Your go-to guys for Lightroom & photography lessons & Lr catalog Repair
On November 5th, the first NYC Lightroom Meetup Group will be held from 6-8PM at Tekserve, located at 119 West 23rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenue. Scheduled guest for this Lightroom Meetup is Eric Wessman, 30 year veteran travel photographer and Adobe Lightroom Expert.
Sign up http://www.meetup.com/New-York-Lightroom-Meetup/ for this Meetup and stay current for upcoming Meetups.
Please join us!
As explained in my earlier post, making a Quick Collection and saving it as a Collection is an effective way to manage your photos without moving them from any of their original folders.
The following description of a Target Collection may (“may” is an understatement for sure) sound confusing.
A Target Collection is when you assign the Quick Collection’s attributes to any Collection folder that you’ve made or saved. It’s a simple right-click away (or Control Click or two-fingered click, depending upon the kind of mouse or trackpad you are using) on any saved Collection folder and choosing “Set as Target Collection.” A little “+” is the indicator.
Then your Targeted Collection will behave like the Quick Collection in the Catalog Panel.
That is, any time you tap the “B” key (simply the B key, no other modifier) with a photo selected in your library or when you click the, “Add Photo to Quick Collection” button (see earlier post), that photo will now appear in the Collection folder of your choice. How do you know it’s a Collection folder? By the small “+” to the right of the Collection name.
Yikes! This all sounds like a real nightmare, but it’s not.
Watch the video. It will be a lot easier than reading my futile attempt of a written explanation.
And now, 180 seconds (more or less) with Lightroom Guy on how to create a Target Collection.
Skeleton Man ©2014 D.A.Wagner
After waffling for a year, I finally took the challenge to demonstrate my Lightroom skills by taking the Adobe certification exam.
I studied hard making sure I knew all the little minutia that I heard Adobe put in their tests. Sure, I was ready, but on the day of the test, at the testing site, they took away my phone, ipad, backpack, even my keys before they let me into the testing room (yes, it’s on a computer). I was waiting for them to ask me to take off my belt and step in for a full body scan, but I guess that was being repaired. And, then they have strange people watching you through giant picture windows, just to make extra special doubly sure you’re not looking at notes written on the soles of your sneakers. I have to admit, all that made me a little nervous; Adobe doesn’t fool around when it comes to testing. They are expensive and if you fail, you have to pay again. Plus, it’s been a long time since I’ve taken a test.
Through all the nervousness I performed well, as it seems Adobe saw fit to certify me, Lightroom Guy, as an Adobe Certified Expert.
Actually, they wouldn’t certify anyone named Lightroom Guy, I had to use my real name.
The Lightroom Quick Collection is a smart way to gather together a group images from any of your folders in a Catalog without changing the location of the original images. It is essential to the process of maintaining an organized library. Whenever you start a new project within Lightroom, a book, slideshow, etc., it makes sense to create a Quick Collection of selected images and then save it. Quick Collections are temporary. Collections are saved Quick Collections. And so, with that confusing comment in mind, I’ve tried to make particular note of those issues that have confounded some my students. For some, this will be less of a tutorial and more like an, “Oh, %#&!, that’s why that happens,” kind of post. Once you get into the habit of creating Collections, you’ll wonder why you waited so long.
To make sure your copy of Lightroom has Quick Collection Markers turned on, go to the top menu and choose View>View Options (Command J for the Mac or Control J for the PC). Select the Grid View tab and in the Cell Icons Panel, make sure the Quick Collections Markers is checked. Then close the Library View Options dialog box.
Now, when you float your mouse cursor over any thumbnail in the Grid View or Film Strip, a small circle will appear in the upper right hand corner. Click on it and the circle becomes gray. The image never moves from its original location, it is only added as a thumbnail to the Quick Collection folder located in the Library’s Catalog Panel. Or you can tap “B” which is the keyboard command for adding an image to the Quick Collection. As far as I know, there’s no limit to the number of images you can add from any folder within the catalog, including saved Collections (see below). Clicking the gray marker or tapping “B” will also remove an image from the Quick Collection as well.
NOTE: When you click on the Quick Collection Marker, Lightroom does not give you any feedback, there’s no indication that you have added the image to the Quick Collection other than the gray circle, which you may not easily notice with images that have a similar gray colored background or in very small thumbnails. However, if you use the keyboard command “B” when adding an image to the Quick Collection, Lightroom flashes a little note on-screen “Add to Quick Collection.” I don’t know why Adobe doesn’t flash that note in both cases.
Images are added as thumbnails to the Quick Collection folder, but they are not moved from their original folder locations.
At this point, you can work on developing your images from the Quick Collection as you would normally and the changes you make will be reflected in the original image, no matter where it is located in your Lightroom Catalog.
Lightroom can only have one Quick Collection but can have many Collections. Saving a Quick Collection makes it a Collection. Get it? Boy, was I lost on that one originally. Anyway, to save it, all you have to do is right click the Quick Collection title for the contextual menu. If you choose “Clear Quick Collection” it clears the gray circle markers from the images and empties the content of the Quick Collection folder. Lightroom doesn’t even ask you if you’re sure you want to clear the folder. Oh, well. Just be sure that’s what you want to do.
Right Click to Display the Contextual Menu
If you choose “Save Quick Collection,” a dialog box comes up. (I named my Collection “Head Shots”) And whether or not you choose to Clear the Quick Collection After Saving, there’s still gonna be some confusion, especially the first time around. I hope the notes below clear things up.
Saving a Quick Collection Will Make It a Collection
Confusing behavior #1: If you Save without selecting “Clear Quick Collection After Saving,” the collection will be in two places – 1. The images will remain in the Quick Collection folder in the Catalog Panel and 2. The saved Collection will be in the Collections Panel. And this can become confusing because Lightroom doesn’t take you to the saved Collection, it remains looking at the Quick Collection folder when, in my opinion, you should really now be looking at the saved Collection. Additionally, any future images you choose for the Quick Collection will be dumped in with what is already there. Messy.
Confusing behavior #2: If you select “Clear the Quick Collection After Saving,” the images in the Quick Collection are cleared and you are now looking at an empty Quick Collection folder, probably wondering what just happened. Just like the previous note, it’s in the Collections Panel on the bottom left side of the Library Module. I don’t know why Adobe doesn’t at least have a prompt that tells you where to go.
So, after saving a Quick Collection, you will always have to scroll down to the Collections Panel in order to find your saved Collection. *Unless Adobe decides to fix it in a later version. (Currently this is LR 5.6)
How Adobe was able to make such a simple concept so confusing is truly remarkable feat of engineering. It’s exactly that that trips users up in Lightroom. And, explaining it has turned out to be equally as challenging. So, I hope this has helped!
Here are some additional links to Adobe tutorials on the Quick Collection that might be helpful:
Tim Grey’s Adobe TV Video on creating a collection – http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-lightroom-5/the-quick-collection/
From the Adobe Help pages – http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/photo-collections.html
Sure, most computer users know adding RAM or a Solid State Drive (SSD) can work wonders to speed up Lightroom. However, here are three suggestions I recently gleaned from comments LR users made to speed up their workflow in response to blogger Scott Wyden Kivowitz’s Open Letter to the Adobe Lightroom Team. The seconds we spend waiting on Lightroom add up to hours and, at the end of the year, maybe days! These suggestions may work for you and they may not, but they’re all worth trying.
Move all unused user presets & 3rd party presets out of your Lightroom Presets folder (Go to your Lightroom Preferences and in the Presets Tab, choose “Show Lightroom Presets Folder…”).
Then, (NOTE! if you’re not already in the Develop Presets folder, look for the Lightroom Settings>Develop Presets folder and) select all or most of your unused presets and place them into a “Load When Needed Presets” folder. The Lightroom default presets are stored elsewhere, so you won’t see those. You can place the moved presets back into the Develop Presets folder when you want to use them and restart Lightroom to see them in the Presets Panel of the Develop Module. Keeping all those additional presets from loading may speed up LR a fair amount.
In the Library Module, change the Metadata Panel to Default. Some users claim it helps and there’s an Adobe Community post about it as well. Apparently changing the Preset pulldown to None may also help.
One user claimed that they’ve been importing their files as DNG and they have no symptoms of LR running slowly. With tens of thousands of images, I’m not about to start backtracking, but for those of you who are just starting or have smaller libraries, this may be a good idea. Maybe the reason that DNGs are better is because they embed the .xmp data in the files instead of using sidecars with Raw files. And, for those of you who are interested – XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) was invented by Adobe and it’s is how Lightroom knows exactly what metadata changes you’ve made with each image in your library and why the Develop changes you make are non-destructive.
I’ve tried the first two and I see some speed improvement, which is nice, but the real test is when I’m working for an extended period on a lot of images.
Now, with this all said, the more important point here is that Adobe needs to improve Lightroom’s speed. So it wouldn’t hurt to leave a comment on Scott’s Open Letter to the Adobe Lightroom Team and then click over to the Lightroom Forum and add your comments on the Lightroom Installation and Performance page. You can also look for other solutions to different issues there. Sign in, you should already be a member anyway. Let’s start a movement to get Adobe to address this issue for version 6!
Before Lightroom, back in the olden days of dinosaurs and darkrooms, I would contort my hands into various shapes to manipulate the amount of projected light coming through a negative to control where it was falling on the photo paper. Not only was that hard, it was time consuming with lots of trial and error within the confines of a chemically smelly dark room. Lightroom on the other hand (pun intended) gives me instant feedback with everything I do. Whether it’s too dark or too light, Lightroom (and I’m talkin’ about Lightroom 5.6 here) gives me all the tools I need to replicate any of the hand-work that I used to do without the mess.
In this tutorial, I’m using this dramatic, digital photo taken just past sunset of zebras shot at an African wildlife preserve by my talented student, Shaula Yemini, shot hand held with her Olympus OM-D E-M10 and a Lumix G Vario 12-35/F2.8 Lens. (For you exposure techies out there— the camera was set to Aperture Priority, 1/80th second, F/5, ISO 1000 with a 35mm equivalent focal length of 70mm)
And although the meter exposed for the brighter parts of the scene, rendering the zebras and background much too dark, the critical saving grace was that Shaula shot using Camera Raw. It’s unlikely in a case like this a JPEG would have been able to reveal the same amount of fine detail as the Raw capture. You can read more about Raw vs. JPEG on a previous blog post.
In this tutorial, I demonstrate using multiple Radial Filters (see my post on the Radial Filter) to lighten the darkest parts of the image, while using multiple Gradient Filters (what I like to call Linear Gradients) to further bring the viewer’s eyes to the subject.
It sounds hard, but it’s not. Really.
If you’ve ever attempted to use the Spot Removal Tool to clone out anything bigger than a piece of sensor dust, you already know Lightroom does a lousy job cloning big areas. In fact, it can make things look much worse than when you started. Lightroom’s Spot Removal Tool lacks finesse and works in the complete opposite of Photoshop’s Rubber Stamp cloning tool. I’ve mentioned this function reversal with the Radial Gradient in an earlier post.
So, what’s the cloning difference between Photoshop and Lightroom?
Photoshop allows you to choose your source (the section of the image you want to copy and paint with elsewhere) and then you choose the destination (the stuff you want to hide with what you just copied) and gives you a paintbrush for some control. To me, that’s logical thinking. But maybe that’s what nearly 20 years of working with Photoshop will do to you.
Lightroom has you working in the opposite. Instead of choosing your source first, you choose the destination – i.e. the thing you want to hide – and, instead of a brush they give you a hammer (disclaimer – Lightroom does not really come with a hammer tool). And, geez, Lightroom chooses the destination for you. What makes Lightroom think a street foreground is a good blend with an out of focus doorway? Yes, Lightroom allows you to adjust your source and destination but it’s not Photoshop by any stretch of the imagination.
Arrrrgggghhhh! But don’t give up. You can work wonders with the Spot Removal Tool with a little patience and practice. Well, maybe a lot of patience and practice, especially in the beginning. But it’s possible to make it work quite well once you get the hang of it.
I had only a couple of seconds to catch this fantastic photograph of two accordion players walking down the street in Florence, Italy with my Nikon D800E. But there’s an unwanted pedestrian crossing the street in the background and here’s how I got rid of him…
And one of the most difficult and frustrating challenges is finding missing Lightroom photos and relinking them. There are a fair number of tutorials on this, but missing images rarely will be found in the same folder as where they were originally located, which is what most tutorials cover. That’s waaaaay to easy. You usually lose (or shall we say “misplace”) images because they were moved outside of Lightroom (we won’t say by whom) using your Finder or Explorer – if you’re on a PC. So finding and reconnecting the file is only the start, then locating where the photo ended up and moving it back to its proper folder and linking it is the finish – and the process can be confusing.
My video attempts to explain how to identify missing files, locate and reconnect them to the Lightroom library. I also have some useful suggestions to find those reconnected images because strange things happen when you reconnect files that are no longer in the same folder as your original import. Trying to simplify the step-by-step process of finding and relinking missing photos has been challenging. There’s no one way to do it and everyone’s library is different. So, consider this video tutorial a suggested serving…
If this video has helped you, please leave a comment and if something wasn’t clear, let me know, too!
LRG
If you’ve watched my previous post on importing into the Lightroom Library, you know that I recommend importing your photos into Lightroom with dated folders. Once you’re back in the Lightroom library, this is the next step – naming your folders while keeping the date up front.
I know, there are two camps on naming folders: one for importing into folders by date and one for importing into folders with names. But I hate having to choose one over the other and wondering when I took took the photos or what’s in the folder. Working both camps makes the most sense, dated folders with names to identify the contents. Here’s how in this short, two-minute video tutorial about adding descriptions to your dated folders in the Lightroom library.
Soooooo many LR users have struggled with lost files and keeping their libraries organized that even Adobe now has a warning at the very beginning of the Workflows chapter, in the Lightroom PDF manual:
“Important: When importing for the first time, think through how you want to organize your photos and where you plan to store them before you start to import. Planning ahead can help minimize the need to move photos later and possibly lose track of them in your catalog.”
And, lose track we do. Ah, but do they tell you how to do this? Nope. Nor do they tell you how to fix it if things get screwed up. I meet most of my new students because of this. Adobe assumes everyone knows how to come up with a plan to organize his or her photos. We don’t. And, just for the record, when I started with LR five years ago, boy did I screw up! It used to be that all my photos were in a file cabinet where I had clues as where things were: a bent file hanger, a yellow highlighter, an oddball brand of file folder I bought on a rainy Sunday or even a label written with a sharpie instead of a pen could get me where I wanted. That kind of human quality is something that no one has yet invented for the digital world.
I only use ONE catalog for everything and recommend it for everyone, even pros. Why? Because keeping multiple catalogs can turn your library into thousands of missing images. And, while I love meeting new students, repairing and organizing Lightroom catalogs instead of teaching Lightroom processing techniques is never much fun for anyone. I’d much prefer to get down to the art of Lightroom processing.
I’ve tried not to get sidetracked with all of the available Lightroom options, but rather to demonstrate a simple method of importing that sustains an organized library, import after import. Truly, it’s taken me years of repairing LR libraries to figure this out. I hope that sharing this with you helps!
Here are Lightroom Guy’s 7 rules to an organized and secure library:
Remember, there are only two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data and those who will.
P.S. Don’t forget to look at the previous postings of The Lightroom Library Mystery Parts 1, 2 and 3!