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Collecting Images for Use

Lesson 9 from: Tour of the Library Module in Adobe Lightroom Classic

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

9. Collecting Images for Use

Lesson Info

Collecting Images for Use

So now that we have, our image is selected. We have them in a folder where we want them to go. Um, Now we're going to go through those images, and we're going to start collecting them for purposes, and you're going to start collecting images from all over the place for various purposes. But once we're done, we can start moving them around. We can. We can add them to collections. We can start organizing them. So we confined them. And one of the major things that we do toe organize our photos before we even put them into more folders or in tow collections or publish services. Um, is keyword Now? Remember, Wiki worded these on the way in, and so we keyword it him, and you can see that it's Mackinac Island, Michigan. Personal travel. That's on every single one of these photos. But now we need to start adding some key words that will help us identify things even better. So the first thing that I could do is Aiken. I congrats a block of images, so I could I could click on this image and shif...

t click to that image and then by hitting command k. It takes me to the key word entry spot, which is over here on the kind of right hand side. And I can enter in a keyword Simon entering the keyword lamp post. And you can see that I've obviously taking pictures of lamppost before and I hit Enter. And now lamppost is on all three of those images I can also put on the word street. Um, comma. Ah, well, that's it. And then and then these two here, if I click. And by the way, this is important to when you're inside of the grid. If you click on the actual picture when you've got a bunch of images selected, the primary selection changes. But the secondary selection, all of the images that are selected with it don't change unless you click on the frame. If you click on the frame, it de select everything except for the image that you want to select. So that's really useful, because I'm gonna click on this image and then shift Click this one and I'm gonna go back in and add Bird on and flight there. Okay, so now I have mawr keywords that would help me find that image just in case I want to find it. Also, I might want to highlight these images, and this is something that I keyword this way. You don't necessarily have to keyword this way, but I like to keyword based on things that I might do with an image. So if you if you photograph textures, if you're wandering around in you photograph textures, add the term texture to your photographs so that you know if you're the type person is looking for texture, so you can add it to a photograph later, like you're using it as an overlay than added texture, comma overlay. That way you can always sort by overlays and find him or sort by textures and find him. So what I'm gonna do is add instructional, because I know that I can use this to instruct, and I'm gonna type lights on. Oh, no, I I'm sorry. Turn, turn the lights on. Now that's the first way you can keyword. But there's an even easier way to keyword, and that's with this little spray tool right here. If I click on it, it's called the spray. Can the paint tool and I can paint keywords or labels or flags or ratings or rotations or anything like that, even a target collection, which I'll talk about in a minute. But I'm gonna spray keywords and then right next to it, there is a place where you can enter. Think so let's just say anywhere that I see ducks and water, Um and, ah, fog. Like those air all in some shots there. But notice that the it's not all on the same plate. Well, that actually that's the only place it is. So if I click on an image now, it sprays it on there. And now I don't need ah, Duck's in it. So I'm gonna delete the ducks part, But I still have water and fog. And so now I'm gonna look for places hit, enter. So that's blue. And then I there's water and fog in those two images, so I just click and spray and move and adds the keywords toe all those images so I could just add keywords to anything. So ah, like I could say child comma girl. So now wherever there's child and a girl, I can click on it. And now I've I've tagged that I can also say anywhere that I see a lighthouse. Lighthouse. Oops. So I got a lighthouse, and then Aiken anywhere I see a lighthouse. Aiken, just spray lighthouse. Um, if you're running through an entire event, say, or a wedding photographer, all you have to do is take your selected images and start at the top, and usually you don't need. You don't need to put keywords on all 700 or 1000 images you're sending to your client. You just need to put keywords on the things that are, you know, your portfolio worthy stuff, the stuff you're gonna be finding on a regular basis. And so those would be maybe 100 images, like everything that's a one star and above. So then you would just highlight your one star, are you, would you would sort by your one star and above and then just start at the top and spray everywhere you see the bride and then change it to groom and spray everywhere you see the groom and then change it to father of bride and spray. Everywhere you see the father of the bride and then anywhere you see emotions and moments, you know, add that keyword, and all you have to do is up and down 15 times on 100 images, which doesn't take very long, actually, just to spray through little things like that and you'll have some really impressively keyword images. So key wording is important because then, once we've key worded, it's really easy for us at any point to just go up to the very top of the search bar. And I can even do this by going and searching here in the catalogue in all photographs. So now I'm looking at everything in the catalog and I can go up to the text area, and I could type in a keyword so I can say Lamp, there's a whole bunch of places where there are lamps. Yeah, so I've got all these lamps. So, um, it is very useful to be able to find stuff that you're looking for when you don't even know when you shot it or what? That you just know you're looking for something. And that's why I put the instructional tag on stuff so I can look for instructional photos where I teach people how to turn the lights on or whatever. So it's very easy to find stuff because I'm key wording now, once I've keyword it and let's just actually go back to this folder. And by the way, if you're in a position where you search for something and then you found one photo, let's say you just found this photo here. But you knew that there were some vertical photos just like it. And let's pretend that these didn't show up in the search. Then I could right click that photo and just tell it to show it to me in the folder in the library. And if I click on that, so I click on Show It in the folder the of the library, and it'll take me right to that selects folder. And once I'm in the selects folder now those verticals show up right next to it. So it's really if if you do a search and Yuki worded 10 images in a job. But those 10 images when you searched you found one of them, it could take you to the job. That way you can find the surrounding images really fast, So key wording, even just a few images in a job is really helpful to finding those images in the long run. So key wording. And once we've keyword it, if I go in here and say, all right, I want to show, Ah, I'm preparing for Creative Live or or you have a client that called and said, Hey, could you show me all the images that you have of? You know, this particular building, you could type in that building and show all the images that you've taken of that particular building or that particular city. Or you just want to show everything that you've shot in Rome in the last 10 years. Just type in Rome and all of those show up. So I'm going to go into the collections area, and I'm just simply going to click on this little plus button ride up at the top of the collections area. Now collection is a virtual location. It doesn't really exist. It's just a place that represents photos. So it's a virtual folder that is pointing to folders that happen to be over there. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click the plus button and we're going to create a collection. Now you can create collection set, which is like a folder, and then you put collections inside it, and that helps you to organize things. But I'm gonna create a collection cause I already have a folder, and that folder is going to be here. I click on here and this is my, uh, creativelive class. And so I am clicking on this button here. This is include the selected photos. Now I can make a virtual copy. So if I want to make a you're not actually copying it again, you're making a virtual copies. So it's it's a it looks like it's it's own photo, and you can adjust it separately, but it's not taking up any additional space. It's just a different idea for that same photo. If I do that, then I could rework the photos inside of this collection to my heart's content, and it won't change the originals. If I don't do this, it's going to just add a reference to the photos. And if I work on the new photos inside of this new collection, it will change the original photos. So I'm fine with that happening cause we just brought them in, Um, and then I can tell it to sync with light room. So I'm sinking with the light room ecosystem on. I could also tell it to make it into a target collection. And I'll do that just so you can see if I click set as a target collection. Then when I import these images and I'm just gonna call this Ah, we're gonna call this Ah, burn and dodge lights and click create. So now it has created a burning dodge lights. But see that little plus button right at the end or that plus emblem, that plus emblems says that if you come across another image that you like So if I was wherever, let's go back toe all photographs and go into the text and type on Let's type on lamppost again. So I OK, so if I came in and I said Okay, well, I want to do the same thing to this photograph here. All I have to do is hit the Beaky as in Boy, that boy, This is great. Just click be And it adds that image down here to that collection which is called the Target Collection. And now, instead of three photos, there are four You can Also, if you want, just click on the circle right at the top, right hand corner of any grid. And once it adds the sea out turns gray, that means it has just added it to now. There are five. So if I click on this collection now, we have a bunch of lampposts that we can play with. So this is the process by which we bring images in. So we've already imported are images, and now we're slowly honing them down into packages of useful images. The first thing that we do is we go through the selection process would make sure we do it in the survey mode. We make sure that we do it with multiple images showing at one time that we pick images. We don't reject him. We make sure that we are zooming in to make sure they're sharp. And we also, uh, don't reject images. We pick him so we're not. We're not trying toe get rid of images. We're just trying to bring images in. Once we're done with that, we're going to select all of the picked images, and we're going to move them by creating it their own folder and put them into a folder called Select so that they can be used later. And once we're done with that, we further keyword, um, so that we can find them later based on whatever random photo we're looking for. And not only do we keyword him, but we can also start highlighting images and creating collections in order to collect them down. Now, if you're a wedding photographer, that might mean you're choosing your favorite three star images and you're highlighting all those and you're gonna put him in a collection called slideshow. You're gonna make a slide show. Or maybe it's an album. You're gonna make an album or a book. So we'll talk about making a book later in this, uh, with light room classic. And so when we make a book, um, you want to collect them before you make the book? So you're going to start collecting images that are gonna go in your book. You're gonna put those into a collection, um, and and you're making slide shows. Maybe they're also images that the client wants. So the client has ordered images and they want eight by tens. You can make a collection in a folder for that client called eight by tens, and then just start dragging the images that they want as eight by tens into that collection. So we're making useful pots of photos that we can use in order to make our job easier in the delivery process later on and also in finding images for our portfolio purposes. So we have gone through the process of organizing all of our images. We've started to collect those images so that we can use them later, and that is the That's basically the nuts and bolts of the library module. That's what you're doing here is you're collecting images. You're finding images. You're sorting through images because then we're going to go into the develop module and start making them brilliant and beautiful, and then we'll start sharing them out.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workflow in Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom Mobile Cloud
Adobe Lightroom Image Pipeline System
Black & White Preset Collection
Color Art Pro Profiles

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