[saturdaysaint]

I'm on a 5S. This might sound like melodramatic consumerist envy, but I've been struck over the last year by how many emotionally stirring pictures I've seen amateurs take with the iPhone 6. My phone can take a pretty sharp photo of a baby/puppy/landscape, but there's something about the 6 generation that almost triggers that sense of "presence" people bring up in regard to VR. I think you can see this pretty vividly in the jump from 5S to 6 in the author's self portrait - I can call the improvements incremental on a lot of levels, but somehow she's "there" looking me in the eyes on the 6.

[exhilaration]

Are you sure it's not just postprocessing? Many of my friends and I all have DSLRs but my photos are always the best because I know how to use Lightroom.

[eecks]

As a very amateur photographer, do you use lightroom on every photo? What sort of photo enhancements do you do?

[username223]

Mostly boosting shadows. When your shoot outdoors, it's usually best to properly expose the bright regions, then fix up the dark ones afterwards.

[matwood]

On my DSLR taken photos I white balance/color correct, level, and crop all photos I'm going to keep. Photos that have particularly good subjects, I may get artistic and play with other settings until I see something I like.

[micampe]

Very often you just need to adjust levels and white balance to see a significant improvement on many photos. You don’t even need Lightroom for that, even more basic photo editors like OS X Photos work fine.

[saturdaysaint]

I'm talking about off the cuff pictures taken by my sisters, who have no knowledge of Photoshop.

[avn2109]

Out of curiosity, how does one learn to use lightroom?

[roymurdock]

There are some great tutorials on Lynda. You can try it free for 10 days, which is more than enough time to get up and running with Lightroom. You shouldn't need more than 3 hours of watching videos and few more hours uploading, editing, and looping through photos to have basic proficiency. The most useful parts of the tutorial in my opinion are best practices on how and where to save photos. A lot of the development stuff can be picked up easily by playing around with the sliders and watching other online tutorials.

http://www.lynda.com/Lightroom-training-tutorials/450-0.html

[matwood]

Not to be a smartass, but usage. Take a bunch of photos and go figure out how to manage and improve them in LR. Google and youtube are awesome ways to find out specific things, but nothing beats playing around.

[slig]

I learned by watching Antony Morganti's tutorials [1]. They're freely available on youtube and they cover everything you need to know.

Watch the first 3 videos I linked, play with Lightroom, and then come back and watch again. You'll learn more now that you're familiar with the tool.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLllFqBuTM0WI0fC_PujkG...

[nogridbag]

Thanks, I've never seen lightroom before, but I've used photoshop extensively. I have a Sony A6000 and shoot jpeg as I'm a novice and probably won't bother modifying all of my vacation photos (the A6000 applies corrections for things like barrel distortion for the attached lens automatically when set in jpeg mode).

I watched the first three videos and it actually turned me off to lightroom a bit or at least the workflow that was demonstrated. For example, when the author used the clone stamp tool it was painful to me that he just left those duplicated clouds in the final image without attempting to merge them in more gracefully. The final post-processed images look really amateur to me - overly artificial but not in a tasteful way. But all the youtube comments seem to be very positive so take my comments with a grain of salt.

I always assumed lightroom was used primarily to correct mistakes made by the photographer in exposure settings but it's use here seemed more artistic in nature... more like a fancier version of Adobe Elements. For example, one of the final steps in the author's workflow is to select a Camera Calibration which essentially applies some filter to the entire image like "Vivid" - which I thought negated all the effort to manually adjust all the individual colors, contrast, saturation, etc.

[WickyNilliams]

I used to think "I know photoshop well, I don't need lightroom". Now I rarely, if ever, open photoshop (only for extensive clone/stamp stuff as you mentioned).

Anything you can achieve in lightroom you can achieve in photoshop. So why lightroom?

Firstly, it's optimised for the type of things you want to do to photographs (compared to the scope of what's possible in all of digital image manipulation i.e. photoshop). Editing functionality, UI and additional tooling/features are all focussed (pun not intended) on this, so it's a much more pleasant experience when working with hundreds (or even tens!) of photos

Secondly, lightroom is as much about editing photos as it is about managing collections photos. You might want to tag photos, rate them, search for "photos taken in this date range, with this lens, rated above 4 stars". You will have a hard time doing this by other means.

Don't dismiss it because you know photoshop, or because you don't like that guy's style. Shoot RAW, give lightroom a go, you'll be surprised how much you can recover photos which would otherwise go in the trash if shot as JPEG. Lightroom also has lens profiles built-in, so it knows how to correct vignetting, distortion etc for each lens

[slig]

If you're shooting JPEG, then your camera has already done a lot of corrections for you. The heuristics that the camera use are limited, and one can always do better than that by doing the post processing manually on Lightroom.

Try shooting RAW + JPEG and see the differences between the pics.

Personally, I believe that doing the post-processing myself is part of the experience of photography, and I find it fun to tune each photo according to my tastes. But I do understand that's not for everyone.

[onedev]

The same way you learn anything, YouTube and Google Searches!

[micampe]

I think the largest difference in that portrait is the warmer white balance.

[jakobegger]

It seems to me like the 6/6s does something to the skin tones. Less details, but warmer.

[saturdaysaint]

Downvotes without any explanation are weird.