One of the advantages of the internet is access to knowledge on your fingertips. Webinars are a great tools to expand your knowledge on a specific subject. Anytime I’m free and want to “waste” time, I almost always go to creativelive.com. They feature webinars for photographers, designers, illustrators, video editors etc. 
When the webinars are on air, they are free to watch. However, once the webinar is concluded, you can buy the entire video they recorded for an average price of $99, which to me is reasonable if you are serious about that subject. The great thing is that these webinars are covered by industry professionals, so you may argue that you might learn photoshop on youtube with free tutorials. However, these professionals make their bread on the knowledge and it’s amazing that they are willing to share that.
I’ve “attended” a lot of photography and photoshop related webinars on creativelive. Most of them, if not all, were fantastic. They share so much knowledge, it’s incredible. A recent one I saw was by Pye Jirsa who owns SLR Lounge, and is a very famous wedding photographer. His two day class was about lighting 101 where he showed how you can use natural and artificial lights to enhance your photos.
The most recent one I saw was on Lightroom Mastery by Ben Willmore. I’ve seen Willmore’s webinars in the past so I was familiar with his teaching style.
One of the most common tools that photographers use is Photoshop Lightroom. Lightroom is used for editing batch photos. It’s a great tool I personally use for all the time for my shoots. Even for Antandre, I use Lightroom to edit my photos.
However, I’m not an “expert” at Lightroom like I am with Photoshop. Yes, I am familiar with the basic features of Lightroom, however I wanted to delve deep. So I thought this webinar would definitely help me achieve that.
I watched the webinar on Saturday for a couple of hours, and then Sunday for about an hour. For the time I watched it, I learned a lot of things; a lot of tips and tricks to enhance your workflow in Lightroom, which is exactly what I was looking for.
He talked about using adjustment brush and masking on the images to add detail to specific parts of the image, which was very helpful. Some of the things I was already familiar with since I use them on a regular basis. However, what I did learn were keyboard shortcuts!
Using adjustment brush
He also talked about “stacking” in detail, which I wasn’t familiar with at all. When you shoot in burst mode you get a lot of images. Lightroom has a feature where you can stack similar looking images so it doesn’t take up that much viewing space.
He also briefly talked about Quick Develop settings. Usually if you want to edit a photo in Lightroom, you have to use the Develop module on the top. However, with Quick Develop you can edit multiple photos together without going to the Develop module. This is a great feature if you have a tight deadline and need to release the photos to the client quickly.
Ben Willmore
He did go in detail about Lightroom preferences, importing/exporting photos, making virtual copies, creating slideshows etc. A lot of these I was a familiar with so it was a good refresher.
It was good to spend these few hours on the weekend and get a bit of deep knowledge on Lightroom through this webinar. I will continue to use this as a tool to develop my skill set in photography and design.
