Lessons

Lesson Info

Setting Lightroom Preferences

1 Now that I've given you a overview 2 of the entire program of Lightroom, 3 let's start from the beginning and talk about preferences. 4 So Lightroom is storing your images 5 in a very specific location on your hard drive, 6 at least for the time being until it gets 'em to the cloud. 7 Once it gets 'em to the cloud, 8 it will either delete that original photo, 9 once it confirms it's in the cloud, 10 the image in the cloud stays in the cloud 11 and then it deletes the original 12 and it only keeps a preview of that file 13 or a small raw photo on your computer itself. 14 So based on preferences, 15 or you can have it keep both 16 so it can keep the original raw file 17 and it can keep the original raw file in the cloud. 18 And all this is based on your preferences. 19 So let's go to the preferences 20 and see what kind of options you have there. 21 If you're used to Lightroom Classic, 22 there's a ton of preferences. 23 There are not a ton of preferences 24 inside of the new version...

of Lightroom, 25 but I'm gonna go over all of them with you right now. 26 So the first one is your account. 27 That's just shows who's logged in 28 and allows you to get to your account settings. 29 The next one is cache. 30 Cache is really important. 31 If things start to slow down 32 and you need to kind of clear out some space 33 on your hard drive, 34 one place to do that is inside of your cache. 35 You can clear your cache right here with this button. 36 I've set my cache size limit to maximum. 37 So it may be here when you start, 38 but you want it to be here. 39 So if you have the space, if you have extra gigabytes, 40 use them and that will speed up your Lightroom catalog. 41 So instead of staying at 10, get to 25, 50. 42 Just look and see how much extra space you have 43 on your computer. 44 And if you have say, you know, 45 one terabyte drive on your computer 46 and you're only using 256 gigabytes of it, 47 then give yourself the maximum 48 and you'll be great. 49 If you don't have a ton of space 50 but maybe you have 150 gigabytes available, 51 why don't you give it 50? 52 But the more space you give for the cache. 53 the better off you'll be. 54 So I have mine at maximum. 55 The other options that you have here 56 is to store a copy of all smart previews locally 57 on your hard drive. 58 So if I click on that, 59 it's going to take every image that's in my catalog 60 and it's gonna download a smart preview of them 61 and it's gonna put them on the hard drive on my computer. 62 Now I'm working off a laptop. 63 I don't want that to happen 64 because I don't have a ton of space on my laptop 65 and so I don't want to fill it up 66 with a bunch of smart previews. 67 Keep in mind the smart previews are pretty small. 68 And so it's not like, if you have a desktop 69 with a lot of space, say you have a four terabyte drive 70 or something as your main drive in your desktop, do it. 71 Download all those smart previews 72 and it will move faster and it'll be great. 73 But if you're using a laptop, 74 you have limited space, 75 don't worry about doing that. 76 It will download the things it needs when it needs them. 77 But this is useful if you have the space. 78 So it's up to you. 79 The other one is store a copy of all of the originals. 80 So you can tell Lightroom 81 to not only store all your images in the cloud, 82 but also take all of the originals 83 and put them on a hard drive. 84 And you get to choose where that hard drive is going to be. 85 And that's important. 86 Because if you're gonna store all of your originals, 87 you don't want all of your originals 88 on the main hard drive of the computer 89 'cause it is going to fill that drive up. 90 And you don't want to fill up 91 your actual working hard drive on your computer. 92 The main hard drive on your computer 93 should be left specifically for things like programs, cache, 94 your catalog, things like that. 95 What should go on an external drive 96 is all of your files. 97 So your actual original photos. 98 So if you have an external hard drive, 99 say it's a four or an eight or a 10 terabyte or you know, 100 maybe it's a 30 terabyte RAID system, whatever it is, 101 whatever that external hard drive you have is, 102 that's where you wanna put all of your original photos. 103 And if you're not going to trust the cloud, 104 if you're not gonna put all your images in the cloud 105 and just trust that cloud 106 and you want to be absolutely secure 107 that you have them not only in the cloud 108 but also here on earth, the best way to do that 109 is to simply click on this store a copy of all originals. 110 And then you're gonna choose the storage location 111 by clicking on this browse button. 112 And you can see that mine, 113 my hard drive that's storing files is Platt Blade. 114 So it's a drive called a Blade Lightroom original photos. 115 And so all of those images are being stored 116 inside a very specific spot. 117 You just click on browse 118 and then once you click on browse, 119 it's gonna open up your finder 120 and then you can go find the place. 121 So Platt Blaze, there's the Lightroom original photos 122 and that's where they're all stored. 123 And if you drill down, 124 you can see there's all the originals. 125 See how there's some from 2024, 2023. 126 Now you're asking, wait a second, Jared, 127 you don't have that thing checked. 128 So let's cancel back outta here. 129 I don't have the store all of the originals. 130 I don't have that checked. 131 So why do I have folders with photos in them? 132 Well, the reason is, is that it's still storing 133 original photos on that drive. 134 So I still have to set this drive location. 135 So this is something that you should do right off the bat 136 the first time you open up Lightroom. 137 Don't do it later, do it now. 138 Go to your preferences, go into cache, 139 and choose the location of your original photos 140 and choose a large hard drive. 141 And if you're gonna click all original photos, 142 it will take everything and put it on there. 143 So you'll have all photos that are in the cloud 144 also on that drive. 145 For me, what I've chosen is not 146 to store all of the originals. 147 I'm only storing the ones 148 that I've clicked on that little chevron. 149 So the only ones that I'm working on 150 that are on that drive are the ones that look like this. 151 So any album that has a green chevron pointing down on it 152 tells me that those images have been downloaded 153 and put on that drive. 154 So only what I've chosen to keep locally, 155 everything else is just up in the cloud. 156 And every time I click on one of these albums 157 and I click on it, I right click it, 158 and I say make the album available offline. 159 The second I do that, it starts to download those files 160 and it's gonna tell me 161 before it does, it says downloading this album will require 162 X amount of storage on your hard drive. 163 You'll still have three terabytes available. 164 Is that okay? 165 Absolutely, download it. 166 And now it's downloading that file 167 and you can see that it's already downloaded that file. 168 In this case, if I click on it 169 and I go to the info area inside of Lightroom, 170 you'll notice just as we talked about, 171 that the local images of smart preview, 172 the cloud images of smart preview, where did it come from? 173 It came from Lightroom Classic. 174 So this is the exact circumstance I told you would happen 175 at some point during this workshop 176 is that we would have something 177 that I had put into Lightroom Classic. 178 It uploaded a smart preview to the cloud 179 and it downloaded the smart preview to my computer 180 for Lightroom, the new version of Lightroom. 181 Now as a result of that, 182 that photo here is on my hard drive. 183 If I go to the preferences, 184 it's in that hard drive area. 185 Again, below the cache settings in that browse area, 186 if I click on browse and I go to the Blade drive 187 and I click on Lightroom originals, 188 you can see I'm drilling down into this area 189 and I look down here and there's all these photos. 190 See how the original photos are there? 191 So all of my photos are sitting on this hard drive 192 waiting to be used. 193 So even if you're not going to store the all, 194 that's the operative word there, all, 195 of the original photos on that hard drive, that's okay. 196 You cannot check that. 197 Still want to browse and choose this storage location 198 so that all of the images that you do choose to pull down 199 album by album gets stored in the right place, okay? 200 So you can also store a copy 201 smart preview on the local hard drive. 202 You don't get to choose where that's gonna go. 203 It's gonna go on the local hard drive. 204 And so if you have the space, this is a great idea to check. 205 If you don't have the space, don't worry about it, 206 it'll download what you need when you need it. 207 And then storing a copy of all the originals. 208 If you leave it unchecked, 209 it will download the ones that you want to download. 210 And the rest it will leave in the cloud 211 and it will keep kind of a small preview of every image 212 that's inside of your catalog. 213 Okay, so that is the first area, which is cache. 214 The general area, you have to enable the people view. 215 So if you don't see people view on yours, 216 come to the general area and enable the people view. 217 Also, do yourself a favor and click on this, 218 prevent sleep during sync. 219 So you don't want your computer to go to sleep 220 and then synchronization stops. 221 You want it to synchronize overnight. 222 So just prevent the sleep 223 when your synchronization is happening. 224 The next option is import. 225 When you import an image, 226 you want it to add your copyright information 227 so you can see that I've got copyright Jared Platt 228 as images get imported. 229 Also, you can see HDR defaults enable HDR editing 230 by default for HDR photos. 231 This doesn't mean can you create an HDR photo 232 by merging photos. 233 It's not talking about the process 234 by which you merge images into an HDR. 235 This is talking about the new feature inside of Lightroom 236 that allows you to work on an HDR monitor 237 and actually see it in HDR. 238 There's not a lot of ways to show an HDR image 239 because most people don't have an HDR screen 240 and most people can't. 241 You can't print out an HDR image necessarily. 242 And so there's not a lot of ways to view HDR at the moment, 243 but Lightroom is capable of showing you 244 what an HDR image is going to look like 245 and show you all the detail that could come out of it 246 if there was the option of showing it. 247 And so you can click on that, it enables it, 248 but I don't work in HDR all that much, 249 so I don't click that 250 because I'm not trying to share it in HDR, okay? 251 And then of course there are the raw defaults. 252 This is an important setting actually. 253 You can see down here 254 that you can choose the raw default 255 as images come into Lightroom. 256 What default do you want them to use? 257 There's several options. 258 There's camera settings and there's Adobe defaults 259 and then there's presets. 260 So if I choose Adobe default, 261 then Adobe chooses what that image is gonna look like. 262 So it looks at the camera 263 and it decides based on Adobe's opinion of that camera, 264 what it needs to look like, plain and simple. 265 If you use camera settings, 266 then what it does is it looks at the image 267 and it looks at the camera that took the image 268 and then it looks at the settings in the camera. 269 So like for instance, 270 if I was on the portrait setting in my Canon camera, 271 then it's going to look at that portrait setting 272 and it's gonna try and make a default setting 273 that approximates what that portrait setting looked like. 274 So they know what the Canon portrait setting looks like. 275 And so it's going to honor that choice. 276 So my images that I shoot on my camera, 277 if I choose a picture style in my camera, 278 it's going to look like that picture style 279 inside of Lightroom. 280 As opposed to if you do camera default, 281 you'll look at the back of your camera 282 and you'll see it looks really rich and poppy 283 'cause you use the landscape option. 284 And then when it comes into Lightroom, 285 it will change and it'll become kind of a draft photo, 286 because it's not honoring the settings 287 that you put in your camera. 288 So if you want it to look like 289 what it looks like on the back of your camera, 290 use this option of camera settings. 291 If you have a very specific preset that you've built 292 that makes the image exactly what you want it to look like, 293 it gives it the amount of contrast you like, 294 it gives it the amount of saturation you like, 295 you can then go and choose that preset. 296 And any preset you choose here 297 will be to the image on the way in. 298 My preference is camera settings. 299 Then we're going to go to interface. 300 This is where you just choose what the things look like, 301 how your mouse pad 302 or your mouse or your track pad swipe accessibility modes. 303 These are your help menu options. 304 All this stuff is just based on your own preferences. 305 Then there's performance tab. 306 Now in the performance tab, 307 you're gonna see that there are GPUs settings 308 and you have to decide which one of these work. 309 Auto generally figures it out, right? 310 But you can do off or custom. 311 If I click on custom, it gives me an option 312 as to whether I'm gonna use the GPU for display, 313 am I gonna use the GPU for image processing, 314 and am I gonna use the GPU for export? 315 So if I click on all of those, it's going to use the GPU 316 as much as possible for all of these operations. 317 If I choose auto, it's gonna choose the best version 318 or the best version of those three things 319 for my specific GPU. 320 If it's wrong, then you need to come in 321 and choose these for yourself. 322 And I would just play around. 323 Some GPUs are gonna struggle with this 324 and some computers aren't gonna have a GPU 325 that's capable of it. 326 So you just kinda have to play with yours 327 and see what works best. 328 Or you can turn it off. 329 And if you turn it off, then it's not gonna use the GPU, 330 which if you don't know what a GPU is, 331 it's the graphics processor on your computer. 332 So the the GPU mostly runs 333 things that are going on the monitor, 334 but you can use that GPU 335 because now we have pretty powerful GPUs. 336 You can use that to process your images as well 337 because it might not be doing anything at the moment. 338 And so if that's the case 339 and you want to use your GPU, you can. 340 But if you turn it off, 341 it's only gonna use the software to process it. 342 It's gonna use the computer but not the GPU. 343 So you kind of have to play with it. 344 If you have it on, if you have it on custom on all 345 and it's just totally killing your computer, 346 come in and then turn it off and see how it works. 347 And if it's going much faster, then choose the offsetting. 348 Or if auto works best, and that seems to be 349 what makes your computer faster, choose that. 350 So this is kind of a trial by error. 351 So just turn it on and off, 352 change the settings, see what works best for you 353 and go with it. 354 Auto tends to work pretty well. 355 This last option, technology previews allows you 356 to turn on things that are kind of in testing. 357 They're in beta mode. 358 In this case right now, 359 content credentials is an option 360 where Adobe's trying to fight 361 the problem of manufacturing photos, especially for press. 362 And they want to be able to prove 363 that a photo was not edited too much 364 or to associate the actual creator with their work. 365 This is how they're gonna do it. 366 And so they're kind of in testing mode with it. 367 If you want to play with it 368 and get kind of on the forefront of this kind of technology 369 so that your images are always associated with you 370 and they're always associated with being verifiably accurate 371 and not just a lie, 372 then this is the way that you're gonna do that. 373 So just a technology preview. 374 Okay, that's all the settings. 375 There are not any more settings inside of Lightroom 376 that you need to worry about. 377 Once you've set those up, which is very few of them, 378 you're ready to rock and roll.