Introduction to The One Hour Essential Lightroom Course
Lesson 1 from: The One Hour Essential Lightroom CourseRafael "RC" Concepcion
Introduction to The One Hour Essential Lightroom Course
Lesson 1 from: The One Hour Essential Lightroom CourseRafael "RC" Concepcion
Lesson Info
1. Introduction to The One Hour Essential Lightroom Course
Lessons
Lesson Info
Introduction to The One Hour Essential Lightroom Course
My name is RC, I'm a digital post production specialist. Photoshop, author, and professor at Syracuse University, and what I want to do today is talk to you about Lightroom in one hour. There's a ton of different things that you can do with this amazing program, but what happens a lot of the times is when people want to start working with it they're just like, "Well, there's just a lot. "How do I begin? What do I work on? "How do I organize myself?" So what I wanted to be able to do here is give you a overview of the things that I think that are the most important components of working with this Lightroom program. Now the first thing that I usually tell people before you do anything else, is that Lightroom is a photo management program that happens to do developing of pictures. It's not the other way around. What happens is a lot of the times when people get into it there's just start ingesting cards, and ingesting cards, and ingesting cards, and they're like "Look! All these sliders "...
they work really cool, they can do "all of these different types of things." And then you don't really know where anything is. You try to find a file and it says that it's missing. You can't develop it, you don't know how to organize yourself with it. So a lot of the times people forget the fact that it actually is supposed to be something that you're using to be able to organize your photographic life, then you can also develop pictures. And from a photographer's standpoint, that does make sense in that, when we go out, I take a camera, I don't just sit there and just go click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Perfect. All of the shots are great. Bag it, print it, move to the next thing. You actually spend a lot of time working on a lot of different pictures of which only a fraction of those are actually any good, or not good at all, in my case. But I wanted to talk to you guys about the workflow for that stuff, and all of that stuff starts inside of the Lightroom catalog. So the catalog is your home for everything that you're working with with your pictures, and a lot of the times I tell people it's a lot like a notebook. So imagine if we were sitting in a house, right? And we're just like this, and all of a sudden (knocking) we got a knock at the door on our house and somebody came in and they said, "Hey listen, I need you to be able to take "a set of pictures and I want you to save "these pictures for me. "Here's a box." You grab it and you turn around and you go, "All right, I have no idea where "I'm going to put these pictures. "I got it, I'm going to put them in my bedroom, "there's a little nightstand, I'm going to "put them over there. "I'll put the box of picture right there." Well, you don't want to forget that you did that, so what you do is you take your notebook and you write down inside the notebook "The pictures are in the bedroom next to the nightstand." (knocking) Somebody knocks and they give you another set of pictures, and you're like "Ah! I don't know where "to put these things. "I'll put them in the kitchen." So you grab them and put them in the kitchen. You don't want to forget, so you write it down, and you're like, "All right, well it's in here." (knocking) Knock comes again, they give you another thing and you're like, "I'm kind of running out of space here. "I'm gonna put them in the bathroom. "That's were I'm gonna put them, "I'm going to put them right on top "of the thing on the toilet." And you write it down in your notebook. So every single time that you hear the knock you're grabbing these pictures and you're storing them because you want to be able to make sense of all of that kind of stuff, you write it into your notebook. Now, you're at the bathroom, you're sitting there, you've got time to kill, you're waiting for something to dry. Something. And you grab the box of pictures and you're like, "You know, these pictures would make a lot more sense "if they were like this." And you would re-organize the pictures that are inside of the box. You don't want to forget that you did that so you go into your notebook and you go, "Here are the pictures that are in the bathroom. "Oh, I happened to re-organize them." This notebook contains the location of all of the pictures in the house. If somebody wanted to find where those pictures were they don't just start ambling around the house trying to look for stuff to try to make sense of it all. What they do is they go to the notebook. And the notebook is the record of all of that information. Your digital notebook is the Lightroom catalog. The Lightroom catalog just keeps in mind where you have placed stuff and what you've done with it. Where have you placed stuff? Internal hard drive, external hard drive, network-attached storage device. Where? What you've done with it. Rank, sort, pick, flag, collection, collection sets, develop presets. All of that stuff sits inside of the notebook. It's very important to be able to understand the differences between the two. When you're working inside of Lightroom, what you're doing is your organizing stuff inside of a digital notebook.
Ratings and Reviews
JennMercille
Even though I'm already pretty advanced in Lightroom, I'm glad I took this class anyway. You never know what you don't know.. until you learn it! RC is a fun instructor and super knowledgeable. More importantly, he's a talented teacher who has the ability to explain how certain processes work, and why they work so well. Great class!
Emily Compton
Concise, no-nonsense instructor with a sense of humor. Love it. Thank you RC for helping a LR newbie better understand the software. The one hour length is perfect.
a Creativelive Student
Excellent instructor! Clear and concise with a little humor! I learned so much in one hour! Very impressed!