloud”). Lightroom Classic is the desktop-only Lightroom that most photographers use, whereas Lightroom is a cloud-based editor that stores your original photos in Adobe’s cloud.

Depending on what package you buy from Adobe, there’s a good chance that you’ll have both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom available to download. But that doesn’t mean you should be using both of them. Despite some similar features, these programs are quite different from one another. I’ll outline the differences between the two below.

1) The Naming Headache

For years, Adobe has offered both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom on the market. At first, the only difference was that Lightroom Classic was a standalone, perpetual-license product, while Lightroom was part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription model. Over time, Adobe started to differentiate them and add unique features to each one.

The interface on Lightroom Classic is exactly the same as the interface in the older, perpetual-license versions of Lightroom. On the other hand, Lightroom is a bit different. It has a simplified and less powerful interface, but it is cross-platform – meaning that you can edit your photos on your desktop and then switch to your phone or tablet to continue your work.

• Lightroom Classic is a continuation of Adobe’s popular desktop-based RAW editing software
• Lightroom is a cross-platform, cloud-based editor that has more limited editing and organization features than Lightroom Classic

The next section will clarify things if you want a full list of feature differences between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom.

2) Comparing Features Between the New Lightroom Products

Basically, Lightroom Classic really is “classic.” If there’s something you’ve been able to do in prior versions of Lightroom, you can do it in Lightroom Classic as well. It is also more advanced and has better organization-related capabilities (except that it lacks the artificial intelligence keyboarding of Lightroom).

Meanwhile, Lightroom is very streamlined. It lets you edit the same photo on your desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone without worrying about transferring images across devices. It also doesn’t have a huge learning curve; it should be pretty easy for most people to figure out what’s going on. However, it’s less advanced than Lightroom Classic, and if you want to gain the signature features that it offers over Lightroom Classic, you need to pay to store your photos on Adobe’s cloud. This can get expensive if you have multiple terabytes of photos.

Even though Lightroom Classic has more advanced editing features, most of the good ones made their way to Lightroom as well. That includes things like local adjustments, for example, which are a must-have for advanced editing. Lightroom also has an artificial intelligence keyword search tool, which is an useful way to find a set of photos with the same subject. For example, consider this image, with a search for “cactus”:

Artificial intelligence keyword search in Lightroom.

3) Who Should Use Lightroom Classic?

Are you an advanced or professional photographer? Have you used Lightroom before in the past? If so, Lightroom Classic is the obvious path for your work.

It simply has more features that advanced photographers would want, like tethering, soft proofing, and complex organizing. As nice as the artificial intelligence keyword search in Lightroom can be, most professionals will care more about things like plugins, multiple catalogs, fully-fledged develop features, and so on. Lightroom Classic fills the same market segment as all the prior versions of Lightroom did.

• Advanced or professional photographers who have used Lightroom in the past and appreciate its in-depth feature set
• Photographers who edit a large number of photos, which would be too expensive to store in the cloud or too inconvenient with a slower internet connection
• Photographers who use third-party plugins

4) Who Should Use Lightroom?

In many ways, Lightroom can seem a bit slimmed-down compared to Lightroom Classic. It doesn’t have some of the features that photographers consider valuable, or even necessary, for professional work. However, that is one of the biggest benefits of Lightroom in some ways. The target audience of Lightroom is photographers who value ease-of-use more than advanced features and capabilities in their software.

Lightroom has a very consumer-oriented design and feature set to make the learning curve as easy as possible, while still containing fairly advanced editing and organizational features. As such, it’s the better software for hobbyists, especially those with multiple devices like a desktop/laptop/tablet that they often switch between.

Does that mean advanced photographers would never use Lightroom? Actually, there are some circumstances where I see Lightroom as holding a distinct advantage over Lightroom Classic even for professionals.

For example, if you do a lot of social media marketing, you’ll want the ability to edit videos on the go (i.e., behind-the-scenes smartphone videos). Lightroom can do that, and Lightroom Classic can’t. I can see YouTube and social media professionals relying on the relatively advanced post-processing abilities of Lightroom to post quick content in the field.

In short, Lightroom is built for mobile use, in addition to its value for hobbyist photography. If you’re an advanced photographer who doesn’t use your phone or tablet as an integral part of your brand and marketing strategy, though, Lightroom Classic will make more sense most of the time.

• Casual or hobbyist photographers who want an easy-to-learn, yet surprisingly powerful, post-processing app for multiple-platform editing
• Professionals with an active social media or YouTube presence who consistently create/share content on the go, especially with smartphones
• Photographers who want to edit across multiple devices without worrying about file management

5) Pricing

The pricing for Lightroom Classic is $19.99/month with Adobe’s photography package, which also includes Photoshop. This package also includes the cloud-based Lightroom.

If you don’t need Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, you can get just Lightroom and 1TB of cloud storage for $10/month. If 1TB is not enough for your uses, you will need to add another $10/month for every additional terabyte.

6) Conclusion

A lot of professionals will find the cloud-based version of Lightroom lacking in a few areas. No plugin support, virtual copies, history panel, or even color labels? It’s definitely limited in that respect.

Still, the biggest target audience for Lightroom – casual photographers – neither needs nor wants most of those things. Professional photographers who do want them will prefer Lightroom Classic instead. And some photographers will use a combination of the two, such as professional photographers with a big social media following who might want some features of both.

At the end of the day, it’s not surprising that Adobe split Lightroom into two parts. The only frustrating thing is that the two different software options have such similar names. And most of the time when photographers just say “Lightroom,” they’re referring to Lightroom Classic! Hopefully, though, this article has helped you see the differences between them and recognize which one is right for you. If you have any questions, leave a comment below, and someone from our team of professional photographers at Photography Life will get back to you with an answer!

Lightroom Classic | Common Questions

Whether you are a beginner or pro or somewhere in between, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic includes all your essential tools for amazing photography on the desktop. With Lightroom Classic, you have access to powerful one-click tools and advanced controls to make your photos look amazing. Easily organize all your photos on your desktop and share them in a variety of ways.

Get Lightroom Classic as a part of the Creative Cloud Photography – new plan.

See the What’s New page for details.

The latest version of Lightroom Classic enables you to organize, edit, and share your photographs from Windows or a Mac machine. Check What’s New to know more about the latest Lightroom Classic features.

Lightroom Classic includes all the tools you need for most digital photography tasks in one intuitive solution. It’s your go-to app for organizing, enhancing, and sharing your images, every day. It helps photographers work faster and more efficiently with one image, a set of images, or a large image library. Photoshop is the industry standard in digital image editing, with advanced tools that photographers, graphic designers, and other graphics professionals use when they need complete control to perform detailed, pixel-level editing and work with multilayered files. Get both Lightroom Classic and Photoshop as a part of the Creative Cloud Photography plan.

No, Lightroom Classic works on Mac or PC only. However, you can have Lightroom on mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, and Android, as a part of the Creative Cloud Photography plan. Learn more about Lightroom on mobile devices. You can edit and organize photos on your desktop or mobile devices anytime. Any adjustment you make is seamlessly updated across devices. You can also share photos and get feedback with Lightroom web galleries.