Using Adobe Lightroom to help increase brand awareness on social media (a beginners guide Adobe Lightroom).
With so many people online these days, getting your brand to stand out can be tricky.
It’s all about being able to create content that catches people’s attention. One of the best ways to do that is by creating amazing images to accompany the content you post online. If you’re not a photographer, the thought of using any Adobe photo application can be intimidating. However, Adobe Lightroom is easy enough for anyone to use. Making even minor adjustments to the images you post online can go a long way when it comes to standing out online. So I thought it would be helpful to share my workflow plus a couple of tips that I wish I knew when first using Lightroom.
Starting good habits
Before you jump straight into Lightroom and add all your fancy presets to your photos, it’s essential to start by creating good habits. The best habit you can get into is properly storing your files. Just like everything else on your computer, you want all of your photos neatly organized and stored on a separate hard drive and not just piled onto your desktop.
I’ve discovered that the best way to store files on Lightroom is to:
Get an external hard drive.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to tell you, but having an external hard drive is essential for anyone who wants to take post-processing seriously. You can’t just have photos floating on your desktop or in your downloads folder. Not only will that make it hard to find photos, but flooding your computer with a ton of photos will make it unbearably slow.
Create a system.
After you get yourself a hard drive, you’ll need a way to organize it.
What good will having a place to properly store all of those photos if you just dump all
Of them on your hard drive without having a proper system, so you’ll need to create
folders and, if necessary, sub folders as well.
- Folders
Firstly, you’ll need to create folders on your hard drive. This step requires you to first create a folder on your hard drive. I usually label this folder photos. This serves as a master folder where you will store everything and link your hard drive to Lightroom.
- Subfolders
Now you’ll probably want to organize all of your files by date, event, or both.
And that’s where sub folders come in handy. I like to use sub folders to organize
My files by date. If I have multiple shoots on the same day, I will create another sub folder to separate the different events.
Have a backup
After you have your folders set up and have a comfortable system, it is crucial to have some sort of backup in place. The best way to back up your files is by either using another external hard drive, and another option would be to use cloud storage. Here is a list of some of my favorite cloud storage apps.
- Adobe CC
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
1 Importing Photos
Okay, so now that we have a proper way to organize all of our files, we can start importing photos into Lightroom. This process is pretty simple and won’t take much time at all.
First, you need to locate the import button and click it
Next, choose a source; in my example, my source was my desktop, but yours will most likely be the memory card that came from your camera.
After that, choose a destination. This will be where you want the file to be stored. In this case, we want our photo to be stored in Donmason>Phtotos>2021.
2 Editing your photos
Now that you’re all done with all of that boring stuff, we can get into the exciting part. Once you have all of your files imported and neatly organized, you can begin the editing process. Editing photos isn’t just about applying a filter to your photos and calling it good. Part of what makes Lightroom such an awesome tool for me is its capability to do a lot of what Photoshop can do while still being way more user-friendly.
Lightroom has a lot to offer when it comes to post-processing. Anywhere from basic adjustment to more complex tools such as the tone curve and color correction. To begin editing your photos, you’ll need to navigate to the Develop tab. I encourage you to play around with these tools and do further research to try and figure out how each one of these tools can make a difference to your photos.
Once you’re done making your adjustments, you can finish by cropping your photo for whatever you’ll be using it for. For example, if you plan on posting the final image to Instagram, you might want to crop your photo to 1080x1350, as that’s the most popular crop size for Instagram posts.
3 Exporting your finished photos
Now that you’re all done adding the adjustments to your photo, and you’re ready to share your image, you’ll need to export your file. This process is very similar to importing but with a few minor differences. The first thing you notice is that you’re brought to a page like this.
Just like the importing process, you’ll first start by choosing a destination for your photo to go to. For example, I’ll be exporting to the desktop.
Next, you’ll want to give it a name
After that, you will want to look at the file settings depending on what you’re using the photo for, which will determine what file type you’ll export as. Since I plan to post this photo to Instagram, I’ll want to export it as a JPEG, and since this is going online, I want to choose the sRGB color space and quality anywhere between 75 and 100. And since I had to crop my image to fit Instagram, I won’t need to resize my image, but I need to make sure the resolution is set to 300 ppi.
Now you’re ready to export your file and share it to whatever social media platform you’d like. That’s a basic walk-through of my workflow from import to export. It’s not too complicated and, for the most part, should keep you organized.
But wait, there’s more!
Lightroom Mobile
Adobe offers a mobile app for Lightroom. What makes this app cool is its ability to sync straight to your Adobe Cloud and any devices connected to the cloud.
This is useful for many reasons. For example, if I’m editing a photo on my desktop and need to export a photo to post on Instagram quickly — instead of trying to airdrop or Dropbox the file to myself — I can just sync the file. Within seconds the file will be synced and be visible on the mobile app, and any adjustments I make to the file on my phone will also affect the file on my computer and vice versa.
After adding any final adjustments, I can easily export the file to my camera roll and post it to Instagram. And that’s it, my entire Adobe Lightroom workflow.
Conclusion
Having great visuals could be the difference between having your content seen or not.
Adobe Lightroom is the best application for both processing photos and photo organization. Unlike Lightroom’s counterpart, Photoshop, Lightroom not only makes for a powerful post-processing tool but also makes an excellent place to easily store and share photos.
If you haven’t considered editing the images you post online I suggest you consider using Adobe Lightroom.