Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom Catalog Setup

I talked about time lapses and, one of the things you want to do when you're editing is you really want to kind of take a quick view of what you did. So, in this case, this morning I walked into the studio here, and made sure I was in the right studio. And so, I'm just making sure that that's all happening and it's live. There's you guys. Sorry it's a little out of focus, but we talked about how to correct that. So, this is really just the basics of editing. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the different stages that you'll go through as you edit. You've got to keep up as far as library and the folders and collections. I've told you a little bit about folders and how I structure those, but I really want to talk about collections. The tip really is that inside that collection, you're gonna end up with just the best ones. You can leave all your other ones out of that collection. People don't need to see those bad ones. At least, that's how I use it. All this stuff can be modified for wha...

tever workflow you want. But I really need to emphasize that collections are a powerful tool, and you're gonna like them, especially once you get the hang of using them. Stars and flags, I use quite a bit, and so, in this case, we really like this picture of our host, and so we'll give it a one star, well, no, maybe we'll give it a five star. And so we like that one. But just to give you a quick example, the power of the database is basically that it is a database, and so, some of the best tools you can use in this database are right up here. So, all these pictures can be sorted, or found, by just typing in something in the keyword right here. Or, you can disregard anything as a keyword and just simply sort by the attribute, in this case, five stars. So now you've just eliminated from preview all the other pictures. Turn that off. Metadata, this one's really handy because, as I mentioned earlier, I used a 28 to 300 lens, and through looking at metadata of all the pictures I took, I realized that most of them I captured from that lens were at 50. But this gives you a whole nice list of not only when you took the pictures, but what camera you used, what lens you used, and you can decipher what you use the most and what you don't want to use again. And remember, when you go into that camera store, think about what cameras you're gonna buy based on how often you used it, right? Okay, so first of all, we have the library view, which is what we're looking at right here. And then we have the develop module which is over here, and all these other modules, I'm not gonna address in this class because there's not enough time to do all that. I'm gonna focus on the library and the develop module because those are the things that are gonna matter. Some of the things that I use in here continually are shortcut keys. G is for grid, the space bar is to look at a picture larger, and that's one that I constantly use. I sort through pictures with the arrow keys, and as you saw here, it was a very quick way to bring up all these pictures and look at them fast. Some of the other shortcut keys are, when we're looking at these pictures, we hit the F key to look at them full frame. There's our friends working hard. Go back to G, that brings us back to the grid view. What's also fun is, you select a couple of these, maybe we'll go up here, select these, and you hit N and it brings up all three. That's a really nice way to help you in your process of editing. Again, I'm gonna go back to G to get back to the grid view. And then, if you want to look at some of the information on the image, some of that is previewed by just tapping the I key, and that gives you not only the file name, it gives you the date, the resolution, and you can modify it of course. In this case, it gives you just the shutter speed and the ISO. Why? Because I had the meta bones adapter on the Sony, it's not giving me the aperture. But typically it'll give you the aperture and all that good information. The other key I use often, I'm gonna go back to G, is the tab key. It eliminates the panels on both sides so that you can see more of the preview that you're looking at, and as you're looking through your pictures, and you come to one that you really don't like, the X key. That sets it to be rejected, as it says, but you don't have to delete it now. This is important, like I said, if you're on a trip, and you want to just mark these so that you don't have to deal with them later when you get back home, you leave them on your computer while you're traveling, and then you get back home wherever you are, and then you hit command, let me hit another one here, then you hit command delete, and it brings up only those marked with an X, and you can delete them at that time all at once. So those are some helpful hints. But speaking of deleting, don't delete, okay, unless it's one of those that's really out of focus, I mean really out of focus or really overexposed, but remember, based on what I was saying earlier, you do not want to delete these pictures until you have more time to process them and learn about it. So, to kind of conclude, and it'll be a long conclusion, but to conclude this hour, I do want to talk about the stages and the rounds of editing. So, what I do when I first get these pictures in, is I make sure, first of all, that I have a nice place to sit down and take into account some of the things that I've been looking at. And I really want to create the scenario where I'm not hastily going about this. Now it depends on your time, but essentially, the workflow for me is, I have different rounds of editing, and I do different things in those different rounds. First round of edit is really just a loose look. Look through things really quickly. Don't check for focus, you don't need to know if it's in focus if it's really close. Remember, you can tell on a preview that it's way out of focus, that's not what I mean. Don't go to one-to-one and spent the time to look for focus. Scan them in thumbnail size only, and don't try to label anything. You just open the file, you hit tab, and you basically go like this, and sometimes there's thousands of pictures. But you're just getting a good idea of, oh, I started here, I've got all my pictures. Make sure they're all there, the file names are right. It's just a really quick scan. That's kind of round one, okay. Round two, this is where you're actually going to start flagging things. You're gonna add stars. And how I do it is, I first remember, this is a little bit more about mindful observation. So get into that frame of mind, because now you're gonna start looking at these pictures, you're gonna hit the space bar, and your gonna go, "Do I like that one?" Well, she's awfully beautiful, but I'm way out of focus, so really quickly I'm not going to star it. I'm gonna go through there, that's a better one, and you get the idea. And I'm just sorting through like this, hitting the space bar or the arrow key, I'm going through and I'm saying, "I really like that one." If I like a whole bunch like that, I'll go back to the grid view, and with the shift key down, select them all, and then hit one, and it gives them all a one star. So that's round two. I've given them one stars. Sometimes, occasionally, like I said, I might go up to one and look at it and then, by clicking once, by default, you go into one-to-one. And so occasionally when I'm in round two, I will check focus. Not all the time. Go back to grid view and then we come to round three. Again, I just want to remind you, don't delete the files. Not yet, no matter how depressed you are. This happens, you get back from a shoot, you just scoured through everything, you go through, you're trying to hit one stars, and you're thinking to yourself, "Self, that looks nothing like what I saw out there." And it does happen. I see it happen often. Our expectations about what's gonna happen here are dependent upon a whole lot of other work that's coming up. So just don't delete, again. So again, we're back to round two. Don't be hypercritical, don't check for focus, don't check for color, don't even check for exposure at this time. So, third round. Now you're gonna go and you're gonna come up here to attribute, and you're gonna sort by one star. Now you have all the ones that you just picked fairly liberally. Your job next, I jumped ahead of the game and gave you a five star, but that's what I do when I come to a picture that's the best thing I can't live without. So, I'm proud to have your picture and your portrait in my collection. I gave you a five star. But honestly, most of the time I'm going through here, and I'm giving things that I really like two stars, like so, and I'm just gonna randomly pick here, and of course, that one and these guys here. So, once I get to that point, I have two stars, then I'm going to start looking at things like focus, and I'm gonna start looking at things like color and detail. You might even want to check the histogram. So you come in here, and you go into develop, by hitting the D key, it's pretty quick, and you look at this histogram and you go, "Mm, that one's kind of okay, exposure's good enough." It just gives you a good reference. This is where your mind starting to get an idea of what things are working, what things you messed up. So now you've gone through and you've sorted out the two stars. Now it doesn't happen this fast. I'm going through this really fast so you guys get the idea and the whole workflow, but essentially this could take hours depending on how many pictures you have. Then you come up to attribute, you simply add the two star to the flag, or to the search criteria. Now, you do the same thing, but this is when things get a little more critical, because the pictures after the two star moment are ones that you want to process. Those are the ones that you really want to spend your time on. So now is the time to look at the focus, to look at the exposure, to look at the overall composition, and just check all these things that we've been talking about. You want to make sure that they've really happened in your camera, the things that you think you did. This is the time to pick that out, because once you get down to three stars, and we'll just give these more fun pictures the three star, then you're gonna take all these, select them, I'm gonna hit tab, and I'm gonna come down here to collection, and I'm gonna say Create a Collection, and in this case, I'm gonna call it Creative Live. And I'm not gonna put it in a set yet. I'm just gonna make the collection and hit create, and way down here at the bottom, I have my Creative Live ... I did forget to hit a button, oh no. So, I come down there and I will have my Creative Live collection, but again, to recheck this, I'm gonna go into see all, and I'm gonna it attribute, find my three stars by sorting, and then I'm gonna drag those into the Creative Live folder. So there's more ways to skin the cat than some of the buttons they show. Now, you have your collection, you have your folder still there with all your images in it, you didn't delete them, but you've weeded out from all these images the images that you really want to spend time on and work on. And that's the stages, or the rounds, of the workflow that I use constantly. I try to use that. Once in a while, like I did, I got excited, I gave it a five star. For that reason, I have a five star image. And regarding the five star images, those are ones that are, honestly, the occasions in life when I'm out shooting that I simply know I will never see again. I'll put those on another little back-up stick or anything. One of the best examples of this was, when we were in Africa and our guide took us out to photograph these elephants crossing the dusty pliah. He'd been there his whole life photographing, but that night was so spectacular that it actually scared him that he was gonna lose the pictures. So, in addition to having the pictures on the camera card and saving them to two other hard drives, he had a third thumb drive which he put in his pocket while we were driving around the rest of the trip. So, sometimes you really don't want to lose your pictures, and this is a very powerful way of making sure you can identify the best pictures in your catalog right away, okay. So, I went through that fast, but I think you've got the general idea. You've got the stars, different rounds, different reasons for editing pictures and looking at pictures and giving you a feel for how they look, and what you did in the field, whether it was successful or not. John, see pics and one other, "Do you GPS tag your images for location?" Good question. Don't listen to my answer. I'm old school, I do not, but I know a lot of people that do, and they really enjoy it because it goes into the map feature in Light Room, and it's fun for them to identify exactly where they took it. Like I said, I'm kind of old school. I figure it out and I don't need it, but anyways. I'd like it if it was easy and inside the camera and I didn't have to attach something to get it. So when that comes, I'll use it. Great. One more. "How do you deal with winnowing out your photos when you've bracketed everything?" That's coming up. I'm gonna show you how to take a group of bracketed files and do what's called grouping them, or stacking them. It's a quick way to eliminate some of the cluster. I love that we're hitting so many questions that people have. You're saving all of your photos in the one catalog? Does it take forever to open it, and then, when you've culled them and you've put them into different collections, where are all the ones that you didn't delete? Do they just sit in the catalog? All right, good questions. The files that I didn't delete are still actually up inside the folders, and so all those can be viewed as long as you don't remove them. Lightroom gives you the option to delete or remove. I never remove, because then I lose track of what's actually on the hard drive that I can't see. Somebody might have a reason for using that, but I don't. Anyways, I don't delete them. I leave them on there, and they're always visible if I go back to the folders to find them. And it does not, depending on your computer. If you have an old computer, it might take a while to load, and that's gonna be based on your processor and the attachment to ... if you have an external hard drive. That attachment could be USB 2 instead of 3, or thunderbolt. There's different ways the data gets back and forth. If that's slow, that could slow down the way it finds the catalog and previews it and shows it. The other thing is the drive itself might be slow. So all the machinery has to be operating quickly for Lightroom to work fast. Unfortunately, it's more money to get the speed, which is always the case. I was wondering what you do when you've shot a certain location, you have several different versions of it that you like, some vertical, some horizontal. Do you figure those at at the round four when you're going through, or comparing them all and deciding which compositions you like best, or do you wait until a later point? No, I think when I make up my mind on the compositions of a sequence of images that I took in one particular spot, great question, I'm gonna do that before the last round, because that decision's being made so that I'm not gonna spend time editing all those other images to find that out. So I'm gonna try and figure that out before I have to waste, not waste, but spend, ten, twenty minutes or whatever it is, to edit each picture. So I really want to figure that out first, before the final round. I'm not saying that I never go back to the other rounds and pull one out, which is all the more reason why I don't delete.