LR_HowTo

Lightroom HowTos: How to do things in Lightroom. Covers LR2 and LR3

Lightroom: Getting Good Prints from Costco

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 10. February 2012 - 6:10

Everybody is bashing Costco because their prints are cheap. I use Costco, not by choice but by necessity. I have a custom lab, but anything as next day service is very expensive and same day service, we are not talking 1 hour service here, cost an arm and a leg ($39 for one 5” by 7”.) I could print my own but I can never get it right on the first or the second print. There's always a tweak here and a tweak there, I want/need to change the print one more time…

I use Costco for most of my proofs, to show the customer before the final prints, even for myself to see if the concept will work.

The Recovery Slider in Lightroom

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 1. February 2012 - 6:32

Lightroom Develop Module Sliders, recovery/fill/black

Lightroom Develop Module Sliders: Recovery, Fill & Black

Everybody uses the Exposure slider to make their photo lighter or darker. Then the problems starts, what to do with the recovery, fill... The problems are due to Adobe's "poor documentation". I will attempt to clarify.

The recovery slider works best with RAW photos. It will still work with JPEG photos, but not as well.

Lightroom: You Have a Bad Backup

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 25. January 2012 - 6:10

Do you have a backup? The vast majority of the people do not even have a backup. My personal experience is that less than 1 in 10 people do have a backup. The problem is that people that claim to have a backup, actually have a bad backup! People claim that they have RAID 1, 5 or 10 or they use a Drobo box. Those are not backups.

The purpose of a backup is:

What's the cost of re-entering the data?

— Syv Ritch, http://www.foto-biz.com

  • A guy, that I know, does weddings. He just raised his price from $199 to $249 per wedding.

Lightroom: Remember the Why of a Virtual Copy

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 16. December 2011 - 9:16

Lightroom has this wonderful concept of the virtual copy. A virtual copy is just a set of adjustments that is stored in the catalog, it's not an actual file. The beauty of the virtual copies is that it's possible to have hundreds of virtual copies of the same photo but with different adjustments, crops, colors, black and white…

Some people are amazing, years later, they remember every single detail of why they did… and then, there's me. I need to see some notes, then I can remember the tiny details. That's why I need to keep track of why I created the virtual copy.

Renaming a virtual copyLightroom has this wonderful concept of the virtual copy. A virtual copy is just a set of adjustments that is stored in the catalog, it's not an actual file. The beauty of the virtual copies is that it's possible to have hundreds of virtual copies of the same photos but with different adjustments, crops, colors, black and white…I use the `Copy Name` to type in my explanation of what I did and/or why. For me, a large number of the virtual copy are the balck and whites and that's obvious. But I also do virtual copies for printing the different size that forces me to crop such as 8½ by 11 vs 11 by 17 vs … That way I know what's what.lightroom-virtual-copy-name.jpg — ©2011 Syv Ritch -- foto-biz.com: http://www.foto-biz.com/usageterms

Lightroom: Renaming A Virtual Copy to Remember the Why of a Virtual Copy

Lightroom: Where is the Selection Criteria: “Description”

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 13. December 2011 - 6:00

I use Smugmug for my photo back-end for photos.foto-biz.com. The problem that I have is that I wanted to make sure that all the photos have a description.

The proper way would be to use Lightroom with a smart collection. If the description is empty then display the photo in the collection. Should be simple. Yes? No!

Lightroom: Selection Criterias I want to find the photos in Lightroom that do not have any description.The question is where is the description selection criteria?Nowhere to be found.

Lightroom Available Selection Criterias

Lightroom: Default Keyword

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 9. December 2011 - 7:46

lightroom-default-keyword

Right-Click on the keyword > Use this as Keyword Shortcut will either enable or disable the default keyword.

Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — My Summary

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 22. November 2011 - 7:21

After a few major crashes, I decided to start from scratch, almost (I had saved all of my XMPs.) I created a new catalog and imported 93,259 photos. I was able to import all of them in less than 5 days!

Here's my summary for the:

Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — Part 3

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 18. November 2011 - 6:40

In this blog post we will discuss the crux of the matter when it come to importing a large amount of photos like I had to do, 93,259 photos.

The “standard” advice is to:

  1. Render Previews 1:1 so that you don't have to wait when you are scrolling through the Develop module or browsing at 1:1

Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — Part 2

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 16. November 2011 - 6:50

In Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — Part 1 I spoke about the importance of checking vs un-checking the Include Subfolders on the performance. Now we'll look at the basic import operations, the different ways of getting the photos into Lightroom:

Lightroom: Import Options

  1. Copy as DNG
  2. Copy
  3. Move

Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — Part 1

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 14. November 2011 - 6:25

Importing photos in Lightroom is very easy to do, just like any the other camera processors. Click the import button, select the photos, press OK and some time later you are done. This works without any problem when you import only a few hundreds photos. If you want to import a thousand photos at a time, now we start to talk as much as 6 hours depending on your settings. Now try to import 10 thousand photos in a weekend, wish you good luck. A 100 thousand photos and now we are talking at least a month.

1.

Lightroom: Really Deleting Photos from Collections

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 2. November 2011 - 5:23

When marking a photo with a Reject Photo or pressing the Delete key, Lightroom only deletes that photo from that collection. But what about the other collections and what about really deleting that photo?

  1. The hard way? Switch to the collection All Photographs, you will keep your position and Lightroom will highlight the photo that you want to delete and press the Delete key.
  2. The easy way?

Lightroom: Real Black and Whites

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 27. October 2011 - 5:26

Lightroom has the treatment Color and Black & White in the Basic section. By selecting the Black & White, I only get “mush”. I don't get any blacks and the only whites that I get are in the burned out skies.

Here's my way of getting “real” black and whites.

Black and Whites before and after

1.

Improve Your Photography with Lightroom

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 20. October 2011 - 5:53

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 and Recovery

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 9. October 2011 - 23:12

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.

Pirated Lightroom

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 12. September 2011 - 5:06

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.

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