Tag Archives: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: Slideshow, Print and Web Modules

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Hi Folks:

This is part 4 of a 5-part series on Lightroom presets. The segments are:

Slideshow/Print/Web Modules

The Slideshow, Print and Web modules all use presets in a similar manner, although the outputs of each are quite different. In these modules the presets are called Templates, and in each module Lightroom ships with a certain set of standard templates. One can also create user templates based on the sliders in the right panel, and/or download presets online. Templates for each module are available for free and in some cases for sale. In each module one can also create a ‘Saved’ output – i.e. a Saved Slideshow, a Saved Print or a Saved Web Gallery, and in doing so Lightroom will create a speciall Collection that combines the settings for that output module with the image(s) associated with it. As with the Book module, these Collections are merely collections of images and more can be added or images removed. Continue Reading →

The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: Map and Book Modules

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UPDATE: December 12, 2018:

As of November 30, if you have any version of Lr older than Lr 8 CC, the Maps module will no longer work. As I understand it, Google updated their API key and Adobe had already claimed it would no longer support older versions. So, if you’re renting Lr via subscription, run the updater and it should be all good. If you have a standalone version of Lr, all is not lost. Jeffrey Friedl has a plugin for Lr that enables geolocation support and is much more powerful than the Lr Map module was anyway. More here:

Jeffrey’s “Geoencoding Support” Plugin for Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

This is part 3 of a 5-part series on Lightroom presets.  The segments are:

Map Module

The Map module doesn’t use presets in the way that the previous modules have, but there is one facility for presets in the Map module called ‘Saved Locations’. If you’re familiar with the Map module (if you’re not, you may want to read our Lightroom, Geolocation and .GPX files post) you know that there are several ways to add geolocation data to your images and associate them with Lightroom. One of these is to select known areas and to mark them as ‘Saved Locations’. Continue Reading →

The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: The Develop Module

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Hi Folks:

This is part 2 of a 5-part series on Lightroom presets.  The segments are:

Develop Module

As mentioned in the previous post, there are a number of sites devoted to Develop presets, some of which are free and some of which are for sale. There are actually two (three) different presets in the Develop module. One set of presets is for the sliders in the right panel of the Develop module and the other (two) are for the sliders in the Adjustment Brush Tool and the Graduated Filter tool (although these both share the same presets).
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The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: The Import and Library Modules

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Hi Folks:

If you mention the words ‘Lightroom’ and ‘preset’ in the same sentence, odds are pretty good that the person is referring to Lightroom’s ‘Develop presets’.  There are a number of sites devoted to sharing and/or selling Develop presets; ‘Lightroom Queen’ Victoria Brampton has an excellent list of such sites here and you can also check out the list of over 200 website links in our ‘Lightroom Links‘ post.  For those who haven’t used them, presets are ways of assigning a series of steps or actions to a one-click movement.  I have a number of Develop presets installed on my computer and I sometimes use them for inspiration when I’m stuck on an image that I’m not sure what to do with, but I rarely use them without tweaking them a bit.  We’ll get to Develop presets in their own time, but there are many, many other presets in Lightroom that can make your workflow smoother and more efficient and I thought I’d highlight a few of them based on each of Lightroom’s modules.  I wrote this originally as one post, but since it’s over 3500 words I thought I’d break it up into segments.  They are:

Continue Reading →

More on Lightroom and Metadata

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Hi Folks:

Someone on Twitter recently asked about understanding Lightroom’s various metadata fields.  I responded by providing a link to our Lightroom, File Management and Metadata post.  She wrote back and basically said, ‘Thanks for the information, but what I really want to know is what all of those fields are for…”  So I wrote the following.  She seemed to appreciate it, and I thought it might be of use to you as well. Continue Reading →

Collections in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

I’ve done a few tutorials on what I consider to be among the most important of Lightroom’s features – digital asset management (DAM), and how you can use the various options to help you organize your images.  Among the benefits are being able to find ONE image out of 10,000 or 100,000 or… Lightroom allows several different ways of classifying your images – folder structure (on your hard drive), keywords, colour labels, pick flags, metadata (capture date or camera serial number for example) and more, and the filter bar at the top of the Library module allows you to quickly highlight specific images based on these criteria.  However, there are times when one wants to create a, well, a ‘collection’ of images that share some theme or purpose from across different folders, either temporarily or permanently.  This is where Collections come in.  Lightroom works with two types of Collections – Standard Collections and Smart Collections, although the Standard Collections include one special variant called a ‘Quick Collection’ or ‘Target Collection’.  Because this post is going to be long I’ve broken it into three parts. One can read down or click on a specific section. Continue Reading →

Lightroom’s Crop Tool: Aspect Ratio and Image Size

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Hi Folks:

I recently answered a question for someone on Twitter about using the Crop Tool in Lightroom so I thought I’d embellish that a little bit and post it here as well…

There are two related issues here, so let’s forget about computers for a moment and deal with paper. If you have a sheet of paper that 1″x1″, that’s a specific size. A sheet of paper that’s 4″x4″ is also a specific size, but they both have the same aspect ratio (1:1). Similarly, a sheet that’s 4″x5″ and a sheet that’s 8″x10″ have the same aspect ratio but obviously one is four times the size of the other. Now, if you have a print that’s 8″x12″ and you cut two inches off the long edge to create an 8×10 you’ve both created a specific size and cropped it to a specific aspect ratio. Continue Reading →

Lightroom, Geolocation and .GPX files

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UPDATE: December 12, 2018:

As of November 30, if you have any version of Lr older than Lr 8 CC, the Maps module will no longer work. As I understand it, Google updated their API key and Adobe had already claimed it would no longer support older versions. So, if you’re renting Lr via subscription, run the updater and it should be all good. If you have a standalone version of Lr, all is not lost. Jeffrey Friedl has a plugin for Lr that enables geolocation support and is much more powerful than the Lr Map module was anyway. More here:

Jeffrey’s “Geoencoding Support” Plugin for Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

Welcome to our first blog post about Lightroom 4! (LR 4 Beta at this point).  A number of tutorials and videos are already available about the new features of LR 4; you can find several of them on our ‘Lightroom Links‘ page.  One of the new features in Lightroom 4 is the ‘Map’ module, and if your computer is connected to the internet the Map module will connect with Google Earth, read each image’s metadata and overlay a map of the earth (or portion thereof) with the location where your images were made.  It’s not a feature I’ll likely use much, but I can see its use in certain applications. Continue Reading →

Lightroom, File Management and Metadata

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Hi Folks:

This has been covered before on other sites (and to some extent on ours), but since I recently explained all of this to someone on Twitter I thought I’d take what I wrote then and massage it into some form of post for our blog.

To begin with we need to cover a few terms. One is that, as I mentioned in our Should I Get Lightroom or Photoshop or…? post, a digital image isn’t really an ‘image’ in the traditional sense. It starts as light, gets converted into electrical impulses by the camera’s sensor, and is then translated into binary code – 1s and 0s – as a digital file. Be that as it may, there are two aspects to each digital image. One is the image information itself – the code that is assembled to create the image on your computer screen or as a print, and the other is information about the image. This starts in the camera and can include the camera make/model/serial number, the exposure information, date and time of the image capture, the lens, focal length (for zoom lenses), GPS information and more. When the image is transferred to the computer one can add copyright information, keywords, owner contact information… All of this is collectively called ‘metadata’. This metadata is stored in one of two ways, depending on the type of digital image you’re working with. For .TIF, .PSD, .JPG and .DNG files, the metadata is stored within the image file itself. For raw images, a second file, often called a ‘sidecar’ file is generated. Sidecar files have an .XMP extension. Therefore, for a Canon raw file for example, one would have IMG0001.cr2 for the image data, and IMG0001.xmp for the metadata information.

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Import/ Export Tips for Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

One thing I see frequently on Twitter is that someone has decided to import or export a large number of images and is then distraught about how long this particular process is taking.  There can be many reasons for this; some of them you can change, and some you can’t but I thought I’d put together a few tips.  These have been cobbled together from both my own experience and from a number of other sites, so my thanks to those others!

Update, February 19, 2014.  We’ve added a new post called ‘Getting Images Out of Lightroom‘ that covers exporting images in great detail.  This post is still valuable for tips for importing images.  Also, remember to check out our ‘The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: The Import and Library Modules‘ for more tips on setting up import presets.

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