Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom Interface Overview Part 2

now let's look at a little bit of an overview of how to think about light room is a hole because so far all we've done is important stuff into it now there are some files I want to get to that I made for this class in since we started out with a brand new catalog they're not currently in here I want to get them in here just so I can access the files I need to to do that I'm going to import a catalogue into this one so this could be similar to me right now being at home on a desktop machine a tower kind of machine and I come home with my laptop and I want to get the images off that laptop onto this machine or anything like that in this case I'm just going to the catalog but file import from another catalog I made a catalogue just for this class and I just want to make sure that I have the files for it it's right there but we'll talk more about how you would actually use that uh later on and let's see here from count along teo was real good yeah I don't want to move them so here I could ...

tell a copy to a new location mean like get it off my laptop hard drive and onto my normal hard drive but I'm going to say add new photos to the catalog don't move him and I'll just choose important this you'll understand more later once we've already talked a lot about catalogs and dealing with them for now I just needed some files that I had prepped earlier because I've set up some things in here to be able to easily get teo all right so let's take a look at light room asshole first off light room has on each side of your screen little panels that can show up and right now I don't have all of them visible but if you look on each edge of my screen you will find a small trying well if I were to click on the small triangle and see one's right here that little guy if I click on that that would collapse or expand whatever panel would usually show up on that side of the screen and there's a panel that could show up in each side of your screen so that means that the top right now I have a very small panel showing up up there but there's a triangle if I wanted it to go away I had clicked there and it would collapse it down I can click on the one on the left collapse it down and then on the right side of my screen click on its triangle and I'd see another panel so each side of my screen including the bottom can have these little panels to show up now sometimes those panels are overly useful and sometimes they get in your way because sometimes you want to concentrate on these thumbnails you see of your pictures or you have a picture filling the screen you don't want the panel hog in the space so that's why you can go over here to the little arrows click on them to expand that panel and get to whatever settings would usually be there I know we haven't gotten into what settings are there yet so you don't know how special they are or anything but then if you look at that little triangle it can actually have different appearances right now you notice it's kind of dotted it's not a solid triangle but now you see it is a solid triangle what that's the difference there well there's a way you can get those panels teo either stay there where you have to manually click this little triangle make it go away where they could automatically show up where if I just hover over there on the edge without even clicking it would show up automatically that could be convenient for a panel you only need to use for a second and you're going to go over there makes a little change for a second when you mouse away it just goes away well how do I control that you right click on the little triangle if you right click on the triangle in any side of your screen you're going to find these choices and the choice called manual is the one where it's not going to mess with those panels you have to do all the control yourself if you should choose auto show auto hide and show then whenever you move away from the edge is going to disappear in whatever you move your mouth until you we touched the edge it will show up and that type of stuff with auto hide it's I think it's never going to show up on its own you'll have to click to get it to show up but then when you move away it would hide so it's up to you which setting you'd like what I would do is for those panels that you only use on occasion maybe having automatically showing high and for those panels that use all the time and you'd be annoyed if it wasn't there then you might want to set it to manual but what I did to get to this menu is they went to one of those triangles and I control clicked and I chose how I wanted to act so the one on the left side of my screen is the one I need to get to so often that I might want to leave it on the manual setting so it just stays there until I do something to make it go away the others though I could have so they only show up when I get to the edge of my screen and therefore I can have the area where my thumbnails are or where my main images really dominate the space so that's uh nice but just so you can see those your you know it's there all set him to manual so that they don't just start disappearing now look at how little space I have for my pictures the thing at the bottom is called the filmstrip we probably won't start using it until we started just in pictures which will be later on today so I'm going to collapse it down and we'll just use the two side panels on the top one for now all right so in the upper right you're going to find some choices these here are the different modules there in light room and you can have library module which is where you see thumbnails of your pictures you can organize things even have developed which is where you adjust your pictures and you khun do map and other things but some of versions of light room you will find have choices like webb in book and print the mind don't have that's because you khun right click on that area and choose which one show up so if you absolutely never produce a book in your lifetime you have no plans to make a book why see that choice there all the time so if I choose it it will show up though I just right click on this area there's a choice called show all light room starts out like that so if your website is not created using what's called the web module over here then why ever see that choice you could make it go away hey uh end I also don't make books in here all that often so I'm gonna make that disappear but all I was doing was right clicking there and so it's kind of nice being able to get rid of clutter I wish we could do that maurin photoshopped in photo shop we have this tool panel that's so long but there's like probably a dozen tools that I never use in there I want to just hide a mall and I can't so when we click on these various modules who in the opera right what we see below that will completely change so right now we're in the library module the library module is where we organize your images and so on the left side we have our list of folders and other things that have to do with organizing our pictures on the right side we usually have things related to adding metadata metadata I described in the last session is just information about your picture that isn't the picture itself your shutter speed your aperture setting the camera model it might be the name of the country that it was shot in but that's where we're usually goingto end up doing that and when it comes to those you can click on the name of each one of these individual choices it will expand to show their settings click again and it will collapse it down and you don't have to click on the triangle that's just to show you if his expanded or collapsed you click anywhere on this bar to make them expand or collapse to get to uh each particular area in one setting that is nice with those that you might not be aware of is to remember how those side panels we had you could right click on the triangle to say how does it act does it automatically show up in hyde or do I have to manually do it well there's something related to those as well that you might not be aware of just because it's not all that discoverable how would you ever run into it on your own in that is if you look at these triangles you noticed that they're solid watch what happens if I come in here and I option click on one that will be all clicking and windows when I option collect you see it turned into like a little dotted triangle instead of a solid one what that means I'll have to remember the name it's it's like solid are not solid single pain mode or something and what that means is only one of these could be visible at a time so when I click on one the one that was previously open will automatically usually collapse so if I come down here to metadata you'll see the one called key wording automatically collapses I actually like that for a lot of these not necessarily in this particular panel but in the adjustment panel where we actually adjust the picture I find the really long list of all the adjustments sliders get to be a little overwhelming but if I make it so on ly one section of the adjustment sliders is available at a time I really like it in the way you do that to see how long the option key alton windows and click on one of those triangles if it's solid it's in a mode where you can have more than one open at a time if other hand it looks like a dotted triangle it means only one will be visible at a time but it's nice to know of its features not very discoverable so library as I mentioned is where we're going to be organising our pictures develop is where we're going to be processing our images optimizing them adjusting them whatever word you want to use for that light room calls it developing them in that case what's on the left and right sides of our screen will change now those things are related to develop in our picture and so on the left side I have a full history of everything I've done to this picture since all we've done to it is important that tells you the date I important but if I were to make a change my moving one of the sliders that air in here it would tell me exactly what I've done in the exact order I've done it in and it any time I could click back on a previous step it would bring my image back to the way it used to look at that time so this is just going to be a list of the changes that I've made on the right side though in the developed module is where you'll do most of your work and that's where all your adjustment sliders are we'll get into those we'll start getting into them later today we also have a module called map in map if you're on the internet can actually show you a map of where all your pictures were taken and you come in here and zoom in and zoom out on these and in this particular case I might not want to be in southeast asia since where were these pictures taken what they like in the blue ridge parkway and that kind of thing so I can come in here and if I have the right information attached I can see where all my pictures were taken and I can't even come in here they what do they look like from that location that kind of stuff but we'll talk about how you get that information added to the pictures and what we can do with it later on then the other modules air for printing making slide shows making websites but in general whatever you choose in the upper right dictates what's going to be in the main part of your screen and today and for most of tomorrow we're going to concentrate on the library module for organising our pictures in the developed module for processing them and if there's any other modules that you never use right click and just turn him off I'm not going to use those modules yet so I'm just gonna hide him get rid of her then you notice that the menu bar up here takes up space and so does the name of my catalog was called the title bar in oftentimes I want my images to dominate the space don't like that so if I press a special key of my keyboard I can cycle between various views this view this view and back to the other view so there are a total of I think free this is like the default view this one just gets rid of the name of your catalog from the top and the last one gets rid of the menu bar at the top you might be thinking why would I ever get rid of the menu bar well because if you move your mouse up there will show up for you so therefore do you need to stare at it all the time maybe if you have the clock over here so you need to know what time it is but otherwise why not make light room dominate the space so what key am I pressing well the letter f means full screen but it depends on what what you're doing if you have a picture highlighted and you press the letter f all by itself it means show me this picture full screen if you press the letter f means show me this picture full screen and what it's going to do when you press the water out of his hide all of light rooms interface and just show your picture what's nice about that is you can then use the arrow keys on your keyboard in cycle through the rest of the pictures there so you could make a little impromptu slideshow you could say in when I want to get out of it either press the letter f again to get out of full screen or hit the escape key the escape key usually gets you out of any kind of special mode that you are in and most any program but the letter f means full screen now if you add the shift key to that then x cycles through those various modes I mentioned so shift f the first time I press it watch the name of the catalogue at the top up there it goes away if I do shift out the second time it makes the menu bar go away there's still available if I move my mouth up there and if I press it a third time it gets me back is showing all that stuff and there are choices for that also under the window menu I believe it would be under most likely screen mode yeah here's full screen with menu bar or full screen without the menu bar so you this is really what I'm switching between when I'm using those keys there are lots of things in light room that I only used the keys for because light room is so nice it's so not cluttered with stuff you don't need that the keyboard shortcuts still makes sense in photo shop every single keyboard shortcut you could ever use is already used so if they had a new feature where the most obvious keyboard charcot would be I don't know p it's already used so a shift piece so a shift option you know everything's used whatever keyboard shortcut they come up with is going to be some obscure one but f for full screen mode I can remember that shift f for a kind of full screen I can remember that sometimes and if I don't I can search out in the menu all right then let's look at a few other things we can dio in getting a little tour here and also in customizing talked about cuss surprising how the little triangles work usually right click on him if right clicking does not produce a menu then that means for some reason they decided not to implement it that way the other way did his option clicking clicking and windows I had to do that for these these little sidewalk okay other things we can customize well in the upper left dc works his light room five just right up here okay small on screen let room five well what if I have clients looking over my shoulder and I don't want him to know I'm working in light room well these days everybody's going to know it's light room when light room first came out though people like whoa what is this thing and you can actually change this this is called your identity plate and if you move your mouse over it you'll see a little triangle there it only shows up when your mouse is on top of it and if I click on that you have some choices there are some choices related to what's called light room mobile which is where you can actually use light roman on ipad we'll talk about that tomorrow but down here you see where's his change identity plate if I choose that I can customize the way that top bar looks here in light room so if I come here I can choose personalized that's where aiken make my own and I can type in whatever text they want over there whatever you wanted to say you put in the name your studio you can put in name of you know whatever I usually use have been wilmore up there then if you select that text on in this case I just typed command am so used to command a for select all for everything so that's what I typed you can actually choose the typeface you'd like to use so if you want to ignore oi graphic designers use comic sans it's not being overly respected typeface these days and but anyway you can choose whatever type face you would like uh you can also choose of its bold or a talic you can choose the size and if you click this little bitty square you can also change the color just make sure you select the text first because I could make my first name a different color than my last name you have to select what you want to change otherwise if you just finished typing you start playing with these settings it wont do anything because nothing selected doesn't know what she text to work on um over on the right side you can also change the appearance of the text where you change between modules so let's see here I like a slab serif museo slab and I'm gonna go with the bolder version there we go you can also choose there's two squares here and one square would be for the module that is currently active the other is for the ones that aren't so I could come in here and say I want the module it's currently active to be whatever your corporate color is um also on the identity plate in the upper left of your screen you can also use a logo there is a choice over here it says right now use eighth styled text identity plate that's where you type it in if you choose to use a graphic identity plate you can copy and paste or dragon drop a picture into the space to have it there so if you have a logo you could put it there usually you wanted to be I believe in ping file format is called png and you can have transparency on in it so that you don't have a white background if you happen to know how to do that for now I'm going to use text and once you're done with this you can go to the right menu that's here and say that is a preset so you could actually have more than one of these if you have two people that work in your machine or if you get one clients show you wanted to look different than when clients aren't there so I'll just choose ben you know click okay so what did I do to get to that well I went to where the identity plate shows up and on lee when I hover over it do I see a triangle click on the triangle and there's change identity plate we'll talk about other customization as we go throughout the three days we got a lot of time so we don't want cover everything at once but one other thing you might want to know about is when you view your thumbnails if you zoom up on them there's various information that it could show around the edges and I simply want to show you where you control what what's displayed there what I have at the moment in here is my shutter speed my aperture setting my iso setting across here this down here tells me how far from my metered exposure was I meaning here I'm under exposing by one stop is what that means and then this is the width and height of the picture in pixels so I can tell how big is it and I think I might be ableto put it in there where it's a cropped dimensions so therefore I can tell you is this severely cropped or not because if those numbers are low it means I'm showing only a tiny part of the image that kind of thing um anyway where do I choose that stuff well if you go to the view menu and you go down here to a choice called view options you're going to get a dialog box which allows you to control what shows up so mainly right down here see where it's his expanded sell extras here is where I chose what was in the upper left here's where I chose what was in the upper right and then what's below that in the crop dimensions anyway if you clay there there's all sorts of information you can have show up there including just the plain old file name I just find the file names aren't usually overly useful it's like this one is called blue ridge parkway in the date okay um and so I like having a bunch of them from other information showing up there's actually two ways you can display that that's why and here we have compact and expanded sell extras sell me show you how you switch between them if I go to the view menu and there'll be a choice down here taking a second find it grid view style and you see there you can switch between compact and expanded compact is just going to show your image with one line above it and in that same dialog box we're in a moment ago you could choose what that text wass and if I come back down here again to grid view expand did then I see the additional information personal choice some people hate data around their images they just want the image dominate um and then you can have it show other things these other things are things like the rating that you could assign down at the bottom tapping on these little dots that kind of stuff