With Adobe Ligthroom you can manage your photo production efficiently. With our tricks, learn to master its features and optimize your time.
We let ourselves go quickly, when we love the photo. However, good organization is essential. You have probably experienced it: sometimes, during a session, we take several dozen shots. Of all these images, you will only keep and work on the most successful. This means sorting and planning your work to get you there. Here are some tips to get there.
1. Organize your images in catalogs
To organize your images and sort them, you will first have to view them to select only those that really interest you. As mentioned above, during a shooting, we take a large number of shots, some are missed, others are used to make the adjustments of his camera or are only tests, ... In short, there may be A lot of waste.
How to scroll your images?
Once you have finished importing your raw files into Lightroom, you will be able to view a thumbnail for each image. On your keyboard, click on "space" to see a photo in full screen, then scroll your files with the left and right arrows on your keyboard. To return to the thumbnail presentation screen, press the "G" key. Also note that in the bottom right corner is a slider that allows you to magnify or shrink the size of these thumbnails.
How to sort and organize your images?
There are many types of organization available to you. When you scroll your photos in full screen, you will notice in the lower left corner several small icons. Among them are stars and two small flags, one with a cross. The flag system allows you to assign the "hold" or "reject" indicator to your images. This is a first level of selection that will allow you to keep only valid pictures.
The idea will be to display only the images with the "hold" indicator. At the top of the screen, just above the thumbnails is a bar named "Library Filter", with an "attribute" tab where you can find the small flags. This is where you will be able to tell the software which images to display or not. You can therefore choose to show only those "retained" or "rejected" or those that have remained neutral, without an indicator.
Just to the right of the flags is another rating system based this time on stars (from 0 to 5 stars). How to use this notation? The best thing is to proceed by successive sorts. In other words you will make a first sort and give a star to all the images that you like rather well, the others remaining to zero.
Once this first pass always ends in the "Library Filter" bar, choose to show only photos with at least one star. During the second pass you will notice two stars the images that you like a little more, and so on. Thus at the end of the fifth passage you will have only the best images, those that will have received the five stars. These are the images that you will take the time to post-process.
Note that there is also a color image collation system based on the same principle.
2. Add or remove a catalog
Click in the "File" column and then click "New Catalog". Then fill in the name and location you want for the new catalog.
If you want to delete a catalog this will happen outside of Lightroom in your computer's browser. You will need to go to the folder where you saved the catalog and then delete the file. The catalog will be erased but you will of course keep all your photos. However, be careful before deleting the folder, take time to verify that other files related to Lightroom are not there.
3. Move a catalog
To move a Lightroom catalog, you will have to move the folder where the catalog is located. If you do not know where this folder is, go to Edit (from the top menu) and click Catalog Settings. A window will appear, indicating the location of the catalog.
Once you have found the right location, close Lightroom and do not open it until the move is finished.
Open the file explorer on your computer and move by cutting and pasting the catalog folder to the new location. Note that you should make a cut / paste and not a copy / paste, in the latter case you would then have two versions of the catalog which could lead to confusion.