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Lesson Info

Importing Images

So at this point, you should be well on your way to understanding light room in general. But now we're going to get into the very specifics. And the first thing that we do with light room after setting up our preferences is we're going thio import the images. Now remember, I set up a specific location where everything that gets imported into light room is going to go. So as I put in a card and as I import those images in tow light room, it's going to then take copy of those, and it's going to put them in the location that I set up in my preferences in that DT Originals folder. So now when I import all of those images, they're going to go there. Then once they're in the location, then they're going to go up to the cloud and there's gonna be a copy in the Cloud Azaz. Well, and then from the cloud, it's going to go toe all of my other devices, but in my other devices, I've set it up so that it's on Lee receiving the smart previews so that I'm not filling up my IPad or my phone with all so...

rts of extra versions of these photos. All right, so on this card reader and in this card, I have the images that I took out on location as a test. So I'm going to show you how to import the images with our test images, because at some point, we wanna go through those and kind of circle back to the idea of how to get a better exposure and a better understanding of how your cameras responding to you. Eso. But for right now, let's just use this as an import lesson. So I've got my card reader, and I've got my, uh, card. Now, remember, I've got two cards. Both cards have the same information on them. I'm just using the SD card because I have an SD card reader that's really easy to use, So I'm just going to simply plug this in to my computer, all right? Now that I've plugged the card into the reader, I'm going to go up to the add photos. Now you'll see that the card is sitting here on the desktop right there. So it's it's ready to be imported. Um, but instead of taking that I'm copying it onto my computer. I could just import it directly in tow. Light room. I don't have to do anything like copy this over to a specific place. Now, if you are a very fastidious like you're you're really good about dotting your I's and crossing your T's and making sure you have multiple backups everywhere. Then you can actually do that. You can take this set of images and you can copy them into a secondary location. Don't copy him into the file folder, where you're going to wear light room deals with the photos that that DT Originals folder the one that I set up. So this one right here that DT original folders is on Lee for light room. Just don't mess with it. Don't put photos there. That's on Lee for light room. That's where light room will put stuff. Let it just keep that. It's it's own playground. Don't touch it. Just leave it alone and let it do its thing. But you could conceivably put your images into another drive. Say this. This drive down here you could put it into, like, a backup hard drive, and then when you import, you could just import from that back up location, and then you would have an extra copy. However, we're just going to go through the process as though we don't care about that, because what's gonna happen is now we'll have a copy on our card. And remember, I have two copies, one on one card and one on the other, so we have a copy on the card. When I bring them in the light room, Light room's gonna copy them to a location that the one I set up in that DT original folder. And then it's going to send them to the cloud and make another copy. So I will have four copies of those files. By the time all is said and done. Two copies on my card, one copy on the DT original folder and one car copy in the cloud. That's four copies. I don't think I need any more copies, so we're going to go up to the top left hand corner inside of light room and click on add photos. When we do that, I can either browse to that location where you made those copies. If you if you did, or I could go directly to the E. O s digital card and click on that. Now I'm going to see what's on the card, and you can see that I did a whole bunch of testing and I can scroll down and I'll keep going and see. Now, here's that exposure test that I was doing. I was going really, really bright and really, really dark. So those air my, that's my test. So I can choose toe Onley import the ones I've checked. Or I can check all of the photos by just simply choosing up at the top saying Select all. You can see that there are 359 photos that are going to come in and then I can tell it where I want to go. Where do I wanna put these photos? Well, I wanna put them in their own unique album. So I'm gonna click on this ad toe album and it says travel because that's the last album I added things to. So I'm gonna click on travel and I'm gonna click on new and It's Going toe Let me name this and I'm just gonna name this album, uh, X Bowsher test and hit create. So now I have an exposure test ready to go, and it's gonna be all of these, but notice that I've got some additional images down here of other things that I don't necessarily want to import. So I'm gonna highlight all of those by clicking the first one and going all the way down to the bottom one, and I'm gonna shift, click there and then I'm gonna uncheck those and unchecked all of them. So now I'm on Lee, importing that one section Now, in most cases, you would actually import all of them just because you want to import all of them. But I've already done the importing on all these images so we don't have to worry about those. I'm just going to import the ones that I want to import. And so it's 180 photos and I'm going to click add photos. And now what it's doing is it's taking the images off the card. It's copying them onto that spot in the hard drive in the DT Originals folder, and then it's putting them into this album, which is over on the left hand side, and it's out with all of the other ones, so you can see that it says exposure test down here. So right now there's 32. And while while it's on my mind and while I'm working here, I'm just gonna grab that exposure tests. And don't worry, you can move it while it's putting stuff in it. I'm just gonna grab the exposure test and move it into my folder. So now it's organized with all of my other shoots that I'm using for this light room lesson. So now if I click on exposure test, I'm going to see all the images that air coming in to this light room exposure test album. And when it's finished, we'll go in and start working on them, so we'll just wait here and let him do it. You can see that the importing is happening pretty quick. It does a pretty good job, za pretty fast. So let's just wait for these to import. Now that the images are inside of the hard drive and they're inside of light rooms catalog, you can see up on the top left hand corner. This exposure test has a little spinning icon and that little spinning icon is telling us that something is happening. It is processing or sending stuff somewhere. Well, it's sending it to the cloud. Look up here. The cloud is now sending all of those images synchronizing photos. Now, if I don't want them to think of the moment, I consume plea Click the pause button, and now they are paused, and I can work locally without the network activity slowing down my computer as I work. But if I want them to synchronize, I simply click on here and resume the sinking, and it's going to keep synchronizing those photos. So depending on how much computing power you need, you might want to pause the synchronization. Also, by the way, um, Dropbox and Google Drive and all of those things that require network activity, those air slowing your computer down. So if you ever run into kind of a slowness on your computer, pause all of the synchronization that's happening with networks and see if that speeds up your computer because probably it will eso. If you need to be working hard and you don't want network activity slowing you down, that's where you do it. Click the cloud icon and pause the synchronization. So while that's synchronizing up to the cloud, I might as well talk to you about importing on other devices. Now it's It's exactly the same process. But in our case, we're gonna talk about the phone because on a phone you're also likely to take photos. And that's just the same thing as importing images from some other camera. So, for instance, I'm looking at the travel album Inside of Light Room on my IPhone. And so as I look through this, um, this set of images, you'll notice that there are two buttons on the bottom, right hand corner of the screen. One of them is an import button. If I click on import, I can either choose items from my photos. I can choose them from my camera roll. I can choose them from the files. Or, if I had a dongle, I could simply plug the dongle in, and I can plug my camera through USB directly into my IPhone, and I can bring in the images straight from my camera into the IPhone in light room, and then it sends them up to the cloud, so there's a lot of ways that I can actually add images into light room through that add images option. But the second button over on the right, the far bottom right hand corner is the camera. And when I click on the camera, then you see that I've got a full on it is a great camera. Then you can see that I've got a full on professional camera inside of light room itself. Notice that I've got several different ways to I can shoot automatic. I can shoot professional high dynamic range, long exposure and even a depth capture option which, although the depth capture option is not raw, so I I rarely rarely use it. In fact, I never use it. Rarely is not even the right term. I don't use it. But if you go to the professional, any of these other options, um, you have the ability to either choose D N G or J. Peg and I choose DMG because it's the best possible file type. Remember, Raw is better than J peg. So I would prefer to shoot, uh, in a DMG format. Um, okay, so you also have flash no flash. You have the ability Thio choose various items like, for instance, focus peaking and grids and timers, and even you have the option over here. By the four by three, you can choose different aspect ratios, so there's a lot of options there. And then if you go over here, you have filters, which were kind of like presets. Um, you also have the ability to lock your exposure so that it doesn't change on. Do you also have telephoto or wide angle lens that you can choose? So it's using both lenses if you have two lenses on your camera, and then you obviously have the ability for professional, which allows you to change not only the exposure but even the shutter speed the I S o the white balance on Ben total auto exposure. So there are a lot of options inside of this little camera, and then once you take the photo, it's going to place the photo into that particular album. So the point is, is that you have a lot of options when you are working out in the field to take pictures. Let's say that you're out traveling and you want to take a photo, but you don't have your camera with you. But you think this would be a really good background for other photos or this would be a really good detail for other photos. You have a fairly professional version of camera right here, and it will take a really good photo. I actually have photos that I've taken with my IPhone inside of the light room app that I put up on my website, and it looks like there photos that were taken with a with another camera, and they're just they're just kind of raw and gritty in the moment, and they're awesome photos. But no one would ever suspect that I took him with the phone because they're right in the midst of all of my other travel photographs. There's an old adage that says the best camera is the one that's that you have with you, and you generally always have your phone. So if you have the light room app on your phone, not only do you have access to all your photos, but if you don't happen to have a really good camera with you, this is a perfectly acceptable alternative to take a good photograph that you could use for any purpose, especially if you have ah later model IPhone or android device. Their cameras air so good in them. They really are worth using. Don't discount taking photos with your phone because they're going to go right into light room with all of the other photos, and they're gonna be shared all the way across all of your photos. And generally speaking, when I have phones, phones when I have photos from my phone, I typically take those photos, and I put them into the same album as the rest of the photos, especially if they're behind the scene photos or quirky little photos that I took while I was shooting a job or something like that. I put them in with all the other photos, and so they show up in the same place inside a light room, which is really useful for organization. So just be aware that you can import inside of light room on your phone on your IPad and on your desktop computer, and all of those will take the entire full file, send them up to the cloud and then disperse them based on your settings in your rules toe all of your other devices. Now, where are these photos that we've imported very simply there inside the work in catalog there inside of the light room DT originals. And then they are deep inside with those originals in 2020. There, right in here with all of the other photos. So all of the images that you import in tow light room on the desktop are going to go into that DT original folders. Anything that you import into your IPhone or your IPad or your android mobile device is going to go into that device. Then it's going to go to the cloud, and then it's going to go down toe light room on your desktop computer into that D T original folders as well. So no matter what all images air going to end up inside of that folder that you chose in your preferences important to note that because you always have access to that and there's still the original raw images, so you can always go in there and grab one of those images and copy it out. You could use it like you have the original photos hasn't done anything to him. In fact, when we start editing them, you're going to realize that it never does anything to the actual photo. The raw photos stays untouched, and it's just light room that decides what that image would look like if we did this. That or the other thing to it. And so the original is always safe, and the the adjustment is just shown to you inside of light room in a virtual way until you export that file and then it becomes a J peg or a tiff. Or however you export that image, and that's when it becomes its own file. And it all those changes that you've made have been baked in to that final JPEG file that you send out.