How I take my travel photos to the next level with Adobe Lightroom
As a world traveler constantly on the go, I take thousands upon thousands of photos to capture — and sometimes even share — the perfect moment.
But of course, photos don’t always turn out how I want them to when I’m just snapping away on vacation. Bad lighting, extra people in the background, and a stain from my ice cream moments before can all detract from the way I remember that moment in my mind.
That’s where Adobe Lightroom comes in. For years I have used Lightroom to make editing photos on my phone a breeze. I don’t have to stress about getting the perfect shot because I know I have a powerful editing tool in my pocket that can transform any of my standard phone-quality photos into amazing images.
What is Adobe Lightroom?
Lightroom is a photo editing app designed for photographers of all skill levels, from hobbyists to professionals. It’s the perfect app for capturing travel.
A great thing about Lightroom is that it offers pro-level tools that are easy and intuitive to use. I’ve used it for years to make selective adjustments and editing tweaks, but it’s recently become even more powerful with some brand-new tools: Generative Remove, which lets you remove background objects, and Lens Blur, which lets you quickly blur distracting backgrounds to highlight any subject you choose. These tools make editing photos simpler and more efficient if you want to adjust the color of images, change the geometry of photos or even remove unwanted background objects.
Why I love and use Adobe Lightroom
I find myself in many situations where I need to snap photos quickly and can’t worry too much about how they look at the moment – whether while my family is on the go or for stories I share on TPG. Knowing I have Lightroom, I can focus on getting all the images, and if they aren’t exactly to my liking, I can easily edit them later in the app.
Since Lightroom is attached to the cloud, I can start an edit on my phone and move it to my computer if I want more screen real estate to make more precise tweaks. Plus, I can store all my photos in the cloud, which helps me keep my phone’s storage clear. Not to mention, Lightroom also makes organizing my photos from different trips a breeze.
My absolute favorite feature of Lightroom is the previously mentioned new Generative Remove feature. We all have taken photos and later found out that there were people in the background, which can ruin a perfectly good photo. With Generative Remove, you can simply remove any pesky or unnecessary objects or people by drawing over the subject and hitting a button.
And poof – the photo goes from fine to pretty great.
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But it’s not just about removing distractions; it’s also about making the images on your phone look the way you remember them.
The photo above is underexposed and not as well-lit as it could be. With Lightroom, I was able to both brighten the image to my liking and use the Generative Remove feature to remove the random strangers in the original photo.
In terms of editing capabilities, Lightroom has many more tools than your phone’s native camera app. I can use the native camera app for simple things like rotating and cropping images. But Lightroom lets me edit colors, lighting and the image’s geometry for the perfect photo.
Another aspect that makes Lightroom so easy to use is presets. These are premade edits I can batch apply to my photos, saving me so much time. Editing in Lightroom takes just a few minutes, and my photos are ready to post and share, looking just how I want them to. Additionally, the ability to post my edited images to social platforms right from the app saves me time since I don’t have to go into each app to post individually.
Notable and powerful new Lightroom features
I love using Lightroom even more with the newest features that make cleaning up imagery so easy, whether for my personal trips or when taking photos for The Point Guy. Lightroom has many notable features that are included with a premium subscription:
- Generative Remove: You can instantly remove objects and distractions with the power of AI. Generative Remove is even smart enough to replicate the background behind removed items, matching complex patterns like paisley shirts or ripples in the water to ensure no smudges, distortions or dark spots are left behind. You can also remove extra people, distracting wires, signage, debris or even a stain from a complex-patterned shirt in a family travel photo with this tool.
- Lens Blur: The new Lens Blur tool introduces all-new presets to empower everyone to achieve aesthetic blur effects in a single click. You can adjust the blur of your photos so that some objects are in focus and others aren’t. This helps create a shallow depth of field. As you can see in the photos below, Lens Blur lets you change the depth of field to achieve a blurry background and emphasize the foreground.
- Presets: You can make one-tap edits to multiple photos with these presets made by professional photographers.
- Video editing: You can apply presets and trim and make adjustments to clips and easily share them across multiple platforms.
Pricing for Lightroom
Lightroom is quite affordable and accessible to anybody. While the free version grants access to the basic editing features, if you really want to enhance your images, you will want the premium subscription. That subscription includes cloud storage, presets, healing brush, batch editing, raw editing, selective adjustments, sensei search, people photo sorting, the ability to share web galleries and the new features, Generative Remove and Lens Blur.
Lightroom plans start at $4.99/month for access to Lightroom Mobile and Lightroom Web with 100GB of cloud storage. Other options are available with access to more applications and increased storage.
Bottom line
In my experience, Lightroom is a great app for photo editing for all skill levels.
With the incorporation of Generative Remove and Lens Blur, it is now easier than ever to transform a quick photo into the perfect image. Nowadays, almost everybody uses their cellphones to snap pictures, and pairing that functionality with a powerful photo editing app can help take things to the next level without adding a bunch of costs or hassle.
