Lightroom Love

Merging Catalogs in Lightroom

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Catalogs are the backbone of managing photos in Lightroom. They contain all of our editing data, holding basically everything that we need to get RAW images to our clients! Managing multiple catalogs can get to be a lot of work, so today I want to take a look at how to combine catalogs.

Personally, I keep a lot of catalogs. Sometimes it gets to be a lot to handle, and I want to consolidate! So let’s say that we have a situation where we have two separate catalogs, and we want to combine them. We’re going to use Lightroom’s “Import from Catalog” feature to do that.

The best way that I can explain these things is to relate it to my own workflow. Let me tell you how I manage my weddings.

Each wedding is going to get its own catalog. I do this because weddings are huge! It doesn’t make sense to have to go through a wedding I shot six months ago all while editing last week’s wedding.

However, it’s also really handy to flip through all of my wedding photos at the same time! As I’m sure you know, it takes a few seconds to close down one Lightroom catalog and open up another, and when I need to pull the best images for portfolio or marketing purposes, it really helps to be able to have all of my images in one catalog.

So what I do is edit an entire wedding, then plan on “pushing” that catalog into the big catalog. We’ll call this the Wedding Master catalog. Each catalog that we merge into it is a smaller catalog.

To visualize, this is how I like to run my catalog system:

(image here)

There’s one quick note that we need to be aware of: these catalogs don’t stay synced. Let’s say that we merge a smaller catalog into a master catalog. At that moment, all of our settings are migrated. That includes all of our exposure and color adjustments, stars or tags we’ve applied, etc. However, if we go back and make changes to the smaller catalog, it doesn’t update those changes in the master catalog.

Wrapping Up

Juggling tons of catalogs can be a lot of work when you need to pull the cream of the crop. Although I use separate catalogs to protect my data when editing weddings, missing out on the power of consolidated catalogs is ignoring much of the power of Lightroom.

Troubleshooting Lightroom: 5 Quick Fixes

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You’re editing late at night and suddenly Lightroom just won’t behave. For one reason or another, that thing you always do… just isn’t working. First of all, suffering from fatigue can throw me completely off. I’ll find myself making ridiculous mistakes.

These troubleshooting steps are designed to help you look for the quick things to look for to get you back on the right track.

1) Make sure you’re in the right module.

The Lightroom 4 modules.

If you’re in the Print module but attempting to edit your photos, your controls aren’t going to be where you expect them to be. I can’t tell you how many times this has caused a quick panic while working.

2) Make sure caps lock is off.

I’ve talked about this a few times before – several buttons or keys in Lightroom act as “modifiers” that alter our shortcuts. When caps lock is in, it’s going to make Lightroom behave differently. If that’s not what you want, ensure you haven’t turned it on.

3) Photos disappear? Make sure you’re viewing “all photos”.

In the Library module, make sure that you are setup to view All Photographs under the catalog dropdown. I’ve accidentally switched to Quick Collection or Previous Import before realizing what had happened.

4) Check your filter.

Another fix to the “disappearing” photos issue is making sure you haven’t applied some weird filter. I don’t rate images with stars, so when I filtered by photos 4 stars or higher, all of my images were bound to disappear.

5) Give Focus to Lightroom

Oh boy. I’m not proud to share this story. One night, after a marathon editing session, I was multi-tasking (huge productivity killer by the way; most people think they are good multi-taskers but they aren’t.) and was also working in iTunes or Chrome or something. Regardless, I had minimized the window, but still had “focus” on Chrome – meaning that all of my keyboard strokes were not being read by Lightroom. This went on for a solid two minutes before I maximized Lightroom and restored order. (Ever had one of those “am I still sane moments?” This was mine.)

 

Quick Tip: How did I edit that photo?

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Looking to find out the settings you’ve applied to an image in Lightroom? Sometimes we forget and want to remember how we got that perfect look for our image. I’ve got a really quick tip for you today that will help you do just that.

To do that, we use the History panel in the Develop module. Go ahead and open it by clicking on the word “history” if it’s not already visible.

Lightroom’s History panel shows each effect that we’ve applied to an image, step by step.

Now, it’s clear the settings that we’ve applied to a given image. Let me walk you through how I modified this image:

  • I created a Virtual Copy to work with a separate edit of the image.
  • I applied a preset that I call bw that gives my images a black and white effect
  • I added +1.0 stops of exposure to brighten the photo up
  • I played with the whites setting, bringing it down by a value of 43
  • I added a post crop vignette, with a value of -12

Using this history panel, it’s so easy to find out how we treated an image, and presumably make notes about how to achieve the same look with other images. This is also a great time to build a preset! (Hint, hint.)

How to Rename Lightroom Catalogs

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You may occasionally need to change the name of a Lightroom catalog. Maybe you made a typo or need to clean up a long folder name; either way, Lightroom doesn’t offer an easy way to do this from within the program. We’re looking today at how to do it manually.

First up, you need to browse to wherever you have your catalog stored. When you created a new catalog, you had to choose a location to store the catalog. If you’ve forgotten where you stored it, I would suggest doing a search on your computer for your the catalog name.

If you lose track of the current name of your catalog, just check the top of the Lightroom window in the center.

Okay, once you’ve tracked down the folder with the catalog, this is how Lightroom catalog folders are typically setup: when we create a new catalog, it creates a folder with two files inside of it. All three of these share a common name, with a few slight differences. Here’s how a typical catalog folder looks:

This is how Lightroom catalog folders typically look; inside are two files: a catalog file (.lrcat) and a preview files, with the .lrdata at the end. We need to rename all of these to rename the catalog.

First, make sure that we’ve shut down Lightroom. Next, we’re ready to start the renaming process. I will rename all three of these files to a common name. Now, it’s important to keep the parts that Lightroom has added the same. For example, on the Previews file, called “Walter White Previews.lrdata”, it’s important to leave that “previews” bit the same.

Basically, for this rename, I’m changing all instances of “Walter White” to “Heisenberg”, and leaving everything else untouched. Simple enough, right? This is how it looks after renaming.

I changed all instances of “Walter White” to “Heisenberg” and left everything else untouched.

The next time that we open that catalog in Lightroom, you’ll notice that it has recognized that we changed the catalog’s name at the top of the program.

All told, you can get a catalog renamed in around a minute once you know how! Honestly, I’m hoping that Adobe makes it even easier than this in the future.

Are you having any issues getting this done? Feel free to let me know in the comments.

Mastering the Detail Panel

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Photographers are always trying to draw out the finest parts of their prized photos. In Lightroom, we handle that efficiently with the Detail Panel

You’ll find the Detail panel in Lightroom’s Develop module. It’s what we use to handle the fine details and enhance the finer points of our photos. The Detail panel has two main functions: sharpening and noise reduction. Let’s take an in-depth look at what each of these does, and how we can use them.

Sharpening

Sharpening is for enhancing the detail of our photos. We can draw

The sharpening portion of the detail panel has four factors that control how we sharpen the image:

  • Amount – this is pretty basic
  • Radius – 
  • Detail – 
  • Masking – 

Tread carefully with the sharpening function! I know so many photographers who try to restore sharpness to a blurry photo. This isn’t an instant fix slider. As is the key with all edits, we can only enhance what we got with the camera to begin with.

Noise Reduction

Noise is a fact of life in photography. The higher we set our ISO value or the more that we tweak exposure, the more noise that our photos will show. Newer cameras manage noise better, but you’re still going to see it.

(image here of what noise looks like)

The good news is that Lightroom 3 introduced some really impressive noise reduction, and Lightroom 4 has helped grow that even further. With this feature, we can remove the noise in our images and clean them up nicely.

The issue is that when we remove noise, we’re also removing detail from the images. Software has a hard time balancing removing the bad detail in the form of noise with preserving the detail that we want in our images.

Noise reduction has five factors that control how we remove detail. In general, moving the slider further to the right increases noise reduction.

  • Luminance – 
  • Detail – 
  • Contrast – 
  • Color – 
  • Detail – 
Typically,

Wrapping Up

The Detail panel is important for managing the sharpening and noise reduction of our images. Each image is going to require some different settings to get it twaeked perfetly. Remember to work at a close level of zoom and tread lightly to

Any questions about the Detail panel? How can I help you understand it better? Check in with a comment so I can help you love Lightroom.

Exploring Lightroom’s Panels

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I like to write things that help my readers understand how Lightroom is put together. It’s almost impossible for me to teach you everything in Lightroom, but I can teach you to think your way through Lightroom. Today, I want to kickstart how you think about the panels that make up Lightroom.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: this program is built smart.Things get grouped together that seem to make sense. As we’ve talked about before, Lightroom is divided up logically across the modules. Things that help us to organize are grouped into the same module.

Beyond the grouping of the modules, controls are grouped together intuitively in the panels of Lightroom. You see, each module is made up of panels. Let’s take a look at just a few of the panels that you’ll find in Lightroom.

Library Panels

Quick Develop

Quick develop is a panel that lives in the Library module. Although most of our images adjustments are made in the Develop module, Quick Develop gives us the chance to adjust images a bit in the Library module. Basic exposures like exposure, clarity, and vibrance are just a click away.

Keywording

Keyword List

Metadata

Develop Panels

Basics

As we know, there are even more modules that have more panels that form the foundations of Lightroom. You certainly don’t have to memorize them all, but learning to think in terms of modules is really helpful to getting the hang of Lightroom.

Wrapping Up

This blog is all about training you to think in the way that Lightroom works. As you think of different things you might need to adjust in the photo, consider the panel that will help you achieve what you want. Learning the layout of Lightroom will help you use it much more rapidly than hunting through modules all the time.

What panels do you spend the most time in? If you need any more information, feel free to drop a comment.

What is a Lightroom Preset, and why are they so handy?

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Hi there Lightroom fans! On the first day of Preset Week, we’ll take a look at the power of Lightroom presets. Think of Lightroom presets like recipes, only much easier to follow! Presets let us save our editing styles, and apply them with one click.  Once we get the “look” of an image that we want, we can build a preset so that editing another image in the same way takes only one click. That should get you excited. 😀

Presets let us save our editing styles, and apply them with one click.

Presets play an important role in Lightroom. They’re handy for replicating our editing style. With just one click, we can apply the same style to our photos over and over. This means that we can edit consistently and quickly. Presets are going to automate the editing process and reduce a lot of work to just one click.

Lightroom comes with quite a few presets built in! You can apply them in the Develop module, and you’ll find the preset panel on the left side, just below the Navigator.

Presets get applied in the Develop module. They have their own panel on the left side of the Develop module just under the Navigator. To apply a preset, all you have to do is click the name of the preset. Boom, presto preseto! The image gets all of the preset settings applied to it instantly.

By default, Lightroom comes with some pretty good presets that you can play with. You can also download many presets for free across the internet, and several great paid preset packs are out there as well.

Getting excited about presets yet? If you didn’t know about them before now, you might be getting excited about the speed at which we can apply our editing styles with presets. Stay tuned for the rest of Preset Week as we take a look at how to build your own presets and much more.

Any questions? How are you today?

How to Import Lightroom Presets

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Lightroom presets are awesome. Here’s how to use presets. With just one click, we can apply editing styles to our photos in Lightroom. What’s even better is that we can download and trade presets! However, we have to import them to get Lightroom to recognize the added presets. Today, I’ll be showing you how.

First thing is first. You have to have some presets that you’re wanting to load into Lightroom. Lightroom presets have a file extension of .lrtemplate . You might download presets that are compressed or zipped – .zip files – but the files that we need to feed to Lightroom are .lrtemplate files. Zip files need to be extracted or decompressed, and you can do this easily in your OS. (Here is Windows help; on Mac, just double click to extract a zip)

Okay, so now we have our preset ready to import. Go ahead and note what folder that preset is in because we’ll need to browse to it in just a moment.

Now in Lightroom, in the Develop module, make sure that on the left panel, you can see the presets already in Lightroom. Place your mouse cursor in the preset area, then right click to bring up a menu. Go ahead and choose “Import”.

Okay, so now we will show Lightroom where our presets are. I’m on a Mac, but this is basically the same on the Windows platform. All you have to do is browse to the folder where .lrtemplate files are stored, and then click to import them. We can also shift click two presets to select a long list of presets, or control click to select multiple presets. Here, I’m using the VSCO Film Presets, which I highly recommend purchasing.

That’s all! Your presets will appear in that panel on the left and you’re free to apply them to your heart’s content.

5 Steps to Faster Culling

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Every step of our photo editing process is important., but there’s something essential about culling. Culling, the process of cutting down our shoot to our “keeper images” is where big decisions get made about which images will make the cut.

The problem with culling is that it’s time consuming. It takes serious time – and energy (in the form of decision making) to get our keepers cut down. Today, I’ve got five of my favorite tips for how to expedite this process.

1) Do it all at once.

After I throw a series of images into Lightroom, the first thing I do is cull in the Library module. Period, no questions asked. I won’t do any editing (Develop module) work until I have my images narrowed down to exactly what I need post-culling process.

Before adopting the “all at once” approach, I spent too much time jumping around in Lightroom. I might cull for an hour, edit those photos, export etc. Terrible approach – knock out all of your culling all at once.

2) Build a system.

Photographers have all types of systems for culling their images. Some use flags to mark keepers, others use color labels, and still others like to use the star system. Whatever route you want to take, make a choice and stick with it! The more that you can learn your routine, the more you can reproduce it. Routine helps us keep our creative thoughts organized.

Filter by color label is one system photographers use to cull.

3) Use the keyboard.

I can’t say enough about the power of the keyboard shortcuts that I’m always talking about. You don’t realize how much time you lose by moving your hand back and forth to the mouse. A quick refresher on a few keyboard shortcuts:

  • Flag: P to mark as a pick, U to unflag a photo
  • Color labels: use the keyboard numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9 to apply color lables
  • Star ratings: use the keyboard numbers 1-5 to apply star ratings

When it comes to culling, I think that using the keyboard is the only way to go. Here’s a quick tip for you, free of charge! When culling, make sure Caps Lock is on on your keyboard. This auto-advances you to the next photo to mark it is a pick, give it a color label, etc.

4) Be confident.

This might sound like a silly tip, but this is one thing that I used to miss out on. I would deliberate or agonize over “should I keep this one or the one right after it?” and find myself taking forever to finish culling.

We’re digital these days. If I find that I’m missing a photo in my the editing stage, I simply switch back and add that photo to my selections. Do we want to get the cull right the first time? Absolutely. But we aren’t dealing with life or death, one time opportunity type work here.

5) Enjoy it!

This might not make it faster, but it will certainly make the time pass more rapidly. Culling is rarely mentally-intensive work, so I almost always have something going in the background. A good episode of SVU on Netflix or one of my favorite stations on Pandora has set the stage for lots of long nights of getting my favorite photos picked for Development.

What are your favorite culling tips? What challenges you to get your work done?