Mastering Adobe Lightroom

When it comes to quickly culling, editing, and exporting large groups of photographs, most professional photographers are using Adobe Lightroom. The problem is that most photographers have been using the same features for the last 10 years, choosing to do quick global edits in Lightroom and then importing one image at a time into Photoshop for more detailed retouching. 

You may think you know how to use Adobe Lightroom, but if you're not taking advantage of the powerful new features that have been released in the last few months, you're wasting hours editing every single job. 

In this tutorial, Pye Jirsa is going to teach you everything about Adobe Lightroom. You will learn the basics of the software, his studio's comprehensive time-saving workflow, and detailed retouching techniques. You will learn about every incredible new feature in Lightroom that will take seconds rather than minutes in Photoshop.  Although most of the tutorial will be spent in "Lightroom Classic," Pye will also be teaching the benefits of Lightroom Cloud and Lightroom Mobile as well. By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to do final edits of 75-100 images/hour without ever leaving Lightroom. 

Who Is Pye Jirsa? 

Many people know Pye as a leading photography educator from SLR Lounge, but he is also a partner in one most successful wedding photography studios in the United States, Lin and Jirsa Photography. He and his team have built a multi-seven-figure business and shoot hundreds of weddings and events every year. Needless to say, with over 2-3 million images taken every year, Pye has had to develop an incredibly efficient and effective post-processing system to help his lead photographers and editors develop all of the images taken at these weddings. Despite the huge volume of images, Pye and his team continue to publish award-winning images, push the boundaries of wedding photography, and continue to educate new and veteran wedding photographers both online and in person. 

If those numbers blow your mind, you are probably wondering how Pye can edit so quickly while still maintaining incredible results? When Pye asked us if we wanted to partner up in producing a tutorial that covers his entire Lightroom advanced image processing, it was a no-brainer for us.

Welcome to Mastering Adobe Lightroom!

Course Overview 

Mastering Adobe Lightroom is designed for both absolute beginners and seasoned professional photographers. The course begins with the absolute basics of post-processing images, but Pye quickly ramps up the complexity and teaches image development tips that simply could not be done until Adobe's latest Lightroom update. Some of these editing techniques utilize automated masks, slider hacks, AI automation, and multi-level color corrections that are sure to blow your mind! Here's a list of just some of the topics that Pye covers:

• Lightroom Software Overview
• Basic Raw and JPEG File Editing
• Color Panels and Complex Color Grading
• How to Build Complex Lightroom Presets
• Creating Cohesive Image Sets Using Color Theory
• Simulating Film
• Editing Images With Mixed Lighting
• Using Curves for High Dynamic Range Images
• Sky Enhancement and Replacement
• Retouching Without "Retouching," aka No Photoshop
• Dodging and Burning
• Faking Flash and Strobe Light in Post-Production
• How to Create the Brenizer Effect in Lightroom
• Advanced Masking Using Intersecting and AI Selections
• High-Speed Culling
• Maximizing Lightroom Settings for Faster Computer Processing
• Batching Face Retouching Using Artificial Intelligence 
• Lightroom CC Versus Lightroom Mobile Versus Lightroom Classic
• Shooting and Editing On-Location With Lightroom Mobile

This may seem like a lot to ingest, but Pye breaks down each segment, plus more, into clear, concise lessons that are easy to practice whenever you need a refresher. The goal of this entire workflow is to bring your image editing time down dramatically while also drastically improving the aesthetics and creativity in your final work. Instead of taking days or weeks to edit your weddings and events, after watching this course, you should be able to get through an entire wedding edit with thousands of images, including culling, color edits, and local adjustments, in several hours. For most photographers, you won't even have to open Adobe Photoshop except for the most particular and extreme photo edits. 

Who Is This Tutorial For? 

As with all of our courses, Mastering Adobe Lightroom is designed to teach both novice and advanced photographers the most useful tips and tricks to make their photography better than ever. However, unlike other tutorials that start with the simplest of tasks upfront, this tutorial dives deep into some of the most exciting elements of Lightroom right away.

While all of these techniques can be used to edit a single photograph, the real power of these lessons is for those who edit multiple images at a time and want to get high-quality results with just a few clicks of a mouse. Throughout the tutorial, Pye edits a wide variety of genres, including weddings, portraits, architecture, landscapes, athletic, family photography, street portraiture, and food photography. The fundamental techniques can be applied to anything you shoot. 

Go Behind the Scenes on Pye's Photoshoots

So many tutorials simply show you a handful of images and explain how you can move sliders to get a great image. While Pye certainly explains every aspect of his edit, many of the lessons in this tutorial also contain behind-the-scenes videos of the actual photoshoots as they were captured. This gives you an intimate understanding of how Pye captured each one of these images, his thought process behind the execution, and some of the challenges he faced at the time the shutter was pressed. While it's great being able to see a final image and imagine the shooting environment, nothing helps facilitate learning like seeing behind-the-scenes footage of the actual shoot. If you've followed Fstoppers for any period of time, you know we love our behind-the-scenes content!

The Power of Presets

A well-designed preset can save you a huge amount of time, and when created correctly, it can work for just about any image you apply it to. Along with the purchase of this tutorial, you will receive some of Pye's favorite professional presets that he uses on a daily basis (and many are sold separately on his online education platform). He will also teach you the best concepts and approaches he uses when building his own presets so you too can create your own presets that work consistently and effectively over hundreds of completely different images. Applying these lessons will help you speed up your image processing and bring a more cohesive look to your portfolio. 

Retouching Without Photoshop

When a photographer talks about "retouching an image," most people immediately think of Adobe Photoshop. The term "Photoshop" is basically synonymous with cleaning up skin, dodging and burning, and whitening eyes. However, learning how to casually edit in Photoshop usually takes quite a bit of time, and once those edits are made, it can be nearly impossible to apply those same editing techniques to dozens or hundreds of images from the same session without having inconsistent results across each individual image. Because of these challenges, most of us don't even bother adding the final extra bit of photo polish to our work and simply bypass Photoshop altogether. With Pye's ingenious "retouch without Photoshop" techniques, you can add those final extra steps directly in Lightroom without anyone ever being able to spot the difference.

Pye showed us how to do a Lightroom retouch in under 60 seconds. Not only does he teach this technique for a single image, but Pye also shows how to batch retouch by taking advantage of the newest masking and selection features in Adobe Lightroom's newest update. With a few clicks, Pye edits eight images from the same scene, makes color adjustments, burning, and local adjustments, all in 68 seconds. That's start-to-finish complex edits in an average of 8.5 seconds per image!

Faking Flash in Post-Production

When you look at this before/after image, what are your first thought? Flash was added? It was edited heavily in Photoshop with some complicated masking? Both assumptions would be wrong, but many other people probably were likely fooled as well.

This image was edited entirely in Lightroom in a process that took less than a minute. Until very recently, the only way to achieve this kind of result in software was to spend several minutes to create a precise mask in Photoshop and then dodge and burn within that mask for another 5-10 minutes just to bring your subject off the background. With the latest Lightroom developments, complex masking and edits can now be achieved in a fraction of the time. Pye teaches you how to take advantage of these features and make use of the full dynamic range captured in your files. 

Shooting and Editing on Location With Lightroom Mobile

The workflow of each of Pye's images starts before he picks up his camera and ends in post-production using Lightroom. Knowing what can be done in Lightroom before an image is even taken can help a photographer achieve their desired result more easily and thoroughly. For Pye, this is an integral part of his creativity because while he is shooting, he is pre-planning how he will edit the image in his head. This is a huge part of Pye's process, and it was important for us to show this entire process while simultaneously teaching the benefits of Lightroom Mobile. 

Pye does the vast majority of his post-processing in Lightroom Classic on a laptop, but having mobile access to the software can be incredibly helpful. With Lightroom Mobile, Pye is able to edit images on location using all the presets and tools he would have access to on his main workstation, but still be able to use his normal advanced image processing with the phone camera in his hand. To demonstrate how powerful Lightroom Mobile can be, Pye photographed a model around the streets of Charleston and demonstrated exactly how he captures landscapes, portraits, and architecture using only his phone. 

As more and more professional photographers, influencers, and content creators are required to produce fast results for the web, social media, and instant review, understanding the Adobe ecosystem and Lightroom Mobile specifically is of utmost importance.

Saving Time Editing Is the Ultimate Goal

Perhaps the most important aspect of a busy photographer is good time management. If you ask any photographer what "wastes" the highest amount of their time, no doubt, it would be sitting behind a computer, editing photos. After watching Pye's Lightroom image development techniques, everyone in the Fstoppers' office agreed that we all could have saved hundreds or thousands of hours in post-production if we had been able to use this resource for our own wedding and portrait photography businesses. Needless to say, our valuable time could have been used far more productively than culling and editing our projects with our own, much slower Lightroom workflows. This course is an investment that will simplify your life and let you spend more time on the projects you want to prioritize.

This Download Includes

• 10+ Hours of Video Lessons Categorized by Specific Topic
• 49 Lessons That Build in Complexity
• 147 Exercise Images to Edit Yourself
• Pye's Start-to-Finish Lightroom Advanced Image Development
• Mobile Shooting and Editing
• Pye's Favorite Professional Lightroom Presets
• Instant Download: Viewable on Any Device, Anytime

100% Money-Back Guarantee

Fstoppers understands how important it is to find value in the education you invest in. We stand behind all of our tutorials, and Pye Jirsa's Mastering Adobe Lightroom is no different. After watching this tutorial, we believe you will not only improve your own photography and unlock more of your own creativity, but we also know you will increase your post-production workflow efficiency tenfold. If for some reason after watching this tutorial you are unhappy with it, we will give you a full refund.