Kelly Anne MartinPhotography

22nd January 2009
Posted in Blog, Tutorials
Tagged in: lightroom, lightroomtips, tutorial, Tutorials

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first full-blog edition of Lightroom Tip of the Day.  I hope to do a full blog edition once every week, typically on Thursday.

For my old readers, welcome back.  Lightroom is a photo organization and editing software produced by Adobe systems (you know, the guys who do Photoshop?).  Over the past two years, it has taken the photography world by storm.

I’ve used Lightroom since it was first released, and find that as the program gets more sophisticated, I am going to photoshop less and less for photo editing.  Lightroom is a fantastic RAW editor – the nondestructive editing properties mean that I can revisit and re-edit a photo even after making significant changes – I can even export the photo, decide I want a brand new look, and reset the image to the import settings and start again, all with a few clicks of the mouse.

Lightroom Tip of the Day is a Twitter account I have created to give photographers one Lightroom tip every (week)day.  The twitter account is @lightroomtips.

Today’s tip is :

Rename presets can help you save time when renaming images.

Interested?  Read more below.

Step-by-step walkthrough

Step 1 – Library->Rename Photo

I didn’t bother to rename my photos on import, but now my photo titles are boring and non-descriptive

I can select a photo or group of photos, and then go to the Library menu and choose Rename Photo (shortcut is F2 or fn-F2 on mac)

The dialogue box that pops up gives you a few different options. My own custom settings include a formatted date, custom text, and a sequence number.

Step 2 – Select the drop-down box and try out the installed prests

By selecting the dropdown box, you can see the different options that come installed in Lightroom.

Each option works differently. This option puts the datestamp, a hyphen, and the image name.  You can see that the “Custom Text” and “Start Number” boxes are greyed out, as this preset doesn’t use those options.  Below you can see an example of what the name will look like when you’re done.

Another option is Filename – Sequence. You can see that you can choose the start number for your sequence – so, if you know you’ve already taken 50 wedding photos, you can put “51″ as your start number.  I very rarely change this from 1.

Step 3 – Choose “Edit…” from the drop-down box

To create a new preset, or change an existing one, simply choose “Edit” from the drop-down box.  You’ll notice that the Filename Template Editor will come up, with your last picked preset automatically selected.

The drop-down box at the top of this dialogue matches the one in the previous dialogue, with additional options of “Save Current Settings as New Preset”, “Delete preset [name]“, and “Rename preset [name]“

There are a few different options you might see as well – change one of your custom presets, and you’ll get “Update preset [name]“

Step 4 – Clear the box, and start at the top, creating your preset.

Choose something from a drop down box below the editing field.  If your choice is already the one next to the “insert” button, hit the insert button, or if you want to choose something different, simply click on the one you want to add and it will be inserted automatically.

You can also click on any of the blue boxes in the composer and change the option.  The change is limited to options within that menu.

You’ll notice that as you add things, your example text will change.  This is helpful.

You can add sequence numbers, image numbers, or total numbers with any number of leading 0’s (I always choose three digits, because… that’s what I do).

But what’s the difference between Image, Total, and Sequence

• • “Image #” is the image number (shocking), based on the order in your selection.
  • “Total #” is the total number of photos you have selected.
  • “Sequence #” is kind of like image number, except you can change where to begin this.  Remember back where we could pick a number to begin?
  • If I selected 8 images, and made a naming template of :
    Image# of Total# – Sequence#, and chose to start my numbering at 15, my names would be:

Make sense?

1 of 8 – 15
2 of 8 – 16
3 of 8 – 17
4 of 8 – 18
etc

I usually use sequence, for what it’s worth.

You then can choose if you want to include the date, and how you want to include it.  I typically do “YYYY”, then put a hyphen, then “MM”, then another hyphen”, then “DD”, but feel free to do whatever you like.

The last two options are for different metadata.  I would use these only after you put all your metadata in – if you import your files with specific metadata (another topic, another Thursday), you can use these in your naming presets; if you don’t have anything filled in, they will remain blank.

My Preset

My favorite preset is called “Kelly Standard”.  It looks something like this -

When I do go to rename my photos, all I do is change the text to match the scene (Brian Headshots, Christmas).  One thing that annoys me is that the presets do not recognize spaces (although they used to!!!), so I have to remember to put spaces before and after my text in order to get the name as I like it.  Notice the stars in this example – I would replace the stars with spaces.

And now you can rename your photos, using presets!

Do you have any presets that you especially like to use?  Feel free to share them.  You can use your naming presets not only in “Rename” but also in photo import and export dialogues.  Have fun!