For a long time I thought editing photos was basically cheating. The photo either looked good or it didn't. If you had to fix it in an app, it meant you didn't take it well enough. Then a friend showed me the before and after of the same frame — same chai glass, same evening light, same Xiaomi phone — with three minutes in Lightroom Mobile. I didn't say anything for a full minute. The before looked like a photo. The after looked like it belonged in a magazine. Same moment. Completely different image.

Lightroom Mobile is free, runs on any Android or iPhone — Redmi, OnePlus, Samsung, iPhone SE, all of it — and is what professional photographers actually use on assignment, not just teens on Instagram. Seven days is enough time to go from not knowing what a histogram is to editing photos that consistently look intentional. Here's the plan.

Lightroom Mobile is free, works on any Android or iPhone, and is the same software professionals use.

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Before Day 1: Download and Set Up (15 Minutes)

Search "Lightroom" on the Play Store or App Store. Download the Adobe Lightroom app — it's free, and the free version has everything you need for this plan. Sign in with a free Adobe account. On the first screen, tap the plus icon and import five photos from your camera roll. Pick photos with variety — one portrait, one outdoor scene, one food shot, one low-light photo, one bright daylight shot. These five are your practice set for the whole week.

Spend ten minutes just tapping every slider and watching what it does. Move it to the extreme left, then extreme right, then reset. Don't edit anything yet — just watch the image respond. You're building a mental map of the controls before you use any of them properly.

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Days 1–2: Exposure and Contrast — The Foundation

Open your outdoor photo. Look at the Light panel — Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks. These six sliders control the brightness of different parts of your image. Most beginners grab the Exposure slider and push it up when a photo looks dark. This is almost always wrong. Here's what actually works:

If your photo is too dark, push Shadows up first — this brightens only the dark areas while leaving the sky and highlights alone. If your photo looks washed out or flat, push Contrast up slightly — around +15 to +25, not +80. If the sky is blown out white, pull Highlights down — bring it to -30 or -40 and watch the sky's detail return. By Day 2, these three moves — Shadows up, Highlights down, Contrast up slightly — will fix 80% of the photos you'll ever take.

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Days 3–4: Colour — Where Most People Make the Biggest Mistakes

Open the Color panel. You'll see Temperature (the blue-to-yellow slider) and Tint (green-to-pink). These two control the overall colour mood of your photo. Photos taken indoors under yellow light often look unnaturally warm — pull Temperature slightly left (cooler) and the skin tones immediately look more natural. Photos taken on overcast days look flat and slightly green — push Tint slightly toward pink (+5 to +10) and the colours come alive.

The HSL panel (Hue, Saturation, Luminance) is where you make precise colour adjustments. In Indian photos, the two most useful sliders are Orange Saturation and Orange Luminance — they control skin tone. Pull Orange Saturation down slightly if skin looks too orange or sunburnt. Push Orange Luminance up to brighten skin without touching the rest of the image. These two moves alone separate photos that look edited from photos that look corrected.

Golden hour light in Indian cities responds beautifully to Lightroom's colour tools — warm, vivid, and controllable.

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Days 5–6: Make Your Own Preset

A preset is a saved set of edits that you apply to future photos in one tap. By Day 5 you've learned enough to recognise what you like — maybe you prefer slightly cooler tones and lifted shadows, or warm golden skin with slightly desaturated greens in the background. Whatever your style is, it's starting to emerge.

Edit one photo exactly the way you want it to look. When you're happy, tap the three dots in the top right corner of the editing panel, select Create Preset, and name it something useful — "My Outdoor," "My Portrait," "My Food." From now on, any new photo gets this preset applied in one tap, then small adjustments for that specific image. This is exactly how professional photographers work — one base style, fine-tuned per shot.

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Day 7: Edit Five Photos and Build Your Portfolio

The final day is your showcase day. Take the five practice photos you imported on setup day and edit each one using everything you've learned — Light, Colour, your preset, fine-tuned. Then pick five new photos from your camera roll — your best ones — and edit those too. You now have ten edited photos that look consistent with each other.

Export them at full resolution (tap the share icon, choose Export, select Maximum quality). Put them in a dedicated album called "Edited — Lightroom." Post the best three to Instagram. Compare them to what you were posting a week ago. The difference is the point.