Lessons

Lesson Info

Tour of the Library Module in Lightroom

While those air importing and building let's give you a quick tour of light room so that you know where everything is so in the library module again this is where you're going to work on selecting your photos so we're going to work on it organizing and selecting the photos you can see right over on the right hand side at the very top there is what's called a navigator the navigators simply shows you whatever image you happen to be selecting over here is going to show in here it's a pretty useless little tool so I close it by that little triangle closes it this becomes more useful in other areas like the developed module the catalog area is all photos so it is dealing with everything about your catalogue so if I hit all photos it would show every photo inside of my catalog if I had previous import it shows on lee those images that I just imported so if you're like where those photos that I just imported it's going to be right up here in the catalog area however right now you can see tha...

t both of them are a one hundred eighty because we have only made one import so all photographs also equals all imports are previous import so that's a nice little feature but you can also collapse that in order to save some space you'll only use it once in a while so you can always collapse that the next area is called folders folders is where things actually exist. These are the bookshelves in the library. So all of your images air here on the bookshelves, and it shows you right here that it is on the photos, dr in computer language, we call them volumes, so the drive is called photos, and you can see that it's green that means it's online. If for some reason it was offline, that would not be green, it would be a great and so we would want to then plug it in in order for it to find those photos. So inside of this folder is a bunch of and if I click on that folder it's going to show me all of these images, if I were to click on it, if I had a different folder in there, then it would show those images as well. So let's import another set of images just so you can see what it looks like if there are more. So I wanna click import again, and this time I'm going to go and look for another set of images. So I'm just going toe import a, um a short little wedding here, so there's a wedding that I shot, so this is professional wedding photography stuff, but I'm going to import those images but in order to speed the process along I'm going to tell it toe on lee bring in minimal previews that way it's just going really quickly do it and I'm gonna turn off the smart previous and that's on lee you should leave all of that on in general I'm just doing it so that we can do this quickly so it's not tying up our time and I'm gonna import and when I do now notice that there's going to be a second folder appear here very shortly that's going to have that other name on it so we're just kind of waiting for that to show up there it is so now we have the linen wedding is here and then here's jackson's images so watch what happens then if I click on a different folder all I see are the images from that wedding rather than jackson's photos I can click on jackson's and now I see jackson's I could click on the wedding now I see the wedding and because it's importing it takes a little time to pull him up okay but I could also go to the catalog and I could click on all photographs and now I will see the wedding and if I scrolled down I will see jackson so I have the ability to look at everything in my catalog or individual folders and this is why we don't just import everything in tow one huge folder we want our stacks of books to have aisles so that I know that this is the fiction section this is the nonfiction section this is the harlequin romance section and this is the science section eso these air just your sections and so I can click on him and the other advantages that when you work on images like this if you if you work on all your photographs light room is slow but if you work on a subsection of photographs like room is fast and so light room khun disregard the wedding while I'm working on jackson and when when I'm working on the wedding it khun disregard jackson and so I'm going to click on jackson so that that's what we're gonna work on right below that is what's called collections there is a difference between folders and collections anything in the folder area if I do something to it it will be done in the hard drive so if I right click this and I could do a lot of things when I right click it but if I renamed this folder so I'm gonna hit rename its going to ask me what I want to rename it too and if I said jackson uh two and I hit save now light room has renamed this jackson too if I go to my hard drive you can see that the hard drive has already been renamed jackson too what that tells you is that this folder area is aye, it is looking directly into your hard drive that doesn't mean it sees everything in your hard drive it on. Lee sees the things that you have imported in tow light room so we're going teo ever I understand the concept of importing them importing is telling light room toe look on the shelf see what's there and then make a note of it and show you it inside of light room importing does not mean it's bringing it into light room it means it's making a snapshot of it and light room's going to tell you what exists out there on that hard drive nothing ever sits in light rum and stays there it's never inside here you don't have to get it out it's in here light room just happens to be looking at it. Um and remember, you have to there's a difference there's copying your images onto your hard drive and then there's importing those into light room importing is just that concept of taking a snapshot up and looking at it. Okay, so the collections is different than the folders. The folders mean that you are looking at the actual folders of the hard drive collections or virtual they don't actually exist, so if I make a collection I can create a collection and let's just call this uh, fun photos so I've created a collection and I and it put this chair in it because the chair was already selected when you create a collection there's a little check box here that will allow you to include the selected photo so if you create a collection and then you go to the lenin wedding and grab one of those images and drag it into that collection now you have two images one from the jackson shoe and one from the lenin shoot and they're in completely different folders completely different folders but they're both showing in what looks like one folder so this looks like it's one folder but it's actually not even existing it's a reference to these two so it looks like a folder but it's not any it's not anywhere you can't go to this folder on your hard drive and then below that are published services and we won't get into published services during this workshop but you can learn more about published services in some of my other workshops here on creative life okay, so now that we know the difference between a folder and a collection we wantto work within the folders we can organize within the folders if you want to create folders inside of those folders you khun right click the folder and you can uh create a folder inside it so you hit create folder inside that folder you're going to name that folder so we'll just call this selection's the things that we like and hit create and now you can see that I've got a folder inside of there that could create another folder in there and I could say, uh, reject reject and I could create that and now I have two folders inside of my folders and watch what happens when I write click this and I show it in that well actually we can just if you want to see where a folder is and this is the beauty of light room is that once you have these folders in if you ever forget oh my images I don't know where they are I don't know what hard drive there on all you have to do is right click the folder and then go down and say show this full show this showing find her there if you're on a pc it'll say show and explore and this were saying show and finder so I'm going to click on that and it will literally open up the folder where it exists. So here is the folder where it exists it's showing you where it is and notice that now I have some folders in here called rejects and selections because everything that you do inside of the folders area is done everywhere all right so that's what all the left hand side on that's all organizational stuff below the grid so the grid is in the middle here below that is a filmstrip on the filmstrip just allows you to see all your images even if you're looking at this image all by itself if you hit the e key it will show it as one so that's the key and if you hit the seiki it will compare to images so it'll compare this image to the next image so if we weaken uh shift click to hear so I clicked them then I hit the shift key and click to here so now I'm seeing both and now if I just hit the arrow key it cycles through the photos so I can choose and say okay I'm just looking for one that's better than the one I like that one better so if you like that one better than you can come and click on this little thing right here and it will shift it over and say that's the new selection and then you khun keep selecting through so that's the comparator mode you can also go to so hee is the loop mode which gives you one image of the time g takes you to the grid which gives you all the images see takes you the compare that compares to side by side and then n takes you to the survey so that's n as in nancy it takes you to the survey mode so that you can see and when this year in the survey mode if you click on an image and then you hold down the shift key and click on an image further down the line. It will pull up all of those images, and then you can click on the next image and you can go those four images of the time so you can compare multiple images at one time. So that's the survey mode. And then, of course, in light room c c there's something called the face mode or people mode that's something that we discuss in, uh, other workshops, but that allows for facial recognition. Okay. On the right hand side is the history graham history am is basically all the information about how much red there is, how much green there is, how much blue there is what's light, what's, dark it's, the on ly way that you truly know what your photograph looks like because that's all the data that tells you if something is too dark or too light in this instance, this history ram is perfect for this photograph because most of it is dark so you can see there's a lot of darkness in the photograph and then there's a little bit of light in the photograph, which is his face and you know, his his shirt and stuff like that, okay? Then below that is the quick develop area the quick develop area allows you to quickly adjust images by clicking on them, so if I'm looking at a siri's of images or one image let's say I'm just looking at let's find a better version of him uh I'm going to go all the way to the end because I happen to know that one of my favorite images is right here somewhere all done there that's my favorite image I'm um so I'm going to hit the one key to give it a one star or I could hit the peaky to give it a pick so now it's gotta pick and one star and I'm going to adjust it I can adjust it with the controls over here so I can say increase the exposure a little bit so these air big exposure jumps right here one one stop increments and these air third stop increments and if you hold down the shift key it is six stop in increments and that's in light room five six and cc lightened fine doesn't have some of these options. Okay, so then I can also increase the shadows. I can do a lot of stuff from right here this is called the quick developed area it's so that you're going to just things while you're looking at him without having to go to the developed module also, you have key wording areas here and you'll notice that all the key words that we put in are in there but you could add more for instance in this he has a bat so I could say baseball bat so now I know that this image has a baseball bat, so the key wording areas there there's also a metadata area where you could enter more information about the photograph and then there's a comments areas so that if you shared it on facebook you would be able to see the comments that people making their okay that is in a nutshell the entire library module other than one a thing which is how you search so if you go into the grid, which is the geeky and go up to the very top, there is what's called a library filter that library filter allows you to search by text bye attributes and by metadata metadata is things like lenses and camera body's attributes is whether it's got a flag or a star or a color rating to it text is searching by those keywords, so I concerned for baseball bat and this image would be the only one that would come up so play around with your library filters and you will find that you can search for things as long as you've been entering data, so as long as you've been clicking on images and hitting one two, three, four, five those your stars six, seven, eight and nine are your colors, so you can add, like a cia that's, blue that's, the nine key s o. Once you do that and pick is p and u is unpick, and x is reject. And so all of those keys. If you're entering that data as you're working, then you will be able to search for those images. Okay, so we have covered our library module that's, how you organize things.