Archive for the ‘Library’ Category
The start of a new year is always a time to think about change and improvement. One common resolution is to get more organized. In this age of digital media it is even more critical that we keep track of our digital assets. Lightroom has many features to help you organize your images.
Organization can come in many forms and at many levels. You can organize your images at the drive level (by using a system of folders, subfolders, and file naming conventions) and/or at the metadata level in Lightroom. You must first decide what organizational workflow fits for you. There are many websites and books devoted to this topic. You should do a little research before embarking on this adventure.
The best website I can recommend to you to delve deeply into industry standard organization practice is dpBestFlow.org from the American Society of Media Photographers and funded by the Library of Congress. The site is full of suggestions and videos. Get ready to spend some time there!
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One of the key factors in organizing and tracking your images is metadata. There are many types of metadata that Lightroom handles well. The two main groups of metadata are EXIF and IPTC.
EXIF stands for EXchangeable Information File and contains the details about the image supplied by the camera. Generally, the EXIF information should not be edited after capture. However, date and time corrections are usually allowed.
IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) is where we enter most of our descriptive information that does not relate to the technical capture aspects of the image. Things like descriptions, keywords, creator, copyright data, etc.
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How do you handle rejection? Rejected images, that is. When you import new images into Lightroom you are faced with the initial task of deciding what to keep and what to get rid of. If you haven’t had a chance to read my previous article on using the flags, Do You PUX?, I recommend you jump over there and read that first.
Welcome back. So now how do we handle these images marked with the Reject flag? Personally, I don’t like to delete images right away. I prefer to keep them around a little while and revisit my decision. Of course, if the shot is totally useless (too much blur, out of focus, really bad exposure, etc.) I just toss them.
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A while ago I wrote about Moving Your Images From iPhoto to Lightroom. A reader, Tom, pointed out a neat feature in Snow Leopard that allows you to directly access the contents of your iPhoto Library.
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In Part 1 we examined how to use Publish Services to control target folders on the hard drive using the Hard Drive Publish Connection.
There’s another Publish Service that comes with Lightroom 3 Beta. The Flickr Publish Service allows us to connect Lightroom to a Flickr account (or multiple Flickr accounts) and manage our photostream from within Lightroom. However, there are some pitfalls to watch out for. Remember, this is beta software, so as you come across issues or areas that can be improved please join the conversation over at the Adobe Forums and tell the Lightroom team about it. You can help make this a great release!
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Prior to the release of Lightroom 3 Beta we had the ability to upload our images to various online sites via the Export dialog. Jeffrey Friedl provided several excellent plugins for the Export dialog making it easy to export to these online services. He is hard at work turning those into Publish Services. By the time the final release of Lightroom 3 is ready I’m sure we will have a lot to choose from! For now, let’s take a deeper look into how this new features works!
You can find Publish Services in the left side panel of the Library module. When you first start install Lightroom there are two basic services provided: Hard Drive and Flickr. Hard Drive allows you to create folders to receive images via Publish Services. This can be very useful for adding to a folder that is synched to your iPod/iPhone. Perhaps your screensaver is based on a folder of images. Make this a target and you can easily add and manage that. Or perhaps you are compiling images for a client to view and you first want to collect them in a folder from which you can FTP up to your client viewing portal. Interested? Let’s take a look.
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Any well developed and flexible image processing application will allow users to approach a workflow and adapt it to what works best for them. Lightroom is no exception. Many users are well familiar with renaming image files during import and applying a sequence number to each file.
The Import dialog allows us to choose to add a sequence number as part of the renaming process. We choose what number to start the sequence and each subsequent image receive an incremented number.
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Sometimes thumbnails are just too small to let you see all the details in an image. If you don’t have a second display and you would like to apply a group of keywords while looking at the Loupe view of an image here’s an easy way.
Begin by setting up your Keyword Shortcut. You find this under the Metadata menu in the Library module. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Command-Option-Shift-K on a Mac or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-K on a PC. This will present you with a deceptively simple dialog into which you can enter any number of keywords separated by commas.
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Here’s a quick and easy way to move an image to the top of a stack. When a stack is collapsed, clicking on the stack icon in the top left of the image will expand the stack. As you hover over each image in the stack an icon will appear in the upper left. For example, if you have three images in the stack you will see 2 of 3 and 3 of 3 for the second and third images.
If you click on that icon for any image (other than the first image in the stack) that image will immediately be moved to the top of that stack!
