With Adobe Ligthroom you can manage your photo production efficiently. Thanks to our tips, learn to master its features and optimize your time.
We quickly let ourselves be overwhelmed, when we love the photo. However, good organization is essential. You have no doubt experienced it: sometimes, during a session, several dozen pictures are taken. Of all these images, you will keep and work on only the most successful. This therefore involves sorting out and planning your work to find your way around. Here are some tips on how to do it.
1. Organize your images in catalogs
To organize and sort your images, you will need to view them first so that you only retain the ones that really interest you. As said above, during a shooting, we take a large number of shots, some are missed, others are used to adjust the camera or are only tests, … In short, there may be a lot of garbage.
How to scroll through your images?
Once you have imported your raw files into Lightroom, you will be able to view a thumbnail for each image. On your keyboard, click on “space” in order to be able to view a photo in full screen, then scroll through your files with the left and right arrows on your keyboard. To return to the thumbnail presentation screen, press the “G” key. Also note that in the lower right corner there is a slider that allows you to increase or decrease the size of these thumbnails.
How to sort and organize your images?
Several types of organization are available to you. As you scroll through your photos in full screen, you will notice several small icons in the lower left corner. Among them are stars and two small flags, one with a cross. The flag system allows you to assign your images the flag “retained” or “rejected”. It is a first level of selection which will allow you to keep only the valid images.
The idea will therefore be to display only the images with the “retained” indicator. At the top of the screen, just above the thumbnails, is a bar called “Library filter”, with an “attribute” tab where we find the small flags. This is where you will be able to tell the software which images to display or not. You can therefore choose to show only those “retained” or those “refused” or even those which remained neutral, without indicator.
Just to the right of the flags is another ranking system based this time on stars (0 to 5 stars). How to use this notation? The best is to proceed by successive sorts. In other words you will do a first sorting and give a star to all the images that you like rather well, the others remaining at zero.
Once this first pass is still finished in the “Library Filter” bar, choose to display only the photos with at least one star. During the second pass you will rate the images you like a little more with two stars, and so on. Thus at the end of the fifth passage you will only have the best images, those which will have received the five stars. These are the images that you will take the time to post-process.
Note that there is also a system of classification of images by color based on the same principle.
2. Add or delete a catalog
Click in the “File” column then on “New Catalog”. Then enter the name and then the location you want for the new catalog.
If you want to delete a catalog, it will be done outside of Lightroom, in your computer’s explorer. You will need to go to the folder where you saved the catalog and then delete the file. The catalog will then be deleted but you will of course keep your all your photos. However, be careful before deleting the folder, take the time to verify that other files related to Lightroom are not there.
3. Move a catalog
To move a Lightroom catalog, you’ll need to move the folder where the catalog is located. If you don’t know where this folder is located, go to Edit (in the top menu) and click Catalog Settings. A window showing you the location of the catalog will then open.
Once you’ve found the right location, close Lightroom and don’t open it until the move is complete.
Open your computer’s file explorer and cut and paste the catalog folder into the new location. Note that you must be careful to cut / paste and not copy / paste, in the latter case you would then have two versions of the catalog which could lead to confusion.
To go further, discover all of the Adobe solutions dedicated to photography.