(PDF DOWNLOAD) Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic CC Classroom in a Book ( release) - Book description
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Adobe lightroom and photoshop cc for photographers classroom in a book pdf free.Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book (2022 release)
Adobe did a disservice to the product by confusing the two different flavors. I'm teaching a class, using this book as our textbook, and can attest to the fact that it is for Lightroom Classic and not the CC cloud version. By Streetwise on January 8, The book as far as I got was very frustrating to read.
Many of the instructions were for the Apple operating system and did not apply to the Windows system. This is a very expensive book and I strongly advise not to buy it, at least if you have an Windows operating system. I suggest learning Lightroom from videos on the Adobe site and save yourself a lot of money. This is a great book for helping you think through a suggested "workflow" of processing your photos, and how Lightroom and Photoshop integrate.
They explain that not all readers will need or use every aspect of the book, which is good, because as a hobbyist I do not need instruction on a filing system for my photos which they cover extensively. My only issue, as a neophyte, is that the book title and content refers to "Lightroom", but they are really showing you via the instruction and screen shots "Lightroom Classic" - the two interfaces are very different and if you try to follow along in Lightroom your screen doesn't match what's in the book, at all.
I did not use the online resources which in all fairness may explain that, but the book itself does not. One person found this helpful. This series is almost always a classroom in a book. I purchased it because I have the memory of a squirrel and like to look through it when I forget how to do something. Very nice book that explains everything clearly and thoroughly. Shipped fast. No issues getting to the downloadable content, and the additional ebook from adobe press includes video tutorials!
Must have for new photographers. This was the wrong book to work with Lightroom Classic. It was to work with the cloud version of Lightroom which I do not use. I thought I would like this product because I have watched the authors videos. The book starts out a bit confusing.
I have used Light room previously and did not need the intro chapters. Have not gone through the rest of the book as yet; therefore it might prove better after I do. I haven't finished this book yet but I love what I have read and learned thus far.
I am a "just the facts mam" type student and this book is perfect my needs, facts without being overly wordy. See all reviews. Top reviews from other countries. I got this book mainly for LightroomCC. You have to download information and files from the net.
The process is over complicated , having exchanging several emails emails with the company I was eventually able to download the files. Probably just teething troubles. Im sure that they will improve the experience. The book provides lots of information and is worth having , glad I persevered with them. Not used the downloadable tutorials, which will probably help make more sense, but with practice this will be a helpful guide to demystify photoshop.
Recommend that its read in bite sized chunks!! This book was brought for me as a present by my daughter.
I am new to lightroom and I have found that the book shows me in a clear logical way how to use the lightroom software. It is well laid out and easy to understand and guides you through the process of managing and editing your photographs. Report abuse. Book pages are not cut properly, some were damaged and some dirty. Definitely not in a state you would expect from a new book. It was supposed to be a gift but arrived damaged. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations.
Back to top. Get to Know Us. Make Money with Us. Amazon Payment Products. Let Us Help You. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Straight from size of the thumbnail the factory, the Library module uses Grid view, wherein resizable thumbnails are previews, use the displayed in a grid. If you peek at the Library module toolbar beneath the preview Thumbnail slider beneath the previews.
This option enlarges the selected thumbnail so that it fits within the keyboard to decrease preview area, however large the preview area currently is. For a side-by-side comparison of one image with another— say, to determine which one is the most sharp—use this option. Press the Spacebar to enter Loupe mode, click within the image on the left called the select photo , and then drag to pan around and examine details your cursor turns into a hand. As you reposition one photo, the other one the candidate matches its position.
To exit Compare candidate to select by view, click its icon again or press G to return to Grid view. The candidate is marked by a black diamond. Lightroom grabs the next image in the Filmstrip panel and displays it on the right as the candidate so that you can repeat the process. This is a great way to find the best photo of a bunch, especially if you shoot in burst mode. This option lets you compare multiple images side by side.
To use it, select three or more thumbnails, and then either click the Survey icon it has three tiny rectangles inside it with three dots or press N on your keyboard. You can also drag to rearrange photos in the preview area while sur- veying them. When you find the photo you like the best, point your cursor at it, and mark it as a pick by clicking the tiny flag icon that appears at its lower left.
To exit Survey view, click its icon again or press G to return to Grid view. The next section teaches you a simple strategy for assessing and culling photos. In the resulting dialog, pick a naming scheme; Custom Name — Sequence is a good one because it gives you the opportunity to enter something descriptive into the Custom Text field say, Smith wedding In this case, enter Maui trip The only way to under- stand this admittedly confusing concept is to try it yourself using these steps: 1 In Grid view of the Library module, click anywhere on the first thumbnail preview to select it.
Alter- natively, you can Shift-click the third thumbnail to also select the one in between. In this case, clicking directly atop the image in the second preview switched the most selected status from the first to the second thumbnail shown here in the middle. The result is different than it was in step 2.
Clicking the frame, rather than the image, in the second preview left only the second preview selected and deselected the other two previews shown here in the bottom strip. The takeaway here is that routinely clicking the frame rather than the image in a thumbnail will allow you to avoid being surprised by the less common behavior you saw in step 2. At the bottom of the dialog, Lightroom shows you what your naming scheme looks like.
If you peek at the top left of the interface, you see a status bar. The next section teaches you about another great habit to create after importing images: assessing and culling them. Organizing your photos Lightroom gives you many ways to mark your photos, which makes them easier to organize.
For example, you can rate them with one to five stars, give them color labels, or give them two kinds of flags Pick and Reject. Lightroom also lets you filter your photos for each marker or a combination of them , making certain photos easy to round up. Applying markers You can apply markers in several ways. To apply the marker, click a thumbnail.
Press P to flag an image as a pick one that you want to keep , press X to flag it as a reject, and press U to unflag an image. Press 1—5 on your keyboard to rate an image as 1—5 stars.
Press 0 to remove the star rating. Press 6—9 on your keyboard to label an image as red, yellow, green, or blue respectively. You then likely left the mediocre ones in the envelope you got from the photo lab, and you probably forgot about them. Only the best shots made their way out of the envelope and into a physical album.
The 1 In the Catalog panel at the upper left, make sure Previous Import is selected. Double-click the first image to enter Loupe view, and then click Fit in the Navigator panel. Use the Right Arrow key on your key- board to go forward through your images the Left Arrow key goes backward. When you get to the last sunset photo the one with the blurry palm mistake while flagging photos, press U on your trees , press X on your keyboard to mark it as a reject.
Press your Right Arrow key, and mark the next yellow flower shot as a pick. Keep going through the exercise files, marking your favor- ites as picks and any that you think are bad as rejects mark only three to five of the exercise files as rejects. When you reach the end of the files, your Right Arrow key stops working. When assessing your own images, reject only the ones that are really bad: out of focus, poorly exposed, or awful composition. Lightroom displays one of your rejects in the preview area, and a dialog appears.
Clicking Delete from Disk takes them out of your catalog and off your hard drive. The choice is up to you. For the purposes of this lesson, click Remove. When you do, Lightroom shows only those photos you flagged as picks. In the dialog that appears, enter a designate it as a target meaningful name into the Name field say, Maui keepers or whatever , turn on collection.
Now you can add photos to it by pressing B on your keyboard or by pointing your cursor at a thumb- nail and clicking the tiny circle that appears at its upper right. This also makes it easy to trigger a slideshow from them, as described in Lesson 9.
In Loupe be , press U on your keyboard to unflag them all. Use the Right Arrow key to move through the the photos are selected.
You may need to click the white flag twice for it to actually filter the photo. Call it a feature or a bug—the choice is up to you! In the resulting dialog, enter the name Maui selects or something similar. Click Create. This gives you two collections: one for keepers and another for the best ones of the bunch.
P Note: Collection 13 To further organize the two collections from your Maui shoot, you can put them sets are a great way both inside a folder. Lightroom calls this a collection set, into which you can to keep your Collec- store collections as well as saved projects say, a book project, saved slideshow, tions panel organized. In the pher, you may create a dialog that opens, enter the name Maui and click Create. To remove photos from a collection, select them and then press Delete on your P Note: The same keyboard.
Doing so removes the photo from the collection, but it still resides in photo can live in mul- tiple collections. When your Lightroom catalog and on your hard drive. To move a photo from one collec- you add a photo to a tion to another, drag the thumbnail into the collection you want it to appear in. Adding keywords Adding keywords is an extremely powerful way to keep track of photos by subject matter in your Lightroom catalog. Think of them as search terms, like the ones you use to find something on the web.
In the dialog that appears, enter flora in the Keyword Name field, and then enter flowers and plants in the Synonym field. Click Create, and Lightroom adds the keyword to the panel and applies it to the selected photos. To see nested keywords, click the triangle to the left of a keyword in the Keyword List panel to expand your keyword hierarchies. You can also type a keyword into the search field at the top of the Keyword List panel to reveal it in the Keyword List panel.
When you click the arrow to the right of a keyword circled , Light- room automatically switches your source to All Photographs in the catalog also circled. Once you apply a key- word to a photo, a tiny tag icon appears on its lower-right corner. Other ways to apply and delete keywords As you may imagine, there are additional ways to apply keywords.
To remove a keyword from a photo, do the same thing but turn off the checkbox that appears to its left. If you go this route, you can create and apply keywords in the same step.
If you want to create and apply more than one keyword to the selected photos, use a comma. To delete a keyword from your list, use the Keyword List panel not the Keyword- ing panel. To do it, click the keyword and then click the minus sign - at the upper left of the panel. In the warning dialog that appears, click Delete.
In the warning dialog, click Delete. In fact, the afore- mentioned menu offers several useful options for managing your keywords. For example, you can edit them, remove a keyword from the selected photo, or delete the keyword altogether. Either way, the keyword is removed from your keyword list and from any photos you applied it to. Finding photos You learned how to search by keyword in the previous section, but there are several ways to find certain photos in Lightroom.
With All Photographs selected in the catalog panel, Lightroom searches your entire catalog to meet criteria that you set. You can choose to search text, attribute markers , metadata, and more. To see only those photos, click one of the keywords. The next column shows the camera s you use; to see only the photos taken with a certain camera body, click it in the list.
Same thing with lenses. You can also control which columns appear in the Library Filter. From the resulting menu, choose Column. When you do, a column labeled None appears. Click the word None, and then from the menu that appears, choose the information you want displayed in that column.
In this image, Lightroom is filtering for all images taken with a specific camera and lens, regardless of keywords. And of course there are other ways to find photos. First, clear your current filter so E Tip: You can also you can see all your photos again. In the second menu, choose your criterion say, Contains All.
In the field on the right, enter the text you want to find. Click Attribute in the Library Filter, and then click the marker you want to find: flags, ratings, color labels, or kind photo or video. You can turn on more than one filter in the Library Filter by clicking more than one of the buttons say, Text and Attribute. Doing so reveals a second row of criteria. For example, you could use this trick to search for all the images with a certain keyword that are also flagged as a pick as shown here or that have a certain star rating.
Using smart collections E Tip: You can use Smart collections are collections that automatically populate themselves with smart collections to photos that meet certain criteria that you set. For example, if you use a star rating system to rate your best work, you can easily create a smart collection that perpetually gathers those images.
Click the second menu, and choose Is. Click the fifth star so that five stars are bold. This is handy when you 8 In the Collections panel, select the smart collection you made Best Photos , want to restrict a smart and notice that the photo you added a 5-star rating to is now included in the collection in some way by date, camera, collection.
E Tip: Open a few of the prebuilt smart collections that come with Lightroom to see how they are built and to get ideas for your own smart collections. Click Cancel to close the Edit Smart Collection dialog. What are those shortcuts?
Lightroom scours the folder and adds any new photos it finds to your catalog. Press E on the keyboard to switch to Loupe view the larger view of a photograph. The guitarist pictured here is George Kahumoku, Jr. You can find his music at Kahumoku.
George Kahumoku, Jr. A toolbar and helpful in the Develop module, because hav- the Filmstrip appear at the bottom; click any photo in the Filmstrip to see it in the ing one panel open at preview area in the middle.
Solo mode by right- clicking the Histogram The toolbar near the bottom lets you see before and after views and zoom. The panel. Filmstrip at the bottom lets you select the image s you want to work on. To see a before and after version of the image while T on your keyboard. The menu at the right of the toolbar lets you control toolbar content.
If you turn on the Slideshow option, a Play button appears that you can use to trigger a full- screen slideshow of the images in your Filmstrip.
Photo credit: Lesa Snider, photolesa. Due to its database nature, Lightroom keeps a run- ning list of your edits in the History panel, where you can click to undo and redo consecutive edits anytime you want. Lightroom named this feature Snapshots. They each lesson file. The Presets panel lets you save frequently used settings, which you can think of as adjustment recipes that can be applied with a single click.
The built-in presets are handy for creating black-and-whites and color tints, adding sharpening, and so on, though you can also create them yourself. Once you click a preset, you see it applied in the preview area and it appears at the top of your History panel.
The History panel keeps track of all the adjustments you make to a photo— E Tip: Point your including individual settings—as a chronological list. Click any state to go cursor at states in the History panel to see backward or forward in the editing history of your photo. If you use the Redo command, the state reappears in the History panel. A brown tint is applied to the photo.
The Grain—Heavy and Sepia Tone presets are cumulative, so you see both effects on the photo. This captures a snapshot of the current state of the photo. E Tip: If you no longer The new snapshot appears in the Snapshots panel. Now you can easily switch need a snapshot, select between the grainy sepia and the black-and-white versions by clicking them in it in the Snapshots the Snapshots panel, even after you close and reopen Lightroom.
To retain all the editing history thus far, click the a running list of every- topmost history state before continuing to adjust the photo. This returns close and relaunch the the photo to its original, unedited state. P Note: Lightroom sports another feature you can use to process a photo in multiple ways: virtual copies. The following steps walk you through adjusting a raw file, though you can use these steps on JPEGs or TIFFs too: 1 With the first lesson file selected, return the photo to its original, color-cast- P Note: You can use riddled state by clicking Reset at lower right or by clicking 0 in the Snapshots this workflow on each of the exercise files in panel.
Click the menu to the right of the word Profile, and take a spin through the profile presets to see which one looks the best Camera Neutral was used here.
Behind the scenes, it renders the raw data into pixels you can view and work with onscreen a process known as demosaicing. These camera-specific profiles produce a subtle shift in color and contrast—Camera Landscape has a satura- tion boost, while Camera Portrait is cautious with skin tones. These profiles are worth marching through on a few of your own photos to see which one works best for your particular camera and the type of photos you take. Chromatic Aberration is a lens-related anomaly that can cause unwanted color to appear along super high-contrast edges where the black numerals on a clock meet its white background, for example.
Enable Profile Corrections applies a lens profile for the lens with which the photo was taken and automatically corrects any geometric distortion pin- cushioning or barrel distortion and vignetting dark corners that may have occurred. Both maneuvers can save you a lot of time. This is especially true if you tend to take the same kind of pictures with the same camera say, you always shoot portraits with your Canon 5D Mark III.
To save settings as defaults: 1 Ensure all other panels on the right are at their default settings. From this point on, those settings will be applied to any photo you take with that camera the second you open it in the Develop module. Another option is to save certain settings as a preset that you apply whenever you want or on import.
For example, if you find a camera calibration profile that you like for landscapes but prefer a different one for portraits, you could set up two presets: One for landscape shots and another for portraits. And you could apply either of those presets on import. To save a preset: 1 Adjust the settings in the panels on the right however you like.
To apply the preset: 1 Select an image or several. To apply a preset on import, choose it from the Import Preset menu at the bottom of the Import window. Click the Crop tool in the toolbar directly beneath the histogram. Alternatively, press R on your keyboard to activate the tool. P Note: You can adjust When you activate the Crop tool, a box surrounds your image; drag any edge or your crop at any time corner to adjust its size. You can straighten an image with the Crop tool, too, by using the Angle slider or by pointing your cursor outside any corner of the box and then dragging P Note: The workflow when it turns into a curved, double-sided arrow.
In the Basic panel, click the White Balance Selector it looks like a turkey baster , or press W on your keyboard. Open the Histogram panel at options. When you do, both buttons sport a white border. Detail on your keyboard. By turning on the clipping warnings before you adjust tone, Lightroom shows you clipped areas in the image preview: Clipped shadows appear bright blue, and clipped highlights are red.
When you do, Lightroom sets the next six sliders for you, which you can then adjust to your liking. Drag it to the right to increase brightness, or drag it leftward to decrease it.
E Tip: To have If you point your cursor at the middle of the histogram in the Develop module, Lightroom perform an Lightroom highlights the tones affected by the Exposure slider in light gray, auto adjustment for a which are circled in this figure. That skin details. If you adjust Highlights duce noise grainy-looking speckles , be cautious with it.
To darken and recover detail in the background of the example image, drag the Highlights slider all the way left. The ening effect. E Tip: To see which tones the Shadows 11 Adjust the Whites and Blacks sliders to control how dark your blacks are and and Highlights sliders how light your whites are, to fix clipping warnings, or both.
In the example affect, point your cursor toward the left image, some clipping is occurring in the highlights on the guitar tuning pegs.
Of course, you can also use these sliders to eliminate clipping warnings and to When you do this using the Whites slider, the ensure your tones are within the realm of what can be printed. If your whites image turns black and are overexposed for example, blown out and you turned on the clipping warn- clipped highlights ings described in step 6, those areas appear in red.
To darken them, drag the appear in white or Whites slider to the left. With the Blacks slider, the E Tip: To see which tones the Whites and Blacks sliders affect, point your cursor at the far left image turns white and right sides of the histogram. To lighten them, drag the Blacks slider rightward. By contrast, the Saturation slider saturates tones. Saturation sliders. Drag the Amount add an edge vignette slider leftward to about —30, and then drag the Midpoint slider rightward to before doing local approximately Also, once you send a photo with an edge vignette to Photoshop, that vignette is perma- nent in the Photoshop file that comes back to Lightroom.
E Tip: You can use post-crop vignett- ing to give a photo crisp, rounded edges atop a black or white background. The Roundness slider con- trols the shape of the vignette, and the Feather slider controls the softness of the vignette.
The Highlights slider keeps the vignette from darkening highlights around the edges of your image. For example, you could save the style switch to Color panel. To apply these settings yourself on the exercise file, click the Reset button at lower right or select Snapshot 0 in the Snapshots panel.
And if your subject is off center and you want to move the vignette to another area, you can use the Radial Filter to create the vignette instead. Scroll up to the Detail panel, open it, and locate the Noise Reduc- refers to graininess tion section. Click within your photo in the main preview area to zoom in to a in your images—the view.
Drag atop the photo to reposition it and bring a noisy area into view. Typically, any ISO above puts you in the noise danger zone. If necessary, you can use the two sliders beneath the E Tip: You can apply Luminance and Color sliders to compensate for some of the blurring and loss of these portrait sharpen- edge detail that occurs.
In the Presets portion of your image, which is handy for keeping an eye on two areas at once. For important area into view, such as the face of a portrait. Locate the Sharpening landscape shots, use the section of the Detail panel. For a portrait, drag the Amount slider rightward to Sharpen — Scenic preset roughly 35, and set Radius to 1. These settings are great starting points Much like sharpening a knife in your kitchen accentuates its edge, sharpening that you can then an image in Lightroom accentuates the edges it contains that is, places where fine-tune.
This adjustment works by lightening light pixels and darkening dark pixels wherever they appear next to each other. Use a higher value for portraits say, 1. The Detail slider lets you control which of the more detailed edges Lightroom sharpens. The Masking slider lets you restrict sharpening to only the higher-contrast edges. As you drag the slider rightward, Lightroom sharpens fewer areas. The only real way to produce sharp images is to stabilize your camera using a tripod and then trigger the shutter using a remote control.
You may also be able to produce fairly sharp images by shooting in burst mode wherein your camera keeps firing off shots for as long as you depress the shutter button.
And if you do end up with a slightly blurry photo, you can send it to Photoshop and fix it using the Shake Reduction filter.
As you can see, the adjusted image looks far better than the original. Plus, you can save time by saving frequently used settings as defaults or presets. If you have two or more photos to apply the same changes to, use these steps to sync changes manually: 1 Select the portrait you adjusted in the previous section, and in the Filmstrip, Shift-click the third thumbnail. Lightroom automatically selects the second thumbnail too. Input sharpening vs.
If the button happens to read Auto Sync instead, click the panel switch visible in this figure to the left of the button to change it to Sync. The instructions in this book, particularly those that concern the Basic panel, are for the current Lightroom process version, PV , which was introduced in If you used Lightroom to adjust photos prior to , PV was used instead.
If you open one of those photos in the Develop module, some of the Basic panel slid- ers look and behave differently. For example, the sliders have different names, their starting points are different, and the Clarity slider in particular uses a completely different algorithm in PV than it did in PV If you like the way a photo looks with its older processing, you can leave it alone.
You can change the process version in a couple of ways. You can open the photo in the Develop module and then click the lightning icon at the bottom right of the Histogram panel. In the resulting dialog, click Update. Alterna- tively, you can change the process version using the Process menu at the top of the Camera Calibration panel. Either way, Lightroom replaces the older Basic panel controls with the PV sliders, which you can then use to readjust the photo.
Notice how the two selected thumbnails in the Filmstrip change shown here at bottom. E Tip: You can sync If the result needs fine-tuning on any of the affected photos, including the crop, local adjustments too.
Select the photo you adjusted, and then click Copy at lower left. Immediately after adjusting an image, click to select a photo in the Filmstrip, and then click the Previous button at lower right. If you select multiple photos in the Filmstrip and then click the gray switch on the Sync button, it changes to Auto Sync.
Click it, and Lightroom applies all the changes you make to the most selected photo, from this point forward—until you remember to turn off Auto Sync—to all the other selected photos. You can sync changes in the Library module too. To do that, select the photos in the Filmstrip and then click the Sync Settings button at the lower right of the workspace.
Adjustments are recorded as instructions in the Lightroom catalog. The History panel keeps track of all the adjustments you make to a photo forever, unless you manually delete history states. You can use snapshots or virtual copies. Snapshots let you save different versions of the photo that are accessible in the original file via the Snapshots panel.
Virtual copies, on the other hand, create a separate shortcut alias of the file, which you can adjust any way you want. White balancing is subjective. Edge vignettes made with the Effects panel are always centered. To create an edge vignette you can move, you have to use the Radial Filter, which is covered in Lesson 3. To accentuate a certain area, you can perform local adjustments. However, when applied with a local adjustment tool, the sliders affect only certain areas.
Try setting wherever you want it. Press D P Note: If you prefer to enter the Develop module, and click the Reset button at lower right to see the not to trot through the original version, or click Snapshot 0 in the Snapshots panel. The Graduated ton, click Snapshot 1 Filter panel appears beneath the tool strip. To reset an individual slider to its default value, double-click the slider label or the slider itself.
E Tip: Press O on your 5 To apply the filter, click the top middle of the photo, hold down your mouse keyboard to turn on the button, and Shift-drag slightly past the top of the trees so the adjustment covers gradient mask overlay the sky and mountains. Press the same key to turn it Lightroom adds a mask in a linear gradient pattern over the area you dragged. You also see a pin Mask Overlay at the in the middle of the gradient that you can drag to reposition the filter.
E Tip: Lightroom auto- matically hides the pins when you mouse away from the preview area. You can contract photo. To rotate the filter, point your cursor at the cen- your photo, press T on your keyboard to turn ter line, and when the cursor turns into a curved arrow, drag it clockwise or it on.
This deselects the first pin, which changes to light gray. Clicking the panel switch gives you before and after views of all the graduated filters you added.
Here are a few more things that are helpful to know about using this tool these tips work with the Radial Filter and Adjustment Brush tools too! Next, put the brush in Erase mode by clicking Erase in the Brush section near the bottom of the panel. Mouse over to your image, and then brush across any areas that you want to remove the filter from notice the minus sign — inside your brush cursor. If you determine that the strength of the adjustments you made to a single filter is too strong, select its pin, and click the black triangle at the upper right of the tool panel to reveal an Amount slider.
Drag it leftward to reduce the opacity of all the settings you applied with that filter. Since you made only one adjustment to exposure in this exercise, you can just as easily alter the Exposure slider; however, if you made several adjustments with a single filter, the Amount slider comes in handy.
To do that, click the menu to the right of the word Effect at the top of the tool panel and choose Save Current Settings As New Preset. In the resulting dialog, enter a meaningful name, and click Create. From this point on, your preset will be available in the Effect menu.
The next section teaches you how to use the Radial Filter tool, which works in a similar manner. The Radial delete the filter that Filter panel appears beneath the tool strip.
That said, edge of a radial filter. Photo credit: Jack Davis, wowcreativearts. Press Tab on your keyboard, and enter 32 for Contrast; press Tab again, and enter for Highlights; press Tab again, and enter for Shadows. Tab down to Clarity and enter 88, and Tab down to Saturation and enter When your cursor changes to a double-sided arrow, drag toward or away from the center of the filter to resize it.
When your cursor changes to a curved arrow, drag to rotate the filter. Erase near the lower Adjust the sliders for the next filter, and then drag over your photo to apply it. At the bottom of the panel, set Feather to 75, and turn off not to correct the tone and color of this photo, Invert Mask. That way, the adjustment happens outside the filter, not inside. In the color picker that opens, click to pick a color, and use the S slider at lower right to adjust color saturation.
The color you picked now appears in the rectangle. To close the color picker, click the rectangle again. Using the Adjustment Brush tool The Adjustment Brush tool lets you manually paint an adjustment onto specific areas of your photo. Adjustment pin tips and tricks The following tips work on any adjustment that creates a pin, so you can use them on adjustments made with the Graduated Filter, Radial Filter, and Adjustment Brush tools. To move a pin, drag it to the desired location in the photo.
The Adjust- ment Brush panel appears beneath the tool strip. The Effect section of the panel includes the same adjustments as the filters you learned about earlier. To lighten teeth, set Exposure to roughly 0. Decreasing saturation removes any color cast the teeth may have.
You can also change brush section of the Adjust- size using keyboard shortcuts: Press the Left Bracket key [ to decrease size ment Brush panel let or the Right Bracket key ] to increase it. Set it to 10 for this exercise.
Set it to 46 for tings correct for your this technique. If you settings as necessary. To decrease flow, the brush acts like an airbrush, building up the opacity of the switch between the two adjustments over multiple strokes. If you then slider or by double- clicking the slider itself. Turn it on when you want to adjust a defined area say, an made. To do that, use object against a solid background. Leave it turned off for this technique. Reduce brush size to about 3, this exercise. A pin appears to mark the area you adjusted.
This is a great way to give your subject a little more sleep than they actually got the night before the shoot. Use the Spacebar-drag technique to reposi- tion the photo so you can see the eyes. Try setting the Exposure to 0. To do that, press O on your keyboard or turn on Show Selected Mask Overlay in the toolbar beneath the photo.
In this figure you can see the before version top , a ver- sion with the mask overlay turned on middle , and the after version bottom. Snapshot 1 in the Snap- shots panel to return 4 To enhance irises, you can lighten shadows, increase edge contrast, and boost to the edited version color. To do that, set Shadows to , Clarity to 50, and Saturation to If one button. Here you can see the before version of the eye enhance- ments top , a version with the mask overlay turned on middle , and the after version bottom.
Softening skin and blurring stray hairs You can also use the Adjustment Brush tool to quickly soften skin and blur stray hairs. E Tip: For extra prac- 3 In the Navigator panel, click the Fill button so you can see more of the photo. Brush and soften her skin too. Here you can see the before version of the skin softening left , a version with the mask overlay turned on middle , and the after version right.
Brush a little ways into the edges of the hair as well. This figure shows the before version of the hair strand blurring left , a version with the mask overlay turned on middle , and the after version right.
You already learned how to darken areas using the Graduated Filter the Adjustment Brush tool is also a quick way and Radial Filter tools, but you can do it with the Adjustment Brush tool too.
Here you can see the before version of the background darkening and blur- ring left , a version with the mask overlay turned on middle , and the after version right. The next section teaches you how to remove distractions using the Spot Removal tool. The Spot Removal tool works in both Heal and Clone modes, which lets you deter- mine if you want automatic blending of surrounding pixels or a straight copy-and- paste respectively , so you can use the tool to clone an object in order to duplicate it.
You also learned that you can use Dehaze to fix a foggy or hazy photo. But what you may not realize is that you can use a negative setting on each slider to produce a watercolor and a foggy-dreamy look, respectively.
To get your creative juices flowing, consider these examples, which you can try on the photo of the cherry blossom you can use the Snapshots panel to see different versions of the photo that were prepared for you. In the Basic panel, Clarity was set to —71 to make it resemble a watercolor painting. And in the Effects panel, Dehaze was set to — The Spot state, click Snapshot 1 in Removal panel appears beneath the tool strip.
Set the Feather slider to around 10, and set Opacity Reset button. Any sensor spots in a toolbar beneath your image in the preview the photo appear as white circles or grayish dots. Drag the Visualize Spots slider area, press T on your rightward to increase sensitivity so you can see more spots. The Visualize Spots feature is mission critical for revealing spots caused by dust on a lens, sensor, or scanner.
Although these tiny imperfections may not be noticeable onscreen, they often show up when you print the photo. Press and hold the Spacebar on your keyboard, and drag to reposition the photo so you can see one of the spots. E Tip: When a local adjustment tool is active, you can also zoom in by pressing and holding the Spacebar on your keyboard as you click the photo.
E Tip: You can resize your cursor by pressing the Left Bracket key [ on your keyboard to decrease size or the Right Bracket key ] to increase it. You see two circles: One marks the area you clicked the destination , the toolbar beneath and another marks the area Lightroom used to remove the spot the source , the photo is set to Auto, the circles disappear with an arrow that points to where the spot used to be shown here at left.
Photoshop can use its Content-Aware technologies to fill in those blank areas, both in the Crop tool or through Fill commands. Text, shapes, and patterns are all vital to graphic designers, and can only be found inside Photoshop.
You can start with a photograph, export the image into Photoshop, add any design flair you need, and save the finished copy right back into Lightroom for later use. From simple blurs to using advanced relighting, oil painting, and more, all of this can be done relatively quickly in Photoshop. The next few sections explain how to access the exercise files included with this book, as well as how to create a Lightroom catalog.
Some photographers use a single catalog for all their Lightroom photographs, and some use several. I recommend you keep all your images in one catalog. Imagine I asked you to find a picture from your summer vacation to Mexico. If the image is in your home, you have to remember which notebook contains the location of your vacation images before you can find the location of the picture itself.
If you forgot that you had a notebook that included vacation images, that image could very well be lost forever. This is the same in a Lightroom catalog. Or you can search just one catalog a lot more quickly. This begs the question, how big can a catalog get? While there is no practical limit to the size of the catalog, I can safely attest that I have operated with a catalog of more than , images without a problem.
Remember, the catalog does not actually contain your images. While the Lightroom catalog keeps a record of the location of your images, it also keeps previews of the thumbnails for the images in your library. A final note: while your images can live on multiple hard drives, I recommend that you keep your Lightroom catalog on your computer.
Launch Lightroom. Note The Back Up Catalog message refers to backing up your Lightroom catalog only, not your images or presets. It is making a copy of your notebook. Click Create. It walks you through the process of importing files from a hard drive into Lightroom, using the Lesson 1 files as an example. However, with an active Internet connection, you can access the most up-to-date information.
Help in the applications The complete user documentation for Lightroom and Photoshop is available from the Help menu in each program. This content displays in your default web browser.
This documentation provides quick access to summarized information on common tasks and concepts, and can be especially useful if you are new to Lightroom or if you are not connected to the Internet. You can dismiss the tips if you wish by clicking the Close button x in the upper- right corner of the floating tips window. Select Turn Off Tips at the lower left to disable the tips for all of the Lightroom modules.
In the Lightroom Help menu, you can also access a list of keyboard shortcuts applicable to the current module. Help on the web You can access the most comprehensive and up-to-date documentation on Lightroom and Photoshop via your default web browser. Point your browser to helpx. Only the commands and options used in the lessons are explained in this book. Adobe Forums: You can tap into peer-to-peer discussions, questions, and answers on Adobe products at forums.
Adobe Creative Cloud Tutorials: Visit helpx. Resources for educators: A treasure trove of information for instructors who teach classes on Adobe software is offered at www. Find solutions for education at all levels, including free curricula that use an integrated approach to teaching Adobe software and that can be used to prepare for the Adobe Certified Associate exams.
A directory of AATCs is available at partners. Import photos into a Lightroom catalog from your memory card or a folder on your hard drive. Customize what you see in the Library module. Add a copyright to your photos. Use the Library module to view, compare, and rename photos.
This lesson will take about 2 hours to complete. Please log in to your account on peachpit. Preparing for this lesson Before diving into the content of this lesson, make sure you do the following: 1. If the Lesson 1 files are not already on your computer, download the Lesson 01 folder from your Account page at peachpit. The next section focuses on how to store your photos. Storing your photographs you need a plan Lightroom is a database that stores information about your images.
Note To create a complete Lightroom backup, you must back up your photos, your Lightroom catalog, and the Lightroom Presets folder. I think of this as the beauty and plague of what we do. We make pictures, and they take up space. As we get better, we are inspired to make more pictures, and they take up space even faster. In no time at all, we find ourselves with a stack of hard drives and no idea where any images live.
Many skip this part of the process to get to developing images. The majority of them have 10 hard drives, a ton of images scattered everywhere, and no idea how to make sense of it all. How is that possible?
My images are stored on a combination of the computer hard drive, an external drive, and a network-attached storage drive, or NAS. An NAS is basically a really big, expandable hard drive. Instead of plugging this hard drive into your computer via a USB cable, you plug it into your network. No computer is required! There is a benefit to keeping as much free space as possible on your computer from a performance point of view. After a couple of imports, you will find it incredibly easy.
And I guarantee you will thank me for it. Just stick with it. Although you can perform rudimentary video edits in Lightroom, you can do far more to video in Photoshop.
Folders store; they do not organize To keep a handle on your growing library, you need to store your pictures in folders. Coming up with a solid strategy for naming and organizing your folders can pay big dividends later on in your photography adventures.
Once you tell Lightroom about your folder structure, resist the urge to make any changes to your folders—especially outside of Lightroom. Chaos would ensue. There are times when you will need to use the Folders panel to change the location of a folder or photo, but try to limit this to moving images to a larger drive or an NAS drive only.
If you already have an effective folder structure for your photos, you can continue to use it. Here are some tips to make building a folder structure easy: Work in Windows Explorer or macOS Finder to build and populate your folder structure.
This is far simpler than doing it in Lightroom using the Folders panel, especially if it involves moving thousands of files. In other words, your system needs to be scalable. I set up a folder for each year that I have made pictures.
Inside each year folder, I make subfolders for all the events or places I shot that year. Every event folder name starts with the year, then the month and date the images were shot. My folder names are always lowercase and include a descriptive word or short phrase about the shoot. Note Some Lightroom users prefer to maintain multiple catalogs to separate personal and professional images. Creating and populating your folder structure is critical if you want to have a well-organized photo collection in Lightroom.
The next two sections cover how to tell Lightroom about your new folder structure. Importing photos into a Lightroom catalog Before you can work with photos in Lightroom, you have to tell Lightroom they exist. This is done through the import process. This is where you record the location of your images into your digital notebook. Move: Similar to Add, this option prompts Lightroom to add a record and preview of the image to the catalog; however, it also moves photos from one place on your drive to another.
Importing photos from a memory card If you would like to follow along with me through this process, I recommend that you place a memory card in your camera and go take 20 pictures.
Once you connect the memory card to your computer, the Lightroom Import window appears. The import window is separated into three discrete sections: where your images are being imported from, how you would like them handled, and where you would like them stored. The left side of the Import window shows you the location of your memory card, as well as other folders on your computer that you can import images from.
If you inserted a memory card, it should be selected by default here. Leave Eject After Import selected, as it makes sure that you can safely remove the card once the import is complete. The center preview area shows you all the images on the memory card. At the top of the window, choose Copy or Copy As DNG, the two most popular options when importing images from a camera or card reader. All the image thumbnails in the grid in the center preview area are automatically selected, letting you know that they are ready for import.
At the bottom of the preview area, you have the options Uncheck All and Check All. Uncheck All allows you to select only a series of images to import. If you select Uncheck All, click the first image in the series and then Shift-click the last image in the series to highlight all the images between the two a contiguous selection. Although the images are highlighted, they are not selected for import.
To select them for import, select the check box at the upper left of one of the highlighted thumbnails, which selects the check boxes for all the highlighted thumbnails. For a larger view of an image, double-click its thumbnail to bring it up in Loupe view or press the E key.
To return to the grid of images, click the Grid view icon at the bottom left of the preview area or press the G key. Lightroom wants to import pictures into your Pictures folder by default. Instead, click the location in the upper right of the window and choose Other Destination from the menu.
In the dialog box that appears, choose the year folder in your new setup and create a new event or place folder by clicking New Folder in the dialog box. There are a number of options in the File Handling panel, below the location. Choose Minimal from the Build Previews menu for now. This is especially handy if you shot another series with your memory card, and forgot to format it after importing those images. While backing up your images to a secondary location sounds like a good option, leave Make A Second Copy To unselected for now.
For now, leave Add To Collection unselected, as well. Samsung uses it as the factory setting for its cameras, too. Renaming files and folders during import In the previous lesson, we talked about the importance of naming your folders to better organize your photos and I gave you an example of how to name them. Here are some tips for renaming your files: As with your folders, start the name of every file with the year, then add a month and date.
Use lowercase when naming your files, and add a descriptive word about the shoot after the date. At the end of the filename, add C1, C2, C3, and so on, for card 1, card 2, card 3.
This helps when you have a shoot that spans multiple cards. Does it give you all the information about the shoot? It is a corrupt picture, a quick sign that the card you are using may not be as reliable as you think. Memory cards, like everything else, can fail over time and you cannot afford to lose an important shoot because of it. If you are importing from multiple cards, how do you tell which one is the bad one? As soon as I purchase a memory card, I make it a point to label it using those C numbers.
Then, I add that C number to the filename. The moment I see a potential problem with an image, I can look at the name and know exactly which card failed, so I can take that card out of rotation…and give it to a friend.
A simple addition of C1 or C2 to your filenames can go a long way to helping you troubleshoot. To eliminate excessive folder creation, choose Into One Folder from the Organize menu. Importing photos from a hard drive While the previous process works great for importing new photos you shoot or for individuals starting from scratch, most photographers already have folders of images on their hard drives that they now want to add to their Lightroom catalog.
Open your new Lightroom catalog, and click the Import button at the lower left. Since this catalog is empty, it automatically opens the Library module in Grid view where Lightroom displays your images as a grid of thumbnails. Adding copyright during import One step you can take to help protect your photos is to embed copyright and contact information into the metadata of each file.
The next time you import your own photos, choose New from the Metadata menu in the Import window. In the Copyright Status menu, choose Copyrighted. Scroll to the IPTC Creator area, enter any identifying information you wish to include, give your preset a name at the top, and then click Create to save it as a preset. To apply this copyright preset to photos as you import them, simply choose it from the Metadata menu.
In the Import window that appears, use the Source panel in the upper left to navigate to where the photos live. Click the name of any folder to expand it so you can see its contents. Thumbnail previews of the photos in the Lesson 01 folder appear in the middle of the Import window. In the workflow bar at the top of the Import window, make sure Add is selected it should be, by default. As you learned in the previous section, this tells Lightroom to add information about these photos to the catalog, but to leave the photos in the folders and on the drives where they currently reside.
The check box at the upper left of each thumbnail selects that photo to be added to your catalog. For this lesson, leave all the check boxes selected so that Lightroom adds all the files. In the File Handling panel at the upper right, choose Minimal from the Build Previews menu if the panel is collapsed, click its header to expand it.
This menu determines the size of the previews displayed in the middle of the Library module. For the purposes of this lesson, leave the other options in the File Handling panel unselected. You can add keywords and apply Develop module presets that are specific to individual photos later in the Library module. These relatively small previews are used to quickly display initial thumbnails in the Library module. The Minimal option uses the small, non-color-managed JPEG preview embedded in a file by your camera during capture.
Standard: This option can speed your browsing in the Library module, without slowing down the import process as much as the option discussed next.
It builds standard-sized previews during import that are useful for viewing photos in Loupe view in the Library module. There you can choose a size up to pixels on the long edge. Ideally, choose a standard preview size that is equal to or slightly larger than the screen resolution of your monitor. However, previews take the longest time to import and are the largest in file size in the Previews.
Lightroom will rebuild the previews when you ask for them by zooming in. Click the Import button at the lower right of the Import window. Lightroom adds the photos to your catalog with the settings you specified and closes the Import window. Once finished, Lightroom activates the Previous Import collection in the Catalog panel near the top of the left-side panels, and you see image thumbnails in the center preview area, as well as in the Filmstrip panel at the bottom.
Its various panels and tools will help you make short work of managing, assessing, and organizing your photos. Meeting the panels Each Lightroom module includes a column of panels on the left and right, and a customizable preview area in the middle with a row of tools underneath.
In the Library module, you get source panels on the left and information panels on the right. The panel at the bottom is the Filmstrip, and it displays your image previews horizontally. Tip You can collapse or expand any panel by clicking its name.
To expand or collapse the Filmstrip, click the triangle that appears beneath it at the bottom of the workspace. By default, the Library module opens in Grid view, which is indicated by the icon circled in the toolbar below the preview area.
Source panels The primary function of the panels on the left side of the Library module is to determine what is shown in the preview area.
The Fit option fits the currently selected photo within the preview area so you can see the whole thing. The Fill option shows as much of the photo as can fit the largest dimension of the preview area. The ratio menu on the right has other frequently used zoom levels. With the Navigator set to Fit, you see a white border around the image in the Navigator panel. To see another area of the photo, click within the rectangle the cursor turns into a crosshair , and drag it to the area you want to see zoomed.
Tip Lightroom remembers your most recently used zoom levels and lets you cycle between them using the Spacebar on your keyboard. For example, to quickly switch between Fit and , click once on Fit, and then click once on Now tap the Spacebar to switch between those two choices. Note When you designate a collection as the target collection, you can add images to it by pressing B on your keyboard, which is quicker than manually dragging thumbnails into it.
Catalog: This panel gives you quick access to certain images in your catalog. All Photographs shows you previews of every image in your catalog.
Previous Import shows your most recent additions to your catalog. Folders: This panel displays your hard drives and folder system. Click any folder to see all the photos it contains; click the triangle next to the folder name to see any subfolders.
To reveal a parent folder, as shown on the previous page, right-click a folder and choose Show Parent Folder from the menu. Tip The number to the right of a folder or other source in the left column of the Library module is the total number of items it contains. Collections: Think of Lightroom collections as albums. Using collections is a great way to organize and access your keepers. You can use it to export photos to a hard drive or to upload them online to sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and so on.
These panels include: Histogram: A histogram is a collection of bar graphs representing the dark and light tones contained in each color channel of each pixel in your photo.
Dark values are shown on the left side of the histogram, and bright tones are shown on the right side. The width of the histogram represents the full tonal range of the photo, from the darkest shadows black to the lightest highlights white. The taller the bar graph, the more pixels you have at that particular brightness level in that color channel.
The shorter the graph, the fewer pixels you have at that particular brightness level in that color channel. Tip Another way to think of a histogram is to imagine that your photo is a mosaic and its individual tiles have been separated into same-color stacks.
The taller the stack, the more tiles you have of that particular color. For example, if you select three photo thumbnails and then click the Exposure button with the left-pointing triangle, the exposure of each photo decreases by a third of a stop relative to the current exposure value of that photo.
This means each photo could end up with a different exposure value. In contrast, if you adjust the exposure of one photo in the Develop module and then sync that change with two other photos, all three photos would end up with the exact same exposure value. Keywording, Keyword List: These two panels are related to keywords, which are descriptive tags you can apply to images in order to find them more easily later on.
Metadata: This panel shows you a host of information about the selected photos, including filename, caption, copyright, dimensions, camera settings, and so on. You can use this panel to fill in any missing information or to change certain information. Customizing your view As you can see, panels take up quite a bit of room, but you can give your image previews more screen real estate in several ways.
For example, you can: Hide a column of panels by clicking the triangle inside the thin black border outside that column. Click the triangle again to reveal the panels. Technically, you can click anywhere within that border to hide or show panels, although the triangle is an easy target. Once you click to hide a column of panels, they show again whenever you move your cursor near them, and then they hide when you mouse away from them. If this constant panel showing and hiding drives you insane and it probably will , right-click within the outer border and choose Manual from the menu that appears, as shown on the next page.
That way, the panels stay hidden until you click within the outside border again. Hide all the panels on the left and right sides of the workspace by pressing Tab. To show them, press Tab again. Dim or hide everything around the image previews with Lights Out mode. Press L a second time for Lights Out mode and everything except your previews turns black, as shown here in Loupe view. Press L again to return to normal view. Tip To return quickly to the Library module Grid view, press G on your keyboard.
This is the most often used keyboard shortcut in all of Lightroom! Enlarge a preview to fill your screen by pressing F on your keyboard to enter Full Screen mode. To exit it, press F again. Another handy way to manage panels is to use Solo mode. In this mode, only one panel is expanded at a time; the rest remain collapsed. When you click another panel, the one that was open collapses and the new one expands.
This keeps you from having to scroll through a slew of open panels to find the one you want to use. Tip To change the size of the thumbnail previews, use the Thumbnails slider beneath the previews. You can customize how your image previews are displayed, too. Straight from the factory, the Library module uses Grid view, which displays resizable thumbnails in a grid.
In the Library module toolbar, the grid icon is active and shown in light gray. The Library module toolbar also houses the following options:. Loupe view: This option enlarges the selected thumbnail so that it fits within the preview area, however large the preview area currently is. You can trigger it by clicking the Loupe icon it looks like a darker gray rectangle inside a lighter gray one , by pressing E on your keyboard, or by double-clicking the image.
Compare view: For a side-by-side comparison of one image with another—say, to determine which one is the sharpest—use this option. Press the Spacebar to enter Loupe mode, click within the image on the left called the select photo , and then drag to pan around and examine details your cursor turns into a hand. As you reposition one photo, the other one called the candidate matches its position.
The select photo is marked in the Filmstrip by a white diamond in the upper- right corner of its thumbnail. The candidate is marked by a black diamond. To exit Compare view, click its icon again or press G to return to Grid view.
Tip If the candidate looks better than the select, promote the candidate to select by clicking it, and then pressing the Up Arrow key on your keyboard, which moves it to the left position. Lightroom grabs the next image in the Filmstrip panel and displays it on the right as the candidate so that you can repeat the process.
This is a great way to find the best photo of a bunch, especially if you shoot in burst mode. The art of selecting thumbnail previews When you want to select a thumbnail in order to work with it, make a habit of clicking the gray frame surrounding the photo rather than clicking directly atop the photo itself.
In Grid view in the Library module, click anywhere on the first thumbnail preview to select it. Click directly on the image in the second selected thumbnail. In this case, clicking directly on the image in the second preview switched the most selected status from the first to the second thumbnail shown here in the middle. Repeat step 1 to select three thumbnails in Grid view again. Now click the gray frame, rather than the image, in the second selected thumbnail.
The result is different than it was in step 2. Clicking the frame, rather than the image, in the second preview left only the second preview selected and deselected the other two previews shown here in the bottom strip.
The takeaway here is that routinely clicking the frame, rather than the image, in a thumbnail will allow you to avoid being surprised by the less common behavior you saw in step 2. Survey view: This option lets you compare multiple images side by side. To use it, select three or more thumbnails, and then either click the Survey icon it has three tiny rectangles inside it with three dots or press N on your keyboard.
You can also drag to rearrange photos in the preview area while surveying them. When you find the photo you like best, move your cursor over it, and mark it as a pick by clicking the tiny flag icon that appears below its lower-left corner.
To exit Survey view, click its icon again or press G to return to Grid view. The Library module toolbar also has a Sort menu you can use to change the order of your thumbnails. When Lightroom finishes importing your photos, take a peek at the Catalog panel on the left, and make sure Previous Import is selected.
In the resulting dialog box, pick a naming scheme. Custom Name — Sequence is a good one because it gives you the opportunity to enter something descriptive into the Custom Text box, like an event or place name, and it automatically adds a sequential number after the name.
Enter a starting number into the Start Number box, or let it roll with 1. At the bottom of the dialog box, Lightroom shows you what your naming scheme looks like. Click OK, and Lightroom renames the selected photos in one fell swoop. Now that you have a good command of importing your files into Lightroom, we need to focus on how to get the very best images from your shoot into one location.
To do that, we need to gain an understanding of how to mark images in Lightroom and how to add select groups of images to collections. So, the next lesson teaches you a simple strategy for assessing and culling your photos.
Review questions 1. How do you select only a single series of photos from your memory card to copy to your hard drive and add to your Lightroom catalog? What are those shortcuts? How do you collapse all the panels and bars in the Library module for maximum viewing space? How do you enter Lights Dim mode, and then Lights Out mode?
How do you compare two photos side by side? What is the easiest way to rename a bunch of photos? Review Answers 1. In the Import window, click Uncheck All.
Click the first photo you want to import, then Shift-click the last photo to highlight everything in between, and select the check box at the upper left of any one of the highlighted images to select them all. Press G on the keyboard to switch to Grid view thumbnail-sized previews.
Press E on the keyboard to switch to Loupe view the larger view of a photograph. Then, drag around your image. Lesson overview This lesson covers how to sort through your images to separate the ones that are keepers that you will print, share, or put in your portfolio and ones you can discard or review later. Use a star system to rank your images. Filter images based on flags, colors, or other metadata. Set up smart collections for specialized tasks.
Set up a target collection for quick organization. Share and get feedback about your published online collections. Download the Lesson 02 folder from your Account page at peachpit. Iterative culling: My workflow The single most tedious task after a photo shoot is sorting bad pictures from good so that you can come up with a plan for editing.
This process is known as culling and is one of the most important steps you can do in Lightroom. To fix that, I want to share the technique I use when working with my photos. When you get to a question that you do not know the answer to, the strategy is to skip it. If a shoot contains pictures, there is a good chance that a large number of those pictures are either really good or really bad. These are things that we immediately know are problems, and we would never spend any time working on these images.
This shows a grid of images that we can start culling. As we learned in the previous lesson, we can get rid of the panels on all four sides by pressing Shift-Tab. We can also black out the interface by pressing the L key twice to go into Lights Out mode. This will get rid of all of the distractions in the Lightroom interface that take us away from doing the job at hand—culling. You have a couple of options with this first image.
If this is a picture that you think is worth keeping, press P on the keyboard to mark it as a pick. If you have to think for more than half a second about whether this picture is effective, press the Right Arrow key on the keyboard to skip the picture and go on to the next one.
Remember your qualifications for bad and good. Do not spend more than a second thinking through these pictures. The goal is to get rid of the pictures that you know will not work. Should you mistakenly flag one of the pictures, press the Left Arrow key to go back to the picture in question, and then press the U key.
Pressing U unflags the picture. Lightroom has a way to filter all of these pictures: the Library Filter bar at the top of the center preview area. The Library Filter bar has the following options to help you find specific images: Text mode allows you to filter your Lightroom catalog for specfic words. These words can be in the filename, title, caption, or any of the metadata embedded in the image.
Attribute mode lets you filter out images based on flag status, star rating, color label, or virtual copy status, as shown below. Metadata mode lets you sort your images using a host of different metadata items Lightroom has compiled from your images. This is an extremely powerful way of filtering, but outside the scope of this book. Click the Attribute tab, then select one of the Flag options pick, unflagged, or rejected to see only those specific images appear in the preview area.
If you click both in the Attribute filter, Lightroom shows you both sets of images in Grid view. At the top left of the Filmstrip panel, you see the number of images in that folder or collection that contain a specific flag.
At this point, the images that are the most important part of the process are the unflagged ones. Click the Unflagged Photos Only icon, hide the panels press Shift-Tab , go into Lights Out mode press L twice , and repeat the culling process until nothing appears in the preview area.
You will notice that this second iteration of culling goes much faster than the first one. The best thing about this part of the process is that you now have seen the shoot in its entirety, and can make better judgements as to which pictures stay and which pictures go.
Click the Unflagged Photos Only icon again to bring back all your photos, and your cull is complete! What is a collection? As different needs arose, they had to create other folders and store more copies of the same pictures in them.
Each folder had a specific need and contained copies of pictures that also lived in other folders. Keeping track of the copies, and the space they occupy, makes this solution untenable.
This is where collections save the day. You purchase one song and own one physical copy of a song, but that song can live in an unlimited number of playlists.
The same holds true for pictures and collections in Lightroom. On the left side of the Library module, you have a Collections panel.
From there, you can add images from throughout your catalog to the collection, no matter what folder they live in, and you can add as many collections as you need for organization. Every collection that you create in Lightroom can hold images from any folder you have imported into your catalog. The Lightroom catalog your digital notebook notes that you have one physical file but would like to have a reference to that file in multiple collections.
The collections serve as a way to look at disparate parts of your photographic life without having to change your folders or make copies of your photos to live in different folders.
This is an extremely powerful feature and one that your photographic life will revolve around. Go to the Folders panel in the Library module and click the little triangle to the left of the Lesson 02 folder. Repeat this with the other folders that have the word Sabine in the name, making collections for each of them. While it might seem repetitive to have collections that are named exactly like your folders, there are a couple of really powerful things happening under the hood here.
First, unlike in a folder, you can drag the images around within the preview area and sort them into whatever order you like. Second, you have the option to add images from any of those Sabine collections to the Best Christmas Moments or Cute Sabine Pictures collections. The catalog your digital notebook will still reference that one physical file. Under Exposure, click the double left arrow three times.
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