I love Lightroom! This photo editing software by Adobe Suite allows for rapid photo editing with the option to set a consistent style or formula. While I can admit that I am just getting to know this program, I am highly impressed with its abilities and functionality.  

Here are a couple reasons to use Lightroom

#1 Lightroom makes your overall workload easier.

I am responsible for building an arts and crafts blog. I work with a team of artists who submit 2-3 projects a month. I do a lot of photo editing and one of the exhausting things about editing 6-10 photos at a time is the constant back and forth between files and trying to remember sizing and saving for web. The beauty of Lightroom is that it automates the saving and resizing of files with an export feature. This is huge! What would take me 30 minutes to an hour is reduced down to 10 - 20 minutes.

#2 Focus on the photos.

When you have several windows open in Photoshop, it can be distracting to navigate between each one. Lightroom organizes photos in a slide gallery. The slide bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to quickly switch between photos. If you take a bunch of photos and you are trying to determine the best ones to use the ease of switching between each photo takes your mind more into a critical or analytical mode. When all your photos are picked then you can select which photos you'd like to export. 

#3 Power of Preset

One of the features in Lightroom is the preset panel. When you are in the "develop" mode in Lightroom, a side panel on the right named Presets becomes available. This is a powerful way to edit all the photos in one specific style. For example, if you'd like a "vintage" look then you can go the preset under B&W classic and choose "Creamtone." 

How Lightroom is not Photoshop. 

While Lightroom is very powerful it is also a limited program. You cannot make a flyer or web graphic in Lightroom. You can’t do layers, add text or collage in Lightroom. So there is no tools bar on the left side to do a bunch of slicing and dicing. It simply is not a layout program. That is where Photoshop and Indesign are still great!

I highly recommend the use of Lightroom if you are working with several rounds of photos on a daily basis. If you are editing one or two photos every once in a while then it is good to stick with Photoshop. AND I am excited to learn more about this program. Please comment below if you have any tutorial recommendations on this program!