Why Copying Someone Else's Style Might Be the Best Way to Find Your Own

If you spend any time in r/AskPhotography, you'll notice a recurring type of post: someone shares a photo and asks how it was made. Often, the image barely reads as a photograph at all. Outside of a few sharp, in-focus elements, the rest looks more like a painting.

Some of these looks come from practical, in-camera tricks — fogging up the lens, for example, to soften and diffuse the image. But more often than not, the effect was built in Photoshop, or generated with AI. Either way, it's clear real effort went into developing that style, even if I have no interest in recreating it myself.

How I learned Lightroom — and how learning has changed

When I first picked up Lightroom over a decade ago, I joined an online training platform and worked through a full series of videos, module by module. The instructor walked through nearly every setting just to show what it did. After that, I was on my own: play with each option, get a feel for the tool, and slowly build a personal style. I'd also just started taking photos, so it took a full year of experimenting before I landed on a set of go-to settings and a workflow I could rely on.

These days, the expectation is different. There's a growing assumption that any photo's "look" should be reproducible with a handful of simple adjustments. Software companies haven't discouraged this — Adobe, for instance, builds tools specifically designed to recreate popular effects with a click. On top of that, YouTube is full of tutorials breaking down exactly how to get a given look.

Honestly, my own editing style is a good example. It's heavily shaped by a single YouTube video that changed how I use the Clarity slider in Lightroom for good.

The tradeoff of learning this way

There's a real upside to this — you can find a tutorial, follow along, and land close to a style you admire far faster than I did a decade ago. But there's a cost too. When every effect feels like it's just a few adjustments away, it quietly lowers the incentive to learn the fundamentals or to work out how to mimic a great photo on your own. And when nothing requires that kind of effort, there's very little pull toward making something genuinely new.

The real skill isn't the shortcut — it's knowing when to use one

I've come to believe that knowing how to find the right instruction — through search, forums, or tutorials — is just as valuable a skill as learning the fundamentals from scratch. Mimicking great work is a legitimate and important building block for developing your own style. But it's a starting point, not a destination. At some point, you have to put the tutorials down and figure out what you actually want your photos to say.