“Do I need Photoshop?” I’m sure many of you have asked yourself this question when trying to select which photo editing software to use for your photos. The answer is no. No. No. No. The truth is Photoshop is a massively expensive, unbelievably complex application and if you’re just starting out fashion blogging, editing your photos in Photoshop is like trying trying to understand hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an awesome application, but you just don’t need it.

I have Photoshop, but truth be told, I never use it for editing Grace’s photos. Ever. Instead I do 100% of my editing in Adobe Lightroom. It. Is. Amazing. It’s an inexpensive powerhouse when it comes to photo editing and it’s optimized for efficiency. The interface is very well laid out. You use simple sliders to adjust things such as exposure, contrast, white balance, saturation, shadows & highlights, sharpening, noise reduction and all kinds of other goodies like spot removing tools and so on. Check out all these options:

Each of these categories on the right {such as the Basic tab} has an expandable drop-down menu.

Here’s the expanded basic tab on the right.

You can even adjust the saturation of individual colors! This gives you so much more control over colors.

Want to know the absolute best thing about Lightroom though? It has this awesome preset feature. When you edit one photo, you can simply save this as a preset and sync it to all of your other photos so that you don’t have to adjust the settings on each individual one. How awesome is that? It cuts down your editing time to such a degree that you won’t know what to do with all of the extra time you’ll save. Seriously.

Simply edit one photo to your liking, then select all of the other photos that you want to apply the adjustments to and click the Sync button. Editing done. Cool right?

Lightroom is available online for download, or available via disc in any type of store that sells electronics for around $79. If you’re a student, you can even get a student discount from Adobe! There’s another option too. If you really want Lightroom and you also just have to try Photoshop too, Adobe has a service called Creative Cloud where you pay $9.99 a month to get the full versions of both Lightroom and Photoshop.

The Creative Cloud icon will appear in the top bar on your computer screen and it will notify you whenever there’s any new updates available for your applications.

If Lightroom doesn’t sound too appealing, you might want to try Photoshop Elements, or Adobe Camera Raw. Elements is basically a condensed version of Photoshop and is much easier to use. Just remember the answer to that nagging question. You definitely do not need the full fledged Photoshop to have amazing outfit photos.