Lessons

Lesson Info

Converting From a Previous Lightroom Workflow

Questions about how to convert from an existing organisation system s o one of them is ah ifyou're not just starting to use light room ah, where where can you do this work flow as described, how do you efficiently convert to this style that's a great question because I get that a lot where do I start the process? Okay, if I'm in complete shambles, complete shambles, the first thing to do is start fresh so the first thing to do is start a catalogue completely from scratch and whatever comes in next start that came so pick a date say, as of today, I am doing jared's workflow great start a catalogue from scratch and by the way, you can do that. I'm gonna quit light room right now and I'm going supposed to back it up, but I'm gonna skip it don't ever do that don't ever do that. I'm skipping it because I don't want to waste your time. Um, I am going to hit the option or the altar key and I'm gonna hold it down. I'm holding the option key down and I'm clicking on light room. I keep holding t...

hat option key down until it opens up this dialog box once it opens that dialogue box, I can create a new catalogue, so I'm gonna actually go through this process so follow me on this. Anybody who's out there who's like I don't know what to do. Follow this process. I'm gonna create a new catalogue from scratch brand new catalogue and I am going to go to my catalogue drive okay? For me that catalog drive is the working cattle long drive. And I'm gonna call this a brand new start catalog. It's going to be clean? Nothing in it. Once I have that system and the catalog is set, then I'm gonna turn this off. All right, so what I want to do is I want to set up this catalog. Every service, every thing that I want to use is going to be set up right from the beginning. So the first thing you do don't start importing photos first, the first thing to do is start going through and setting up all of your various items. So, for instance, go to your preferences, your catalog settings make sure that you're not see how it wants to do it once a week. We want to do it every time light room exits. So those types of catalogs are settings we want to set up. Notice that in the preferences here and this is a good catalog setting preferences discussion there is now in light room. See, see, there is the option of doing auto previews so if you choose to do standard previews it will make them based on the size of the monitor that you're currently on so that way it's on ly building it to the size it needs its not building in any bigger not building it any smaller so if you turn that on that will help you in the metadata choose whether or not you wanted toa automatically write thie ex mp data, which means it's literally making sidecar files and it's tough storing stuff in the in the catalogue so that you have two copies of everything you're working on it just makes it slower but not a lot slower so a lot of people would do this it also allows you to then go to photoshopping open something and work from bridge so if you kind of work on both systems if you work in camera raw and photoshopped and in light room than turning this on actually synchronizes photo shop and light room so that they're working back and forth if you wanted to do that I don't like to do it it's I don't but set up your catalogue the way you want it set up once you've got all the things set up that includes published services, all this kind of sound we'll talk about public service is a little bit later once you've got that then it's just a matter of going in importing everything that you have now, if your photos are in shambles like they're not in folders anywhere, they're just let's say they're all in one folder, but they're just kind of random league organized and there's no sense to it then what you would want to do is you want to hit your import and you'd want to go point at that folder so let's just say, you know, my folder wass my entire, uh, my entire user folder I don't know where the photos are, but there's somewhere inside of this jared platt folder and you can see that there's all sorts of random like it's finding every picture that exists and I could go on hit, okay, import that but let's say that it's all and I know they're all in my pictures folder, so if I do that, then I can say, okay, here's, everything that's in my pictures folder and I'm going to import it all at once what's gonna happen is when you do that it's going to import every photograph and it's going to import all the folders that they're in and you'll see the structure, then you can start moving it around and re organizing it. Now, if you kind of know where things are and you've been using light room in the past, then it would be a matter of simply going up too uh the first thing to do is to go to any folder that you have so let's just say inside of this so you had stuff over here and you wanted it all in one place just simply going grab all the jobs that you do don't have in decide what's the place okay this is my driver this is where I'm going to put everything so I'm going to grab these folders that I know don't exist over here and I'm gonna collect them all into one place so grab all the drives that you have and start pulling them in and putting them all in one place once you've collected all those jobs then you can go into light room and if if they were in light room but they were just folders of photos then you would go down to the bottom and import and then go to each folder and import those folders so like for instance if I was doing the this secure uh digital hard drive I would say okay I want to import all of those folders so shift click all the way down and hit import and it's going to draw mall in inside of their individual folders but it's going to know where they are because you put them all in the same place if on the other hand you already have light room catalogs and you've moved all your stuff in tow one organized folder inside of ah hard drive then you can go into each one and hit file import from another catalog when you click that it's going to give you a dialog box asking you what? What catalog do you want to import? So then I would go to whatever catalog I wanted to import and I would go and choose the catalogues, so I'm going to say, I want this catalog and I'm going to go to the catalogue itself I'm gonna click on it and I'm going to choose that when I do that it's going to has that upgrade that folder are that, uh, catalog? Because I'm enlightened cc it was made in light from five, so I'm gonna hit that and it's going to bring that folder in and all of the changes that I had made in the old catalog it's going to bring those in and then we're gonna work on him. Okay, so they here's the important dialog box I'm telling it this important add new photos to catalog without moving I don't want to move them that's where they are and I'm gonna hit import and here they come they're being imported right now and then you just do that over and over and over and over again to all of the different catalogs that you have now the other thing that you might have out there is apertures dead they're not making apertura anymore oh no, what do I do? I was working professionally in it and now all of my stuff is organized in aperture I'm sorry they did that to you, but it was only inevitable that they wouldn't be able to catch up with light room and so that it just it makes sense that they are planning on serving the non professional crowd and just doing their photo thing that's great that's their place light rooms places to serve serious people who really like photos um so in that case in light room c c also light room six by the way there is a stand alone version of light room c c, which is called life from six it's just not connected with cloud but otherwise has the same features in it it's just all the cloud features or not they're um and also I don't know if it will be something that's going to be constantly updated um when when photo shop see six are yes, yes six came out they said that that was it you have to go to photo shop cc to get anything further and I think that's probably the case there is a way to import from aperture okay? And so you can come in and you can I believe it is in aa library maybe I don't do this so oh here we'll just do this is the easiest way to find their go it's in plug in extras it's right there so inside of plugging extras you can import a light room or an iphone armenia aperture or an eye photo catalog so if you are in that system and you want to bring in the stuff that you had made in that system bringing in you could do that the difference is it's not going to it's not going to bring in the the adjustments because the adjustments are different sliders are completely different and so it's not gonna bring that in but what it will do is it has the ability to bring in a j peg of final work and then the raw untouched and set them side by side so that you can see this is what I did an aperture I need to match it in light room or if I don't need to match it and I like what's there then you have the final j peg just sitting there so that you know I always have access to that but what it does is it organizes it exactly the same so it brings in all the folders the same way and stuff like that so and I even think that those stars and stuff like that come in so to some degree you could bring it in and start from there but it is a good idea to start um fresh at a certain point and so usually what I'll tell people who are working professionals is start at say january one and then reinstitute institute the workflow from january one up to now and then go forward from here and everything else that's in chamba lt's in the back just deal with it and get rid of it and then go forward from here one last question does light room support multiple users you can have obviously if you have different users on a computer, each user can have their own light room catalogue or you can have the same catalogs shared amongst the users but I think that question might be mortgage eared towards can multiple users on different computers used the same catalog that's probably what the question really is and that question is answered by saying no you can't have multiple users coming in and using the same catalogue at same time you can have a catalogue stored on a drop box or some other synchronization service that synchronizes that between the computers as long as you check it out. As long as one person says hey, I'm going to use this catalogue and open it up and the other people don't get into it then you're fine and you can work on that cattle because of that the key is that light room has to be resident on your computer in order to be working okay all right