Looking to up your photography game? In the mood to try out a new post technique? Well, we’ve gathered up an amazing list of the best free Lightroom tutorials for photographers. Whether it’s your first foray into Lightroom or you want to learn how to create and sell your own presets, this Adobe Lightroom tutorial round-up covers everything you need to know to become a Lightroom whiz. We’ve got the best Lightroom tutorials for beginners, experienced editors, and even Lightroom pros looking to add a few new tricks to their arsenal and learn how to be a better photographer.
Nailing these Lightroom techniques is the perfect way to stand out and get noticed amid the crowd of photographers online. These Lightroom tutorials are a great way to enrich your online photography portfolio—and lure in potential new clients looking for shooters with that magic post-production touch.
Here’s everything you need to create the gorgeous shots you yearn for—even if your original shot is only so-so.
Adobe Lightroom Tutorials For Beginners
Starting out in Lightroom can be overwhelming for newbies, so we’ll start with the very basics. These Lightroom CC tutorials for beginners are perfect for anyone new to Lightroom, and will help you build your photo editing skills quickly. From opening the program to making your first edits, these Lightroom tutorials cover everything you need to get started.
Take Your First Steps In Lightroom CC
This free Lightroom tutorial for beginners—straight from Adobe themselves, so you know it’s good—covers the basics of the Lightroom CC ecosystem. You’ll learn how to add photos to your photo library, tour the workspace, and view your photos in different ways.
Get to Know Adobe Lightroom’s Editing Controls
Again from Adobe, this beginners Lightroom Tutorial gives an overview of the editing controls, tips for getting started with presets, and the basics of how to create your own presets.
Adjust Light and Color in Lightroom
This tutorial covers how to use the controls in the Light panel to adjust exposure and contrast, how to correct a color cast with the white balance controls, and how to use the Vibrance and Saturation sliders to control color intensity.
Crop and Adjust Perspective in Lightroom
Are all of your architectural shots crooked? This Lightroom tutorial for beginners covers how to crop, straighten and use Upright to adjust perspective in Lightroom CC.
Make Selective Edits in Lightroom
As your photography career advances, you’ll need to learn to be more selective during your editing process. This Lightroom tutorial teaches you how to use the Radial Gradient tool, the Linear Gradient tool, the Brush tool, and the healing brush to selectively edit your images.
Add Effects and Improve Detail
Sometimes you just need a little clarity. Here’s an Adobe Lightroom tutorial that will show you how to apply a Clarity adjustment to enhance midtone contrast in your photos, as well as how to use the Dehaze adjustment to reduce or add haze. Plus, you’ll learn to reduce digital noise and sharpen your photos.
How to Even Out White Balance and Exposure in Camera Raw and Lightroom
Getting the proper white balance is key—but mixed lighting can wreak havoc on your color balance. This handy Lightroom tutorial covers a quick and easy retouching technique to even out the brightness and white balance in your images.
Get Started Editing Food Photography in Adobe Lightroom
This one’s for all the foodies out there: it’s a Lightroom tutorial that covers the basics of food photography for food bloggers and photographers. Hope you’re not hungry!
How to Retouch a Portrait
While you probably won’t be airbrushing for Vogue in the very near future (although maybe, if you practice a lot in the next little while…), this intro to Lightroom portrait retouching will give you the techniques you need to make people look fabulous with just a few clicks. (need a little portrait photography inspiration? Check out this round-up of amazing portrait photography portfolios.
The Complete Guide to Adobe Lightroom Processing: 109 Tips
This tutorial guides you through everything you need to know to master Adobe Lightroom, from start to finish. If you want to see everything in one place, start here.
A Free Tutorial on Lightroom CC for Beginners
A comprehensive tutorial for beginners, this 38-minute training course walks you through all of the different tools and panels in Lightroom CC, so you can get a thorough understanding of what’s what as you start exploring.
Lightroom for Travel Photography: Basic Adjustments
If your photography goals include traveling the world and sharing your images as you go, here’s an intro Lightroom tutorial geared specifically towards optimizing your travel photography with Lightroom’s basic adjustments for tone and color.
Intermediate Lightroom Tutorials
Once you’ve mastered the basics, it’s time to move on to more creative edits. These Lightroom editing tutorials will have you exploring new ground (and sky) in no time. From editing newborn photography to applying watermarks, these Lightroom tutorials cover everything you need to up your editing game, now.
Color Correction in Lightroom
When unpredictable light is in play—for example, in the middle of Times Square, where this tutorial sets the scene—it’s impossible to correct the color in camera. The solution? A quick and easy tutorial that will help you handle the color correction in post-production.
How to Make Creative Color Adjustments in Adobe Lightroom
“How do I edit my photo to look like (insert famous photographer’s name)?” This tutorial sets out to answer one part of that eternal question, exploring the many ways you can edit color to get the look you want in your final images—and find your own signature style. The tutorial covers the basics of hue, saturation, and luminance, before moving into the technical how-tos of playing creatively with color.
Turn a Photo into a Silhouette
Add an artsy silhouette effect to your images, whether you’re adding drama or just finding a creative way to make up for poor lighting. Here you have a tutorial that shows you how to use the Brush tool in Adobe Lightroom, adjusting the subject of a photo so it’s in silhouette.
Soft Light Baby Portrait Processing Lightroom Workflow
Bring out the cuteness in all of those baby photos, whether the munchkins are your own or a client’s. This Lightroom tutorial walks you through the steps to processing a natural, soft light baby portrait.
Natural Light Baby Portrait Editing Lightroom Workflow
Another Lightroom tutorial dedicated to bringing as much cuteness as possible out of baby photos, this one is geared towards taking an underexposed, dull photo and using Lightroom to turn it into a print-ready portrait.
How to Get the Most Out of Night Photos
Need a fast and fun overview of the many sliders and filters that you can use to make the most of your night photos? You can learn to use color, selective adjustments, and brightness as a combo for great night shots here.
Create a Cinematic Effect in Lightroom
Up the drama in your photos with a moody cinematic effect. This Lightroom tutorial takes you through the simple steps you need to apply a cinematic style to your photos, to Oscar-worthy effect.
How to Create a Lomography Effect in Adobe Lightroom
Here you can learn how to get the same effect you’d get with a Polaroid, Hola, or Lomo camera—without the camera.
How to Create a Desaturated Cinematic Effect in Adobe Lightroom
This Lightroom tutorial walks you through the steps to get the moody desaturated look you find frequently in movies and TV, which is also a perfect fit for ads and poster design.
How to Edit Black and White Photos in Lightroom CC
A single click takes you away from a world of color and into Lightroom’s powerful black and white editor. Use the tutorial for a walk-through of the basics of Black and White RAW editing with Lightroom.
Lightroom Tutorial: Create and Apply Watermarks to your Photos
Get serious about protecting your images (and upping your branding!) with a guide to using watermarks in Lightroom. Everything you need to know to mark your images and control your image.
Make a Pastel Effect in Lightroom
Want to create dreamy pastel images? (This technique works especially well with outdoor shots and portraits!) Here’s a Lightroom tutorial that’ll help you rock this oh-so-soft insta-look.
Create an Orange and Teal Look in Lightroom
What about a high-contrast orange and teal palette? This Lightroom tutorial walks you through multiple options to get the same effect, with more or less control over the final image.
How to Use Lightroom’s Graduated Filter Tool
Calling all landscape photographers—Lightroom’s graduated filter tool will be invaluable to you in processing landscape photos. Learn to make selective adjustments that highlight different parts of your photo for an entrancing effect.
How to Use Lightroom’s Radial Filter to Enhance Your Photos
This Adobe Lightroom tutorial for photographers covers all things radial filter, which can be used to make a wide variety of selective adjustments, quickly and easily, without Photoshop.
Introduction to the HSL Settings in Lightroom
Lightroom’s Develop Module gives you an abundance of tools and settings to work with the colors of a photo, including the ultra-powerful HSL settings. These often-overlooked tools are key to maximizing your results in Lightroom—learn how to use them here!
Create Portraits on the Go with Lightroom CC
Watch and learn how portrait photographer Jared Soares shoots, applies presets, tweaks color and lighting, and shares directly to social media—all with Lightroom CC on his phone.
Using Smart Keywords in Lightroom CC
If you don’t take the time to think about keywords, you’ll be missing out on the ease of organizing, storing, and finding your photos, fast. This might sound less exciting than some of the more creative Lightroom tutorials, but we urge you not to skip it! You’ll thank us later.
How to: Backing up your Lightroom in the Cloud
Flashy it’s not, but it’s definitely worth learning how to backup your images (in multiple locations!) just in case.
How to Batch Edit your Ohotos in Lightroom
If your favorite part of photography is the part where you’re actually taking the photos (and not the part where you’re sitting in front of the computer prettifying them), this Lightroom tutorial will take you through batch edits. Edit dozens, hundreds, or thousands of photos in one go with Lightroom’s powerful batch edit feature.
Creating HDR Effects in Lightroom and Photoshop
HDR can give you incredible shots, but isn’t possible without multiple images to pull from. Here’s a Lightroom tutorial to take you through how to replicate an HDR effect using just a single exposure.
How to Create a High Contrast Black & White Effect in Lightroom
Want a bold, striking black and white look? This Lightroom tutorial takes you through the settings you need to create an attention-getting black and white shot.
HDR Merge and Panorama Merge
This Lightroom 6 tutorial is especially useful for landscape and nature photographers. It will take you through the HDR merge and panorama merge features, which let you create HDR images and panoramas inside Lightroom.
How to Edit Skies in Adobe Lightroom
Photos featuring both the sky and a foreground can often turn out imbalanced. Exposing for the darker foreground means the sky ends up overexposed and overblown. Here you can master a quick fix.
Easily and Selectively Desaturate Colors in Lightroom
Sometimes a little pop of color is just the thing you need to take a photo from blah to bam. In just a few seconds, you can make one (or a few) colors in your photos stand out, desaturating the rest to delightful effect.
Advanced Lightroom Tutorials
Now it’s time to have some real fun. These advanced Lightroom tutorials will cover tips and tricks that can seriously take your portfolio to another level. Flex your Lightroom muscles by acing these advanced Lightroom tutorials.
Advanced Lightroom Tips for Professionals: 10 Lightroom Tips for Awesomeness
This advanced Lightroom tutorial features 10 things to think about every time you fire up Lightroom CC. A quick and easy watch with a few surprises that will change the way you think about editing in Lightroom.
Advanced Lightroom tutorial – Complete Edit from Start to Finish!
Here’s a very in-depth video that will take you through one photographer’s whole editing process from start to finish, giving you all of their insights on why they make each decision as they go, how the different tools are affecting the final image (and in what way), and how you can apply their techniques to your own photos.
How to Retouch Using Lightroom Only
Tired of switching over to Photoshop for in-depth retouching? Learn how to retouch portraits using Lightroom only. Clocking in at 39 minutes, it’s one of the longer tutorials in our roundup, but it is one of the best Adobe Lightroom video tutorials out there, and worth watching to see every step this photographer takes as he edits his final image.
Advanced Lightroom Vignette Settings
This Adobe Lightroom video tutorial covers little-known, advanced settings inside Lightroom’s vignette effects. Master the tips and tricks to get a truly awesome vignette effect going.
How to Create Your Own Lightroom Presets
If you want to develop a signature look, you’re going to want to start creating your own presets. Presets let you recreate complex edit settings with the click of a button. Check out this tutorial for a workflow walk-through to create your own presets, featuring three retouching techniques: sunset, dramatic black and white, and an Instagram-ish look.
How to Make and Sell Your Own Lightroom Presets
This in-depth Lightroom tutorial covers everything you need to know about boosting your photographic business with preset sales. Beyond just creating and using your own presets, this guide shows you how to create online shops to sell your presets and custom filters—and add another revenue stream to your business!
Relighting Your Photos in Lightroom, Photoshop and ON1 Photo
You might not have gotten the light you wanted, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try to create it yourself. Here’s a way to play with the lighting way after the fact, to a beautiful effect.
How to Recover and Process an Underexposed RAW Photo in Lightroom or Photoshop
An underexposed RAW photo files has a ton of data waiting in the shadows for you to bring out and use to create a stunning photo. This advanced Lightroom tutorial will show you how to bring your photos back from the edge of darkness.
How to Save an Underexposed Photo Using Lightroom
Another guide to saving underexposed photos that you can consult before giving up hope. All is not lost! (Hopefully.)
How to Use Virtual Copies in Lightroom
Here’s one your clients will love you for, even if they probably won’t realize why. Create multiple versions of your photos and save diskspace with Virtual Copies.
Advanced Brush Settings in Lightroom and Photoshop
This Lightroom tutorial was created by a photographer who states that, if they could only have one tool, it would be a brush. With these advanced brush settings, the brush is sure to find its place in your own arsenal of tools, too. This video showcases two little known Lightroom settings, Flow and Density.
Boosting Fall Colors in Lightroom, Photoshop, and ON1
This tutorial applies to far more than just fall photos—the techniques explored will improve all your photos (but they are especially good for autumnal photos with nice reds, oranges and yellows that are just calling out for enhancement).
Creating the Landscape Soft Glow Look (The Orton Effect)
The Orton effect creates a soft glow that makes landscape photos look especially dreamy. This Lightroom tutorial walks you through one photographer’s technique for getting that gorgeous glow.
Don’t Forget to Share Your Shots!
Once you harness these Lightroom tutorials into creating new and amazing work, you should show it off! Make sure to share your shots on your online photography portfolio, so you can wow your potential clients with your Lightroom mastery.
Your online photography portfolio is your top spot for sharing, followed by any and all social platforms you’ve set up for yourself, like Instagram, of course.
Haven’t created your own portfolio yet? Now is definitely the time—all of your new Lightroom skills need to be showcased somewhere equally chic!
To get yourself set up, choose a website builder with great templates that complement your aesthetic, an online store (so you can sell your prints), and client proofing built right in, allowing you to cut down on annoying back-and-forth e-mailing with clients. Another handy feature to look for? Integration with Lightroom.
We can’t wait to see what Lightroom wizardry you have to share!
Want a few more ways to up your photography game?
These 18 Lightroom Plug-ins Will Change Your Life
Best Free Online Courses and Tutorials for Photographers
The Ultimate Photography Hashtag Cheat Sheet
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