Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom Interface Overview Part 1

all right well let's talk about a few things related to what we did in the previous session we had some questions earlier we have a chance to discuss kind of what would be best to cover in so let's look at a few things related to what we've already covered let's say first off you've imported your images in tow light room but when you imported them you didn't think about what kind of previews were made do you remember in the upper right of the import dialogue in fact if I hit import right now I should see it in the upper right there was a choice called build previews and there's where I could have chosen to build just what comes with the images which are what the top two choices aren't which means things that my camera produced then standard means one about the same size as your screen so you could view your images that fit in window size and it wouldn't have to sit there and say loading to show you the image he could tell you right away in one two one means a full size preview so you c...

ould zoom up one hundred percent view and check critical focus right away well let's say you didn't think about that at the time that you imported your images and you later on wanna change what kind of previews you have also we have the check box of build smart previews and that's the kind that allows you to adjust your image is when your hard drive isn't even attached that contained the pictures so let's say I didn't think about that and instead here I am the images have already been imported and I really would like to change what kind of previews we have well what I could do is click on the name of one of the folders over on the left side to view the images that are in that particular folder and then I could select all the images that air here I'm sure there's a menu command to do that but I've never used the menu command I'm so used to it it's command a on a mac for all control in windows for all uh and after doing so I go to the library menu in down near the bottom is a choice called previews and here is where I can force it to generate whatever kind of previews I'd like right now so if I didn't do it at the time I imported and now I know I'm going to go in and have to review these pictures I might say well I needed to create one two one previous because I'm going to have to check critical focus I've been shooting some people and if they're eyes aren't sharp pretty much throw the picture away I need to be able to click and really figure that out so if I right now where to choose build one toe one previews and let go I would see a progress bar in the upper left where the light room logo usually is just like I saw when I imported pictures in the previous session and it would start to create those previews this is also where you can tell it to build smart previous those are the kind of previews that allow you to edit your pictures when the drive that contains the images are not even attached s o we could choose all that kind of stuff the other thing we can choose is to discard those smart previews maybe we've already adjusted the pictures in those smart previous take up additional space on my hard drive and running low on space they need to free up some that space so I could choose that we're here discard one toe one previous because I've already checked the focus in having a full size preview of every single images in that folder it's going to make my previews file much bigger and take up more space in my drive I know that there's also a preference in light room then I'll try to show you later on not right now though that would allow you to have these one toe one previews automatically be discarded after like thirty days that type of thing so that you just don't have a huge previews file now actually go and look at what light room produced when we created this catalogue and we imported these two folders of images now this particular catalog I don't know if you remember or not but I went to the file menu and just chose new to create it and it asked me to type in a name the name that I happened enter was called monday I need to pick something it tells me that name at the very top right up here and I'm just going to go and find that file in my hard drive now there's a little hidden feature if you're on the macintosh that I don't believe it is available on windows because it's part of the mac operating system it's not part of light room and that is if you're ever working on a file in any program on the mac and it has the name of the file up here in what's known as the title bar you can hold down the command chiana mac and click on it and it will tell you where that file is located on your hard drive and I can simply choose the name of the folder that's there it'll take me there so here I am on the mac operating system it just brought me there if I'm on windows I mean you're not gonna have that feature there but usually I think it might put your catalog either in the documents folder or the pictures folder I don't remember which of the two is the default where it goes but let's just look at some of the features that aaron here right here this is our actual light room catalog there's monday dash l r for light room in c a t for catalog that means the things that we do in that catalog file are stored in here but it tries to store separately from our catalog the previews that we generate but if you're hard drive ever says that it's absolutely completely full I could delete this file and then all of my smart previews that were created the kind that allow me to just my images with my hard drive's not attached would go away but I'd suddenly free out ball the space that they were taking up and then up here are the other kinds of previews you might have like the one toe one previews or what's called the standard previews that type of stuff it's not that I would usually delete these files but in an emergency if I just I need some space and how am I going to get it I could throw away those smart previous so it holds them in these separate files and if I shrink these up we can see what the file sizes are here so if you look at the light rim catalog it's eleven megabytes inside that's not too big but we don't have all that many images into it yet but then the previous take up a lot of space so smart previews it's about a gigabyte for this number of images because I generated smart previews I believe for all of those images it's almost a thousand pictures and then up here the other previews are taking up a good amount of space as well so if you ever find your hard drive is starting to get full what you really could do is go to the folders within light room where you know you're already done processing the images you don't need to be able to view them separately and you can come in here and select all go to the library menu go down to previews and instead of deleting the file that contains every single preview in your entire catalogue you could say right now let's just discard those smart previews or let's get rid of one toe one previews if I happen to have generated them and that would free up some space in your hard drive then if I then ported my images in a decide that is something I didn't do right maybe that I didn't name my folders the way I'd like I didn't realize that I didn't have chosen the right name in there instead it's the name that I used last time important images well what I can do is over here in the folder list on the left side here you see the name of the folder I'm working on right now if I pressed the right mouse button when I'm on top of it one of the choices is renamed and so if I choose that maybe when I choose it I decide I don't need four digits for the year I don't even have images in my catalog that were shot in the in the nineteen hundreds that sounds it sounds like it's a long time ago but it takes time not that long ago so I'm only going to use two digits for my year and if I click save right now you can see that it ended up changing it here I'll do the same thing to this other I'll say rename and again I'll take off the two zero now I have sometimes wanted to do that when I organized my files with only two digits for the year but I just find when I glance at the number then it doesn't mean anything to me my brain just doesn't think of forty no seven is being year and month and so I often use all four s o now when I made those changes just so you know the folder list simply reflects how you've decided to organize your folders on your hard drive and any changes that I make to that folder structure here in light room should be reflected wherever those pictures are so right here is where those pictures were imported to I just opened the drive on my operating system and if you look at him do you see that now the file the folder names no longer have the two zero at the beginning if I go backto light room and I write click again in che's rename and I have the two zero on the end I'm going to do it to one of the two folders click save and now I go back to the finder the same folder do you see how it put it back in there so all it's doing is reflecting what's on your hard drive it's not like light room has some other way of organizing your pictures it's simply shows you how they've been done but here's one thing that I wouldn't suggest you do don't mess up light room you could mess up light room by going in your operating system in renaming this folder I'm gonna click on it and I'm going to change it by adding the two zero at the beginning so now the name that's on my hard drive is not the same name that was used in light room light room doesn't always know about changes that you make outside of light room and so right now look at what just happened to that folder it doesn't know where it is anymore do you see the question mark that question mark would usually be there if I were to disconnect this hard drive then there'd be a question mark on the other folder as well because it would know where it is on this drive isn't there it would be well going out looking for it and we just say I don't know what where it is now I can still view the images that are in that folder I can still do a lot of things to those images I just can't print them that high resolution because it would need to go back and look at the original file to get all the data from that file to do it so what do I do if for some reason I accidentally changed the name of the folder well what you can do is any time you see a folder in this list that has a question mark means it can't find it if the name of the hard drive is sitting right here and it's got a green light on it green light means it's hooked to your machine if that light turns I think it turns orange if I remember correctly it means your hard drive is almost full so you might want to use another hard drive that's got a green light on it meaning it's still have space and if instead it turns to just kind of a gray it means that this isn't it connected it's just driving in there so if there's question marks in your folders and this little light homicidal call it is gray it just means the drive is in there go find the dr hook it up the question marks will probably go away because they will be able to see the files again makes sense but this one the reason why it's not showing up is I made a change in my hard drive which confused light room it expected a folder of this name and didn't find it so here's how I fix it and move my mouth's on top of the name and I pressed the right mouse button now if you're on a mac and you only have one mouse button any time over the next three days or any time you ever hear anybody say press the right mouse button on a mac with one button on your mouse just hold on the control key in your keyboard and click control clicking is he going to write mouse button if you don't have a two button mouse now in here you'll find it says find missing folder so I'll choose that it brings up a standard open dialog box and I'm gonna navigate to the hard drive where the folder is and what was the name of that one blue ridge so I'll click on it with my renamed name up here in the lower right there's a choice called choose choose and now it updated the name and the question mark went away because it knows where it is so if you ever see the question marks first glance at what I will call a little light because I think about it it's the light on the front of my hard drive and see if it's colored if it's not we'll see what happens when I just connect this drive first eject it disconnect here now it'll take a moment to realize that I did something and usually I thought that went gray there goes okay do you see the little dark right in there which means the hard drive's not there if it's green it means it sees the hard drive and I think if it turns orange it means that drives almost full eso thatyou might have problems importing a lot of images on it and then I'll take the hard drive you see the question marks they're saying that can't find these folders make sense it can't find it because it drives not on so I plug in my drive should take in a moment for it amount to my desktop and it also taking a moment for light room to go and pay attention to that because it doesn't know if I'm looking right here in light room we're looking at another feature where it shouldn't spend time tio look here but you see the light turns back on these light up in the question marks go away then let's say that it's not the name of the folder that I didn't like instead I have one folder that's called africa trip and I wish it was in a folder instead called zimbabwe and then another one called botswana in another one called johannesburg and I didn't do that instead of generic one folder that's there so how could I end up doing that well if I come over here to my list of folders and I right click on a folder one of the choices within this is uh you get a couple things first off just so you know there's a choice called import to this folder if he ever choose that it would bring up the import dialog box like the import more photos and it would automatically choose that folder as the destination it's kind of an interesting little a shortcut but you see right here says create folder inside and then the name of this folder so I could choose that and call this I don't know what I'd want to call in this particular case but and hit create and now you'll see a little triangle next to that folder which indicates there's another folder within it and if I click the triangle to expand it I would see my newly created folder and you notice it says there's no pictures in it and it's great because there's nothing in it is just a folder with nothing within it so now I could come in here and if I want to put a image in there says cabin visit I can come over here and choose as many pictures I want I'll act like this is a cabin really isn't but hold shift click on the last image I want and I'll just drag these images onto that sub folder and let go and it warns me that it's actually going to move these files on my drive because that folder lives simply represents how my driver's structured so if you make a change to it light room it's going to make the same change in your drive and it's just trying to let you know about that and so I'm going to say don't show again and hit move and now you can see up there says moving files and you see them disappearing from here and now there's thirty of them in that folder called cabin visit and if I go to the finder and I find that dr felicity and I open up the folder called great smoky mountains somewhere in here there should be some folders probably at the bottom called cabin visits it created that sub folder on my hard drive and if I open it up there's probably thirty images in there and it says the bottom thirty items so it made those changes on my hard drive and uh so if you don't like the structure you currently have in your heart drop you decide you want to change it you could end up coming in here and making the changes right in light room and that would probably be best just because you have previews for your images so it's easy to tell which images you're dragging between particular locations but let's say for some reason I didn't think about that instead I went on my hard drive little sippy and I went into that same folder not in light room instead in my operating system in my operating system I can create a new folder in here I'm sure there's some way of doing that in the operating in the menus I always use the keyboard shark at on the mac it's shift command and for new if I type it I'll call this um give it some sort of name and I'm going to pick a siri's of images here and I'm going to drag it into that folder and then I'll close the folder so I've made changes outside of light room now if I were to and I probably should have been more careful about which images that I dragged but if I were to actually find those images within light room there would usually be a question mark question mark near the upper right of the images to say hey I don't know where this images but unfortunately I wasn't careful with what pictures I drag so I don't know how easy it will be to locate them here but light room will have an issue here is how to get light room to reevaluate that folder an update its structure so it reflects what's on your hard drive again so you go to that list of folders you right click on the folder you're thinking about and there's a choice called synchronized folder and what synchronized folder means is compare what we currently have here in light room so it's actually on your hard drive and when I choose synchronized folder it brings up some choices and it can import new photos because maybe you manually added the photos when light room wasn't running so light room doesn't know about it and it tells me there's eighteen of them that it found that are new and it can remove missing photos so if I manually deleted photos it would remove him from white room and it notices were eighteen that seems to be missing two numbers correspond means I actually moved them in then this stuff here we haven't talked about yet like import metadata I'm so gonna ignore that for now but the main thing here is says show import dialog box before importing what that would do is bring up that import dialog box we saw previously and you'd actually see the thumbnails for the pictures you're about to bring in I don't need that right now because I know what they are uh so I'm going to synchronize and now you see appearances importing two operations in progress and once it's done you will find that now this folder again reflects how my hard drive is structured but I don't suggest that you make changes outside of light room because there are other consequences that can happen within light room confuse it in other ways eso do that if you have to if you already have but try not to make a habit out of it yeah and that was a pewter leader I was asking if you move files in lightning can you go back and work with the history and prior at it still and that's as long as you move it from within light room otherwise if you move it outside in the finder other file browser you're gonna have to re sync it you'll have to re sync it and the problem is some of the changes you make in light room are recorded on ly in the light room catalog file in not on the files themselves from how he said changes are made to metadata which is his text attached to the files well most of the adjustment changes air made there but there are some um some changes that aren't stored in the file itself instead are on ly stored in the light room catalog and if you confuse light room enough by making enough weird changes you might lose a few changes you've made so the changes you make though if you set it up the way I'll show you how to set things up your adjustment settings will never be messed up those will always be on the image itself and it doesn't matter if you change the file name or you move it or whatever you do always have your adjustments built in but just now yeah don't make a habit out of changing things too much outside of light room to try to stick and light room so light room doesn't get confused okay so if you don't like the way you structured your hard drive up until now change it and just change it within light room by right clicking on folders who want to change their names or create a sub folder within them and then drag the images from this thumbnail view over to whatever folder you'd like to put them in it will move them on your hard drive for you so that light room reflects what's on your drive