Mastering the Basics: Your Essential Adobe Lightroom Editing and Workflow

Explore Landscapes #67: The first in a 3-part series covering my Lightroom workflow when importing, editing, and rating my landscape photos.

My Lightroom Library - Adobe Lightroom Classic (Release 14.1.1) | © 2024 Jon Norris

Introduction

Ansel Adams wrote a series of books, The Camera, The Negative, and The Print (which are still well worth reading, even though most of us are shooting on a digital camera rather than on film).

“The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print is the performance.” - Ansel Adams.

Digital photography today still has the same three steps that Ansel Adams followed back in his day:

1. take your camera, compose, and ‘capture’ a scene

2. post-process your digital image file (today’s negative)

3. export an edited digital image or make a physical print of that image

So, you've taken some landscape photos with your camera. Now what? That would be step 2. Post-processing your digital image file (or files, most likely).