Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Hi All,

I commonly use Lightroom to process my RAW photos. However, I'm hoping that you want to share what your routine is when you're using Lightroom. (e.g.: What do you do when you're processing the photo from beginning to end - some digital media management is also cool ). I'm sure I'll learn much more from this.

Thanks, I look forward to everyone sharing their experience

Import (add keywords etc), look through photos, reject ones I know are completely off or boring, find ones that I like a lot, work on those first. 1. exposure tweaking, 2. in-depth processing with brushes/graduated filters etc. 3. add sharpening for input. 4. either process in external editor more or export (with sharpening for output) depending on what I want to do with it.

I have actually been using ACDSee Pro 3 lately, and finding it very similar in operation to LR. Rather than importing all of the images - ACDSee creates a small file in each directory which saves all of the attributes for each image, and how they were treated by the software. You can export or "develop" images to a final jpeg or TIFF, or whatever you want once you have reached the desired effect. And the processing tools are much more powerful than they used to be in older versions. They have come a long way since the start.

LR does not import images, it does what you described ACDSee doing. Although it says "import" when you add them to the LR catalogue all it is doing is mapping the location to which it applies the edits you do to the image in LR. All it saves is some script or "file" that is applied to an image. The raw files themselves are not changed/moved by LR.

I did almost the same. But I would crop it before everything.

I think so too, the little "sidecar" file lightroom creates is called .xmp (and you want to be careful of not deleting it, as it carries the processing applied to the file. That's why some critical files are better off converted to DNG)
I just got into the light room experience and find myself amazed how flexible is for batch processing and saving me hard drive space.

unless you tell it to move them!

Hehe, yes, unless you do that.

How to get dramatic skies in LR

When you crop it, does LR save the original RAW file for you? Or do you have to manually make a backup?



PotatoEYE, do you have a good reference for number 2 and 3? I'd love to learn more about that..

Lightroom does NOT alter the raw file. It applies actions to it which can be output in various ways but the original raw files stay the way it is. Think of the raw file as a negative/slide and Lightroom as your enlarger, no matter what dodging and burning you do to the print the negative remains as it is.

PotatoEYE's 2 & 3 can be quite sophisticated and varies greatly with each shot taken. There are myriad online sources about such things.

Here's just one site to take a look at: http://www.photoshopsupport.com/lightro ... rials.html

Lightroom 3 Keyboard Shortcuts PDF
Camera Dojo LR3 portal

Thanks a lot Chris.

I'm gonna keep this open in case anybody else wants to add something.

Yeah, Chris said it all right. The good thing about LR is you can copy all of the adjustments or specific ones to the other files with 2 clicks if you want same look

I screwed up a section of my library and I am hoping someone can help me out.

I used to save my raw files in a directory I would name after day/month/year. "April 10 2010" for example, and another for the pics taken "April 14 2010" and so on. Later on I decided I just needed the month - May 2010 for example. The problem is I decided to go back and move all the separate April days into a single April 2010 directory. I did the same for March. I did this with the file manager in my OS, not with LR. Now, when I start LR up it sees my new directories but doesn't have any of the edits that had been applied to those files in the previous location. Follow me? Not sure I've explained that well... Any idea how I can get LR to say "oh you moved those raw files here? Okay, here are your edits on them!" It's only a handful of files really, but still...

It should say missing files, maybe try syncing the folder (old ones and new ones)

Hope you didn't delete the old folders. When you edit raw file, all the info was saved in a seperated file in that folder. So please make sure you had copied all the files (including the hidden files). What I normally do is just rename it and move the location of the entire folder.

... if you are using ligthroom 3 (I pressumed this goes the same also to other lightroom versions)... block all the pictures, notice a quesstion mark on the upper right side of the picture, when you click that, a pop-up box would notify you that the picture is no longer located on its original location... just click the "locate" button on the lower right hand of that pop-up box.....

hope that helps...

Problem is I didn't realize the ramifications of what I had done until after I synched the parent folder. So, it checked the photo was no longer there and thus no longer appeared in the filmstrip. I run LR in a VirtualMachine (VM) so the edits are not saved in the same folders but in a directory native to the VM OS. By the way, don't do this, file synch performance is very poor this way.

What I'm hoping is that file that carries the edits hasn't been removed by LR after the synch. The next part will be identifying and applying it.

If we change the RAW files location, do you suggest that we remove all from LR, and then re-import later? I might need to do that in the future.

To be honest I'm not sure you can move your files around with anything but LR if you want to keep LR up to date where everything is. I do recall in the LR tutorial J__ held earlier this year him suggesting that we do not use LR to import photos... I forget why. Now that I have defined my file structure how I want it it won't be a problem and fortunately most of the older stuff in my library sucks and needs new edits anyway...

If you move files that are in your LR catalog around you don't need to remove and re-import them. In your LR catalog, go to the file folder with the missing images, and if you right click that folder you'll see a "Find Missing Folder" option. Using that option, you can simply point LR to the new location of the images. Voila.

The file folder isn't missing the images per se. The file folder that had them is now gone. I deleted it. And since I synched directly after doing that Lr doesn't know the folders existed and is treating the moved files as brand new.

where's the graduated filters??? i'm still using the old version of lightroom 2.

Look for a rectangular looking tool next to the adjustment brush in the Develop module.

ok...i'm going to look it tonight...thanks~~~

Or press the 'm' key when in the Develop module to open the grad filter.

ok but i still like to use photoshop eventhough i have no idea what i'm doing there.