Transcripts
1. Trailer: My name is Lotus Carroll. I live in Austin, Texas. On Skillshare, I'm going to be teaching how to organize your photos in Lightroom and really harness the power of organization that Lightroom gives you. You can use Lightroom to process photos from anything. I think this class is good for anybody who's interested in learning how to use Lightroom more efficiently, for a person who's never opened Lightroom before, a person who's opened it but hasn't used it very much, and I think it's also going to be good for a person who has been using Lightroom for awhile but doesn't know everything that Lightroom can do for them, things that will give you a boost to your workflow and save you time, and help you find exactly what you need when you need it.
2. Software Overview: Okay. So let's get started by doing a software overview and we'll just talk about what you see onscreen when you first open Lightroom. I'm going to be using Lightroom 5. If you don't have a copy of Lightroom 5, you can get a free 30-day trial version and I've provided the link in the lessons, so you can go grab that. That way we'll all be on board with the same menus and options available as those things have changed. We're always going to open up library module run mode, but you can see the other modules listed out across the top here. Develop, where you do processing, as well as Map Book, Slideshow, Print, and Web. We're going to be focusing on the Library module, so let's start looking around. At the very top, you'll see the main menu and all the tabs on the main menu. We've got the main Lightroom menu: File, Edit, Library, Photo, Metadata, View, Window, and Help. Below that you've got a bar that shows you the name of the catalog that you are currently working with. Here it's called Lightroom 5 catalog. You will learn how to rename that later if you want to. Then we have a left and right tab, each of these has panels. So, we'll start here on the left tab. The first panel is the Navigator. The Navigator is going to let you view a photo in FIT, in FILL or a zoomed in version. You can actually move around or click to wherever you want to look up close and you can Zoom even further. There's actually a menu that will expand all the way, whichever the last one is that you choose is the last one that will be available to you in the Navigator menu. Let's bring that back out to Fit. I go back to the grid. Underneath the Navigator panel, you have your Folders panel. Then you've Collections and Publish Services. Below that we have an important export buttons. If we move to the right tab, you'll see the first panel as the histogram. Below that, we've got the quick develop panel, keywording panel, keyword list, metadata panel, and comments. If these are collapsed, you can just click on the arrow to open them. The very bottom we've got the sync metadata and sync settings buttons. Underneath the image area, we have two things. One is this toolbar with some different options there, and at the very bottom, we've got a filmstrip. This is another place where all your images are available to be seen and scrolled through as well as the main image area in the middle. One more thing here is the library filter right above the image area. This is a very powerful thing, we'll talk about it later. Okay. That's our overview. Let's move on.
3. View Modes: Now, that we've taken a brief look around and seen everything that is in our workspace, I'm going to talk a little bit about how you can change the workspace to suit your needs. I want more room for my images rather than having things that are not really important for what I'm going to be doing. I want to be able to see my images more than I want to be able to see that I'm using Lightroom catalog five or that I have these menu items at the top here. So, I'm going to go to Window screen mode. I'll say that we're in the normal screen mode. This is how Lightroom is going to open up for you with all these venues and tabs showing. I want to make some changes. So, I can do that here on the menu. Whenever possible, I'm going to use shortcuts because that saves a lot of time for me. I'm going to show you guys how to do menus as well. So, we have the normal screen view right now. We can also move to the full screen with menu bar. I just want to take away the catalog name at the top. But I can also move to full screen that takes away both of those things. That's actually what I'm going to prefer to see. Note that you can also do full screen and hide panels all on one here too. This would be Shift+Command+F. Whenever I say Command, it's going to be Ctrl for PC or Windows. I'm saying Command because I'm used to Mac. I have also provided a link for you for all the shortcuts. So, make sure that you refer to that and use the correct shortcuts for your operating system. So, let's jump to full screen. You'll see that the menu at the top is hidden, but if I take my cursor up there it'll pop down for me. When I'm not interested in it it, goes away. I like that. I've also gotten rid of the bar with the name "The Catalog". I like that too. The next thing I'm going to get rid of is this list of the modules. So, I'm going to click this arrow here at the top and hide them. Whenever I want them, if I hover over the now grayish-looking arrow, they will come back and I can still use those to navigate. Even though it's better to use shortcuts, which I do most often anyway. Now, remember a minute ago, I told you that you could get through different full screen views with not only the menu at the top but with the shortcut and that would be F. If we hit Shift+F, we can bring back the menu at the top and then hide them one by one until we get our screen back to ourselves. You can also hide the film strip at the bottom. The same way I had Develop Module menu. Let's click on our arrow. So, I don't feel like I really need to see this at the bottom. Of course if you want to, it'll pop up. Or you can click to bring it back if you like. These are all things that will be personal to you and how you want your workspace to appear. Each panel in the tabs on the left and the right can be collapsed. You just click the little arrows next to them, you can collapse them and hide things, streamlining what you view. Then you can expand them whenever you need to see what's inside. You can also hide these panels by clicking the arrows like I did with the others, and they will pop back out when you hover as well. If you don't like that, you can specify what their behavior will be by hovering over an arrow and right-clicking. Here we get a menu. Right now, they're set to auto-hide and show. You can also have them auto-hide as their default and having to click to make them come back. You can set them to manual so that they never auto-hide. Finally, you can also decide to pair one of these things with syncing with the opposite panel. That means that whatever you tell one panel to do the other panel will automatically do. You have all these options also with the film strip at the bottom. Let's focus a little bit more on the panels. Notice that when you have them all open, you're going to have to scroll more to see what you want to see at any given time. There's a pretty cool little thing that you can do called Solo mode. If you right-click here, you can move down to Solo mode. Select that. What that does is it only allows one panel to stay open at a time. This is nice. It's very streamlining and it doesn't put anything that you're not interested in in your face. Also stops all the scrolling that you have to do to get to the next thing. So, Solo mode is a really cool thing to know about and to activate if you want. Now, let's talk about the library filter at the top. The library filter is a powerful tool that you're going to want to use a lot. But when you're not using it, you can hide that as well. You can hide it very easily just by using the backslash. That's three keys over to the right from your P key on the keyboard. The toolbar at the bottom has its own customizations. You can tell it what to include here on this little arrow menu. You can also hide it by clicking T. Okay, let's move on to getting a little bit closer to our images and how we can make them appear. Right now, we're in what is called Grid view. So, you can see all of your images in this grid. You can change the size of the grid by going to the menu and clicking View. You can increase or decrease the size of the grid here, or you can also click the plus and minus buttons on your keyboard. When you have your tool bar showing, there's also a thumbnail slider to use. My favorite thing is to use keyboard shortcuts there. So, I'm usually going to do it that way. Now, this is Grid view. But you can double-click on an image and you get what's called Loupe view. On the toolbar, you can also toggle between Grid view and Loupe view with these bottoms at the bottom. Click on Grid. Click on Loupe. You can also choose G or E, grid, and then E is the Loupe. You have to remember that E is the last letter of Loupe. Maybe that makes it a little bit more sense. You'll notice that the area behind the image is this kind of a light gray color. This is something else that you can change. If you right-click in that area, you can choose different colors to have, and you can also choose to have a texture in the background. If that's what you want, this is what it looks like. I find that really distracting so I leave it on none and gray works really well for me personally, but you can choose whatever you like there. If you want to get rid of everything and just look at the image, there's two things you can do. First you, can just hit F to a full screen preview hiding everything else. You hit F again, you come back to the view you had before. You can also do what's called dimming or turning out the lights and you can scroll through that by clicking L. This is dim and this is lights out. Lights back on and now I'm going to show you that you can actually change things in the grid and the Loupe view to view extra information. First, we'll show what can be added to Loupe. So, if you go to the menu at the top and you click on View, you'll see all the way at the bottom that you have the option to have Loupe Info and Loupe Overlay. Let's go to Loupe Overlay first. What this is going to do is it's going to overlay something on your image, either a grid, a guide or a layout image of your own that you can add. Let's just look at what the grid looks like. Here's the grid. As you see, you can hold Command for options. Let's do that. Up at the top, you'll see that you can click on Size and drag back and forth to change the size. You can click on Opacity and drag back and forth to change the opacity. That's the Grid. Let's also view the Guides. Now you see you can have them both at the same time or you can add one and subtract the other. The Guide has changes that can be made as well. You can grab it and move it around. Okay, so those are your overly options. I will click not to show those now. The next thing that you can have on your Loupe view is actual information about the image. So, let's click to show that. You can also do that with command I, and we will see that some information is now overlaid on the image. We've got the filing, the capture time, and the dimensions of the image. There's two different types of information you can have. That's Info 1 or you can have Info 2, where you can see there's something a little bit different on the image now. We have the file name and we have some extra information about that image. If you want to change the information that's included for Info 1 or Info 2, you can do that by going to the View Options. In Loupe View, you see that you can change the information that's on Info 1 or Info 2. You have different options that you can choose from, and so you can customize that to display exactly the information you want to show if you want to use the information overlay. Otherwise, you can choose not to show it and you can do that on the menu or you can cycle through that on your regular view by using the keyboard shortcut I and that's easy to do. Two more things we're going to look at and that's how to compare photos and compare view and how to look at several images at once and survey view. If you'd like to compare two images, first, let's go back to grid, I'm going to push G on the keyboard. You can choose two images of your liking by clicking on one, holding down command, and clicking on another or if you just choose one image and go into compare it will compare with the adjacent image. By going to View and scrolling down to compare, we can click C on the keyboard or you can use your toolbar icon, this little XY guide down here. Here we see our initial image. That's the selected image and our candidate. In this case, since I didn't select a second image, it uses the adjacent photo. You can scroll through images that you want to compare with the select image by using the arrow key on your keyboard or by using the arrow keys down in the toolbar. If you'd like, you can swap the images, and now, you'll be comparing it to other images when you scroll. On the other side here, we've got this little lock, a zoom, slider and a sink. Well, what's all that about? Well, if you'd like to, you can zoom in while you're comparing to the images, and if you want to zoom in on each image independently, you can click the lock, select an image, and then zoom in on that image independently of the other image. If you'd like to sync them again, click Sync. Now they're the same zoom level, and if you want them to keep zooming at the same level, you click the lock again and they will do that. Now, let's get back into the grid mode. Press G. That was comparing two images. We can also look at several images at once in survey mode. You can highlight an image by clicking on it, hold command and select several images, or you can highlight an image by clicking on it, hold down shift and select a long line of images. Now again, we can go to View, Survey, or we can click N on the keyboard or we can go to the tool bar and click the Survey button. Now you can see all of these images on screen at once, compare them. You can also do things like give them ratings of flags, which we'll talk about later, and you can easily remove any of them from your collection. This one's a little scary. Let's get rid of this one and just compare the others. Maybe we only want to compare things of nature with plants. I didn't even include all those other images. So, there. You can compare them, you can remove them, you can change them, can move through them with the arrow keys to highlight different ones or use your keyboard. I'm going to click G to take us back to grid now. So, now that we've had a look around and we've seen everything that's here and we've seen how we can change what we see and control the way we're looking at our images, let's move on to talk about setting some preferences and personalizing other parts of our experience.
4. Personalize: Preferences: Let's talk about some ways that you can personalize your experience. We're going to go to the top menu here and click "Lightroom" and go to our "Preferences." So, we'll start off with the "General" preferences. The language on your splash screen are going to be your personal preferences. I would actually tell you to always check for updates because it's important to keep the software up-to-date, but that is my preference. Below that, we have an area that shows what our default catalog is going to be when we start Lightroom. If you use the same catalog all the time or most often, loading the most recent catalog is probably a good option for you. You can also choose a specific catalog, and your list of catalogs will be here, or you can just tell it to ask you when you start Lightroom which catalog you would like to use and choose that. Underneath that, we have several import options. Show the Import dialog when a memory card is detected. This means that whenever you pop a memory card into your computer or your reader that's connected to your computer, the import window will automatically open without you having to click the "Import" button. Next, select the Current/Previous import collection during import. This means that while your images are importing, that the collection that's going to be highlighted is the Current/Previous import collection. Next to that is, if you want to ignore camera-generated folder names when naming folders. This is just your personal preference. If you want to use the camera-generated folder names, unclick it. If you don't click it, asks you if you want to treat JPEG Files next to raw files as separate photos. If you take JPEGs and raws next to one another and camera, what Lightroom will do if you have this unchecked is that, it's going to just add it as a sidecar file, and it's not going to show it in your image view. You want it to show them as separate photos, you'll have to click that. Next, we've got Completion Sounds, and this is just whether you want to hear sound when you finish importing photos, when tether transfer finishes, or when you're finished exporting photos. Then, you have Prompts, reset all warning dialogues button. Catalog settings, we're going to skip that for now because that's a different menu, and we're going to talk about that when we go more in-depth at their catalog. Next, you've got Presets. These are the preset preferences. We've got some Develop Settings that are default in Lightroom, and you can check or uncheck whether you want those to happen. First one is to apply auto tone adjustments. If you have it apply auto tone adjustments, Lightroom is going to automatically make tone adjustments to your images when you import them. If you want that, you can click that. I prefer to have control over those things, so I don't have that checked. Next, you can apply an auto mix when first converting to black and white. That comes checked as a default. I like to uncheck that because I would prefer to mix my black and whites myself. You can also make defaults specific to your camera serial number or specific to a camera ISO setting. Those require profiles to be saved for those things, and you can check those if you want your defaults to be set to your camera serial number or ISO setting. If you don't like the things that you've changed, you can click to reset all the Default Develop Settings here. Next, there's a location area. This is asking you if you want to store presets with this catalog. What that means is that, if your presets are stored with a catalog, they're going to be stored in the same file as the catalogue, and wherever you take that catalog and open it in any copy of Lightroom, your presets that you have loaded, the ones that were default, as well as any that you've added, are going to be present along with your catalog. If you don't do that, the presets will be saved separately. If you open a catalog that doesn't have the presets saved with it. In another version of Lightroom, you'll have to import the presets. Similarly, if you have the preset saved in the catalog, when you open a different catalog, the presets won't be available and you have to re-import them. I prefer not to store my presets in the catalog file, but again, this is a personal decision for each to make. There's also a button here that shows Lightroom presets folder on your computer. This is really handy if you can't remember where you have saved your presets, you can click that, and it goes right to the folder there in. Here, we see Develop Presets and other presets. Next, there's a whole bunch of buttons that will help you restore Lightroom defaults after you've made changes if you don't want them anymore, and you want to go back to the default setup, you can click any of those. Moving to external editing. These are going to be important things for you to fill out once you've decided you're going to do editing in another piece of software like Photoshop or another external editor. You want to be able to send your photos from Lightroom over to that. This is going to give you the details about how you're going to do that, the File Format, Color Space, Bit Depth, Resolution, and Compression for editing in Adobe Photoshop CC and similar information about any additional external editor that you would actually specify. Do you want to stack those images, the ones that have been changed and brought back into Lightroom with your original image? That's checked by default. I like to keep that checked. You may send a photo to Photoshop and make changes in it. I can save it, and bring it back into Lightroom, and then it will be stacked right next to my original, they're not floating around in different places, and that's nice. Finally, edit externally file naming. This just controls how you want your files be named when you're sending them to out to another program, and you have some choices here. You can do a custom name ( x of ), that's a number in a sequence that you are determining, Custom Name - Original File Number, Custom Name- Sequence, and so on. You can edit these to make them look exactly the way you want by adding or subtracting things to these fields. Moving on to file handling. The first piece here is about the Import DNG Creation. We'll come back to this when we talk about importing and DNG. Next part is about Reading Metadata, the forward slash as a keyword separator. Mostly, unless you're importing from a third-party software that has set up this way, you're not going to have to worry about this, I leave this unchecked. File Name Generation, treat the following characters as illegal. You can choose to have the forward slash or the forward slash colon and many other symbols as illegal. This is a personal preference. What will you replace your illegal filename characters with? Dashes or underscores or similar characters. When a file name has a space, should we leave it as is, replaced with an underscore or replaced with a dash? That's your personal preference. Now, here's another area, and this one is more important than the others, I believe. This is Camera Raw Cache Settings. This cache is basically what Lightroom is using when you're making changes, so it's all the information that it's accessing to make information and processing changes while you're working in Lightroom. This information needs to be readily available and very quick. So, what you want to make sure is, that you're not going to choose to change this location to somewhere that's not as easily accessible, say, an external drive, keep it on your internal drive. It's automatically saved to your internal drive. But if you have more than one drive internally and one of them is faster than the other, it's smart to choose the fastest one because the faster the drive is, the more quickly you will be able to do things in Lightroom. Also, you can set the maximum size of your cache, and this is helpful to make a setting unique to you about because it will also affect how fast you're able to do things. You want to be able to have all of the information that you need available to you while you're working. If you're working with very large batches at a time, that a small cache size isn't going to be very convenient for you. Some people like wedding photographers and the like are going to have thousands of images that they need to work with at any given time. You'll want to increase this to reflect what the size batches that you're working with are like. I have mindset at 30 gigabytes. This will change for each person. You can purge your cache here as well if you like. Similarly, you can set video cache settings to limit the cache size, and to give it a maximum size, and to purge the cache. Lastly, we have the interface. Here are some things about the actual interface that you can change. End Marks will add a little image to the bottom of these panel tabs. You can choose the Small Flourish, for example, or you can add and choose others. It's not really a big deal. You can also change the font size in these panels on the tabs. Lights Out, Screen Color, and Dim level could be changed here. Remember, when we dropped the lights by using the L-key and we had initially a Dim, and then a Lights Out. You can also change the background color and texture, and your main and secondary windows here. The Secondary Window is if you are using a display, a secondary display, you can turn on that Secondary Window in the window menu. We have Keyword Entry, separate keywords using commas or spaces. Commas as the default, I consider it the superior way. It's a personal choice. I do not want to separate by spaces because a lot of my keywords actually have spaces in them, so I separate by commas. Auto-complete text and keyword tags field means that once you've used tags, it will start to auto-complete for you the next time you start typing in something similar. I like to have this checked because it's a timesaver. I only have to just begin typing something, and then I can hit "Enter" as soon as it starts to auto-complete. The Filmstrip has options. They all are checked by default. These are ratings, picks, badges that counts, little things that you've added to the photo, information that's indicated, and you'll be able to see icons on the images that indicate those things. Showing the photos in the navigator on mouse over, like I showed you earlier, and showing the photo info tooltips. This is nice to have especially when you start out. If you hover over something, it will give you some information about how to use that thing. You can uncheck those if you don't want to see those. Zoom clicked point to center, this means that when you zoom in, if you haven't clicked, it's going to center exactly where you're zoomed. Let me show you what I mean. If I zoom in on this gentleman's eye, it's going to go right to his eye. This makes sense to me. If you don't have that option clicked. When you click to zoom into an image, it will automatically zoom to the center of the image every time. You can choose to set that as you like, and finally, using typographic fractions. This is in your panels when you see things. The Metadata, it'll have typographic fractions. You can choose that or not choose that. Okay, so those are our preferences.
5. Personalize: Identity Nameplate & Watermarks: Okay, let's talk about a couple of other things that you can do to personalize your interface and also something you can do to personalize your photos. Let's go to the identity plates set up here and the Main Menu under Lightroom and click on that, and what this is going to do, it's going to allow you to change that identity nameplate that just says the Lightroom logo and name at the the top left of your workspace. You can choose a stylized text identity play or you can use a graphical identity play. The stylized identity play, you can type in whatever you want to show up at the top. You can change the fonts and the type of typing, and the font size and color. You can also choose something that will complement this for your module menu, and then you can save that, and have your nameplate show up the top if you do that. So, this is a way for you to customize what you see here at the top. So, it could say Lotus Photos or I could put an image there. Last on the personalization, let's talk about watermarks. Go to the main Lightroom menu at the top here and click Edit Watermarks, and we'll get a little window that will help us create custom watermarks to use on our images. It's down at the bottom here, you can see there's some typing copyright Skillshare Studio. This is what will appear in the watermark, if you export with the watermark chosen. You can use text where you can have a graphic watermark, you would have to use a graphic that you would upload. Let's stick with text and look at how to do that. You want to have an image, you would choose it here, otherwise you're going to just use the text options. If you want to add a shadow, you can change the elements of the shadow, although opacity, the offset, the radius and the angle of the shadow can all be changed with these sliders. You can also change the properties of the watermark altogether. You can change the size, so we see the size increase here at the bottom, and you can have it fit at the bottom of the image, or fill the entire image, or be proportional and use the slider. We can also change the inset of the watermark here. We can move it horizontally and we can move it vertically. Finally, you can choose an anchor point by clicking around in here and you can rotate it. My favorite part is changing the opacity because in my opinion a good watermark is very hard to notice. Okay, when you've got everything you like in your watermark, you click to save it, and that'll be saved in your watermarks, which will be an option to use when you're exporting photos. Next, we'll move on to a section on file handling.
6. Understand Your Catalogue: We're going to start off talking about our catalog. The catalog is so important. I think often people jump into Lightroom and they get really excited about using the processing power of the program, and they don't spend very much time learning or thinking about how the catalog works and later they will wish that they had understood that so that they can make appropriate decisions when they started. So, your catalog is a file that's going to save information about all the photos that you have imported into Lightroom. That is, information about where they're stored, the originals source files that is, and any metadata, information that you've saved on the photos, as well as any changes or processing that you've done or wanted to do to your photos. This is all going to be saved in the catalog file without changing the original image files. It helps you organize your images in the same place where you process them. This is very nice. It's very powerful. You can be disconnected from your original image files, and you can still view your images in Lightroom because of the catalog because it has the previews. If you create smart previews, you can even still edit photos in Lightroom without being connected to your original image files. Now, you can have multiple catalogs and you can choose between them or you can just use one. This is going to be a personal choice. If you did have several, for example, you might want to have one for all of your wedding work, one for your personal use, one for instructional use etc, or you may have such a high shooting volume that you choose to do a different catalog each year. It's all up to you how you want to create your catalogs and manage them, in the long run, depending on what your plan for your photography is. Adobe recommends using only one catalog, if possible, to reduce confusion and accessibility issues, remembering where each catalog is and being able to connect to them to work and make exports and such when you need to. I choose to work with just one catalog. Many other people choose to do that differently. It's a good idea to ask around, talk to other people who have made these decisions, and think very carefully about what your strategy is going to be when you start off. It's also good to think about where you're going to store your catalog or catalogs. If you store them on an external drive, you should remember that if you're not connected to the external drive, you're not going to be able to view your catalog. That means you can't even view the previews or your organizational setup at all. I personally like to keep my catalog stored on my internal drive and keep my photos and their backups stored on an external drive and do my work that way. If I want images to be available when I'm disconnected from my external drive, I know I'm going to need to work on them in a situation like that, I will build smart previews and then I can still edit them. I discard the smart previews when I'm done so that I can save space. Now that we've talked a little bit about how the catalog works and you know that you should spend some time planning what your strategy is going to be, we're going to actually look at the catalog settings. So go up to your main Lightroom menu, up at the top right, and click on catalog Settings. Here's our window for catalog settings and we start off with the general window. We've got information about location and a little show button which is nice so that you can go right to where your catalog is on your computer or wherever you have it. In case you forget where it is, filename, when it was created, the last backup and last time it was optimized. This is a brand new catalog. So it hasn't been backed up or optimized at all yet. But that's where this information will be, and the size of the catalog. You also have backup scheduling menu. You can set that to never, once a month, once a week, once a day every time Lightroom exits, or when Lightroom next exits. This is going to be based on what your workflow is like. How often do you use Lightroom? If you only use it once a week, then once a week is great. But you use it every day, you probably will want to backup your catalog every day. What this control is when it's going to ask you. So, if you have once a week when exiting, it'll ask you if you want to back up that. If you have when Lightroom next exits, it'll ask you the very next time you exit. What it asks you, it's also going to ask you where you want the backup to be. This is a good thing to take note of. If you do have a setup where you or have access to external drives, my recommendation is that you choose to store your catalog backup on the external drive. The reason for this is that a backup is there to help us if an original is damaged or lost. If your original catalog that is saved on your computer is damaged or lost because you lost the computer or had it stolen, you're also not going to have access to your backup catalog if it's also stored on your computer. So, it's a very good idea to store a backup on an external drive and maybe even to store a backup on two external drives. Depends on how safe you want to be. Again, that's an option that you choose when it actually prompts you to do a backup. As far as optimization goes, it's saying last optimized here. It will also ask you when it asks you if you want to back up, if you want to optimize your catalog and if you want to test the integrity of your catalog. I say yes to both of those because it keeps your catalog in top condition. If you haven't optimized your catalog in a while after you've been using it for a while things in Lightroom will start to slow down a bit. So, I just like to tell it to optimize every time I'm telling it to backup and I back a very regularly. Let's move to file handling, and talk about the preview cache. Preview cache is the cache of all of the previews that you have of your images in Lightroom. These are the copies of your photo basically that you are working with when you're making changes to the images in the catalog file. Remember, those changes don't actually have any impact on your original file, but you need to have a good preview to see what you're doing and to work with. Here you have some information. How big is your preview cache? What's your standard preview size? Quality? And when to discard your 1:1 previews. Your standard preview size is going to be based for you on a decision that you should make about how much room you have on your computer and how fast it is. The faster your computer is, the larger the preview size it can handle without slowing Lightroom down. Same goes for your preview quality. The better quality your preview, the more fine detail you can see in effect when you're doing processing. So, it's going to be a trade-off. You have to decide how much room and speed you have and trade that off for quality if you don't have very much room or speed. You can change those settings as you work and see what difference it makes. One-one previews are the highest quality size previews that you can have, and I recommend that you use those whenever possible to do editing. You can have those built when you import your photos or you can build them later. If you're not going to work on your photos right away, it's a good idea to just import smaller photos and save making 1:1 previews for later when you're going to process. Here you can tell it when to discard those. If you don't work on your photos very often, you can click never and then you can manually discard the 1:1 previews. Otherwise, you can tell it to discard the previews after a day, a week, or 30 days depending on how quickly you know you're going to get to a batch of photos and work on them and be done with them, and not need those 1:1 previews anymore. Next, we have smart previews size. Smart previews are the type of previews that you can additionally build for your images that will allow you to access them to edit when you're disconnected from your original image files. If you're not planning on doing editing when disconnected from the original the files, you don't need to build smart previews. Last, you can control the import sequence numbers; the starting number and the number of photos. This is not something I really worry about, I just leave it at the defaults and I don't do anything different with that. Finally, we've got the metadata panel. We'll start off with editing. First option is to offer suggestions from recently entered values. This means that when you're entering in metadata for an image, it's going to give you suggestions based on what you've entered previously. This is nice because it saves time. If you want to clear the suggestion list anytime you can click here. This will control whether you're going to have your develop or processing settings information from Lightroom in the metadata so that when you transfer JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and PSD to another piece of editing equipment or hardware software, that information is going to be present and we can see the changes that have been made in Lightroom. Automatically, write changes into XMP. This is something that's going to add a whole lot of extra information into your files. If you are not going to be using third party software that needs this, I recommend keeping this unchecked. Next, we have reverse geocoding. Enable reverse geocoding of GPS coordinates to provide address suggestions. Export reverse geocoding suggestions whenever address fields are empty. If you're going to be using a GPS and geo-location, it's a good idea to have these checked because it's going to offer you suggestions so that you can get your locations as precise as possible. It's going to export those when there aren't anything in the address fields, again, giving you more of a chance at getting at least a very close location added to the information in your photos. Finally, DXF. Do you want to write the date or time changes into the proprietary raw files? This means if you change the capture time or date on a photo because it was wrong or for whatever other reason you want to, it will be written into the raw file information. I would want to have this checked because I would want for that information when I change it to stay with the metadata because I'm changing it because it was wrong, I want it to be correct. That's a personal choice, you can choose to or not. That's it for our catalog settings. One more thing we're going to look at before we move on to the next part is how to create a new catalog or how to open a different catalog. So, if you go to the file menu at the top, you can see right here at the top, New catalog, Open catalog, Open Reset. This will be a list of any of the catalogs you opened recently and you can easily choose among them and select a different one to open it. If you want to create a new catalog, you can also do that here. It's new catalog. You'll give it a name, any tags, where to save it, and click Create. That's all about catalogs. Now, let's move on how to import files.
7. How to Import Files: Okay. Let's talk about how to import files. When you want to import files, you can either come down here to the bottom and click Import or if you have this setting in your preferences, you should be able to put a card into your computer or card reader and have the Import dialog open automatically, like so. I have a card that I've put into the card reader attached to the computer, and you can see that over here, on the left side, as one of the sources. So, you can plug a card reader in and stick a card in it or you can plug in a camera or you can plug in your phone or you can have files on your computer or on an external hard drive that you can access. Any of these places, you can move files into Lightroom. Next, you need to understand how you're going to get your photos into Lightroom. Are you going to copy, move, or add? Let's talk about copy as DNG. DNG is a proprietary type of file that is created by Adobe and used in different types of editing software. Let's go to the Preferences menu that I mentioned earlier and have a look at the options for DNG. You're going to copy your photos as DNG. You can control whether the extension is lowercase or uppercase. You could control the compatibility. You need to choose this carefully because if you have Photoshop that has Camera Raw 4.6, you don't want to set your compatibility to Camera Raw 7.1 and later. So, think about that when you're doing this. You can control the size of your JPEG preview. Remember, this will affect speed. You can choose to embed fast load data. What this means, as it's showing us, is that it embeds data inside the DNG file so it loads faster. It'll increase the file size slightly but it's recommended. You can also embed the original raw file when you do copy as DNG. What this means is that if you think you may ever need that raw file for another purpose, it will still be available. This will increase your file size. But if you're going to use DNG and you still want to retain your raw file, you should be using that. Okay. When you copy as DNG, your file is going to be converted to a DNG, and placed in a new location, and then added to the catalog. If you just choose to copy, it's going to copy your photos to a new location and add them to the catalog. With both of these, since you're making a copy to put it in a new location, the original file that you're making the copy from is still going to be wherever it was before. So, in this instance, it's still going to be on the card that wasn't a file from your computer. It would still be there. Here, you can see that Move and Add are not available for me to use when I have a card selected. You cannot move files from a card and you cannot add files from a card to the catalog. Instead, let's find a folder to import the photos from. So I'll go over here, and I'll click on the Macintosh hard drive. I'm going to navigate to a folder. Now, it says there are no images there, but there are. I'm going to include subfolders. They're the images I'm looking for. Looks like all of these images have already been imported. How can I tell? Well, these images are grayed out, and I have Don't Import Suspected Duplicates checked over here. I'm going to need to find some different images to import. Here are some images I can impart. Okay. So, this is a nice feature. If you have Don't Import Suspected Duplicates checked, it's going to gray out images that thinks you've already pulled into Lightroom. That's nice. We're not going to be adding extra files that are already in there just because we forgot we did that. Now you can see that I have access to Move and Add. Move, instead of copying, is going to move these files or photos to a new location and add it to the catalog. Now, if you do this, you have to remember that this is what you did. It means that these photos are not going to be in this original location anymore. Later, if you choose to delete them out of Lightroom from their new location, you will not have them anymore. So, it's just something you have to be conscious of that you've done. Add will not move the photos at all. It will leave them where they are and it will add them to your catalog. This mean it's going to access them from the folder that they're in, not in a different location, but it's going to give your catalog access and give Lightroom access to your photo. My personal preference is to copy. Later, I can get rid of the images wherever they originally were and I don't have to worry about the images that Lightroom is accessing being affected. Also, almost 100% of the time for me now, when I'm importing images, I'm importing them from a card. So, they're not in another folder on my computer. I don't have to worry about that anymore. I'm just copying them over to a new location and adding them to my catalog. Now, let's go to the tab on the right side and talk about some other things you need to decide before you import. Let's look at the File Handling panel here at the top. It's automatically building 1:1 previews. This is the highest type of quality preview. It's going to offer you the most fine ability to process because you're using the best kind of preview. If you don't build a 1:1 preview, you're going to have to build it later when you're processing. The things to think about here are how long do you have to import. If you need to get the photos in really fast or you're not going to be working with the photos for awhile and you want to build your 1:1 previews later, you can import them with minimal previews. This will make the import go faster and it will mean that not as much room is being taken up on your computer. Then later, when you're going to process, you can select photos and tell Lightroom to build 1:1 previews for them before you start processing. Now, we can also click to Build Smart Previews. As I mentioned before, you build smart previews for your images. You're going to be able to edit them even when you're not connected to the original image files. If you don't need to do any editing, when you're disconnected from the original image files, don't check this because it is going to take up extra room. We have an option to not import suspected duplicates, as I mentioned. You can also make a second copy of the image to a place of your choosing. File Renaming. Here is where we decide how files are going to be named. We can leave them named as they are on the original source or we can choose to rename them. We have some templates that we can use, custom names that you can work with. So, if I click on Custom Name, it's going to let me enter a field. If I click on Custom Name and Original File Number, I get to enter something in that field, and it'll tack on the the file name at the end of that, or the file number, and so on and so forth. You have different options. You can also edit these templates to create new ones for you to use later. I'm going to choose to use the date and file name. Next, you have some things that you can apply during import. You can actually alter your Develop Settings that is processing on the photo, Metadata, and Keywords as you're getting the images imported. This is a really great time saver. If you want to go ahead and apply a preset that will do some processing on your photo right away, if you know which preset you want to use and what look you want on this entire batch of photos, you can do that. You can also choose to add metadata. We'll talk about creating metadata presets later. If you have preset saved, you can apply them here and you can include keywords, like if I wanted to put the word family on all of these images, which actually applies as these are images of my son and my husband. Here's all of us at the end here. Next, we need to determine the destination. These images are going to go into a subfolder. We can choose how they're going to be organized. I generally choose to organize by date. I like for my Lightroom hierarchy, to include years, and days, and months. It's much easier for me to conceptualize that way and then use the other organizational things in Lightroom to drill down to different things. Date format can be chosen from a long list of options. I usually stick with this year parent folder, and then year, month, day format, but you can choose a different one. Then I can see the folders that are going to be created and all of the subfolders that are going to be created. They're kind of grayed out because they haven't actually been created yet, but we can see what's going to happen in a minute when we import, which is kind of neat. Now, the last thing that you need to do is to just click Import. You can also choose, by the way, to only import some of these images. You can easily do that by either manually unclicking them or doing it all at once, uncheck all or uncheck here all photos. Then you can manually select which ones you do want to import. You can also select several at one time easily by clicking on the lead photo, holding Shift, and clicking on the end photo. Now that these are highlighted, I can just put a check mark in one box, and they'll all be checked. Any photos that aren't going to be imported are easy to see. They have been dimmed with a vignette, which you can see disappear when I roll over them. But in this instance, I want to import all of these. So, I have them all checked. So let's click Import, and let them come on into Lightroom. So, we can see the progress bar at the top left. Now, 1:1 previews are being built for the photos. Okay. The images that I wanted to import are in. Now we can see the collection here, the previous import collection is selected and I have 13 photos that I just imported.
8. Moving Files: So, let's talk about moving files. The way that you have your image files stored or located is going to be completely up to you. They may be in different folders and different places, on your computer, on an external drive. I choose to leave all of my images in the folders, the date folders that are created by Lightroom that I have selected and I leave them all in those folders with that level of organization on an external drive. In one place it's very easy for me to know that's where they are and they're actually also on what's called a Drobo. So, it's backing them up automatically for me. I feel really comfortable with that. If you have your images somewhere else or you need to move them around, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you're going to do any changing to the folders or the files, you should do that all within Lightroom. If you're going to rename folders or delete things or anything of that nature, you should do it within Lightroom. What happens though if you don't? Well, going to go navigate to this folder that I've created. So, this is where the images are going for this class and you can see that it's created year folders for me and within each one of those, we have a specific date folder and the images are inside of those. Well, let me go find an image in Lightroom. Let's go to the 2011 folder here and you can see the same hierarchy of parent and source folders. We've got this great image of my friend Ricardo Lagos. Let's see. Maybe I want to move that image. I'm going to play around. I'm going to take that image and I'm going to put it on my desktop. Let's see what happens. Look right here. All of a sudden it's telling me this photo is missing. There's a little icon on your grid view as well. Lightroom doesn't know where this photo is now, because I went outside of Lightroom and moved it. You're still going to be able to view the preview but you won't be able to do any processing on this photo until you tell Lightroom where it is. In order to do that, you can click on this little icon and you can tell it to locate the file. Now, I'll have to go to where I put the photo, and there it is. Something that's interesting is that you can also find nearby missing photos. So, if instead of just moving one photo, I had moved several photos, Lightroom will attempt to find those as well if I have this option checked. Now here's what's going to happen when I tell it to find this photo in its new location. It did find it. Here it is but it has now added the desktop folder. So, wherever you put the image and you've now relocated it, it's going to add that as part of your Lightroom catalog and part of your setup. Now I'm going to do this one more time, so that we can see. I'm going to take this and I'm going to move it, and I'm going to put it where it belongs. There we go. It's back in the home it should be in. Of course, it looks like it's missing again here. There we go. It's back in its proper home and it's not missing. We see right here that we have accessed the original photo. I'm going to remove this desktop folder now because we don't need it. This will also be the case, if you move an entire folder. I'm going to take this folder and put it on the desktop also. Here's what it looks like when you've lost the link to a folder. The folder will actually have a grayed out icon with a question mark on it. Similarly, you can right click and find missing folder. Now, it's in a different place rather than being in this folder it is. Let's see the parent folder. In this folder. Let's move that back. There we go. So, you see that you can recover things if you move them around, but it can get very confusing especially if you didn't remember that you moved things or you didn't run into the fact that the file was not linked to Lightroom anymore until a long time later and you can't remember where you moved it to. The best strategy is to keep everything in one place and to do all of your moving of folders and files and renaming of them as well from within Lightroom so that Lightroom always knows what's going on and you don't have to figure out anything that's confusing. Everything can be moved around right in here. So, for example you can click and drag from one folder to another and you see that when you make a move it says this will cause the corresponding files on the disk to be moved. If you proceed neither this move nor any change you've made prior to this can be undone. You'll have to re-move things yourself if that's how you want to do it, you can't just click undo. It says that folder already exists at this location because I picked it up and dropped it in the same place. Okay. If you right click, you can also see that you have different options to move, rename and do other things with your folders right in here. So, this is the place where you're going to make changes. Not from somewhere else. Always [inaudible] right in here. If you want to move a photo to a folder, if you want to rename a folder or remove it. If you want to save metadata from it. Also from in here you can synchronize folders, which means if you click this it's going to look in that folder and see if changes have been made. If you added more files to the folder on your computer, it will find those and add them here, and you can update the folder location here. You can import directly to this folder, and you can export this folder as its own catalog. You can also click to show this folder in your finder or if you're on Windows, I guess in your explorer, and you can also get the info for this folder. So, all the information that you're going to need about folders is right here. You just right click on any folder, or you right click on the title folders you get information that you can use. That's it. We're going to move on now to adding information to our images.
9. Rating, Pick Flag & Color Labels: Okay. We're going to start talking about adding information to your photos. This is going to do so much in order to help you organize your images. The more information and different kinds of information that you add to your photos, the much better your search functions are going to be and your organization is going to become. So, the first thing we're going to talk about is using ratings, flags, and color labels. Ratings is pretty much what it sounds like. You're going to rate your photos, and this is on a one to five stars level. So, five stars is going to be your most super duper, awesome, fantastic photos of all. Then, one is going to be like those really, terrible, sucky photos that you don't ever show to anybody. I know that nobody else has those. I definitely do. But you can rate your photos here from one to five stars, and you can do that in a few different ways. You select a photo, and you can go to Photo in the top menu, come down to Rating, or excuse me, Set Rating, and you'll get a menu: None, One, Two, Three, Four, Five. You can either click here in the menu, or you can click the corresponding keyboard shortcut. I love shortcuts, so that's what I always do. You can also increase or decrease the rating with the open and close bracket symbols on your computer. Let's go straight to the photo. You see when you hover over it, you have these little dots underneath it. Those are the places where the stars can be. If you click there, you can actually give them a rating right there. The same thing for the keyboard shortcuts. If I give it a four star rating with a four, but if I click zero, it will take that rating away. So, that's how you set your stars. You can also use these handy-dandy flags to give information to your images. The flags have three different statuses that they can be set. You can either have it Flagged, this is also referred to as Picked. Unflagged, like they all are now or Rejected. Boohoo. There's also these great keyboard shortcuts. P is for flagging a photo. It's easier to remember that if you consider it as a picked photo. It's a photo you picked. U is for unflagged, and X is for rejected. On any of those photos, you can also click this symbol, which I don't ever remember the name of, to toggle the flag, and you can increase or decrease the flag status by clicking on command up or down. So, let me go to this rose abstract photo, and I'll give it a five star rating, and then I'll click P, so that it is picked. So, I've now added some information to this photo,\ to say something about it. It's my best work, and I'm going to choose it, to process it, or printed, or whatever picked means to me. See, that's the other thing. It can mean whatever you want it to mean in your scheme. Personally, I use the picked flag to denote photos that I want to use for some reason at some time. So, this flag on this photo would mean I want to use it at some point. I want to process and use it for something. You can also add color labels to your scheme on Lightroom, and it's up to you to define what they're going to mean. Let me show you what I'm talking about. We got a photo again. We can scroll down to a set color label, and you'll see red, yellow, green, blue, purple, or none. There's also corresponding numbers: six, seven, eight, and nine. Purple doesn't get one, so it's the only one that doesn't have a keyboard shortcut for it. Now, these are a default color set. You can also create custom color sets. This will be under Metadata. Here, Color Label, Set. Right now, we have the Lightroom default selected. There's also a couple of other defaults that you can use if you like them. You can click them and see what they are. I clicked Review Status. Let's go back to Set Color Label. On this one, it's made what was red, and it will be a red color label. It's now called To Delete. The next one is Color Correction Needed. The next one is Good to Use. The next one is Retouching Needed. This might actually be a scheme you want to use. If it's not, you can still create your own Metadata, Color Label Set, Edit. Now, we can create our very own scheme. Let's say that red means I want to make a book out of these photos. Yellow means I want to make a slideshow. Green means I want to process these photos next. Blue means I've already processed this photo. Purple means I want to print this photo. Now, I can click Appear at the top and Save the Current Settings as a New Preset. I'm calling this one Lotus's Color Labels, or how about just Lotus's Labels? Create, click Change to finish that. You can still see the old ones, but I have to check my new labels. Photo, Set Color Label. Here we go. Let's say, I've already process that one. Now, you can see that it's blue, and there's a little blue box down here. These are considered part of Extras and Badges. There. Now, they're not visible. I actually like to see those though, so I'm going to keep them. Another thing that you can do with picked labels and these other types of information is, you can turn on a couple of extra options that are very valuable to use and can be timesaving. One is Auto Advance. Auto Advance is helpful if you're just doing one kind of information application at a time to each photo. So, let's say you want to go through a batch of photos and decide whether it's going to have a flag, not have a flag, or be rejected. If you're going to do that, when you're going through them, you're going to need to advance to each next photo, either by clicking on it or by using the arrow keys to move to the next photo. However, if you turn on Auto Advance you can go to a photo and click on that down here. It's going to advance through the next photo automatically for you. So, let's use P for a Picked Flag, U for Unflagged, and X for Rejected. The unflagged or photos that I just haven't decided whether I'm going to use or not yet, but I don't want to delete them. So, I'm going to leave them there. I'm still clicking, and each time, it's advancing for me. I'm not having to do that. It's happening for me. I didn't like that one, I rejected it. So, you get the idea. It will auto advance for you. Now, another nice thing is that, if you want to, you can absolutely and completely delete these rejected photos. That's one of the really great uses for the reject flag. You can already see that these rejected photos have been grayed out, but now I can also choose to delete them. Instead of having to go to each photo at a time and delete it one by one, I can go through and use my picked flags to set the status, and in the end, I can delete them. An easy way to do that is to just hit Command, Delete. These photos are going to now be deleted. However, many of them I set a reject flag on. It will give you the window here. Asking you, "Delete the two rejected master photos from disk or just remove them from Lightroom?" If you just click to Remove, the images are going to be removed from Lightroom. They're going to be removed from your catalog, and Lightroom isn't going to access them anymore, but they're still going to exist on your disk. But if you really don't want these photos, not that you just don't want them in Lightroom, but these are what you consider fails and you don't want them anymore, you can select to Delete from Disk and they will actually be removed from wherever they are and be gone. I'm going to click Cancel here because I want to keep these photos for now, but if you wanted to do that, you would either choose Remove or Delete from Disk. Now, I'm going to change the status of these two rejected photos by using the shortcut command up arrow key. Now, they are both unflagged. If you choose to do it this way, as you can go through, and you can flag things that you want to keep. Then leave things that you don't want to keep unflagged, and then use an option called Refine Photos. Under Library, you scroll down to Refine Photos and you can click on that. But that's going to do is it's going to change your Picked Flags to Unpicked or Unflagged. It's going to turn your Unflagged Photos into Rejected Photos. There's a little bit of a different scheme, but some people like to do it that way. That way, you're only using a pick and not picking and automatically transforming those two, an Unflagged Photo that's just going to stay and a Rejected Flag Photo that can be deleted. I'd prefer to use the three flags schema: Flag, Unflag, and Reject, but you can do it however you like. It's an interesting feature to know about. The last thing that we're going to talk about here is the paint can. The paint can is this little guy down here in the bottom, and you can use the paint can to add information to photos. Set up the Rating. Half appear with it and spray by clicking on an image, holding down that click and dragging. Now, you can see that all the images that I dragged it across are being rated the rating that I selected down here at the bottom. You can change that and continue on.
10. Working with Keywords: Keywords are something that can be a bit tedious. You are going to be adding words to each image that describe what the image contains, or where the image was taken, or anything that you know about the image that's going to give us more information about it. You're going to be adding these to each image, or you can add them to several images. What this is going to do is, it's going to allow you to search through your catalog of images and find very specific things based on those words. The ability for you to find something is going to be increased so greatly. That's why adding keywords adds so much power. I mean, if you think about a photo that you took years ago and it may have been a photo of your son on the beach when he was three, but you can't remember exactly when it was taken. Do you have with photos in Lightroom and if you've been keywording them very regularly, you can easily search for that image and find it right away. If you haven't, you're going to have to do some really annoying searching for it to try to find it. Now, that's just a personal situation. But what if somebody came to you and they wanted to buy a photo from you, license a photo, print a photo, they have a very specific idea of what they're looking for, and they describe some situation like, "I want a picture of a woman who's doing some kayaking and she's wearing a life vest." Well, you might know right away that you have something like that in your archives, but you can't remember where it is. Again, if you have the keywords on your photos, you can go search for that image right away in Lightroom and find it. That's a job. That's something that you can sell and make money on those. It's a really important thing to do, and I would suggest that you start doing it right away if you haven't been doing it yet. If you're just starting with Lightroom, go ahead and start keywording on the very first batch of photos that you import. Now, there's different ways that you can actually add the keywords to your images. After you selected an image, Add Keywords, click K, or go to your field and click on it, on the right. You can add this into the field where the keywords will aggregate or into the field below. If I was going to add keywords to this image, I would probably type something like abstract, red, flower, rose. Those are some good keywords for it. You'll see that, when I click Enter, they all went up into this field. After you have been using keywords for a while, you'll start to have keywords suggestions appear down below. This is really helpful because you can just click on them to add them to your keyword field. You also have a Keyword List. Let's look at that. Here, you can see the keywords that have been used so far in Lightroom. Since I just started with a fresh copy here, there aren't that many. If you want to add any of the keywords on the list very quickly, you can put a check right here. It doesn't really make sense for me to add that to that rose, so I'm going to take it off again. Back to the Keywording panel, you also have Keywords Sets. The first set that's appearing here is Recent Keywords. Here's the ones that you've used recently. You also have some defaults that Lightroom has loaded for you, outdoor photography, portrait, and wedding photography. If you click on one of those, you'll see suggestions that can appear for Portrait Photography: headshots, candid, pets, kids. But maybe I also want to create a different kind of keyword preset available to me for something that I do very often. Let's see how to do that. Let's go up to the Metadata in the menu. We'll scroll down to Keyword Set. Here, you can see the set that is currently selected, the other sets. You'll see that you can add it, so let's click that. You're not going to get a brand new blank template, instead you're going to get a window that shows the currently selected set. What you just do to create your own set is type over that. One of the things that I do very often is self-portraiture. So, I actually have a self-portraiture set. So, if I was going to do that, what would I type in here? Let's see. Okay, you get the idea. But now, I want to save that, I don't want it to be outdoor photography, do I? I want it to be something else. I want it to be called self-portraiture. So, I'll scroll down and I'll click to save the current settings as new preset. Now, it let's me type a letter, click Create, click Change. Let's look up here again now. There it is and there it is. Now, I can scroll to a self-portrait and I can add these in very quickly just by clicking here. So, spend some time thinking about the themes in your photography so that you can think of what some good keywords sets would be to create to make this go faster for you.
11. Metadata: Understand & Control: Okay, now, we're going to talk about Metadata. Click on one of your photos. Now, we'll go over in the right tab and click on the Metadata panel and we will see a setup for default Metadata information. This is the information that Lightroom thinks is most important for you to see at a glance. This includes information like the file name, title, caption, copyright, on down to things about your photo, the dimensions, the exposure, focal length, etc. You can also choose to see different kinds of Metadata and there are many. We can look at EXIF data for the photo, we can look at IPTC data which you can see includes information like the contact, the creator, and the creators address, and other information like email, and website, the content, things about the image, where it was created, the status of the image, the copyright information of the image, and there are many different kinds you can scroll through and click and see all of the different kinds. I usually leave mine set to default because this really is a good summary of information but you can customize this however you'd like. It's a good idea to think about what kind of Metadata you want on your images and why you want it that way. Metadata can be very powerful along with keywords. This is information that's being saved in the file that says something about your images. It gives information about the camera settings. Information about the file itself. It can give information about who took the photo and how to contact that person. Think about if somebody finds your work online and wants to hire you to do a job but they don't know who took the photo or how to contact you. It'd be nice if the Metadata actually contains that information and the person is able to contact you and then hire you. So, that's just one example. Also, to have copyright information included in the Metadata of your photo tells people what kind of copywriter license that you're using for your image which is also nice to have with the image. Now, Metadata will also take some time for you to enter some of it's going to come automatically with the care map. Other things like, title and caption you're going to have to enter manually and of course things like copyright and the creator. All of those other things we looked at a minute ago will need to be created as well. The nice thing is that you can create presets, so that some things are already filled out in one little group and you can assign presets to each photo. If you'd like to create a Metadata preset, you can actually click here on edit presets. You'll get this window and it shows you all the kinds of information that you can include in a Metadata preset. You can actually, include key words. One of the things that I like to do is to create a preset each year, that has 2014 or whatever year it is included in the keywords. That's one keyword that I now use for every image, I add that one. Let's go back up through this, I want to add that I'm the creator. I also want to add my email and my website. This way, anybody viewing the Metadata of the photo can contact me easily or find my other work. Let's say, that's all I want to add this Metadata preset. Now, I'm going to click where it says custom and I'm going to say save current settings as New Preset. It's going to let me title it and I'll call it Lotus Carroll 2014, create, done. Now, if I go to the presets, I'll see that as an option. I can click on it and automatically the things that I filled out are going to be here in my Metadata. You'll notice that, the 2014 keyword got added as well. Creating Metadata presets for the Metadata that you want on your photos makes that step so much easier than having to add it manually each time. A couple of tricks for adding Metadata to photos that's already on another photo is that you can actually go to the photo, right click on it, go down to the Metadata presets. Move over and click to copy the Metadata, it will open this window. You can click to copy it, move to another image, scroll down and paste the metadata. Alternately, you can click on an image and then select other images for example, by holding down shift, going to the end of a line and clicking now we have all these highlighted. Go all the way down to the bottom of the right tab and click to sync Metadata. You'll see that the image information from the first image I selected is brought up, we can tell it yes synchronize and you can see that it's the same owning to these images. That's a nice way to get the Metadata from one image to other images very quickly. So, make sure that you do spend some time thinking about the Metadata that you want, the information that you want to go along with your image files and take the time to create some presets to make it easier for you and apply those to your images.
12. Collections: What & What: Okay, now we're going to talk about collections. What are they? Why do we want to use them? Well, you already know that when we bring photos into lightroom, we're going to have a system of folders, places where the images are stored. Collections are different than this, they aren't anything about where images are stored, but they are sorted. They're like these little albums that you can make, and you can make multiple ones of them and your photos can live in multiple ones of them simultaneously based on what kind of scheme you've set up. It's a nice way to create a deeper organizational framework within your catalog so that you can sort and search your folders in special ways. When Lightroom is first opened, by default it will only have this one collection set that you can expand, which contains these smart collections. These are automatically created. You'll see colored red, five stars, past month, recently modified, video files, and without keywords. It's using information that it has saved about each file to smart sort or use rules and apply them and sort these images into these collections. It knows based on the ratings that I have given the 26 photos have five stars and they're all automatically being put into this folder for you, into this collection, I don't want to use the word folder, that's different. The metadata about when the images were captured says that 13 of these were in the past month, and so on and so forth. The information that's saved with each image is is helping lightroom sort these into these collections. Then you can keep these collections if you like and add to them or you can get rid of them. You do have regular collections as well which there aren't any by default, smart collections, those are collections that have rules like the ones we just saw that lightroom will sort images into for you, and collection sets, this is like a parent folder is to a folder. This is a collection set which contains these collections. One more quick note on collections, if you look under the catalog panel you'll see what's called a quick collection. This is a very quick place that you can sort photos to and have them in one little place that you can look at easily. The shortcut for that is B. If I select an image and I click "B", that image is automatically going to go here, no matter what else I do, I know that I can come back to my quick collection and that image is going to be waiting for me. You can set any of your other collections that aren't smart collections as a target collection, with this menu, you right-click on a collection and you choose it. Right now all we have are smart collections so the option isn't available, but it will be available when we create a regular collection in a little while. That collection will become your new target collection that the shortcut B will send your images to, by default, it's this quick collection.
13. Create Collections: Okay. Let's create some collections. We're going to want to think about what your personal workflow is going to be like, what kind of photos you take and how you can organize your images. Spend a little time looking through them and deciding what kind of collections you could make that would help you sort your images. I'm going to kind of make a couple of these arbitrarily here with this small group of images that I have so you can get an idea of how it works. We're going to go over here to the collections panel and click on this plus key, and click to create a collection. This is going to be a regular collection that you will manually store images into. I'm going to call this Portraits. You can create this inside a collections set or you can create it on its own. Right now, I'm just going to create it by itself. I'm not going to include this image that's selected right now because it doesn't fit for that. You can set this as your Target collection right now if you want to by checking here. Click Create. You'll see that Portraits has appeared right over here. I'm going to select a few images, I'm going to click on an image, hold command and click on another and another and another and so on until I've selected several portrait images. Now, I'm going to move you to portraits. I'm going to right-click and I'm going to add selected photos to this collection. You see that now they have appeared. I can go to my Portraits collection now and view these without any other images getting in my way. Just the portraits. Next, I'm going to go back to all my photographs for you and I'm going to create a collection set. Scroll down to create collections set. I'm going to call this Outdoor. Now, I'm going to create a Smart collection. I want to make a Smart collection that will automatically pull in my photos of flowers. So, I named my Smart collection flowers. Flowers are an outdoor thing. So, I'm going to click to have that inside that collection set. You see if the drop down, you can choose which collections set to include it in. I'm going to choose Outdoor. Now, I need to decide what the rules are. You have the ability to choose that any of your rules can be followed, all or none. I'm going to tell it to follow all of the following rules. We're just going to make a really simple one right now. You can create rules based on rating, pick flag, label color, label text, smart few status, and many, many other pieces of information. You can sort by so much, and this is part of the reason why it's so important for you to take the time to add that extra information to your photos. The keywords, the metadata, the ratings, the flags, the colors. Once you've done that, you're going to be able to sort your images in all of those ways. But right now just to show you how to make a smart collection, I'm going to scroll down to other metadata, to keywords, and I'm going to say let's sort where keywords contains flower. If you want to add more rules, you can click plus and keep going until all the rules you want to sort by are satisfied. If you ever want to remove one, just click minus. This is the only simple rule I'm going to sort by for right now. So, I'm going to click Create. You can see that automatically this has been created. It's been placed in my outdoor collection set. All of the images that have the flowers tag are in here. Unfortunately, earlier I placed the flowers keyword on images that shouldn't have it. Let's go back and fix that. I've selected them all and I'm going to delete that keyword. If I go to all photographs and I quickly select other photos that have flowers in them and add that keyword, you'll see that they have now automatically appeared in that collection. This is a huge time saver for you. You see that if you don't have the keywords you're going to have to use regular collections and sort those things manually. If you do, you're putting Light Room's power to work for you and creating collections very quickly. Let's add another one. Now, we're going to go to my collections and I'm going to create a smart collection called Landscapes or Landscape. I'm going to put that under Outdoor as well. It will automatically bring up the last thing that you used. You can change that, Landscape. Now, these are both in my outdoor set, and they're both automatically sorting based on the rule I gave. I can come over here and streamline things by collapsing them so that I don't have to see all of the collections at once. Whenever I want to see one, I can open it up by clicking on the arrow key. Now, this is starting to have some organization to it. It's starting to feel really good. What else can I do? Well, I can make a collection set called Best and a smart collection called 2013. I'm going to put that inside of Best and I'm going to tell it I want the rating that is five stars and I want the capture date that is in the range of 2013-01-31 to 2013-12-31. So, that's all of my best from 2013. Five stars between these date ranges, and I'm going to tell it to create. Now look, I have a collection set called Best, with a smart collection called 2013. These are my best photos from 2013. I can make 2012, 2011, and I can automatically go over there anytime I want to and see what my best work is. It can collapse at when I don't want to have to see all of those collections. You can see that with a little bit of thought and planning, you can start to create collections that are going to work really well for your personal photography and your workflow and the way you want to be able to see things sorted. If you use keywords and metadata, especially, you're going to be able to create collections that are powerfully sorting for you. So, I would really advise you to spend some time thinking about those and planning them out for yourself.
14. Shortcuts: Now that we're going to start talking about working with our organized photos, I want to take a quick moment to mention how important shortcuts are. I've brought up shortcuts in our talks so far and I'll be using them as we move on. But there are so many that are available to you that I won't be mentioning every single one of them during this class. I urge you to go to the link that shows all of the shortcuts for your operating system and look over them all and start trying them out as you're using Lightroom. It is going to save you a ton of time. Going up to menus and clicking on things is going to take a lot of added time and a lot of added cursor movement. You don't want to waste that time. So, learning the shortcuts will really help you in the long run. It will be tedious at first because you'll have to refer back to the shortcuts often and keep trying to remember them. But the more you do that, the more the ones that are going to be the most useful for you are going to become apparent and that they will become like second nature to you. I use a whole lot of shortcuts that I eventually didn't even think about of shortcuts anymore because they just became the way that I use Lightroom. Some of my favorite shortcuts are being able to select all of the photos in any view. So, if I'm in All Photographs or if I'm in a collection, a batch or anything, I can click Command A and I can have all the photos selected right away. I can click Command D to have none of the photos selected right away. I like those. I like being able to rate my photos with stars by hitting a number key, 5 gives a 5-star rating. I like being able to use the flags very quickly by using P, U and X to flag, unflag and reject. So, for example I'll just click P and that photo will get flagged. Some of my other favorites are being able to use colors with the numbers on the keyboard. Clicking G to go to grid view, clicking E to go to loop view, and clicking D to open the develop module very quickly. You only need to look through the shortcut list and practice them to find out what your favorites are and I urge you to do that. It will save you so much time.
15. Working with Stacks & Image Groups: Let's say I want to take these images of my son that are all very similar, and I want to put them in a stack. They're taking up a little bit too much room. I'm going to click the first image and then I'm going to hold down shift and go to the last image and click again, and all of these are going to be highlighted. Now, I'm going to right-click and group into stack. You can see that all of those images have collapsed and upon themselves, and all you can see is the very first image now. You hover right here at the edge, you'll see two little lines that's also on the other edge. If we want, we can click on that to expand and click again to contract. Stacking is a good way for you to be able to streamline your view of your images so that you can see better all of the other images without these multiple similar images taking up so much room. Again, I can do that with these images at the bottom here and collapse them, and now we're free to look at the other images or images that would come afterwards without those taking up so much room. You can manipulate a group of stacked images in the menu by right-clicking and going to stacking and choosing whatever it is that you want to do. For example, if I wanted to unstack them again or expand the stack or collapse that, not just that stack but all stacks or expand all stacks, I can do any of those things right here. I'm going to unstack these images. Another thing that you can do, auto-stack by capture time. Lightroom is going to look at the times the images were captured and auto-stack. When you click on that, you'll get a menu that asks you, what's the time between the stacks? It tells you at the setting what's going to be created. I can see that I'm going to get four stacks and 39 unstacked. If I change the time, I only have two stacks with 43 unstacked. Let's stack, now I see that I have these two stacks. I didn't have to do that manually for each stack, Lightroom did it for me by letting me set the time between stacks and auto-stacking by capture time. This is an interesting feature, and people that work with things like HDR and panorama can use that to group the images together based on the capture time. These will be things that were captured very, very close to one another, burst of photos. While we're talking about stacks, let's also talk about making changes to a group of images at once. With stacks, you shouldn't think that you can actually have a collapse stack selected at the top image, like so and apply a change to all the images at once. If you apply a change to this, it's only going to apply to the top image. So I clicked the flag status here, now I'm going to expand. You'll see that the only image that received that is the top image. Once you've got any group of images selected, you can apply the same change to all of them at once. For example, if I hit p, all of these get flagged as pics. If I click four, they all get a rating of four. If I apply eight which is the green color label, they all get labeled green. This is a nice way to be able to change many images at once if you're going to make the same changes. You can also do a change like keywords. If you look in the keyword field, you'll see that some of these have asterisks next to them. The asterisks are keyword tags that are only added to some of the selected photos. Any of the tags that are selected are on all the selected photos will not have an asterisk. Okay, I'm going to command D to deselect all the photos now.
16. Search Your Catalogue: Let's talk about ways that you can search your catalog. This is one of the big reasons why we want to spend time doing things like rating, and flagging, and adding keywords, and improving our metadata, because later, we're going to want to search based on those attributes and find specific images. So, earlier, I mentioned to you that you might want to find an image of a woman kayaking wearing a life vest. You could have anything like that, that you want to search. Maybe you what to search the keyword text. Maybe you want to search by who was in the photo. If you have models entered into your metadata for images, you can do that. There's several different ways you can do these things. The first thing I'm going to talk about and the place that I go to very often is the Library Filter. You can see that right here at the top of the screen. The Library Filter can be short-cut accessed, hidden, and brought back with the backslash. Okay. Let's go into this by clicking on Text. With Text, you have the options to search any searchable field or specific searchable fields. You can search for things that contain the word you'll type, that contains all of them, that contains the words, that doesn't contain the words, starts with ends with, are empty and aren't empty. Let say it contains flower. Automatically, I'm going to get images that have flower in the keywords because that's what I asked it for. Now, let's see. I'm going to X the cell and go back. This time I want to search by an Attribute. Let's say I would like to see all of my picked photos. Automatically, I can do that by clicking on a picked Flag. Let's click on it again to get rid of that. I want to see all of my three-star photos or higher, but I don't. I want to see all my three-star photos. Oh, let's change that, Rating is equal to three. Excellent. Well, now I want to see anything that's greater than or equal to four. Oh, wonderful. You have a lot of power here. You can search through all of these, any of these, and Kinds. Master Photos, Virtual Copies, and Videos. Now, let's go to Metadata. Here, we can actually drill down to photos from a certain date. We can look at photos from certain cameras, lenses, or labels. Well, these are all the same. You can also click we don't want any. But, what if you want to search multiple things? Well, let's stack those. Let's go to Attributes. I want to search for picked photos that have a rating of three. There you go. What if I now want to see picked photos with a rating of three that have flowers in them? Oh, there is the one that I was looking for. There's a lot of power in the Library Filter. You will be able to use this to drill down to the exact photo you're looking for at any given time. You're going to be able to create such an amazing structure of organization that you can always find exactly what you want from your archives. Without those things, you have much less power to find what you need. So, that is the Library Filter here. You can also go to the menu and Library, and click the Filter by Preset, Flag, Rating, Color Label, Kind, and Metadata. You have options there. What else can you use to search your catalog? Well, you can use your keyword list over on the side. Let's go to that. Here's all the keywords that have been applied so far. We can go through any of them, highlight or hover over it, and click on this arrow key on the side to see the photos with those keywords. You may click that, and automatically, we're going to get all of the images with that keyword on it. Well, you've also got the Filter bar dropping down, so now I can actually drill down even further. With those, I can select the ones that were shot with this lens. So, again, this is another way you can start with something you're searching for and drill down even more. You can also do this in the Metadata panel. If you hover over here, let's see ISO speed rating 160. I can click the arrow on the side here also and find all the photos that match that metadata search.
17. All About Export: Okay. Now, we're going to talk about how to export your folders and save them to either your computer's hard drive or another hard drive, or how to get them to places online using publishing plug-ins. First, we'll talk about exporting. Down at the bottom we'll see, the last panel, Publish Services. You'll also see Import and your Export button. In order to export, you are going to have some things set up, to export to. Let's click on this Hard Drive Publish Service. All you need to do is fill out the information in these forms to get your images to go where you want them to go. So, let's give it a description. I am just going to call it Hard Drive. Now, we're going to want to decide where we're going to export to. Let's click to choose. We have just started up. Let's click on Pictures. Let's make a new folder. Let's call this Exported Photos. Click to create, click to choose that one. Do we want to put this in a subfolder and that folder? Click now. Next, we're going to designate File Naming. You can rename the files, or you can leave this unchecked and it will automatically use the name that the file already has. You can also decide if you want to extension lowercase or uppercase. Let's choose to rename to Custom Name. Exploit. I don't want them. How do we call that? What else can I do? Let's Edit here. Let's choose to put in the title of the photo. Click Done. Now, whenever it's going to export, it's going to use the title. The example here is blank because none of these photos have titles yet. But, when they are titled, the title of the photo will be used as the name of the folder, excuse me, as the name of the photo when it's exported here to your hard drive. You have some other things that you'll want to decide on. If it's a video, you want to make the settings for those here, you can choose the File Settings, Image format, the color space and the quality and you can also choose to limit file size. You can click to resize them by width and height, dimensions, long or shorted edge and megapixels. Do you want to sharpen? Usually do not do this. Any sharpening that I have done in my processing should remain the same. For metadata, do you want to include all metadata in your image when you export it or not? This is going to be a personal space for you. Would you like to remove location info? Do you want to write the keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy? As you see from the pop up, you can check this to include the Lightroom Hierarchical Keyword information in X and P. This includes all attached keywords. Do you want to add a watermark? Earlier we made a watermark. If you want to, you can edit your watermarks, and add a watermark here. Now, that we have everything specified, we click Save. Now, you have a place that you can drop photos that you want to export, to the place that we decided, when we set all of those fields. You can click this plus, and under hard drive, we can create another published folder. We can create a published smart folder which is like the smart collection. It will have rules, or we can create a published folder set for other folders to live inside it. Let's export a photo to the hard drive. We want take this photo of a flower, this rose, and I'm going to call it Darkness in Her Heart. Now, it has a title. I'm going to add that here. Since it's selected, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to select Add Selected Photo. Now, clicking on this folder will show me that I'm in my Hard Drive collection. I want to publish these new photos to publish, so I am going to click on Publish. Let's look. In my exported folder, on the Hard Drive, there is the photo. You can also export files to folders on your computer without having to use the Hard Drive Publish Service. But, this keeps a nice record. Now, that you've exported this, it's here under Published Photos, and you can see which photos you've already published to your Hard Drive. Let's go back to all photographs. Here, you go down to the bottom and you click Export. You'll get some different options. Lightroom presets that are already loaded are Burning Full-Sized JPEGs, Export to DNG, For Email, and For Email under Hard Drive. These are all hard drive options. Each one of these has options that you can fill out, like renaming your files, Video Settings, File Settings, Image Sizing, and so forth, what we talked about when we were setting up the hard drive folder. This is a CD/DVD burning. It will have different options than exporting to DNG on your Hard Drive. Now, if you don't like the Lightroom presets, you can create your own presets. So, select user presets and click to add. Let's call this Lotus's Preset. Create. Now, you can choose your settings. You can choose where to export to. I'm going to create a new folder called Lotus's Photos, and choose that one. You can rename the file, and figure out whatever other settings that you want. See, I want JPEGs. I want them 100 percent quality. I want to resize the long edge to 1,000 pixels. I want to remove my location information. I think that's good. Actually, I'm going to tell to do nothing after it exports. All right. So, like all those settings, what happens when you click as you lose them? Because I didn't save them, and there's no save button along the bottom. So, you need to know that when you choose settings and you want them to be saved as your preset, you should come over here, hover, right-click and update with current settings. Now, if you click on it again or you click away and come back, it will have your settings saved. You can set up all different kinds of presets to manage exporting images that you want for certain things, and to go to certain places and save them at will. I'm going to cancel out of here, and I'm going to choose this photo. Click Export. I'm going to export using Lotus's preset. There we go. This image was exported to Lotus's photos, which is different than what I have in my Hard Drive published folders set up to do. There will not be an instance of this image here because I exported that using a different type of exporting. So, just know the differences and know that your options exist for both.
18. Social Media Publishing Plugins: The last thing that we're going to talk about is publishing to social media and photo sharing sites using the plugins inside of Lightroom. If you look over here on the left side, you'll see that you have some included plugins to do that. There are also more that you can find if you click to find more services online, or you can just look those up online for sites that you use. You can search for the plug-ins and add them to Lightroom. Having these plugins makes it really easy to manage your collections of images on these sites locally. It means that you can see the photos that you've already uploaded there in a library here, and you can also upload to those places without actually having to go there. You can do it straight from Lightroom. So, it's a really nice thing to be able to have. What you need to do if you want to publish to one of those, is set up the plugin. So we'll go over here to the Flickr plug-in and we'll click Setup. Here we have the lightroom publishing manager again. You want to give it a name, so let's just call it Flickr. Then you're going to need to do a few things in here. You're going to need to tell it how you want it to behave when it's uploading for you, and you're going to need to authorize your account. So, let's see. What title do you want to send with your photos? Do you want your title to be your file name or your title? I like it to be my title. I fill in my title, and then I like to see that title reflected when I upload. When you're updating photos, do you want to replace the existing title or leave the existing title? I always replace. That means if I change my title, or I update my photos for any reason, and I reupload them to Flickr, it'll replace the title that's already there. If you want to change your file settings to rename the file, you can do that as well here, and we've talked about that in previous instances. So, you know how to do that already. You can also specify video information. You can decide what kind of format for your files you will have. Here it's going to be jpeg. Let's make sure they're 100 percent quality. You can resize or you can leave this alone to send full size. You can sharpen. You can control whether metadata goes with it or not. You can send a watermark, and you can also set settings that are just about the way Flickr works. So, we can publish things privately, publicly, and change the type of file and the safety level of the file all right here in the polishing plugin. Once you have everything set up, you'll need to authorize your account. This is going to take you to the website, and ask you for authorization. When you do that, you'll be done, and you can click save. Okay. So, I've authorized my Flickr account, and now you can see that it says, "Authorized as Lotus Carroll." If there's ever a time when you want to change the authorization by changing the account or removing it, you can do that right here in the Plugin Manager as well. Now that this plugin is all ready to go, I'm going to click "Save" and you'll see that the Flickr publishing plugin is ready to use. It's sitting here waiting for me to drop something in the photo stream. So, let's see. I think I'm going to select this image of the sunset here in Virginia Florida, so I click on that, and then I'm going to right-click here on the Flickr photo stream, and add selected photo, go to that photo stream, and now I'm going to choose to click "Publish". That'll upload the photo to my Flickr account. Now you can see that it has switched from new photos to published photos. That means that that image is now on my Flickr account. Let's look at Flickr really quick and see whether it went there. There's my image on Flickr. So, you see that's how easy it is to publish your photos online straight within your Lightroom set up. You can do the same thing with Facebook and some other places as well. Now that my photo is online, and I published it through Lightroom, I can see all my published photos right here, and if I make any modifications to this photo that's on Flickr, it will also give me the option to either tell it to "Mark to republish" or if I just make a change, it'll tell me that it's been changed and then I need to update it. When I click "Publish" then, it will actually update the photo online, which is really nice also. So, that's it. With a little bit of work, you should be able to get all of your published services setup so that you can export photos to use them however you want on your car hard drive, or publishing them online. I hope you guys have learned some things that are really going to help you jump start your organization in Lightroom. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask, and I'll do my best to help you out.
19. Explore Photo Classes on Skillshare:
Lotus Carroll, Artist, Photographer, Teacher
