Before we launch into a year’s worth of learning Lightroom, I realize that some of you that will be joining us don’t know much about the program. That’s okay – maybe you’ve heard about it from photographer friends or heard that it can help you get your images organized.

The truth is that Lightroom is whatever you need it to be.

• Need to organize and keyword your images? It can do that.
• Need to edit hundreds of images quickly and similarly? It can do that.
• Want to print a book with your favorite photos? Lightroom does it.

I won’t provide one answer on how you should use Lightroom. The purpose of this blog is to show you lots of features and how to use them, and then you can apply them to your image needs.

My situation before Lightroom wasn’t too unusual – I had a hard drive full of images that were scattered in folders. I knew they were all safely stored, but ask me to get to one of them in particular and there was little hope of that happening within an hour

Lightroom is whatever you need it to be!

Put simply, Lightroom has been nothing short of a revolution for photographers. And Lightroom 5 only improves the best photo management and editing program out there.

My primary contact with photographers is in the wedding industry. I spoke with a good friend who is a top pro in my state a few years ago when Lightroom was becoming really popular and was shocked by what she told me:

“Before Lightroom, I was doing good to deliver a few hundred images. The tweaks were taking entirely too long in Photoshop, and I couldn’t get my clients their images in time. When I got Lightroom, I started pushing my clients more images in half the time.”

Sounds an awful lot like a testimonial right? The truth is that these types of statements are ones I’ve heard from hundreds of Lightroom users I’ve talked to while crafting this blog. It’s what made me so passionate about keeping up the writing process and teaching people more about how to get organized and dive deep in Lightroom.

Lightroom is made up of modules, and we’ll tackle them all. Each module is going to do something different for us, and help us trim our images in different ways. The Library module helps us get organized. The Develop module lets us edit our images. We can put images into print with the Books module, and get them online with the Web module.

Beginning to see the power yet?

If you’ve got a second to comment, let me know how you use Lightroom, and how you think it might help you get organized.