Class Introduction
Lesson 1 from: Mastering Catalogs and Collections in Lightroom CCRafael "RC" Concepcion
Class Introduction
Lesson 1 from: Mastering Catalogs and Collections in Lightroom CCRafael "RC" Concepcion
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Lesson Info
Class Introduction
(audience applauding) Thank you so much, guys, thank you so much. So, this class is kinda cool. It's probably one of my favorite classes to give, even though it's probably one of the simplest classes that you can work with. It has everything to do with the fact -- now mind you, I love Lightroom. Like, you guys are using Lightroom, right, normally using Lightroom, doing okay. Never used it, first time? You're gonna, you're right in the right spot. You're totally, totally cool. The problem I think sometimes with Lightroom training, in general, is we tend to focus on the second half of a two-step process. I'll tell you what I mean in a second. As photographers, we go out and we shoot all the time, right, so I go out, grab my camera, and I'm shootin', shootin', shootin'. I'm like, everything's import, import, import. And, all, every time that people start talking about this kind of stuff, they usually have this concept of this is how you develop. You could develop some pictures. It's gre...
at, you could develop. You could develop, this is how you develop, this is how you develop, this is how you develop. And you hear it, and you go out, and you're like, "Yes, I gotta go," right? "I got my card right here." "I'm gonna develop," and you put it in and you start doing stuff, and what happens is you start developing and developing and developing and developing, and then you're like, "Uh, my hard drive's full. "Like, I don't know what to do now." And you're like, "Oh, I got it. "I'm just gonna grab, I'm gonna buy a removable hard drive, "plug it in, and develop, develop, develop," and then this thing fills up. And, yeah, I know, right, right? So it's the same thing. So what happens is, you do that, and then you're like, what's the solution? You buy another one, and then you buy another one, and then you buy another one, and you buy another one, and then at one point, like three months, four months, five months down the road, you get a message that says 'file not found', or 'the file is missing', and you start getting all these freak-out messages. And you're like, uh, I don't know where anything is. I don't know how to find anything that I'm working on. Nobody told me about that part. Nobody told me about the first part of the process, which is, as a photographer, yes, you do develop and you do make pictures that are great, but you spend a lot more time organizing garbage. It's like that with me, right? So I spend a lot more time shooting and organizing and getting everything ready, and then out of that, maybe some of those things become something that I could put up somewhere. So not a lot of attention is put into that, and so, I spend a lot of private time on my site and training clients and doing that kind of stuff. I'll be flown around the world, right? And I don't say that, I just mean that because it's happening everywhere, but you'll sit somewhere, and I'm like, "Alright great, we're gonna go do a shoot. "We're gonna go grab this stuff." They're like, "No, actually, buddy, you're here "because this catalog is a mess." I have five catalogs, I have 10 hard drives, I don't know what anything is. And I'm like, "But I wanted to go outside. "I wanted to go do" ... So, what I wanna do is I wanna be able to impart to you some general things that I think you should keep in mind when you're working with Lightroom catalogs, and ... Kinda nerd out a little bit, too, because I get a little geeked out about some stuff. So, how do I do that? Let's take a very big step back, right? A lot of the times, I tend to talk about technology, but I don't like talking about technology. I think it's more appropriate to kind of give analogy, and to try to be able to make this stick a little bit better for you. So I'll go off on random tangents and tell random stories all the time. So if anybody wants to see anything in the chat, by all means, just go ahead and stop me. I have my coffee, and we'll be good. But, let's take a step back, and actually first talk about what a Lightroom catalog is, before we do anything else. And to do that, I have my notebook. So imagine if this was our house. And all of a sudden, you have a notebook. Put that notebook down, right? So, somebody knocks at the door. (knocking) You open the door, and they go, "Hey, RC, listen, "I have a bunch of pictures, right? "I have a box of pictures. "I want you to grab these pictures, and I want you to go "do something with them. "Store them for me." And you're like, "Okay, cool." You grab the box of pictures and go look around, and you're like, "Oh, you know what? "I have some space in the living room, "so I'm gonna go ahead in my living room "next to the sofa, I'm gonna put the box of pictures down." Cool, stay right there. (knocking) Knock at the door comes, and now you're like, "Oh, I gotta go get the door." Comes back, "Hey listen, I got another "box of pictures for you. "Can you hold these for me? You turn around, you're like, "Okay, cool." You grab 'em, you're like, "Uh." Living room's full, I gotta put 'em in the bedroom. Cool, I'm gonna put 'em in the bedroom next to the dresser, everything's good. (knocking) Door, you go and grab it, another box of pictures comes in, you're like, well, living room's taken, bedrooms -- bathroom, gonna put 'em in the bathroom, top of the little thing, right? That's where you hide stuff. So, now I have pictures in the bathroom, I have pictures in the living room, I have pictures in the bedroom. You could kind of see how -- (knocking) every single time that somebody knocks and puts some stuff, it's gonna be really hard to keep track of where everything is, right? So, you buy a notebook. And you turn around and you go, "Okay, cool, got it." "Uh, I put those pictures, the first pictures that came in, I put them in the living room, and I put 'em over by the dresser. And I took those other pictures and I put them over here inside of the bedroom, and I took those other pictures and I put them inside of the bathroom. So your notebook manages everything for you. So now, you go to the bathroom, and, you can't think of anything else better to do, so you start going through pictures. You got some time, at least, I have time. (audience laughs) Sometimes. So you sit, I don't know why, you sit, you're cleaning, and you're waiting for something to dissolve I guess, or something, and you're like, "You know, it would be a good idea "for me to go through these pictures" and just kind of be like, these are my -- these are the best ones. Let me put these over here. Let me reorganize these; this doesn't make sense. And you sequence the pictures and you do some stuff with the pictures. And you're like ... This looks good now, this box right here in the bathroom. You know what, I'm probably gonna write that down. And you go inside here and go, the ones that are in the bathroom I got 'em all set up. And you keep this, and you continue to do that throughout the entire time that you're sitting at the house and every knock at the door, you grab and you organize. And this notebook becomes the record of where those pictures are in your house, and what you've done with those pictures. That's a Lightroom catalog. That's pretty much all it is. Like, when you take a look at it, Lightroom is just a giant hall monitor, and all it does, yes, it does develop pictures beautifully, but the large portion of it has everything to do with keeping your stuff organized. And I tell this to people right off the bat, even though it sounds overly simplistic, because there's so many times that people will stop me. They're like, "Look, I got a backup strategy. "I am all set. "I backed up my catalog, I put it on a removable drive, "and I'm done. "The computer, I could format it and do the whole," and I'm like, "Oh, no, no, you're not, "no you're not, not at all." It is literally the equivalent of your house being on fire, you running in and going, "I got the notebook, we're good," and running out. And it's all of the memories. You're just like, "Yup, that burned, yeah, that burned, "yeah, that burned." So, I tell people right off the bat, understand that your catalog is your notebook. It's a digital notebook that keeps track of where your things are and what you have done with them. Where they are: removable drive, NAS unit, thumb drives, SD cards, and what you've done with 'em, rank, sort, pick, flag, metadata, any kind of information that you could add sits inside of this database, a notebook of it. So once we know that, then we know how to be able to work with stuff. So, I'm gonna put that away. Is everybody okay with that part so far? Pretty straightforward, right? On average, I usually tell people, you want to get all of your stuff inside of one notebook, right off the bat. There are photographers that will go out there and go, "Every job that I do "is inside of separate catalogs." And separate catalogs and you put everything in separate catalogs and you run everything, or one catalog per year. And I will tell you right off the bat, like if you're watching this, workflow, this is all workflow-based stuff. And workflow is a lot like pasta sauce. Workflow's pasta sauce. Everybody's pasta sauce is the best. Everybody else's pasta sauce sucks. (audience chuckles) That just happens, that's the way workflow works, so, I've written books, I've done certification exams, I've written certification exams, I've done all this kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, this is still like pasta sauce. This is how things work for me. Other people can tell you other things. The only difference between what they tell you and what I tell you is that I'm right. (audience laughs) So in that, if we get that, we'll be just fine. We'll be totally okay. (audience laughs) So we'll go ahead and we'll start talking about this entire concept of importing most of this stuff, and I figured I didn't want to just do the catalog and the collection part. I wanted to kind of show you guys a couple of other things, so catalog and collections plus.
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