Lessons
Intro to Lightroom and Catalogs
10:12 2Setting Preferences in Lightroom
05:16 3Importing Photos into Lightroom
23:45 4Tour of the Library Module in Lightroom
15:56 5Develop Module and Adjusting Photos in Lightroom
11:17 6Sharing and Exporting Photos from Lightroom
09:53 7Working with Video in Lightroom and Next Steps
06:41Lesson Info
Intro to Lightroom and Catalogs
Hi and welcome to light room one o one I'm jared platt, and if you are just opening light room and you've never used it before than this courses definitely for you, we're going to take you through light room show you what's in light room, we're going to tell you all about the different modules in light room and how you can use them. We're going to teach you how to import. We're going to teach you how to share your images, adjust your image, is play with your images and will even show you how to do a little bit with video. S o hold on to your hats, we're going to teach you everything you need to know about light room to start using it. All right? The first thing that we have to do is we have to start light room now. I don't know if you have purchased a disc or if you've downloaded it, but what you first need to do is install it. I'm gonna assume that you already have light room installed, and now we're going to open it for the very first time. So when you come to your menu bar and wheth...
er you're on a pc or a mac, this is generally going toby operate the same. Way, because light room is across platform application, so it works pretty much the same way on both platforms, so I'm going to open up light room and if I hold down the altar or the option key while I'm holding down light room it's going to give me a dialog box, that dialogue box is going to be a dialog box that asks me what I want to do for the very first time inside of light room. Now ifit's, if it truly is the first time that you've actually operated light room, then it's actually going to give you that choice right at the beginning because it's not gonna have a light room catalog for youto work in and I'll tell you a little bit about catalogs in just a minute, so I'm going to open up this dialog box and it's going to ask me if I want to create a new catalogue or if I want to choose a catalogue, I'm going to create a brand new catalogue here if you open light room for the first time, you have to create a new catalog because that is what light room wants to use. So when I had created new catalog, it's goingto ask me where I want to put that catalog light room would prefer. To put your catalogues in the pictures folder, which is a great place for your light from catalogue and it's generally going to put it inside of a folder called light room, which also makes a lot of sense, so once we're here, I'm going to name my catalogue and you can name it anything you like. I'm going to just call it my working catalog, you can call it anything you can call it family photos, you can call it work photos, you can call it catalog doesn't matter just name it something that you know where it is and how to find it. So the pathway to that, then again, is pictures like room that's where you're going into your pictures folder in a light room folder. You're going to find that working catalog if you don't already have a light room folder inside of your pictures folder, you can always create it on the way in, so I do that in a mac by cliffs, clicking on this button called new folder, but you could do it also on a pc on dh. Then I'm going to hit create once I've hit create light room will go into action and it will open up a very blank light room interface now that we have that and if you are, if you were opening up light room c c if you have connected yourself to the cloud, then you're going to have the option to turn on those cloud services. But if you're opening light room six, you won't have access to the cloud, and therefore you won't have to worry about cloud access and that's what this is asking me for the first time, do I want to take light room with me everywhere on my phone? I'm going to turn that off because I'm going to assume that you might not be operating with it. Okay, so now that we have open light room, you can see that there are no photos in it, it isn't, and as a blank slate. All right, I want to hide light room for a minute because I want to talk about catalog itself. What is light room? Light room is just like your brain light room is a catalogue of information about photographs, it doesn't actually contain photographs, it knows where they are, and it knows where you put them and it knows if they're black and white or if their color it knows what, how big they are. It even knows something about them because you can put keywords and stuff like that in them to find things so knows a lot about the photographs, but they don't actually exist inside my brain. In the same way that I happen to know where I put my keys yesterday, but the keys are in my brain, I can just picture that they're in a particular covered at my house, and so I don't know where my keys are. I know where my camera is, I know where this book is, I know where you guys are sitting on the couch, and so I know a lot about things, but none of you are in my brain, you're out there, I have pictures of you in my brain, and if I close my eyes, I can still see you in the pictures in my brain. And so that's what light rooms, catalogs ours just little brains that know a lot about where the photos are, what their name is and what they look like, and then if they adjust him, they know kind of what they've done to adjust them. So for instance, if you're wearing a blue shirt, it's, very easy for me to extrapolating, decide what you would look like wearing a red shirt, and so I and my brain can change your shirt from blue to red, but it doesn't mean that you actually change from blue to red shirts, I just can picture it that way. And then I could finally tell you at the very end I could say, hey, I want you to change to a red shirt instead of a blue shirt on guy could do that so that's really what light room is? You could also think of it as a card catalog system for those of you who are old enough to have been in a library where you actually thumb through the card catalogs to find your cat your book so I did this in college I would thumb through a card catalog I find something that looked like the right book and I would read it and say okay, this is a book about the french revolution and it is dewey decimal system such and such a location and then I had to walk through long stacks of books to find it and I would grab it and pull it out and greet it and then I would know what's in the book I could put it back on the shelf I knew where to find it because it's in the card catalog that's what light room is as a catalogue so it's cataloging system the books are not in the card catalog they're out on the shelves. Okay, let me show you are one exists so if I open up my mackintosh hard drive and I go to my pictures folder and I go to light room so I go to the light room folder. You will see that there is a folder called working catalog. We just made that folder, and when I open it up, you will find that it's got to maine files in it. The first one is the catalog itself that is, the card catalogue or the brain that holds all the information, and then right alongside it is one called working catalog previews, and that previews is a snapshot of all the images that are inside of light rooms catalog. So when you import a photograph into light room, the photograph itself does not go into light room. Light room just simply opens it up and looks at it and takes a snapshot, and it keeps the snapshot inside of this little, uh, previews area. This this folder called previews. So once it has that, then it no longer has to go in reference that all the time, and you can look at your photos with that out it having to reference the photos that just makes the whole process faster. It's much faster to look at a catalogue of images than it is to look at the images themselves, because that slows down your computer. The other two files that you see down here are files that are used to protect your light room catalog against. Corruption and I'm not talking about political corruption. I'm talking about the data itself being corrupted if, for some reason there's a glitch in light room and or your computer shuts down or the power goes off, those two files that are highlighted here helped protect you against losing all of the work that you've done on your photos. When you restart light room, it will then look to these files to help rebuild light room and bring you back two seconds before whatever catastrophe occurred happens, all right, so that is where everything exists again. If you don't know where that is, it is in the pictures folder inside of the light room folder inside of the working catalog that's, where all your catalogue stuff exists. Okay, now, once you have light room open, and by the way, if you're wondering how I'm switching back and forth between one place and another to hide it, I'm hitting command or control h I don't know if that's the same on the pc, but on the mac, it is command h, and if I'm trying to go between different programs, I'm hitting command tab on a mac and there's, a similar hockey in a pc that's very close to that that allows me to kind of cycle between different programs just so that you know how I'm doing that quickly. Otherwise, you could just go back down to your menu bar and click on the light room logo and its backup in operation.
Ratings and Reviews
Jim Mundy
Great course but it really really is just the tip of the iceberg. I feel like I know what I would use Lightroom for in my work. But what is not how. So I liked the course but I'm anxious to go to the next one - which for me will be Lightroom CC for Beginners. I met Jared over on a Canon digital workflow course and loved his teaching style. I'm so glad to see that he has a bunch of content on Creative Live. So, great course but you'll get just about what you'd expect for $29 and one hour of Jared's time and your time.
Michelle Martin
Really useful, quick intro to Lightroom that gave me the confidence to start using it and playing around with it. Well taught and I learned a lot. Worth the price for sure and now I feel like I have a solid foundation to start editing my photos like a pro. Thanks, Jared!
Manas Trivedi
Jared does an excellent walk-through of the absolute basics of LR in this video series. I would recommend watching this (free) rebroadcast over at least twice and invest in his LR 101 course on CL. The 101 course is where the real gist of making full use of LR lies - I did exactly this and am quite happy with my decision. Thanks JP - doing an awesome service you are, Sire :)
Student Work
Related Classes
Adobe Lightroom