Lessons

Lesson Info

A Tour of Lightroom Classic

now, before we get started here today, I want to walk through Light room just as a brief introduction and those of you who know Lightroom Well, just, just come along on the journey with us. But this is for those people who are not quite as comfortable inside of Lightroom Classic. I just want to give you an overview, make sure you know where everything is and those of you who already know you might learn a little bit. But let's let's all get on the same playing field. So let's start here inside of Lightroom in what we call the library module. So up on the top right hand corner of Lightroom Classic, you will find a library module, a develop module, map, module, Book module. Print module and a web module. And then a little cloud up here. This cloud tells you what is happening in the cloud because Lightroom Classic can be tied to the cloud for sharing purposes, for sending things to people. And also for backup purposes, sharing it with yourself onto your iphone, that kind of stuff. So thes...

e are called modules and they are the type of thing we're doing. And so in the library module is where we organize our photos, that's where we work on figuring out what we want to do with them. We look at. We add stars to it by simply clicking on an image. And then once we clicked on it, we can give it a one star, two star, three star four star five star. Just by clicking on the 12345. We can also make little color labels for them by clicking on 6789 or zero, takes it back to zero stars. So the numbers give you ways of organizing your photographs over on the left hand side, you'll see an area that says folders. And in the folders you'll see different hard drives. So there's one hard drive called photos. And in photos you'll find that you can drop it down and you can see different folders. And these are actual folders on the computer. So their physical locations on the computer, they're not virtual. They're physical places on the computer where images are stored. And so if you drop into them and just kind of Keep breaking down. So you can see that there's images 2018 Europe travel. And then that's where all of these photos are stored, as in this folder on my computer, in the photos drive. So folders are physical locations inside of the collections area. This is a panel. So inside of the collection panel, you'll find a bunch of collections. Now they look a lot like folders, but they're not they're not folders, they are they're not physical locations. They're not specific folders on your computer. They are virtual locations. And so you can have the same photo in 15 different collections and there will still only be one photo. So it doesn't matter if you put this photo in five different collections. It will only have one version and it's a reference to that version. So the version stays in the folder where it already exists and then it's referenced by five different collections. And so that's collections. Collections are virtual locations and you'll notice today that I'm going to use the collections to show you things. I've organized my lessons here by different activities and all of those are in collections but it makes it easier for me to present them to you. I don't have to put them in different folders and move them around. I can just reference them in a virtual location. So collections are really, really useful. And then below that you'll see the published services. Those are just publish collections. You put things in a virtual place on your computer and then that ties to some kind of a cloud service like for instance smugmug or pixie set, which is where you can build a website from your photos directly from Lightroom. Those are things we're not going to cover here today, but I need you to understand that folders are physical locations and that collections are virtual locations And today you're going to see me working inside of collections. And so if you're wondering where is he going? And where is he getting those photos? I'm getting them from my collections. Uh that's something that you don't need to worry about. I want you to put your editing hat on today because that's where we're gonna be working now. Below this grid, you'll find a filmstrip and this filmstrip is going to be very active today because the filmstrip can always be visible even while you're working on one photo inside of the develop module. And so we're going to be working on this film strip today and you can kind of scroll back and forth right to left with your mouse and you can choose images from there and you'll notice that it's also choosing them up in the grid and when we're in the develop module, it's going to change the image we're working on. So this is a really nice way to find your images. However, whenever I want to find a very specific image, I'm always going to go back to this library module and then I'm going to choose a collection that I want to work from. And then once I have that collection selected, then only the images from that collection are going to show up in my filmstrip. Now, over on the right hand side, you'll see that there's a history graham up at the top and that's great for looking at the exposure of your images. But also below that, you'll see a quick developed area. Now quick develop area has some buttons in it. Like for instance, exposure and contrast and highlights All of these things can be adjusted right here and anything that I have selected is going to be adjusted. So if I click on one image and I start adjusting it with this, it's going to adjust that one image. But if I hold the shift key down and then click on some other image so that I'm I've got a bunch of images selected. Then anything that I do here in this quick develop area is going to be done to all of them all at once. And so the quick develop area is a very easy way to adjust a lot of images. However you can kind of see how small they are and so it's not really a good idea to do a lot of adjusting here inside of the library module, especially when you're looking at a grid. But there is a reason for the quick develop area and I will show that to you a little bit later. Um it's a it's a very different method of adjusting and it's useful but in most cases we're going to stick to the develop module and we'll do all of our real editing there and then occasionally we might need to come back to the quick develop area in order to do some relative adjustments. And so we'll teach you about relative adjustments in a little while. Then below you'll see keywords where you can add things that will help you find those images as well as metadata and that's a really good quick tour of the entire library module. The next module is the develop module and the develop module is where we're going to spend most of our time in this course and on the left hand side, you'll see that there's a navigator that allows you to click on it to zoom in, you can drag your cursor around and quickly get to different parts of the image and then double click it to zoom back out Above the Navigator. Really important are some zoom levels, so I have the ability to choose fit or Phil if I click on fill, it fills that whole entire square, but I don't get to see the crop. Um so I prefer to be either on fit or I want to be at 100% which allows me to see how sharp something is. And then also I have the ability to go to a higher level of zoom. So if I go here, you can see that I've got a specific zoom amount and I can choose that zoom amount up to 1600% Which is uh at the pixel level, so that's really far in there and I've never used 1600%. However, um I do use 200% sometimes and you'll see that happen in this course here today. Now below the navigator are are presets and we're gonna talk about presets in a while um and then below that is snapshots anytime you have come to a point where you think I have worked on this image and I kind of like this, but I think I'm gonna go a little further, Then it's a good idea to click on, add to create a new snapshot and that will then register the time and the date that you got to that point. And you could name it if you want as well. And that'll at least give you the ability to go back to that point without having to click the undo button 50 times. You can just register different types of progress on your image. So snapshots is a really good thing to know about the history is obviously you can go back and see the entire history of the photograph itself and then below that are the collections, which is awesome because in the develop module itself, you have the ability to go to your collections and move back and forth between the collections without having to go back to the library module. So that's really useful as well. And below those you'll find a copy and paste button which is to copy and paste settings that we've put on one photo or another. Although I'm going to show you how we almost never use these at the very bottom of the screen. You'll see our film strip. That's how we're going to get around to images really quickly and I can grab the line above the filmstrip and I can increase or decrease it so I can make it very small or I can make it very large. I'm going to keep it nice and large so that we can see the images that were about to select. But above the filmstrip, you're going to see a gray bar here. This gray bar is the toolbar and it is context sensitive. So it changes based on what we're doing at the moment. And the way that you get this is by clicking on the T key so you'll notice T takes away that gray bar and then t brings it back because it's the toolbar. So we have the toolbar t brings it in and out and in that tool bar you're going to see different modes of viewing the images and then as we do things, other items are going to show up in this. So it's a very useful bar to know where it is. If I tell you that we're going to the toolbar and you don't see yours. Just click on the Tiki and bring up your toolbars so that you can see it then on the right hand side is where all of the developed magic happens. So at the top you'll see the history Graham again, very useful information below the hissed a Gram is a little indicator as to whether or not you have the original or the smart preview in play. So right now you can see that I've got a smart preview built of the images but I also have the original. However, if I were to remove that disc lightroom would not be able to see it and it would just tell me that there is a smart preview. Now, the smart preview allows me to edit the photo even when the original is not present. And you can build those previews on import when you click on import, just click on this little check box that says build smart previews and that will allow you to have access to all of your images and work on your images as long as you have the catalog on your say laptop while you're traveling, even if you don't have the original files present. So just build those on import. If for some reason you haven't built them on import, you can always highlight your images inside of the library module and go to the library menu and click on preview, build smart previews and that will build those smart previews after import. So either way build those smart previews so that you have access to editing and the develop module and all of the powerful work that you can do here, you can do all that whether or not you have the originals present below that, you'll see the crop tool, you'll see a spot removal tool, you'll see the red eye and you'll also see the masking tool. Now it's important to know that this tool is old but new, So it's been around for a while but before we called it local adjustments and there was a brush and there was a gradient and there was a circular gradient and so those things have been around for a number of years. But as of 2021 towards the end of 2021 we got a masking update and so now it's just called the masking tool and when we go into the masking tool we'll have all sorts of tools available to us far beyond what we had before and we're gonna talk a lot about those because we're gonna have so much fun with those masking tools but I'm gonna save it for later so that it's kind of like a little surprise so just know that that's the masking tool and we're gonna be there a lot today. Below that you'll see the basic adjustment area which has the same controls, generally speaking as the quick develop area but it's very exact, so quick develop in the library is relative and this is exact and so I'll talk about the difference in a little bit and then of course below that is tone curve and the color area, color grading, detail, lens correction, transform effects and calibration. So all of these tools we're going to go through and we're working on them throughout this course and then below that you're gonna see the sync button and the reset button right now mine has turned on auto sync but there's a little button right next to it that can turn off auto sync and it just becomes a sink button, so you'll see the sink and the reset button are below our adjustments and finally the sync button and the reset button and this auto sync is on right now. But if I click on this little toggle next to it, I can turn it off. And so now it's just a sync button. But most of the time I'm living in auto sync and I'm going to tell you more about that as well. Now let's move on beyond the develop module just so that you can see what exists. And again, we're going to live in the develop module in this course because this is about editing. But I want you to see that there are other things available and there are plenty of lessons right here on Creative Live that will teach you how to use these other modules as well. So we have the map module which shows us a map and shows us where our photos are being taken. And then there's the book module which allows us to build books from our photos. Then there's the print module and the print module is for people who have a printer at home. Um and they want to quickly make prints but they don't want to have to keep setting up all their settings for the printer all the time. And then there's a web module which quite frankly between you and me should not even exist because it makes really old looking websites. And if you don't want to see it anymore, which I don't want to see it ever again because it's worthless to me, I'm going to right click and I can choose which of these I want to show. You can also see that there's a slide show module that I've turned off and that's because it's also fairly worthless. And so I'm going to turn off the web module. And so now we just have the ones that I use, which is library, develop map book and print. The other two slideshow and Web are old. They're antiquated and they hardly make any sense because there are so many better tools out there right now. So, but again, we're going to talk about the develop module today. So that is your basic tour of Lightroom classic.