Comprehending:
When I first met Lightroom a few years ago, I really didn't like it. I couldn't get my head around the concept of it's folder management and the way it didn't like files or folders being moved and tampered with in the OS. I was expecting it to act more like Adobe Bridge or Windows Explorer, and I didn't know about having to export the image to make the editing changes permanent.
Yes - I am a dummkopf.
But I relented, bit the bullet and R.T.F.M.
I then understood that it's basically a very efficient database management system that stores not only file and folder locations, but every detail of the 'virtual' editing done on the files themselves, along with the exif data of the shots, and just as importantly, a great image editor.
No wonder it got pissed off at me when I screwed with the database index by moving files and folders without telling it.
Peace:
I have come to use it for 95% of all my processing and image cataloging without a hiccup, and have learned more about it's likes and dislikes, as well as using some of it's features in ways unintended by Adobe. We are now good old friends.
Now to workflow, bearing in mind I'm an amateur photog and this may not suit everyone, but it suits me fine.
Importing:
Keywording:
I keyword everything, and I do it on import, it's quick, easy and invaluable for finding the picture or pictures you want quickly among tens of thousands of images.
A tip on key wording - use words, not strings of words as keywords or your keyword list will become a horrendous mess and hinder the search for your image later. It will also slow down the act of keywording itself while it tries to find a stored match for the keyword being typed.
I don't laboriously keyword each image individually anymore, I keyword the entire import group. For example if some of the images depict pets, some people and others food etc, I just add all the keywords to every image in the import. Some keywords won't necessarily apply to all the images imported, so I tend to get multiple hits for a keyword search, but I don't find that a problem for my purposes, I still end up finding the image I want, albeit a bit slower.
I also found that place names are often good to include along with the rest of the keywords relating to a subject. I can nearly always recall where a particular image of someone or something was taken, senility notwithstanding, but I rarely remember when or how.
Folders:
I arrange my general image folders by year, then months as sub folders. If I go on a planned shoot to some sort of event or specific spot, I'll create a folder for that named 01_10 (Araluen Tulips) under the top level folder of the year, the 01_10 being the month and day in that order.
Presets:
I also made a user preset that I use on import that does the 'global' initial conservative adjustments that I know each image will need, like luminance for noise reduction, sharpening and detail, set clarity to about 25 along with vibrance, and saturation to about 9. The preset on import can also be turned off.
I usually then quickly run through the images one by one and manually adjust exposure, shadow/highlight so that it looks approximately correct.
Rating:
Now, I could make a preset for every situation, like when shooting high ISO etc, but I don't need that. All I want is to have the imported images looking good enough for the next step, to enable rating them.
I have found myself many times almost discarding dud-looking images that proved to be not only salvageable, but turned out quite good, hidden by some exposure flaw like bright highlights, in need of cropping or over exposure. I have trouble evaluating the potential of an image unless it's been processed, hence the reason for giving them a quick run through in the Development module before I rate them and mark the 'keepers'.
I know a lot of people don't rate their images, but I found many uses for rating. When shooting, I usually shoot what I want multiple times with slight variations on composition and perspective, because sometimes a composition looks good in the viewfinder but not on the computer screen.
Rating during review in LR let's me quickly see what I liked the best, and I can also sort the entire folder in order of rating and many other criteria. It's an easy way to get your best work to the top of the grid of thumbnails, and the lower rated ones can be deleted as a group or whatever you want to do with them.
Final Adjustment:
Now it's time to go through the highest ranked and do the final processing touches, individually to suit each image. They say it doesn't really matter in what order things are done during processing other than doing the noise reduction and sharpening last, but I do like some order to my work.
My processing order:
Exposure
Clarity
Vibrance and Saturation
Curves
HSL (hue, saturation and luminance) on individual colours.
Detail (sharpening, detail, radius, luminance etc)
Just a note on using the Details panel. It often pays to use the 'masking' slider directly after luminance adjustment and prior to sharpening. If you hold down the shift+cmd+Left mouse button while dragging to the right, it masks what will not be sharpened with white and leaves the area to be sharpened as black.
This is handy because in areas of little detail, like sky, large shadow areas or water, artefacts can be created easily during sharpening, and this tool prevents that by only sharpening adjacent areas of high contrast, like edges and outlines etc, similar to the action of the Unsharp Mask in Photoshop.
Now, most of you will know, going gangbusters with any of these adjustments will give you artefacts and other nasties, so take it easy and check for artefacts after each step, it's difficult to tell what adjustment caused them if you just look at the end of all processing.
Spotting:
If for some reason the image has a lot of small unwanted details or spots from a dirty sensor etc, I tend to use Photoshop and the Spot healing brush tool, it does a much better job than LR and there are many related tools at the photog's disposal, including Content aware fill, which is indispensable for removing unwanted odds and ends seamlessly.
Flagging:
That sounds like about all there is, but I do one more thing, I use coloured flags to differentiate between images that have been;
Processed to finality. (green)
Exported to Jpeg. (blue)
Flagged for special treatment later (abstract or whatever) (red)
All the above sounds long winded and time consuming, but it's a lot faster doing it than writing about it.
Backup:
I keep a years worth of shots on my machine's hard disk which are backed up to an external drive a couple of times a month, also I don't delete the originals from the memory cards, at least until one back up has been done.
After my local drive has become a bit bloated, I move the folders and contents to a different external drive, as well as also copying them to my NAS, so that I can still access them over our local wifi network.
So I have a minimum of three copies of all my stuff, the local backup, the move to an external drive and on the NAS.
If anyone is interested, I subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud and have Photoshop 2014 CC and Lightroom 5.7, all for the princely sum of AUD$9.99/month, the software is updated for free so I always have the latest versions.
I have no connection with Adobe by the way, I just like their products and especially this Creative Cloud plan.
(I could do without the slow loading web pages though Adobe!)
That's all there is, there ain't no more!
I then understood that it's basically a very efficient database management system that stores not only file and folder locations, but every detail of the 'virtual' editing done on the files themselves, along with the exif data of the shots, and just as importantly, a great image editor.
No wonder it got pissed off at me when I screwed with the database index by moving files and folders without telling it.
Peace:
I have come to use it for 95% of all my processing and image cataloging without a hiccup, and have learned more about it's likes and dislikes, as well as using some of it's features in ways unintended by Adobe. We are now good old friends.
Now to workflow, bearing in mind I'm an amateur photog and this may not suit everyone, but it suits me fine.
Importing:
Keywording:
I keyword everything, and I do it on import, it's quick, easy and invaluable for finding the picture or pictures you want quickly among tens of thousands of images.
A tip on key wording - use words, not strings of words as keywords or your keyword list will become a horrendous mess and hinder the search for your image later. It will also slow down the act of keywording itself while it tries to find a stored match for the keyword being typed.
I don't laboriously keyword each image individually anymore, I keyword the entire import group. For example if some of the images depict pets, some people and others food etc, I just add all the keywords to every image in the import. Some keywords won't necessarily apply to all the images imported, so I tend to get multiple hits for a keyword search, but I don't find that a problem for my purposes, I still end up finding the image I want, albeit a bit slower.
I also found that place names are often good to include along with the rest of the keywords relating to a subject. I can nearly always recall where a particular image of someone or something was taken, senility notwithstanding, but I rarely remember when or how.
Folders:
I arrange my general image folders by year, then months as sub folders. If I go on a planned shoot to some sort of event or specific spot, I'll create a folder for that named 01_10 (Araluen Tulips) under the top level folder of the year, the 01_10 being the month and day in that order.
Presets:
I also made a user preset that I use on import that does the 'global' initial conservative adjustments that I know each image will need, like luminance for noise reduction, sharpening and detail, set clarity to about 25 along with vibrance, and saturation to about 9. The preset on import can also be turned off.
I usually then quickly run through the images one by one and manually adjust exposure, shadow/highlight so that it looks approximately correct.
Rating:
Now, I could make a preset for every situation, like when shooting high ISO etc, but I don't need that. All I want is to have the imported images looking good enough for the next step, to enable rating them.
I have found myself many times almost discarding dud-looking images that proved to be not only salvageable, but turned out quite good, hidden by some exposure flaw like bright highlights, in need of cropping or over exposure. I have trouble evaluating the potential of an image unless it's been processed, hence the reason for giving them a quick run through in the Development module before I rate them and mark the 'keepers'.
I know a lot of people don't rate their images, but I found many uses for rating. When shooting, I usually shoot what I want multiple times with slight variations on composition and perspective, because sometimes a composition looks good in the viewfinder but not on the computer screen.
Rating during review in LR let's me quickly see what I liked the best, and I can also sort the entire folder in order of rating and many other criteria. It's an easy way to get your best work to the top of the grid of thumbnails, and the lower rated ones can be deleted as a group or whatever you want to do with them.
Final Adjustment:
Now it's time to go through the highest ranked and do the final processing touches, individually to suit each image. They say it doesn't really matter in what order things are done during processing other than doing the noise reduction and sharpening last, but I do like some order to my work.
My processing order:
Exposure
Clarity
Vibrance and Saturation
Curves
HSL (hue, saturation and luminance) on individual colours.
Detail (sharpening, detail, radius, luminance etc)
Just a note on using the Details panel. It often pays to use the 'masking' slider directly after luminance adjustment and prior to sharpening. If you hold down the shift+cmd+Left mouse button while dragging to the right, it masks what will not be sharpened with white and leaves the area to be sharpened as black.
This is handy because in areas of little detail, like sky, large shadow areas or water, artefacts can be created easily during sharpening, and this tool prevents that by only sharpening adjacent areas of high contrast, like edges and outlines etc, similar to the action of the Unsharp Mask in Photoshop.
Now, most of you will know, going gangbusters with any of these adjustments will give you artefacts and other nasties, so take it easy and check for artefacts after each step, it's difficult to tell what adjustment caused them if you just look at the end of all processing.
Spotting:
If for some reason the image has a lot of small unwanted details or spots from a dirty sensor etc, I tend to use Photoshop and the Spot healing brush tool, it does a much better job than LR and there are many related tools at the photog's disposal, including Content aware fill, which is indispensable for removing unwanted odds and ends seamlessly.
Flagging:
That sounds like about all there is, but I do one more thing, I use coloured flags to differentiate between images that have been;
Processed to finality. (green)
Exported to Jpeg. (blue)
Flagged for special treatment later (abstract or whatever) (red)
All the above sounds long winded and time consuming, but it's a lot faster doing it than writing about it.
Backup:
I keep a years worth of shots on my machine's hard disk which are backed up to an external drive a couple of times a month, also I don't delete the originals from the memory cards, at least until one back up has been done.
After my local drive has become a bit bloated, I move the folders and contents to a different external drive, as well as also copying them to my NAS, so that I can still access them over our local wifi network.
So I have a minimum of three copies of all my stuff, the local backup, the move to an external drive and on the NAS.
If anyone is interested, I subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud and have Photoshop 2014 CC and Lightroom 5.7, all for the princely sum of AUD$9.99/month, the software is updated for free so I always have the latest versions.
I have no connection with Adobe by the way, I just like their products and especially this Creative Cloud plan.
(I could do without the slow loading web pages though Adobe!)
That's all there is, there ain't no more!
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