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.