LR2

Lightroom 2

Lightroom: Thumbnail Sizes

One of the big strength of Lightroom is its flexibility. There's always more than one way of doing things in Lightroom. This flexibility is also one of the source of frustration with many users. Lightroom's flexibility allows for the almost infinite customization of your own workflow.

One of my most often used step is to clear the whole desktop, use Lightroom's Grid view (“g”) and pick, reject, grade with 1 star… Everything that looks “real bad” gets marked as rejected (“x”) in the first round.

Lightroom: Keywords 51% Off

In “honor” of Black Friday, between 22-Nov-2012 and 30-Nov-2012 11:59pm PST, the Lightroom keywords are 51% off. Only $12.00 US

US $12.00

Paypal/Keywords -- Buy Now

It works with Lightroom 2, Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4.

For more details on how to use the keywords: http://www.foto-biz.com/Keywords/Lightroom-keywords-update

Lightroom: Catalog Size

You can the size of your current catalog by going to Edit > Catalog Settings on a Windows, or Lightroom > Catalog Settings on a Mac on the General tab.

Lightroom: Catalog Size

Lightroom: Catalog Size

Here is what's included in the SQLite database file aka the Lightroom catalog:

The Recovery Slider in Lightroom

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

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.

Running Out of Ideas for Keywording?

      US $24.95

Paypal/Keywords -- Buy Now

It works with Lightroom 2, Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4.

What's the purpose of keywords?

The purpose is to find the photos among the thousands of photos in your catalog. It can be for you or it can be for customers or it can be for internet searches.

The keywords are associated with a photo to describe:

  • subject matter
  • status
  • style
  • use

The simplest way of creating keywords is just add another keyword when you need it. The problem with just adding them on the fly without any structure is fine for the first few dozen keywords. Then it becomes unwieldy when it becomes thousands.

The “cleanest” way is to create base categories, then expand these various categories.

Lightroom Keywords Categories

First: Always fill in the IPTC information. The problem, with the IPTC information, is that you can't search for it! The IPTC search is so limited that I find it useless. It's only possible to search if you already know the exact word and you cannot select in which IPTC field.

Lightroom: Remember the Why of a Virtual Copy

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"

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: Don't Import Suspected Duplicates

Usually, when importing photos into a Lightroom catalog, the Do No Import Duplicates is checked on. The question is what's a duplicate? Everybody in their right mind would assume that 2 duplicate photos are 2 identical photos. It turns out that for programmers, 2 identical photos are not the same as 2 identical files.

What Lightroom really mean is 2 identical files. What are identical files?

  • The same name like: charlie-20111129-1234
  • The same file extension like: .cr2

This means that charlie-20111129-1234.cr2 and charlie-20111129-1234.jpg are not identical files.

Lightroom: Really Deleting Photos from Collections

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?
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