Lightroom 2 – Starting Out
I was asked on Twitter today about Lightroom, how to get started and how the workflow goes – memory card -> hard drive -> Lightroom Library and Develop -> backup. I thought I’d make a quick tutorial about one way to accomplish a basic workflow in Lightroom.
First, start out with an empty catalog. Save your catalog where-ever it makes sense for you to do so – I keep mine in the “Pictures” folder on my mac, under a folder called “Lightroom”.
Next, pop in your memory card or plug in your camera. I don’t have my memory card or camera handy, so I will be importing files from a folder on my computer. I actually have lightroom set up so that when I insert my memory card, the “Import” dialogue launches – so, know that you CAN set it up to do this.
Choose “Import files from disk” if you’re importing from your hard drive, or “Import files from device” if you’re importing from a camera or memory card.
After choosing your folder, the import dialogue will show. Play around with the different options till you get something that works for you – you’ll see that there is a list of dates (or, in this case, one date) in a check-list – this makes it easy if you have some old photos on a card that you know you’ve already imported, you can just uncheck that date.
From here you can choose to put in some develop settings which will be applied to every photo, or some keywords or a metadata set. You can also choose the size of the initial previews – the larger the preview (going full-size, 1:1) will mean a longer import and a larger cache size of previews, but less time to load each photo if you’re needing to go full size instead of smaller previews for editing. I would suggest sticking with minimal and if you notice an annoying lag when you’re trying to proof your photos, you can change it from there. I typically only go 1:1 (full size) if I’m doing a batch of photos from a client shoot, where I’ll proof them at full size to see if they are sharp – saves me a little bit of time.
You can also select “show previews”, so if you know that you took seven pictures with your lens cap on and don’t want to import them at all, you can see little thumbnails and check the ones you do / don’t want to import. This is a cool feature.
After the photos are imported, you will see them in the library. You’ll start to see photos right away – from here you can do any editing you want, or go into the Develop tab to do some more in-depth editing. Edits in Lightroom are non-destructive, so you can always go back to the import version of the photo as long as you don’t delete it.
Right click on any photos / group of photos you would like to export, and choose “export”. You can also do this from the “File” menu.
Like the import dialogue, the export dialogue has lots of different options. Most are pretty self-explainatory – you can choose a folder to export to, as well as options to “Add to this Catalog” and “Stack with the Original”. You can do whatever you would like, here – depends on your own methods and what works best for you.
This weekend I will create a short video tutorial that goes a little more in-depth on this topic. I hope this serves as a basic introduction – enjoy!-
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