Develop your skills

George Cairns introduces Lightroom’s key image-editing tools and photo-fixing panels, which you’ll find in the powerful Develop module

Discover the various tabs and tools in Lightroom’s Develop module

Last issue we touched on ways to improve photos using the Quick Develop panel in Lightroom’s Library module. This panel enables you to quickly tweak common image-related issues. Once you’ve imported and organised your collection of digital negatives into Collections and added keywords, though, you’ll be ready to deal with more complex image-processing challenges – and this is where the Develop module comes in.

Adobe invented the .dng (digital negative) format to make it easier to store and access unprocessed RAW

You can use the Develop module to make selective adjustments to your RAW files, so even high-contrast scenes can feature detail in the shadows, midtones and highlights

files. The word ‘negative’ harks back to the days of film. Before you could see a film negative’s true colours and tones, it needed to be developed in a darkroom, which is why the Develop module’s name recalls traditional darkroom techniques. Here you can process a picture’s colours, tones and composition to perfection. You can also make selective adjustments to your RAW files, so even high-contrast scenes can feature detail in the shadows, midtones and highlights.