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Tips and Tricks

this lesson is tips and tricks, and it's not earth shattering tips and tricks, although you might be surprised by one or two of them. And it's probably things that we've already mentioned prior to this lesson. Um, and after this lesson will mention some of these things, probably in passing as well. So you might have heard a couple of these, but I'm locating these in one lesson so that they could be reviewed over and over again. It's easy to find them, and I just need to make sure that all of them have been mentioned. So these are the tips and tricks. Here we go. Key strokes are essential to a fast workflow, and so we're going to go through some keystrokes right now in order to flag an image, this little white flag down here, you can either click on the actual flag and that will click the flag, and now it's flagged. Or you can simply hit the Z key for Zaoui. I don't The only reason the Z key is used is because it's right next to the X key, which is the reject. So if I hit the Z key, I p...

ick the image. If I hit the X key, I reject the image. You can see that I've just rejected that image. So Z is Pick X is reject and then you is unpick, which takes it all back to no flags whatsoever. Then, if you want, if you want to star the image, so let's say I picked it, but I also want to give it a star. Then 1234 and five. Give it those amounts of stars. So the one through five keys or your stars and the zero key is no stars in orderto access. The different panels that air over on the right hand side of the screen, including the edit panel, the crop panel, the brush panel. All you need to do is learn the keystrokes, and if you hover over the button that represents that individual panel, you will see the keystroke that's involved with that. So there's the edit panel, which is E and that takes you into that full screen image with the edit panel available. If you click on See that's crop, so C is for crop that takes me to the crop panel. If I click on H, that's for the healing brush. If I click on the B key, I get brush. If I click on the L Key, I get the linear or the line Grady int. And then if I click on our I get the radial Grady in So those air different panels that I could get to very quickly with keystrokes. Also, if I click on I, I'll get the info panel, which is right down here. If I click on K, I'll get the keyword panel, which is right here and then Finally, this little, uh, this little quote button here is the Why key for Why did they choose Why? Because it is about activity and likes and comments, so I have no idea why they choose why. Anyway, that's one of the least logical keystrokes. Also keep in mind that you can use the command plus button and minus button in order to zoom at different levels of zoom, and that's really important. Also, you can if you're looking at an image, you can just click on it, and it will bring it to 100% so you can zoom in, zoom out 100% or zoom in in levels, and then if you click on it again, it will zoom out. Then when I zoom in, it takes me back to that same level I was at before. And if you're interested in key strokes, if you go up to the top, you can always go through and see the key strokes that are listed right next to any of the menu items, so you can see that export is shift. E export with Previous is Command E and then edit in Photoshop is Shift Command E. And then, if you go to like photo, you can see the star ratings, the flag ratings. You can also see, you know, increase or decrease of flag rating. Now, one of my favorite keystrokes and one of my favorite tools is the Target collection tool. And if I go down to any album and let's just zoom in here and let's say our card options so I wanna make greeting cards. And so I've got an album called Card Options and Aiken set that specific album as the target album. So if I click on that it is now the target album, you can see that it's got a little border around it, and that tells you that that is the target album. So if I am in any album whatsoever right now, I'm in the wedding album and I took a photo of this tree. And so I I like this image a lot. I want to keep it in the Target album, and that's that card options. So all I need to do is hit the T key for Target album, and it has just added it to this album. So let's look in here, and you can see that there it is inside of the Target album. So it's very easy to just keep a target album selected. So you're just saying this is my target album and then you can run around through all of the different albums you could be looking through. And anytime you see an image you want to collect, just hit the Tiki and it automatically adds it to that album. And remember that all albums are, um, they're virtual, so you can have the same image in multiple albums, which is great because now you can have a collection or an album of landscape images and an album of, uh, greeting card images and an album of mountains, and all three of them can have the same photo of the Grand Tetons in them or the same photo of you know, uh, the Bahamas in them. And you can put this image in multiple albums for multiple uses, multiple ideas because all you have to do is hit that Tiki and it's gonna add it. And then when you're done, do when you're done with this particular album being the Target album, you can always right click a different one and make that the Target album. And now, when you hit the Tiki, anything that you click on as T is gonna go to that Target album. But the ones that you put in the other Target album, the original Target album, are still staying there because it's just all it's doing is pointing and saying, If he hits the Tiki, send it to this album. Right now, it's the same as if you had gone in and just grabbed the image and dragged it to the Target album. It does exactly the same thing, but it just makes it really easy to find images and quickly add them to an album. So one of the tools it's gonna be useful to you, um, in a lot of different ways is stacking and you'll use it in all sorts of different ways. But the main way that we use it is in trying to take a set of images that are useful together. But really, you're only using one of all of those images. So, for instance, like in an HDR situation, Or maybe it's ah, set of, ah, grouping of portrait's that you're only going to use one from, but you kind of want to keep them all. You just don't wanna be looking at all of them. And so we're going to take these images, which is our HDR images that we were working on, and we're gonna stack a set of four. And the way we're going to do that is we're gonna highlight all four of these images, which, by the way, is the This is the normal. And then this is Thea under. And then this is the over exposure. And then this is that J peg that your camera makes that's pretty much worthless s. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna highlight this entire set of images. So there are four of them, and I'm going to simply hit command G and it groups them together. Or I could right click it and make them into a stack. And you'll notice now that it's got a four on the top right hand side of that stack. So that means that this is a stack of four images, and if I click on that four, it will open up the stack and show me what's inside the stack. Now you'll notice that there's also a little mountain right here next to this image. That means it is the top of the stack. It's the representative of the stack, but I want this image to be the representative of the stack. So I right click it and I tell it to set. This is the stack cover, and now it is the stat cover. You can see that this on the grid has changed. If I click the four, it'll close that. And now I just have an image that represents four images down below it in the stack. Now, if I were to right, click this stack, I can go to the photo merge button or the photo emerge link area and I can click on HDR merge. And if I click on that, it's gonna merge everything in that stack and oops, I can't do it because what's in the stack? The JPEG, the J pegs in the stack. So I need to go into the stack here and find this JPEG and that J. Peg and I could tell us the J peg by going to this info button right here on the right hand corner. And I can see that this is the original J. Peg don't want j pegs. So I'm going to, right click this one, and I can actually remove it from the stack. So now that J Peg has been removed from the stack. So these air, all raw images, this is the JPEG. Do yourself a favor and go up to the top search area and click on search and choose extension and then choose J pegs and then highlight all of those pesky J pegs. Right? Click, um, and delete those photos. And, yes, delete them right out of your life. You have no need for those because you actually have the raw images. So now we could go back down to our stack. We have our stack, we can. And by the way, if we have a whole bunch of stack so see, I've got a stack here. I've got a stack here. I can right click on those stacks and merge them Aziz Hdrs And it will merge all of my stacks because I've gone through and prepped. Um, now that's one way to stack things is to just go through and collect things. So, for instance, I could go to my travel area here and say, Well, you know, I I really Onley need this one image to represent all these other images. But I want to keep them for some reason. So I can simply highlight a bunch of images like this, and I congratulate them all into a stack. And now you can see that this image here represents 11 other images just like it. And if I find that there are other images that air also representative of this, I can click on all of those and dragged them into that stack. And so now we have 16 images that air represented by that stack, and I could go through these images and find the one that I think there was an HDR in here and I think that one might be the better representation. And so I'm just going to simply look for that HDR image. I could just cycle through these images until I find it. There it is. That's the HDR right there, Right? Click it and I could say, Set that as the cover of the stack. Ooh, bad decision, Command Z. I don't like the frame on it like the frame on this one better So we're sticking with it and closing the stack, and this is going to be the representation of that one image, and the rest of them are just going to sit in the background. So stacking is a very helpful tool that you can use for HDRs and panels, but also just for grouping images that are similar in content. When you're looking in the develop module, one of the things that I find difficult is grabbing a slider and then just barely moving my mouth a little bit here and a little bit there and sometimes it gets annoying, and I feel like I'm getting carpal tunnel grabbing onto that mouse and pushing it and moving like I just that sometimes gets very annoying. But if I if I simply hover over any given slider and use the arrow keys, I could go up and down and I can increase and decrease the exposure or whatever. I happened to be hovering over eso. If you are in a position where you're kind of not, you're not enjoying the experience of clicking on and kind of doing this with the sliders. You can simply hover over them and then use your left hand on the arrow keys and arrow up an arrow down to get the right exposure. And if you hit the shift arrow, it goes up in bigger increments, so little increments. So that's in basically 1/ of a stop. Or, if I shift, click it shift arrow up, its third stops up and third stops down. So if you're in that position, that's a really good thing to know. Plus, if you're in those sliders and you're looking at sliders, also remember that you can right click that panel. Any of these panels you can right click them, and instead of using the normally out you can use the compact layout, and it actually shrinks everything down so that you can see it a little bit better. You in Seymour stuff in one area. So if you're on a little laptop, then go ahead and right click that panel and make it compact so that you can actually see it. But if you're on a big monitor, I would leave it normal because easier thio find your way to grab those sliders. Because sometimes in the compact view, you actually sometimes grab the slider and it doesn't work because you didn't quite grab it. So I I prefer the normal layout just for being able to grab a tool. But remember, you can always use the arrow keys and shift arrow keys up and down in order to change the exposure or whatever you happen to be floating over. And speaking of adjustments, one of the things that we do when we're making adjustments is we might actually think this is a pretty good version of it. But what if I want to do something a little different to it? And so in this case, I would go down to what we call versions so the versions air down at the bottom right hand corner, and if I click on version, I can see that I have the original, which is without any adjustments to it. And then I can create a version by clicking on this plus button up here and I can say Finished color. So now I have an original and a finished color version, and now I can start working on, let's say, a black and white version of it. And so now I can click on that and say, Finished black and white versions. So now I have three versions, but all of them are within the same image, so it's not taking up extra space. It's not making copies of anything. It literally is just versions. And by the way, if you forget to make some versions, you can always go up here to this little next and named, says Otto. If you click on auto, it will start creating auto versions for you as you're working on it, and oftentimes, when you come here you will find that it's already created a number of auto versions to this. So if I start Thio, you know, say, use color and I and I do kind of a warm tone version of this and maybe a little bit of highlight version of it. I'm just working on these kind of tools here, and I don't like that color necessarily. So I need toe change it a little bit, that's better. And I'm gonna hit the shift key and drag this back so that I don't have as much color in there. It's too saturated. So now you can see that I've got an original image. I've got a finished color image, and I've got a black and white image. If I goto Otto, you can see it has auto created based on when I left the image. So every time you leave an image and go to another image, if you've changed that image, it will make an automatic version for you. So you can always go to the version section here, and you can click on the triple dot button and you can delete all named versions or all auto saved versions, just in case you're interested in doing that and click on versions again, and it will closed down that versions section so back in light room classic there was a thing called virtual copies, and those are different versions of the same image. And so instead of calling them virtual copies, they now call them versions here. And that's essentially what they were. They were just the same image, but with a different iteration of changes to it. So their versions. And so now, instead of having multiple images side by side representing those versions, you simply click on an image and then go to the versions area and you'll see all of the different options for what you've done to the image in the past. Now, if you've done work to an image in a certain panel, so in this case, in the color grading panel and you don't like it, you don't have to go in and reset every single control by grabbing it and moving it back to where it waas, so you can simply right click the entire panel, and you can reset all or just this three way area here. If I recall if I if I click up here, it actually gives me the normal or compact view of this particular panel. But what I want to do is I want to right click down in the panel itself, and that allows me to reset this three way control. And when I do that, I'm back to my black and white version. This next tool that I'm going to show you is Onley useful in very specific circumstances. So you're not going to use it all the time. But when you use it, it will be very, very helpful. And that is called enhanced details. Now, enhanced details is one of those things that uses theme artificial intelligence in the cloud, which means that you're working on it here inside of light room, but you're gonna have to send it to the cloud. It's already in the cloud, but it's going to have to use the cloud toe work on that image and then send the results back to you. So when I'm looking at this image here, I'm zooming and really, really far in order to see some kind of weird stuff that's going on in the image. And what you see here is kind of this weird glow around the lights, and you also see this real texture. Look to this building and especially you can see in the windows of the building, and that's not what it's supposed to look like. It actually is supposed to have kind of a striped look to it. And so there's some artifact ing going on there. So you see a lot of this texture because it's a little bit of a noisy camera and there's some artifact ing that starts to occur because the camera is not. It's not a full frame chip. It's It's the Fuji X t three and it's it's a It's a very small sensor. It doesn't have the light gathering capability that a full frame camera has. Um, I like the camera for travel, and it's fun, but it's it's still has its limitations. And so I'm seeing those limitations here, and you'll find that small little cameras have more limitations than the bigger you know, full frame cameras. So this is why it's an excellent image to show what light room could do. So watch what happens if I right click this image and I enhance the details. When I do that, it's going to send it to the cloud, but it's going to tell me, okay, if I send this to look what it's doing? See those lines? You still look like this. Now it looks like that if I go up to the top, it used to look like this. See how it's all choppy? And now the light looks like that where it's nice and round, and there's not all that weirdness to it. I can come down here, see this little stair case right here used to look like this. You know, it's all broken up and choppy and kind of stair Step E. And then I go like that. And now it's nice and smooth, so enhancing the details is going to take this computer about five seconds, which means it has to send it to the cloud, the clouds going to do some computing. Then it's going to send all that information back to me, and I'm going to hit, enhance, and now we just wait. So now it has returned the image, and it returned it in in a stack. So it took the new image and put it in a stack with the old image. And I can see the two by clicking on this little two in the top right hand corner, and I can see the the new one, which you can see says F g I 3922 enhanced dot d N g. Whereas this one here is just the file named DMG. So now I'm just gonna close this stack. Well, actually, let's not close the stack up. Let's actually look at it. Let's zoom in here. Let's really compare this. So if you look at it, this is original image right here. You can see all that weird patterning that's going on. You see the blossoming and the light is kind of weird. You can see this stair step has a lot of problems to it. You can see that this truck has this, you know, fiery look in the back. And when I go to the new image, which is enhanced now it's a round light up here is nice and round, and these lines air now lines. It's not a pixelated, weird texture. It is now what it should be, which is lines on the building. And I know this is a little bit like pixel peeping. It's like you're getting into the minute details and who's really going to see it. But look at the difference between seeing the name Crowne Plaza up here, and it's all kind of jagged. And then when we change it to the enhanced version, it's nice and smooth, and it just glows like it would normally glow. So there is a reason for all this, and sometimes it's just a weird texture on a surface. Sometimes it's that the light is glaring, weird and has these weird blossoming issues around it. And sometimes it's. You can't read the information on a street sign because there's too much noise or there's too much picks. Elation going on and enhanced details can fix a lot of that stuff, but you Onley need to try it. If you are unhappy with what you're seeing in a specific area of the photograph, so get to know it and play with it, and you're gonna find that it mostly has to do with, um, cameras that have a lot of noise to them or have a lot of artifact ing in them. And usually it's the smaller sensor type cameras, or maybe older cameras that have a little bit too much noise or they're not quite as, uh, they don't have as much detail in them. I found that it doesn't do a ZMA much to an image like the cannon are five, because that's a 45 megapixel camera with a full frame chip with ah lot of technology in it. And so it's getting some pretty clean shots to begin with, So enhanced detail doesn't doas much to it. But if you're shooting with a Fuji camera, you will see that the enhanced details option is going to do a lot of great things for your images. So try it out. There's a really important feature on your camera, and usually when you first buy the camera, the first thing that you do is you turn it on and asks you, Where do you live and what time is it there? And so hopefully you've set that up, but you might have just hit. I don't need to set that up and you went forward. And so now it started at noon, even though it was six PM where you turned it on. So that time is there to help you find images and to make sure that the images from Camera A and the images from Camera B R sync up so that when you take them side by side. The images from those times are similar to each other and next to each other in the time frame. Well, you might find that you mess that up once in a while. And if you do and you want to change what time it actually waas? Because you forgot that you you know you're from Arizona and you went to New York and you shot a whole bunch of images, but now they're three hours or four hours off. Well, you could do that. So what we're going to do is we're going to go into a set of images and say we know that it was not 4:32 p.m. It was It was 4. 30 PM Or maybe it was 3:30 p.m. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna highlight all of my images by hitting command A. And then I'm going to go and edit the time. So notice that now my time says mixed and I can click on this little edit button here. When I click on it, it's going toe. Ask me. Okay, this is the current date range, and I need you to tell me what the change for that date range is. So what s so you can see the whole date ranges from October 27th, so it's all on the 27th, but it starts at 4 13 and goes to 6 23. So what's the actual end of that date range? So if I need to shift it by 23 minutes, I could just come in here and say, Okay, it wasn't 23 after it was 20 after and then hit change, and it's going to change everything in comparison to where they are. So it's gonna move everything by three minutes backwards into the past. And I could do the same thing by saying, But it was in October. It was September. Or I could say it wasn't 27th. It was the 26th. So then, by doing that and changing that, it's going to change all of those images. But it's gonna do it equally back by three minutes and one day, then simply hit the change button, and it will adjust all of those images so that they're now back in time by an entire day and three minutes now that should help you if you're in a circumstance where you went and traveled and you forgot to change the time on the camera. And when you come back, all your images looked like they were shot at midnight because you were in Europe. Now, this next little tool is mawr of kind of a fun tool than a serious tool. But it actually does a pretty good job, and that is the find your best photos. So in order to use this instead of being here inside of light room on your desktop, what you're going to do is you're going to go. So you've created a collection, and that collection has been shared with the cloud. And that collection, because it shared with the cloud, can actually be shared with the artificial intelligence, which is called Adobe Sensei. And Sense is going to look at your images. And if you go to the IPad, or if you go to the Web version of light room or to your phone, you can go to and let me just let me just share that with you. I'm kind of I'm just sharing my screen on my IPad with you and If I click on my travel in Europe and then I go up to the triple dot button in the top right hand corner, there's an option to choose your best photos. So I'm gonna click on that and it's gonna analyze those now. Remember, it's the cloud that's analyzing them. It's not my IPad that's analyzing these images. And so I'm analyzing these. Well, the AI is analyzing these images, and it's doing it based on compositional strategies, color patterns. It's based on other people's selections of images, so it's really doing it based on million's and million's and million's billions of points of information. And so you'll notice up here that it's chosen 362 images, and I can change the quality threshold so that if it's I'm not looking for a good and image, Then I met 687 of them. But if I'm looking for the Onley, the best images it's going to give me, you know, the top 100 or so and so then you can see up Here are the ones that's chosen, and down here are the ones that are everything else, and so what I want to dio Cancel out of here. I'm going to click on this 1 39 and drop them down. And now I'm going to see all of the images that it thinks are really great images. And quite frankly, they're all pretty good images. It hasn't chosen any horrible images. In fact, it's chosen mostly the ones that I like. So it's chosen ones with good compositional strategies. Even though, you know there's still just, like fun little photos. It's family type photos. It's travel type photos. It's chosen. But it's done a good job of finding the better compositions, theme or interesting compositions. The better contrast. And I would say that it did a decent job. Now am I going to trust it to choose my portfolio for me? Absolutely not. But if you're looking at a folder full of 1000 images and you just want to quickly find the best 10, then just go to find my best photos and give it the give it a threshold of 100. Find 100 really great images, and I'll bet you'll find that your best are actually in that 100. So it's a fun little tool. It's their play with it. I have fun playing with it all the time, Um, but do I trust it 100%? Absolutely not, but it's super fun. Now. Keep in mind that light room is not just for photos. It also can store your videos. It's not a video editor by any stretch of the imagination, but it can certainly hold your videos. And so not only can you set your set, your phone and your IPad to automatically import videos from your phone into light room and then light room would send those up to the cloud and back them up. But you can also watch them right here. So I'm in my desktop light room application and you can see that I am doing some drone work here. So there's a bunch of drone shots, these air all D N. G. S from the drone, but then notice that right below here there is a video file and you can see that it's a video file because it has a play button and it's one minute and 18 seconds long, and it's an M V and M four v file. So if I double click that, you'll see that now I can see the video and there's a play timeline here on DSO. I can even go full screen with it and hit play. Now we're not going to actually play the video for you because it's just a personal video. I'll hit play on it, but we're not gonna actually play the audio because I don't actually have the rights to play it in a commercial environment. Um, but it's just a fun little video that we made for our family, and I'm gonna hit play, but we're going to mute the audio now again, you're going to notice that editing is completely unsupported. But that's okay, because that's not the purpose of Light Room is to edit videos. Now, if I wanna edit my videos, I'm gonna actually use a really video editor, So I might be using Adobe Premiere. Or you could use the simple version of Adobe Premiere, which is called Adobe Rush, R U S H. And so look that up. It's on the creative cloud. It's a really simple video editing program that you could use, but again, I'm not putting a bunch of videos in light room that air unedited because this is not an editor. So I only have finished videos in here, or videos of my kids doing fun things or a quick video of a behind the scenes type of thing for a photo shoot just so that I could find them really quickly. And if I need to do something with it, I can simply right click the video inside of the grid. And I can export that video as the original. And if I export it as the original, it's not gonna have toe do any computations or anything like that. Simply gonna take it and make a copy of it and put it somewhere. So that way I'm not working on the original image or the original video. I'm just sending a copy somewhere, and I'm gonna work on that copy. I'm and do something with that copy of it. So that's just a small list of important tips that I thought you should know about, and we've probably mentioned a number of them already throughout the workshop. But there you have it, a small list of important tips that you should know