Processing Drone Photographs Like A Pro: Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom is a powerful photo processing software that is incredibly popular with both professional drone photographers as well as hobbyists. The ability to upload, process photos and post directly to social media adds to Adobe Lightroom’s appeal for photographers.
There is a reason Adobe Lightroom is considered the industry standard.
As Adobe says, “Amazing photos. Anywhere you are.”
What is Adobe Lightroom?
Adobe Lightroom is a post processing photo editing and management software. It is easily accessible and scales to your ability. Professionals have the ability to change whatever they want whilst hobbyists can start using presets and learn how deep Lightroom’s capabilities are.
At a basic level, Lightroom allows drone photographers to organise, edit and export quickly.
Photographers are also able to save custom presets so they can keep using a signature style time and time again.
Before we go further, we want to give a big shout out to HonnCaptures for allowing us to use his photograph for our main image. The rest of his work is equally as great as well!
Learn to use Adobe Lightroom
Want to learn how to use Adobe Lightroom more effectively? Whilst there are a multitude of blogs out there, we find that the best resource is Adobe themselves.
Abobe have a Lightroom Tutorial page that can help you learn the basic as well as more advanced techniques.
We highly recommend checking it out!
How do you add Lightroom presets?
Whilst Lightroom does come with some presets built in, you can find a lot of presets available online for free and to purchase.
The easy way to install Lightroom presets
You can install Lightroom presets by clicking the little plus sign (“+”) on presets and then clicking ‘Import presets’.
Other ways to install Lightroom presets on desktop…
- Once Lightroom is open,
- Click ‘Edit’, hover over ‘Preferences’, click ‘Presets’,
- Click ‘Show Lightroom Presets Folder’,
- Double click ‘Lightroom’,
- Double click ‘Develop Presets’,
- Copy your presets’ folder or folders into the ‘Develop Presets folder’
- Restart the software.
Adding Lightroom presets on Lightroom mobile
This process can be a bit trickier and a little more work intensive.
- Save the .DNG files to your phone. This can be to the camera roll or to a file. If you see them as blank pictures in your phone’s photo album, don’t worry. This is normal,
- Open the Lightroom app on your phone and create & name a new album,
- Open your newly created album,
- Tap the 3 dots in the upper right corner and then tap ‘Add Photos’,
- You no have 2 options; ‘From Camera Roll’ or ‘From Files’. Depending on where you saved the .DNG files, click the appropriate option,
- Go to your album containing your the imported D.NG files,
- Open the first file,
- Tap on the 3 dots at the top right hand side of the screen,
- Tap on Create Preset,
- You should now have a ‘New preset screen’. Here you can give your preset a name and save it to a preset group,
- Select which aspects of the preset you want to keep,
- Tap the tick mark to confirm the save.
What do Done Photography Bible community members say about Adobe Lightroom?
Chris_Alexiou
I use lightroom because its a very powerful and easy to use image editing application that does most of the things I want from an image editing application and most importantly it let me compare photos and group them into permanently saved selections. In other words Lightroom is able to get me to where I want to go!
Chris_Alexiou
Vaughanlawsphotography
The Lightroom app on the android platform I only use occasionally for touch ups or for phone snaps to edit. I personally prefer doing most of my post processing on my PC using Lightroom and Photoshop. Lightroom for basic adjustments such as highlights shadows, clarity, colour correction and grad filters for drone images. Photoshop is where I out it all together. Plus do other adjustments, burn/dodge tool and also use the Nik collection plugin for more finer adjustments.
Vaughanlawsphotography
Lior_levisohn
I use Lightroom because it is so simple without been a professional, giving you all the option to makes you photo better! And one of the best is that you can open lightroom in every device and share you content
Lior_levisohn
HonnCaptures
Part of the appeal is the time saving aspect. Why spend ages per photo when you can enhance it with a few clicks now. Having it across all my devices and the images in the cloud helps massively as well!
HonnCaptures
Julian.varricchio
I love the flexibility of lightroom to enhance my composition, I can manipulate the photo to my liking and really capture a specific mood
Julian.varricchio
Liggephoto
I like using Lightroom because it gives me the possibility to fully express the character of my pictures.
Liggephoto
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