Lightroom HowTos: How to do things in Lightroom. Covers LR2 and LR3
Lightroom is a huge software. It's a digital asset management software and an image editor at the same time. Do not confuse it with Photoshop which is a pixel editor. Since using Lightroom, I have reduced my Photoshop usage so much, that when I upgraded earlier my computer, I haven't even installed Photoshop.
One of the problem with Lightroom is the panels. There's so much. For me, there's too much. It's too “complicated”. I must not be the only one, because Adobe, in it's wisdom has enable the solo mode.
Lightroom can either be as slow as molasses or it can fly. It mostly depends on how you work. So let see some of the ways you can grind Lightroom to a halt.
- Add and delete photos, videos… What do you mean? Adding photos will slow down the Lightroom. Yes! A catalog with 0 photo, that a zero, is blindingly fast. Not useful but… Since the catalog with all its different types of data is stored in a single file. Having “things” spread around slow down Lightroom a lot.
Normally, the first thing I do is go through all the photos and reject the photos that are out of focus, wrong focus, eyes closed, yawning, cut-off... I use the X to mark them, then I filter them through the attribute flag and normally delete them.
But, it's already the second time, that instead of deleting all the rejected photos, I just removed them from catalog. So the rejected photos are not in the catalog, but they are still on the hard drive. How to get rid of them?
Normally when typing in the description or any other text field, I type and the text flows. But... There are times when I want to have either a new line or a even a blank line, like in the screen capture to your left.
Pressing Ctrl-Enter on Windows or Cmd-Enter on OSx will create a new line. Pressing twice Ctrl-Enter or Cmd-Enter/Return will create the new line.
I took this photo of Walter, a French Bulldog at the beach. But I took the photo horizontally. It would look much better if the photo was portrait/vertical. Now in Lightroom, can I can do it manually, changing the sides and maximizing the top and the bottom of the photo, or I can can let Lightroom do all that work for me.
In Lightroom:
- Switch to the develop module
- With digital cameras, we don't pay per photo anymore.
- Remember the secret of becoming a professional photographer? Everyone Can Be A Professional Photographer!: Press the "darn" shutter until the large memory card is full or the battery dies.
On my Canon 7D, I get 600 photos on a 16Gb memory card when I shoot raw and 2200 when I shoot in "high quality" JPEG. That's a lot of photos! So how do you find the needle in the hay stack?
One of the most time intensive task in Lightroom is generating and/or dealing with the previews. So how do you speed up the previews generation? I wrote earlier about speeding up your Lightroom by cleaning up your drive and defragmenting it in Lightroom — Speedup Your Computer and in Why Is My Lightroom So Slow?
This is mostly due to what's called file fragmentation, and that's where Windows and OSx part ways.
Adobe has kept the Lightroom 3 the same as Lightroom 2. If you want, you can operate LR3 in the same way that you were operating LR2. All of LR2 keystrokes have been carried over to LR3.
But, Adobe has done hundreds of small improvements. These small improvements make a huge difference, if you use them, but they are not obvious. One thing I didn't like was the fact that I had to import the photos into my catalog, and then look at the photos to see if they were out of focus...
Danny, the same Danny from Blackmail, like almost everybody that is current with Lightroom, doesn't keep up to date with Photoshop. He still uses his CS3. At least, he occasionally uses his Photoshop CS3. I haven't mine in more than a year.
The current ACR 6.2 does not work with CS3 or CS4. It only works with Photoshop CS5. Like most of us, Danny likes the new processing of the images of the Lightroom 3.x serie. The process 2010 of LR3 is so much better than the 2003 process of LR1 and LR2.
The crop module. You didn't even know that it existed. Normally, you switch to the Develop module and either click on the Crop tool or R.
- It turns out that the
R is also available in the Library module. Lightroom will switch you to the Develop module and start the Crop tool. Now depending on the memory usage and what was done before, it may take a few seconds. Lightroom needs to load or to render the 1:1 preview. All images in the Develop module are always loaded as a 1:1 preview.
