Lightroom

Flags, Stars and Color Labels: Three Systems for Culling

July 10, 2013 by Andrew 2 Comments

Recently, we got started with culling images – an essential part of the photo editing process. We’re always looking to separate our “keepers” from our “throwaways,” so we cull to get to our best images! In this Lightroom blog post, we’ll take a look at some of my favorite methods.

When we cull images, we will want to use some way of marking our “keeper” images. Three popular types of labels are flags, stars, and color labels. Today, I’ll show you all three and give you some ideas about which to use for your culling system.

For all of the labels below, you can apply them in most modules, but I recommend the Library or Develop module.

Flags

Flags are by far my preferred system. For my workflow, there are only two types of images: those that I will deliver to a client, and those that I won’t. Therefore, I use flags to mark images just like this. Images that I plan on delivering get flagged, and images that don’t stay unflagged.

Flags!

To add flags, press “P” on your keyboard to flag a photo as a pick, or press “U” to unflag the image. You can also press “X” to mark an image as “rejected”, but I usually just cycle between flagged as pick, and unflagged.

I recommend using flags to photographers who have only an “on-off” mindset with their images. If you have only two categories for images, I think that flags are a perfect fit for what you want to do. It keeps things simple and straightforward for me.

Stars

Stars are a little more robust system for adding criteria to images. We can rate images 1-5, which probably says something about the quality of the photo.

Stars!

For what my two cents are worth, I find stars to be a little bit tedious. I hate having to decide if a photo is 3 stars or 4. I wind up debating with myself, and ultimately spend more time editing. That’s never the goal of working in Lightroom!

However, this system could work great if you are really precise about having ratings of images. If you want to jump to your absolute best photos, it’s awfully nice to filter to 5 star images. For a more expansive portfolio look, you could do 4 stars or greater.

To add stars to an image, just press numbers 1-5 on your keyboard to assign between one and five stars. You can also remove any star rating by pressing “0” (that’s a zero) on the keyboard.

Color Labels

I think color labels give us the most flexibility for what we want to do. The color labels don’t really imply anything, so mentally, we can assign our own ideas about what those labels mean. You could use a red label to mark images that need some work in Photoshop, or a blue label to mark your favorite images.

Color labels!

To add color labels:

Press “6” to apply a red label
Press “7” to apply a yellow label
Press “8” to apply a green label
Press “9” to apply a blue label

Applying a purple label requires right clicking the image on the film strip and choosing “Set Color Label.”

Color labels are awfully flexible, but require you to put some thought into what they mean. If you’ve got the time to plan and imagine, using a system with the color labels allows for the most creativity in how you’re applying criteria to images.

Combination Method

Let’s not fall into the false reality of having to choose. The truth is that we can apply some or all of these criteria for different reasons.

Although I’ve stated many times that I’m a fan of the flag method, I also use stars! For photos that I’m passing as sneak peeks to clients or using for promotional purposes, I will apply either 4 or 5 stars to the images. That helps me quickly flip back to my best images.

Color labels can also find a way into your Lightroom workflow. Sure, we could use flags to identify “keepers”. But what if we needed to further refine images, such as into sets of “printable” images and “digital only” images. We could apply a red label to the printable images, and a blue label to images for our website.

These criteria can mean anything. Get creative – I know you can. 😀

How do you use these bits of data? Check in with a comment – I’m sure you have something good to share.

Getting to the Good: Culling Images

July 8, 2013 by Andrew 1 Comment

In our first lesson of working in the Library module, we’re we’re defining one of the most important things that photographers do: cull images. When we cull our images, we’re cutting our shoot down to the keepers; the set of images we actually want to edit – the best of the best.

My mindset is to take images from the camera, cull the images, and then head into the editing stage. To me, that’s a logical order for handling our images. Because editing takes the longest amount of time per image, we want to make sure we aren’t editing images

When we CULL our images, we’re cutting our shoot down to the keepers – the best of the best.

Culling is the essential step we have to take to get images to a manageable set to edit.

When I cull, I’m removing all photos that I don’t think will make it to the client. Every shoot has different criteria for what makes it to a client based on the client’s need.

Culling in Lightroom doesn’t mean that we are deleting all of our non-keeper images; that would take too long and ultimately slow our process to a crawl. Instead, there’s some different systems that we can use to mark our images as keepers or non-keepers.

As we start our dive into the Library module, it’s important to know that culling is best handled within the Library module. We can view and explore our images in a number of different ways, and that means we get the best look at what we want to keep.

In the next post, we’re going to take a deeper look at how we can cull images in Lightroom. I’ll show you some systems that you can use to mark off your best images.

Ready to get started with culling? If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment.

Meet Lightroom’s Library Module

July 4, 2013 by Andrew Leave a Comment

As we’ve learned recently, Lightroom is made up of modules that let us interact with our images in different ways. Today, we’re diving into the Library module. Over the next couple months, you can get excited about completely mastering the Library module. I’m going to teach you how to think your way through it.

The Library module is how we view, browse, and add info to our images. We don’t directly edit images in the Library module, but there are many powerful tools built into it.

Chances are that you’ve already spent some time within the Library module. By default, Lightroom starts up in this Library module, where we can get a great look at the images in our catalog.

What are some of the things we can do with the Library module?

Tag images with keywords for easy searching
Add metadata to our images to protect our copyright
Apply Flags, star ratings, and color labels to choose our favorite images
Select your best images with comparison view
Move and delete images around the computer

You’ll learn each of these topics as we dive deep with the Library module. Some of my best posts are headed your way to let you manage your images. The Library module is one thing users want to know more about managing their images. If you don’t know how to use the Library module, you’ll never tap into the power of Lightroom.

If there’s anything you want to make sure that I teach in the next month, make sure to check in with a comment. Otherwise, get excited about our first post on Culling Images, coming Monday.

How to Import Images into Lightroom

June 28, 2013 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Importing images into Lightroom is essential. If you’ve never worked with adding images, importing them into Lightroom simply means that we’re showing Lightroom where our images are stored, and adding them to the catalog. Remember that in our discussion of catalogs, we learned that each catalog stores information about our images.

A lot of people don’t understand how importing works unfortunately, but we’re going to really dive deep on it today.

When we get started with a Lightroom catalog, we won’t have any images in it. We use importing to add images to the catalog so that we can tag, edit, and more. They have to be imported before we can do anything with them in Lightroom.

Importing

To get started with importing images in Lightroom, access the File menu and choose Import Photos and Video.

Choose “import photos and videos” to get started with importing images.

Once we’ve chosen that from the menu, the import menu will appear and we’re ready to get our images added.

The Lightroom import menu can be a little overwhelming at first, but we’ll take it one step at a time today.

1) Image Location

On the far left of the import menu is what I call the “image location” area. This is how we show Lightroom the images that we want to add to our catalog. When it comes to importing, Lightroom can add images directly from a memory card, or add images that are already on your computer.

If you have a camera plugged in or a memory card in a reader, it will automatically default to pulling the images from the camera or card. Otherwise, you can browse to where the images are stored and choose the folder to import images from. Make sure you’re mindful of where you put your images on your computer!

Personally, I don’t like using Lightroom to copy images directly from a card. I would rather just plug my memory card in, and drag and drop to where I want the images to be stored. I actually usually keep my shoots on the desktop until I file them away onto my backup drives, but that’s just my personal system.

2) Copy, Move, or Add?

One of major decisions to make when importing is what we want the import menu to do with our images. We have three choices: copy, move, or add (let’s ignore the Copy as DNG option for now). Each option adds the image to the catalog, but has different effects on the image file:

Copy – leaves images in the original location, and creates a duplicate copy elsewhere
Move – moves the image from the folder it’s stored in, to another folder that you choose
Add – doesn’t move the image at all, and simply adds it to the catalog

If you’re pulling images from a camera or card, you can only choose “copy”, because Lightroom won’t add images from a card to a catalog until it creates a local copy.

Personally, I use “add”, because I’ve already chosen where I want my images to be stored by just dragging and dropping them. If you’re copying or moving images, you’ll need to choose where the images are going by clicking the drive symbol on the far right:

If you’re moving or copying images, you’ll need to tell Lightroom where you want those images to go by clicking the drive on the far right and choosing a destination.

3) The Details

We’ve now tackled the hardest parts in my opinion: where images come from and where they’re going. Other than that, we’ve got just a few more optons on how we import our images.

In the center area, you’ll see boxes with previews of all the images we’re importing. This is how we know what images are potentially being imported. We can selectively choose the images, utilizing the check boxes next to the images to choose what gets imported:

You can use the checkboxes next to image previews to choose what Lightroom imports.

On the far right hand side are a list of other options that we can tweak for results. Let’s take a look:

A few more options are available to us as we import – see below for an explanation of each!

On this menu are a list of settings we can apply, and simplify for today’s walkthrough:

Render previews: choose minimal for the smallest previews in file size, but the slowest ones to load. 1:1 previews take some time to render and lots of space, but make working through images quick.
Checking “Don’t import suspected duplicates” will make sure that we don’t have duplicate images in our catalog
Apply during import lets us add Presets, Metadata, and Keywords as we import. We will study more on this later.

Importing is no small task, and I think that some Lightroom users get stuck on this stage and never move past it, and thus never start using Lightroom! I hope that this post has been helpful in getting started with importing, but if there’s anything I’ve left unclear or your need more information importing images, feel free to leave a comment and help me do a better job helping you.

Let’s Tour Lightroom

June 25, 2013 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Welcome back Lightroom fans! Today, I want to walk you through some of the “parts” of Lightroom that we’re going to spend a year talking about. Today, I’m showing off each section that you’ll see in every part of Lightroom. For each of the parts we’re looking at below, we’ll take a deeper look sometime soon, but this post is a great starting point for us.

The View

An overview of Lightroom.

You’ll see this default layout from when you first open Lightroom. The elements in this screenshot can be seen in almost every part of the program. The middle area with the photo you’re working on shows in the middle.

Oh boy, we’ll be getting used to seeing this a lot! This is a full look at a typical view of Lightroom. I’ll spend today showing around, and the rest of our time together learning to change it all.

The Filmstrip

Your photos, thumbnailed and previewed.

The filmstrip shows off the images that we’re working with in our catalog. As we move through it, we can click an image to have it displayed above. We can also use the keyboard and press the left and right arrows to move through our images.

The Lightroom filmstrip shows us the images that are in our catalog. As we move through them by clicking the images on it or pressing left and right on the keyboard, we choose different images, and they get displayed above the filmstrip.

Module Selector

Lightroom’s “mode changer.”

Modules are sections of Lightroom that let us work with our images in different ways. We can use the Web module to put images online, while the Print module is for printing hard copies of images. Throughout this blog, we’ll spend in-depth looks at each of the modules and what they can do, but for now, just know that you can use this list to switch modules.

Modules are different parts of Lightroom, that handle our images in different ways. For example, we use the Library module to organize and add data to our images that makes them searchable, while the Develop module is for editing the images and adjusting exposure and color.

The Navigator

Your key to moving in the image.

The navigator allows us to move through our images and zoom in and out. You’ll find it most modules, and it’s a good look at a preview of the image we’re working with.

Panels

The parts that drive the power.

Each of these sections that are shown in this screenshot below are essential to the way that Lightroom works. These sections are called panels, and the panels shown below are the Histogram and Quick Develop panels. Lightroom panels change in each module, and impact images differently.

Panels like “Quick Develop” and the “Histogram” are exclusive the Library module. The Quick Develop panel is for tweaking the way the image appears, while the Histogram shows some technical data on our exposure.

Wrapping Up

Lightroom is a powerful program made up of many different parts, and understanding how they fit together lets us work through it efficiently! Today was just a quick look at the parts of the program, and it’s a good starting point for future explanations.

Workflow: Organize your Image Life

June 22, 2013 by Andrew Leave a Comment

One of the most buzzed about words in photography today is workflow. It overwhelms many photographers to try and design a series of steps for handling images. The thing about workflow is that it has to be repeatable. If it’s not a process that you can repeat, you don’t have a workflow.

For me, my workflow goes like this:

Copy images from my memory card into a folder
Import all of the images into Lightroom
Cull images, cutting them down to just the keepers
Edit the images to perfection
Export and deliver.

Those five steps handle 95% of what I need to do with my photographers.

The thing about workflow is that it has to be repeatable.

Let me also backtrack a bit here; I have to admit that those five steps don’t cover everything I need to do. No, a workflow won’t accommodate every single situation. You have to be flexible. I think this point is essential because when I used to design my workflow, I would throw every situation at it to see if it worked. I would riddle myself with ridiculous questions like, “What if I get asked for a single image 1000 pixels wide for a guest blogging job?”

That’s not a part of my workflow, but thank goodness that Lightroom’s catalog system is flexible enough to go back and get the images I need at a moment’s notice. I don’t have to design a bulletproof workflow – I can design a flexible one that I think can meet my needs.

Your workflow is for your sanity. Don’t let your quest for the perfect one keep you from using Lightroom. Take baby steps toward getting your images organized, and that’s good enough for me. This is all about progress, not perfection. 😀

There are three questions I ask photographers about their workflow. If they pass these three questions, I tell them they are doing a good job:

Could you get to an image within a few minutes if needed?
Are your images stored safely and backed up?
Do you spend more time thinking about photography than your workflow?

This post may seem like a bit of a mixed message: on one hand, I want to really encourage you to have a repeatable workflow action that helps you keep your images together. On the other hand, I hate when photographers become so stressed about workflow that they lose track of shooting. Ultimately, there’s a balance here that every photographer has to find. I spent too much time talking workflow last year, so I learned to let go of having the perfectly organized system.

How do you handle your workflow? Do you have a specific routine in mind or are you struggling to design one? I’m excited to hear about what you are doing in the comments below.

Everything You Need to Know About Lightroom Catalogs

June 19, 2013 by Andrew 3 Comments

One of my favorite things about Lightroom is the way that the editing system works. This system protects your original images and allows you to keep adding edits with no loss in quality.

What makes Lightroom different is that your edits are stored in a catalog. The Lightroom difference is being able to move back in time with your edits, removing changes you’ve made. We can jump back and forth and not worry about the safety of our images, as the edits are being stored in the Lightroom catalog.

We call this non-destructive editing. This means that images aren’t changed as we play with them in Lightroom. Because of this, you have to export images in order to get them “out of” Lightroom. As you’re making changes and tweaking the images, nothing is actually happening to the original files. Once we export the images, the edits are applied.

A Lightroom catalog consists of two files – an .lrdata, and a .lrcat file, stored in a folder.

The key to this system is the Lightroom catalog. Catalogs are the basis of everything that we do in Lightroom. In a Lightroom catalog folder, you will find an .lrdata and a .lrcat file. These are the two files that store the editing information, and they are separate from the original images.

When we export images, Lightroom mixes the editing info from the catalog with your input images and creates a finished product. Your original images are preserved and left untouched. Until we export the images, all editing data lives in the catalog.

When we export images, Lightroom mixes the editing info from the catalog with your input images and creates a finished product.

One of the really cool things about Lightroom’s catalog system is that it’s really portable. You can send just the catalog between users, and as long as they have the original images they can load your edits into Lightroom. I edit weddings for photographers that send me 100+ gigabytes of images, and we need only to trade catalog files to update each other.

When we open a catalog, it’s like a new workspace for Lightroom.

Creating a New Lightroom Catalog

Keep in mind that if Lightroom is open, so is a catalog. Anytime that you are working within Lightroom, you are working within some catalog. Lightroom starts with a default catalog, but if you find yourself wanting to work with a different one, here’s how to create it:

With Lightroom open, choose File -> New Catalog

Now, go ahead and give the catalog a name and press create.

That’s all. Lightroom will close and reopen with your new catalog in just a few seconds.

When you start a new catalog, you will find that there are no images inside of it. We’ll change this when we import images into it, which we’ll be covering soon.

One Catalog or Many?

Some photographers prefer storing all of their photos in a single catalog. Others such as myself will choose to allocate each wedding or portrait shoot to its own folder.

Single catalog: all images at your fingertips, utilize organization
Many catalogs: faster performance, keeps work separated

Switching catalogs makes Lightroom close down, then reopen with the new catalog. You can obviously only work on one category at a time. We will revisit the best way to manage these catalogs at a later time to think about how we can use them to our advantage.

Upgrading and Moving Catalogs

With each release of Lightroom, Adobe slightly changes the format of the

Upgrading a Lightroom 3 catalog to Lightroom 4 is necessary to use it with the latest version. The same is true with Lightroom 5.

Wrapping Up

The main takewaway from today’s lesson is that catalogs are the basis of how we use Lightroom. They store all of the data that we add to images in Lightroom, and they separate the editing steps from the images.

Do you have any questions about catalogs or anything to add? Feel free to add a comment and I’ll be glad to help.

Connect Lightroom to Flickr for 1 TB of Free Photo Storage

June 14, 2013 by Andrew 1 Comment

If you haven’t heard, Flickr has made big waves lately by re-launching with 1TB (that’s a terabyte – 1000 gigabytes) of free storage for photograpers. Did you know that you can upload your photos directly from Lightroom to Flickr? One of my readers recently wrote in, asking how he could upload images straight from Lightroom to Flickr. Today, we’ll walk through it step by step!

Today, we’re taking a look at how to upload directly from Lightroom to Flickr with Flickr’s newly introduced 1 terabyte of free storage.

Before we get started, make sure you’re logged into Flickr in your web browser. This makes the process much smoother.

Part One: Connecting to Flickr

1) First of all, ensure that you’re working in the Library module. Next, on the left side of Lightroom, find the Publish Services panel.

2) Press the arrow to the left of it if it isn’t expanded, and you’ll see the “Flickr” button. Go ahead and click the Flickr button in the Publish Services panel.

3) In the window that appears, Click the Authorize button below “Flickr Account”.

4) Go ahead and press Authorize in the next window. This is why I recommend already being logged into Flickr in your web browser; if you are already logged in, all you have to do is press Authorize. Otherwise, you’ll have to switch to your web browser and get logged in, then return to this window and press authorize when you are complete.

5) Once you’re logged in, press Done.

6) This step is an optional one. In the “File Settings” part of the settings panel that’s still open, I always set the quality to 80 to get a great balance between keeping your files smaller yet high quality.

Optionally, we can set the quality to “80” to create a compromise between high image quality without maximum file size.

7) Another optional step to keep your files reasonably sized:

Check the box for “Resize to fit”
Set it to “Long Edge” from the dropdown
Check the box for “Don’t Enlarge
Set the pixels box to 2500

I also recommending setting this to “Resize to Fit” on the long edge with 2500 pixels. Checking “Don’t Enlarge” ensures that we won’t blow up images too large.

8) Finally, press save.

9) Great, now you will see that your accounts are connected in the Publish Services panel!

Your Flickr account name will show up on the left side once you enter all settings.

Part Two: Uploading to Flickr

10) You can either throw all of your photos into your Flickr photostreams all unorganized, or you can put them into a Photoset. I’ll show you how to put images into a photoset in this guide, but feel free to just throw them into your photostream instead.

Flickr has images organized into Photosets, and we can create and modify them. Think of photosets as albums on Flickr. To create a new Photoset, right click (Mac users, CMD + click) the “Photostream” item under Flickr, and choose Create Photoset.

Images on Flickr are organized into Photosets. You can right click the default “Photostream” to create a new photoset.

11) Next up, give the Photoset a name. If you leave “Include seleted photos” checked, the images you have selected (the ones in view in Lightroom’s workspace) will automatically be added into the new collection.

12) At this point, you may need to switch back to seeing “All Photographs”, so go ahead and click that on the “Catalog” panel.

After you create the photoset, Lightroom will switch from showing all your images to just the ones in the photostream. To jump back to seeing all photos, click “All Photographs” on the left side in the Catalog panel.

13) To add photos to a Flickr collection, you’ll want to be in Grid view. Press the G key on your keyboard to go into grid view or the button illustrated in the screenshot below.

Enter grid view by pressing G on your keyboard, or by clicking the grid icon in the Library module.

14) To finally add the photos to the collection, click and drag them from the grid to the name of the new collection on the left side of Lightroom. One tip: make sure you’re grabbing the photo area itself (not the border around it) while dragging it.

Click the image itself (not the area around it) and drag it onto a collection name to add it to the Flickr collection.

15) Great, once you’ve added all of your photos to the set, you’ll need to Publish the images. To do so, click the name of the collection. Lightroom will switch to a view that shows you the images in that set. Now, just press the Publish button and it will upload your images.

Finally, click the collection that you’ve been adding photos to and press the Publish button to push your images to Flickr.

All done! You can now view your newly created photosets on your Flickr profile.

Will you be connecting your Flickr account to Lightroom? With one terabyte of storage for free, it’s hard to pass up. If you need any help with this walk through, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll help you get it solved.

What is Lightroom and how should I use it?

June 12, 2013 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Before we launch into a year’s worth of learning Lightroom, I realize that some of you that will be joining us don’t know much about the program. That’s okay – maybe you’ve heard about it from photographer friends or heard that it can help you get your images organized.

The truth is that Lightroom is whatever you need it to be.

Need to organize and keyword your images? It can do that.
Need to edit hundreds of images quickly and similarly? It can do that.
Want to print a book with your favorite photos? Lightroom does it.

I won’t provide one answer on how you should use Lightroom. The purpose of this blog is to show you lots of features and how to use them, and then you can apply them to your image needs.

My situation before Lightroom wasn’t too unusual – I had a hard drive full of images that were scattered in folders. I knew they were all safely stored, but ask me to get to one of them in particular and there was little hope of that happening within an hour

Lightroom is whatever you need it to be!

Put simply, Lightroom has been nothing short of a revolution for photographers. And Lightroom 5 only improves the best photo management and editing program out there.

My primary contact with photographers is in the wedding industry. I spoke with a good friend who is a top pro in my state a few years ago when Lightroom was becoming really popular and was shocked by what she told me:

“Before Lightroom, I was doing good to deliver a few hundred images. The tweaks were taking entirely too long in Photoshop, and I couldn’t get my clients their images in time. When I got Lightroom, I started pushing my clients more images in half the time.”

Sounds an awful lot like a testimonial right? The truth is that these types of statements are ones I’ve heard from hundreds of Lightroom users I’ve talked to while crafting this blog. It’s what made me so passionate about keeping up the writing process and teaching people more about how to get organized and dive deep in Lightroom.

Lightroom is made up of modules, and we’ll tackle them all. Each module is going to do something different for us, and help us trim our images in different ways. The Library module helps us get organized. The Develop module lets us edit our images. We can put images into print with the Books module, and get them online with the Web module.

Beginning to see the power yet?

If you’ve got a second to comment, let me know how you use Lightroom, and how you think it might help you get organized.

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