Lightroom Classic’s photo organizing and editing processes are split into modules, and the Develop module is where you edit your images. When you’re in the Develop module, the Lightroom Classic interface has a left sidebar, a right sidebar and more controls in top and bottom bars above and below the image you’re working on.
The left and right sidebars, and the top and bottom bars, can all be collapsed and hidden to leave more space for your photo via little ‘disclosure’ arrows half way along the edges. In practice, you’re likely to leave the left and right sidebars open and hide the top and bottom bars.
The top bar lists all the other Lightroom Classic modules for quick access, while the bottom bar acts as a filmstrip for the currently selected Folder or Collection. This can be useful in Develop mode, which displays just one image at a time – though you can always flip back to the Library module to select a different one. The Filmstrip bar is not necessarily quicker or more intuitive. Personally, I never really use it.
So let’s look at where the real work is done – the left and right sidebars.
Develop module left sidebar
You can think of the left sidebar as the place where you carry out quick tasks like applying instant looks via the Presets panel, backtracking through your adjustments via this History panel and creating Snapshots for editing stages you might want to come back to later. The History and Snapshots panels are useful and often overlooked. There is also a Collections panel, which is the only way to browse photos in the Develop module.
Here’s how these work in brief.
The Presets panel applies a pre-configured set of adjustments to any image. These can adjust everyday things like exposure and color, apply creative toning or vignetting effects and, in later versions of Lightroom, ‘adaptive presets’ which use AI masking to adjust specific areas and subjects in your photos. These presets are all non-destructive, so you can undo or change them later.
So while we’re on the subject of non-destructive editing, this is what the History panel is for. This displays every adjustment, every change you’ve made to your image so far. It remembers all of this even if you swap to a different image or quit Lightroom. You can step through all of the changes you’ve made in the past to see what you did and the effect it had, and then you can re-apply your latest adjustments when you’ve finished looking – or you can revert to an earlier History state and take your edit in a different direction.
That’s great. But what if you could also save specific History states so that you can quickly return to them later? That’s what the Snapshots panel is for. This is ideal for photographers who want to take a systematic and analytical approach to their editing. It might be a bit deep for some users (me included) but there’s no doubting the control and scope of the History and Snapshot panels.
The Collections panel is useful but also poses a question. How do you intend to organize your photos? For many photographers, actual Folders make most sense, because they are very definite about where images are stored – the Folders in Lightroom Classic reflect the actual folders on your computer. However, Lightroom Classic also offers Collections. These are also called Albums in other programs. They are like virtual containers that draw together images in different folders and locations without actually moving them. The difference is that while images can only ever be in one folder, they can be in any number of different Collections.
Anyhow, the point is that the Develop module does not display a Folders panel, only a Collections panel. Annoying? You decide. The point is that it’s so easy to swap back to the Library module to select a different Folder that it hardly matters.
Develop module right sidebar
This is where all the real editing work is done, and it’s split into different panels. First, though, at the top is a Histogram panel which is useful to keep a check on whether your adjustments are clipping the shadows or highlights in the photo.
The next item down in this sidebar is a tools strip. This consists of the Edit option, which is what you’ll use most, a Crop option which adds a cropping option at the top of the list of panels, a Healing/Remove tool which adds a retouching panel, a Red-Eye Correction panel (who actually needs red-eye correction in this day and age?) and a Masking option which reveals all the sophisticated AI and regular masking tools now available in Lightroom.
But let’s get on to the Edit panels themselves.
The Basic panel does A LOT of work in Lightroom Classic. It has controls for tonal enhancements like Exposure and Contrast, White Balance and Adobe’s so-called ‘Presence’ sliders for Texture, Clarity and Dehaze. There’s more that will be covered separately.
The rest of the panels are more specialized, including the Tone Curve panel. This is like adjusting Curves in Photoshop or any other image editor. This is good for making tone and contrast adjustments within the tonal range of the photo, and for some color adjustments.
The HSL/Color panel is for shifting specific colors in the image, which is good for all sorts of editing, especially retro/vintage/analog effects. Interestingly, if you choose the B&W option at the top of the sidebar, this changes into a B&W panel for mixing the colors in the original image to change the way they translate into shades of gray. This is a more sophisticated modern alternative to the old Photoshop Channel Mixer approach.
The Color Grading panel does two jobs, really. It can be used to shift the hue, luminance and saturation of the shadows, midtones and highlights in the image, which is good for certain color effects, but it can also be used in black and white for toning and split toning effects.
The Detail panel is for both sharpening and noise reduction. These too will get their own articles, but the short explanation is that you can use it to balance image sharpening and noise reduction. This is where you will also find the Lightroom Denoise tool, which is very interesting and useful.
The Lens Corrections panel will often look after itself. Lightroom Classic will often automatically look up and apply a lens correction profile for your camera, but you may need to check the Remove Chromatic Aberration box manually. This panel also has a Manual corrections tab in case Lightroom does not find a correction profile.
The Transform panel is very useful for correcting perspective distortions like converging verticals. For a lot of photography, this just isn’t necessary, but for photographs of buildings, especially where the architecture is important, it does matter. There are manual adjustments, but the automatic corrections typically work rather well.
The Effects panel is for adding a creative vignette effect, which is often more useful and evocative than it sounds, and also a Grain effect – and Lightroom Classic’s grain effect is extremely controllable and extremely authentic-looking, so that’s a big thumbs-up for fans of retro analog effects.
The Calibration panel is really a legacy feature that’s been overtaken and replaced by more up to date alternatives like Profiles. But it’s here if you want to use old-school editing techniques that haven’t really caught up with the modern era.
And that’s about it for the Develop module’s right sidebar and in fact the Develop module generally. This has been a pretty quick tour of the Develop module and what it can do, but it is central to Lightroom Classic’s editing tools and to get the most from what Lightroom can do, you need to be familiar with what’s available here.
