Lessons

Lesson Info

Overview of Lightroom Workspace

This is Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is a separate purchase. Doesn't come with Photoshop, but there is a bundle where you can get Photoshop and Lightroom together which is, I think, known as the photographers plan, and I use Lightroom to organize my pictures because I really like that I can view every single picture that I've ever put into Lightroom. Even when I don't have the hard drive that contains the originals with me, and so, I don't have the hard drive that has these originals, at least a lot of these originals. So, in Lightroom, how do we do the similar things? Well, first off, on the left side of your screen is gonna be your folder list. You can navigate that. If you find something that is not found in here, you are looking for a particular folder, it's not in the folder list, there's the import button at the bottom which is how you get Lightroom to pay attention to a folder. Here are our thumbnails. In the lower right is where we can change the size. And just like with Bridge, ...

I can hit the space bar to view an image large. And I can hit escape to get back to this view. But, in Lightroom it's a little different if you want to change the name of a file. To change the name of a file, go to the right side of your screen. There's a little triangle against the edge of your screen which will either expand or collapse the panel widths over there and in the area called meta data, right there, is gonna be your file name and you can type in a new one there and it would rename your file. Now, sometimes we're gonna need to send our images from Lightroom, here, to Photoshop, and to do so, we go to the photo menu, and under the photo menu is a choice called edit in. And here, I can say edit in Photoshop. And if I do, it's gonna open it just like when I double click on a file in Bridge. It's gonna bring it into Photoshop. But, there are also special choices that are found at the bottom of the menu. Some of these choices will only be available when I have more than one image selected because one of them is called merge to panorama in Photoshop that'll stitch multiple images into a seamless composite, but, it needs multiple images to work. You can also open things with layers in Photoshop where you get one layer for each image, but, we need more than one image selected for that. The same choices that you just saw here in Lightroom by going into the photo menu and choosing edit in are also available over in Bridge. So, let's return. In Bridge, if I select an image, we have a tools menu. And here's where we have the choice to do things in Photoshop. And we have photomerge which is what is going to stitch things into a panorama. There's load files into Photoshop layers and other choices. So, if you ever see me go to this menu in Bridge, then if you're in Lightroom instead, I'll switch over there, you wanna go to the photo menu and choose edit in to find a similar command. Now, if I tell it to edit this in Photoshop, it's gonna need the original file to be available, and I think this particular folder is on the internal hard drive that I have so I should be able to open it, and I'm gonna choose photo, edit in, and then edit in Photoshop. Sometimes it takes a moment but it should open in Photoshop. So, now let's take a tour of the Photoshop interface and learn how to customize it and just get comfortable in here. So, on the left side of Photoshop is your tools panel, and when you choose one of these tools, let's say I choose the paint brush, then, at the top of your screen, there's a horizontal bar that we call the options bar. The option bar shows you all the settings for that particular tool. So, what you see at the top of your screen will always change based on what tool you have selected. So then, after you've dialed in the settings that are found up there at the top to customize that tool, on the right side of your screen, you'll usually find the layers panel. In the layers panel is where the actual change is going to happen. That's where, if your images are made out of multiple pieces, you can choose which piece of that image should end up being changed by targeting whatever's in the layers panel. So, let's talk about these panels and how to move them around because yours might be configured different than mine, and this is not the setup I usually work with. This is more the defaults. So, when it comes to these panels, if you ever see me use a panel and you don't find it on your screen, then go to the window menu. Under the window menu, it lists every single panel that's available in Photoshop. The ones that have little check boxes next to them are the ones that are currently visible, but if I need something else, like I need the brushes panel, choosing it there is gonna make it visible. And so, if you ever see me using something that's not found on your screen, head up to the window menu to make it visible. Then, when it comes to these panels, there's a lot of things we can do with them. First, if I don't need a panel for a while, like up here I have the swatches panel, and I'm just not gonna need it for the rest of this class, I can double click on the name of the panel and that'll collapse it down. And I can go to the next panel below that, double click on it's name, collapse it down as well. And so, I can make it so my screen is a little less cluttered. Double click again on one of those and it'll expand again. You can change the order of the tabs that make up these panels because these are independent panels that happen to be grouped together. And if I just click on the other tabs, I can switch between them. But, if I wanna change their order, just click on a name and drag, and you can easily put patterns on the far left and put colors on the far right, for instance. Or if you don't like how these are grouped together, maybe you need to use the patterns panel and the swatches panel at the same time. Then, click on the name of one of these panels and drag it to an open area of your screen and it'll become it's own, independent entity. You could then group it with one of the other existing panels. Just click on it's name, once again, and drag to where you see some panels combined together. Here, I see three tabs of different panels. I'll drag it to that area. I see a blue box, indicating that I'm gonna include it in that grouping, and I can easily put it there. Or again, drag it out to an open area of my screen. If you wanna get rid of a panel, cause you just never plan on using this particular one, then go to the upper right and there's little horizontal bars that indicate there's a side menu and I can close this particular panel. If I want to close a grouping of panels, like, here's three of them that are grouped together, go to the little side menu and there'll be a choice of close tab group and that means close all of the ones that are grouped together, where the tabs are right next to each other. And therefore, I can really clean up my screen if I want to get rid of various choices that I'm not gonna use all that often. Then, you'll notice that some of your panels appear as icons, like these. And if I click on one of those icons, it will expand to let me use the panel and then if I click the icon again, it'll go away. Well, if you would like your panels to show up that way, therefore you can access them quickly and make them disappear, all you need to do is grab one of your panels that are here, let's say, the paths panel, and drag it into that section where you see just icons. If I do that, I've now put that particular panel, here's the paths panel, as it's own icon. Therefore, I can quickly access them. So, if I want to do the same with the channels panel, I can pop it down there too. Expand it, collapse it. Whenever a panel's expanded, you can grab any edge and control it's size. Then you can move entire groupings of panels. Here, you see the layers panel and above it is properties and adjustments, but there's this, kind of, dark gray bar above that. If I were to grab that bar instead of the actual tabs, I could move all those things that are grouped together and put them somewhere else on my screen. I personally prefer to often have these on the right edge of my screen. I'll move it over there until I see a blue bar to indicate that that's gonna snap to the edge of the tools panel that is there. And now I've put everything in the left side of my screen. I find that to be more convenient because I always have to come over here to grab my tools and the options are always up here in the upper left, so now, I have my other panels there and I can just have my image on the right. It's a personal choice of how you set these up. But you should know, double click on a panel to expand or collapse it, and then drag the name of the panel to rearrange these. If I want an entire new section of these little icons, I can just grab any one of these panels, drag it and then drag it up against something, so, you see a vertical bar going the entire height of my screen. I gotta be near an existing panel to get that. Then it's there. And to get it to appear as an icon, go to the very top edge. You're gonna find a little double arrow. It's really kinda hard to see, but it's right there. If you click that double arrow, it means collapse us down to an icon. It'll expects that you might not recognize the icon to begin with, so it puts the name there, but if you grab the edge of this and pull it in, you can get just the icon. And that's what happened to these. If I were to grab it's edge and pull, I'd get names, or if I had clicked it's little double arrow, they become full size again. So, that's kinda how to navigate around. Once you get your screen setup the way you'd like it to be, then you might wanna save this as a workspace. A workspace will remember the position of all the panels, and which ones were visible. You can do that in many different areas in Photoshop, but one of them is an icon near the upper right of my screen. Right up here. And if I click there, there's a choice to create a new workspace. And so, I'm gonna call this complete guide so I remember why I created it. And, you can have it remember various settings. You can also customize the menu bar that's up here and if you have, you can save that as part of it. You can customize your keyboard shortcuts or you can even customize which tools appear in your tools panel. So, you can include that. But, once I choose save, then if I ever mess up and I want to have a different layout, maybe one layout for retouching, another one for painting and so on, I could save them up here and then quickly switch between them, just by going to this menu and completely reconfigure my screen. So, this is how I often have my screen set up and I've saved it as a workspace. Once I have moved everything around and do a custom fashion, then I ended up saving that as a workspace via this menu.