LR_HowTo, LR_Reference, Why, LR2, LR3

Improve Your Photography with Lightroom

In the “good old days” aka before digital aka film, if you were a professional, you would take your photos, process the film, make a contact sheet of the film and file the negatives in a PVC free plastic sheet. Finally, we would print a few of the photos.

Now we have to import everything into Lightroom before reviewing the photos. This photos are automatically placed in the Previous Import collection and in the All Photographs collection at the same time. They will stay in the Previous Import until the next import.

My steps

1.

Lightroom Crash: Claimed Victory Too Soon

A couple of days ago, I wrote: Lightroom: Crash and Recovery and claimed victory. Yeah! No :(

A couple hours after publishing it, crash again, and again. It was still not working.

There's no point in trying to recover the Lightroom catalog if the cause of the crash has not been clearly identified, because it will crash again, and again…

http://www.foto-biz.com/Lightroom/Crash-and-recovery

I still have some networking problems.

  • But Lightroom is a single user catalog.

Lightroom: Crash and Recovery

I just had a Lightroom crash. It took me a day of figuring what caused the crash, then came the work of recovering from the crash.

Usually, Lightroom doesn't crash unless there a problem somewhere else. The keyword here is “usually”. For me, it was a change in the operating system. At first, I thought that it was the drive that was corrupted.

Lightroom: Fast or Slow, it's Up to You

Did you know that you decide whether you make Lightroom zoom along or crawl as a slug?

By now, you must know that Lightroom is a non-destructive editing software. What most people forget is what it means and how it affects Lightroom's speed.

Let's review the process.

  1. You start Lightroom
  2. Lightroom loads the catalog, that's the .lrcat file. It's just 1 file
  3. Lightroom loads the ancillary files, overlays, plug-in, settings

Lightroom 3.5 is Finally Out

As you must have seen everywhere on the web, Lightroom 3.5 is out. This is the ready for general consumption release, not the release candidate. They are a few changes since the release candidate (RC).

A few more bug fixes. The PDF list is on Adobe's website: http://www.adobe.com/special/photoshop/Lightroom_35_ReadMe.pdf. Also, they have done some significant optimizations. On a “smaller” computer 64-bit, 2 core CPU and 3Gb RAM computer, the new 3.5 fells “crispier” than the release candidate.

I'm Windows 64 bit, there are been a significant increase in size.

Exposure vs Brightness

Every so often I get an email asking me about the difference between the exposure and the brightness in Lightroom.

  • The exposure slider makes the photo darker or lighter. The exposure affects everything: the shadows, the mid-tones and the highlights.
  • The brightness slider affects mostly the shadows and the mid-tones. The brightness slider makes the photo sparkle and jump out of the screen without burning the highlights.

Some people like to first set the exposure/recovery/fills and blacks then deal with the brightness.

Lightroom – Correcting Existing Misspelled Keywords

It's very easy and simple to correct existing keywords that are misspelled. Right Click on the keyword in the keyword in the right panel → select Edit Keyword Tag or Rename and type in the new spelling. You are done!

What about all the existing photos? It's already done. How?

None of the photos are actually associated with the keywords. Here's the table that configures the keywords. Each photo is associated the various id_global.

Pirated Lightroom

A friend and customer recently spend “muchos dinaros” on a top of the line laptop. iCore 7, a real ATI video card… By the time it was all said and done with Microsoft Office 2010… $2,000+ Whew! Lots of money. Andrei asked me how he could move his Lightroom/Photoshop and his data from his computer to the laptop.

  1. Backups, backups and backups
  2. Install Photoshop
  3. Install Lightroom
  4. Restore the photos
  5. Restore the catalog (without the previews)
  6. Install the many plugins

And that's where the problems really started.

Renaming a Lightroom Catalog

Rename a Lightroom catalog is easy, it's simply renaming 1 (one) file and that's it. The problems is where is the catalog located? Why hasn't Adobe provided a menu function for renaming the catalog?

  • The catalog is named (the catalog name).lrcat

So you have a few choices for finding the catalog:

  1. Do a straight search from the OS (Windows or Mac) and look for: (the catalog name).lrcat
  2. In Lightroom on a Mac: Catalog Settings / Edit → Catalog Settings → General Tab
  3. In Lightroom on Windows: Edit → Catalog Settings → General Tab

Excellent Free Lightroom Tutorial

There's no manual for Lightroom. The help files are “crappy” shall we say. That's why, there are people like Scott Kelby “raking the dough.” But at 450 pages, that's a lot, for many people it's overwhelming and very detailed. I bought it and even today, I still use it on a weekly basis.

Adobe wrote a very nice, free and easy to comprehend gettting started manual, 75 pages, in PDF format, available at:

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