Hello! Welcome to our first-ever how-to Lightroom. Photos are an integeral part of digital scrapbooking and this summer we are shifting our focus to our photos. If you haven’t joined us yet, please do join our 100 DAY Project. It’s free, fun & friendly! We are working together to take 100 photos. Hopefully fantabulous photos we can later scrapbook.

Lightroom is a fantastic photo editing program from Adobe, the makers of my beloved Photoshop. I use Lightroom as a first step in editing all my photos. You can use Lightroom on desktop or on mobile. The mobile version is free and almost as powerful as the desktop version. I use both. For today’s introductory tutorial I will be using the desktop version, the screenshots will be a little bigger and easier to see.

All we are doing today is opening Lightroom, and adding our first photo. This way I can refer back to this post in future tutorials, and you can refer back to this post when you need a refresher. Adobe has a great tutorial for installing Lightroom. I’m going to assume you’ve downloaded, installed and opened Lightroom. My Lightroom already has a ton of photos, but the process for adding a new photo is the same even if you have none added yet.

Click the top left icon (called Photo’s), you can also navigate to File > Add Photos.

The Photos icon pops open the fly out menu for adding & organizing your photo’s.

  • Click on the + Add Photos to open your files

Navigate to where you are keeping your photos. There are many ways to organize photos on your hard drive. It’s different for everybody. Once you’ve found your photo;

  • Click on the photo (or photos, you can add multiple photos)
  • Click on Review for Import

By default, the photo you choose will have a checkmark in the top left corner. You can uncheck if you choose the wrong photo(s). I add all my photo’s to Albums so I can easily find them going forward. Lightroom will also keep track of your photo’s by date added.

  • Click on the drop-down next to Add to Album

You can choose an existing album, none, or select New.

  • Click on New

You will get a pop-up box Create Album.

  • Type in an easy-to-remember name, I choose Tutorial
  • Click on Create

Once you click on Create, the pop-up closes.

  • Make sure your photo is still checkmarked
  • Click on Add 1 Photo (or X Photos)

You have successfully added your first photo to Lightroom! Stay tuned for tomorrow, when we do a little editing.

You can easily find your photo(s) in Lightroom by looking by Date under Recently Added. Or scrolling to the correct Album under Albums.