I primarly use Adobe Lightroom 2.3 for processing and organising pics out of the camera. It’s a nice catch-all program for doing the tweaks that most photos require when you take them off the memory card onto your computer: A bit of exposure, sharpness adjustment, and perhaps some lens flare correcting. I’ve played around with many photo organising and general software over the years but Lightroom is the best I’ve used in the price range.

I’m hardly a Lightroom guru, having learnt it on the job. I make use of its best features, and abandon those that are not particularly good or practical after trying it out. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up while working with Lightroom:

Storage: Lightroom is a great tool for organising your pics. But it slows down dramatically as the number of photos in your library grows. To help alleviate this, always use an internal hard drive for storage with an external backup drive, as accessing pics via USB is considerably slower than a drive sitting within your machine.

Back up regularly. I’ve had two computer failures. Fortunately I didn’t lose photographs, but I lost all Lightroom library information, meaning that all adjustments, keywording and other additions to photos were lost. When Lightroom reminds you to back up your library data, do it!

Keywords, keywords, keywords. As your photo collection grows, it’ll be come more and more difficult to locate a specific photograph. Make a habit of immediately adding keywords to a photo the moment you add it to your Lightroom collection. You’ll be glad you did two years down the line, when you’re searching for an ‘old’ photo. It also takes the pressure of keeping your file structure accurate. Keywording and other metadata is one of Lightrooms strengths, so make optimum use of it.

Export plugins: If you’re using Lightroom and online photo and social services such as Flickr and Facebook, install the Jeffrey Friedl plugins that let you export photos from Lightroom straight into those, seamlessly. It’ll save you dozens of clicks. And this plugin will save you many hours of exporting pics from your Lightroom catalogues to your blog. The ability to integrate Lightroom into other workflows is perhaps the most useful feature of the program.

Don’t bother with Lightroom’s printing or online gallery features. They’re very limited, unless you’re just proofing. Use Lightroom for its strenghts: Organising and basic correction.

Use Lightroom in combination with Photoshop when it comes to advanced editing. In Lightroom, set up Photoshop as your external editor, and then use it to do advanced photo editing. In my experience fine tuning of photos such as working on particular areas in a photograph is better done in Photoshop. The two programs work together seamlessly, and complement each other perfectly.

Work in RAW. If you’re taking pics in JPG exclusively, you may be wasting your money purchasing Lightroom. Rather settle for something like Picasa, which I use as a secondary system.

Set your default colour space and camera profiles. I’m not going to go into the technical details here, but if you don’t do this, your photos you export may not be optimum quality. They may be too light or dark, and the colours may be off somewhat.

If you’re processing lots of photos, make use of presets. I export a lot of photos for my travel website, so have a few presets that make things a LOT easier and quicker.

I use colour, light and lens correction a lot. The spot removal brush is an absolute godsend for getting rid of lens and sensor dust on the image.  Noise reduction works so-so, rather use Noise Ninja, it’s much better.

The things I haven’t used: Masks and overlays. It just seems logical to me that if you’re doing this much editing you may as well use Photoshop.

That’s it in a nutshell. Watch the blog, I’ll post about new plugins and other Lightroom goodies there.