I recently wrote a blog post about the new “Recommended Presets” feature of Lightroom (Cloud version) and I mentioned that it was driven by the community. The community feature of Lightroom is probably one of the most underrated features of the software. If you are an experienced photographer, you probably haven’t even looked at it, as you may think — that's just for beginners. However, I think its worth a look for anyone, and in this post I’ll explain why.

For those unfamiliar, the community section of Lightroom, allows users to share their photo edits with others, so other users can see how you edited a photo. You get to the section by going to the Discover tab in the Lightroom sidebar. Here you will be presented with a grid of photos that people have shared. When you hover over a photo, you will see the “before” version. When you click on a photo, you will see the finished image, along with a list of the adjustments that they made. But the cool part is that there is a “play” button on the photo, and this will step through the edits one by one, so you can see how a photo was edited.

So, why am I so enthusiastic about this?

Because no matter how experienced or how good you think you might be, you won’t have thought of everything. Learning to see things from other people’s perspectives can be a huge boost to your creative skills. I’ve found that browsing the Discover tab, you will find ways of editing photos you won’t have thought of, and it’s a great way to expand your creative repertoire. In some cases, the photographer might have a result you would have come up with, but the technique might be quite different. In the hour or so I spent browsing it the other day, I learned some new approaches to editing an image I would never have thought of.

To give you an example, here’s one I’ve shared. I wouldn’t have normally gone about editing this the way I did, but I saw a similar approach on another photo in the Discover tab and I wanted to try this approach.

You can view this image in my Lightroom community page here. Here’s the final image I posted to instagram after a little extra work in Photoshop.

Just as an aside, if you’re wondering what I did in Photoshop: I used the new neural depth filter to add Depth of field to the image (I’ll have a post about that soon) and then I added some bokeh using an overlay

If you’re sharing in the community, you can also choose to allow remixes. This allows others to try their hand at editing your photo, however, from what I understand, you can’t actually export someone’s photo, so your image is still protected. If you like the edits someone has made, you can save these as a preset, and this is where the recommended presets feature gets its data from.

The only downside of this feature is that it isn’t available in Lightroom Classic, and you need to use the cloud version of Lightroom. However, it is available on the mobile versions too.

You can find my Lightroom community page here (I don’t have much on it yet - but I will continue to add more.) If you don’t already have Lightroom, or are not a subscriber to Adobe Creative Cloud, you can find out more here.

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