I am not a professional but I have alot of photos I need to keep organized. I used iPhoto, but between it and Photoshop, there were some steps that just slowed down the process. Basically Lightroom is a combination of an organizational application with basic photo editing capabilities. It integrates well with Photoshop for more advanced editing. For my family snapshots though I rarely have to edit outside of Lightroom.
Navigating:
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Basic key commands:
G - Grid view, thumbnails of your photos
E - Loupe, highlighted photo fullscreen
D - Single photo in Develop mode
C - Compare, see two photos side by side, nice when you are looking for the perfect shot.
Command+Option+5 - Web module, I use this frequently to upload behind my site, via Lightroom's ftp upload option.
Command [ or ] - rotates image CW and CCW
Organization:
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I am an organization obsessive, especially about my family photos. I have all of my photos on an external drive and LR is pointed to them. There are basically two types of "folders" in LR Folders and Collections.
-Folders
are just that, they refer to the physical folders/subfolders on your hard-drive and reflect the same structure in LR. If you have a folder named 2008>January>01 on your hard-drive, it will be so within LR. When you import into LR you can choose to 1. add photos without moving. 2. copy them to a new location. or 3. move them to a new location.
-Collections
are "virtual folders" within LR and these actually do not move the photo physically on your hard-drive. This is nice because you may have some photos you want to print, you just drag the thumbnails into a collection folder and you don't have to worry about it floating around somewhere on your computer. (when you actually delete a photo in LR it gives you the option of removing from Lightroom only or remove it from completely from your hard-drive) A new feature of LR 2 is the addition of smart collections. There are many options of smart collections, I use them to collect top rated photos. Here is how. You add a new smart collection which takes you into a little sub menu, where you can set how this folder collects photos. I have one called "top rated" which any photo from my folders rated 4 or 5 stars goes into this collection. So where you can drag and drop your favorite photos into collections you can also set these parameters and LR will do the organization for you. Love this feature. You can set smart folders my rating (0-5 stars) color label, dates... and a couple more options I haven't explored yet. As you can imagine there are countless different ways of making these...
-Importing
I basically plug my memory card into my computer and LR asks if I want to import. I have it set to create a physical folder on my hard-drive and import there. So my photos are organized on import. At this time there are options of renaming the whole set of photos with a custom name for example "las vegas 2008 vacation_etc......jpg"
Editing:
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This is basically the photoshop part of Lightroom, you have basic editing tools in the Loupe (E) but you need to go to Develop Mode/Module (D) for more advanced editing. You basically have control of color in LR, for example, white balance, hue, temperature, tint, brightness, saturation, curve...etc There is also allowances for Lens correction, noise reduction, sharpening, etc. You can do cropping in develop mode as well, which is very simple.
A couple of new tools in LR 2.0, I have only started to play around with are Spot Removal and Adjustment Brush. Spot removal tool comes up like the stamp tool in photoshop, where if you have a spot of dust or a pixel you want to get rid of. This is a two step tool, where you first choose the spot you want to remove, (say a dark spot on someone's cheek) next you choose the area of the photo you want to replace the spot with (a clean area of the person's cheek) and voila the spot is gone. The adjustment brush is nice to have because you can overexpose, underexpose, adjust the contrast, brightness, saturation with a brush tool. This is something I didn't expect out of LR so I will definitely be exploring this tool.
You can also edit in Photoshop pretty seamlessly out of LR. You can edit the original (100.jpg will be the one you will be editing in PS) and see the effects back in LR. Edit a copy in PS (100-edit.jpg will be created in your hard-drive and see it next to the original in LR. Also Edit in PS with LR adjustments, any edits in LR will be exported out into PS.
One thing to keep in mind is that any edit done in LR are NOT HARD EDITS. Meaning, you do not affect the original image until you export that image out of LR. The edits are stored in LR until you do an export out into PS or into a folder on your desktop. Until then all photos can be restored back to their original state.
-Presets:
This is a fun part of LR. Lightroom comes already with some basic presets, which instead of remembering all the steps you took to edit one photo, you can save these steps into "presets". So in Develop mode you adjust the, hue, curve, temperature, detail, saturation..etc. of a photo, and you can save it as a preset, call it "preset outdoor" or something and then you can apply this preset to one or dozens of photos at once. Voila. There are lots of free presets already out there. (do a google search. the flickr lightroom group is a good source for learning) You can also cut and paste the edits of a particular photo and paste in onto a group of photos as well.
Web Module:
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This is also fun too. Basically you enter in your web ftp info into LR and tell it to point to a subfolder on your site. (www.website.com/gallery1) and this is where you upload the galleries too. LR comes with a few prepackaged galleries and flash galleries, you select your photos, choose the web template, edit the template (background color, type etc. and upload. and it's really that simple you have uploaded a gallery behind your site. Obviously you need to learn the basics, but before I had to upload with a ftp client, create the html etc.
All in all, Lightroom really is a fantastic tool. I am still learning alot about it. And I know there are people who prefer Aperture and I will try it out to compare, but LR just felt right for me. Try out the 30 day free trial, test out as much as you can, It is not a cheap program but if you are as excited about this stuff it really is a great tool. Cheers. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [OLD VERSION] - Digital Photography - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - Photography - Lightroom'
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