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Image Selection

Lesson 6 from: Lightroom CC: Organizing Your Digital Photo Life

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

6. Image Selection

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

02:25
2

Creative Cloud Construct

31:15
3

Lightroom Classic vs. Lightroom CC

11:16
4

Importing and Organization

10:06
5

Folder and Album Creation

03:08
6

Image Selection

25:17
7

Connectivity and Data

14:29
8

Finding Images in Lightroom CC

12:05

Lesson Info

Image Selection

Couple weekends ago, I went to a wedding and I'm a wedding photographer by career, that's what I do. And I went to a friend's wedding, to his daughter's wedding and I was there, as a wedding photographer, when you go to a wedding that you're not actually shooting, you have no idea what to do. Because you're so used to having things in your hands and taking pictures. But I didn't even take a camera with me, I just went, right. Because I thought, I'm just gonna not be a photographer. I'm just gonna go to this wedding, you know. And so he had his camera at the wedding and at the reception and I was like, I was doing pretty good. But I couldn't help myself so I stole his camera. And so I stole his camera and took some pictures of him dancing with his daughter but then I grabbed the bride and groom and said, okay, you guys gotta come out with me, because the light was perfect. And so I stole them and I took the picture and I left it on the camera so that he could find it, so that he'd like,...

and then I stole the card and put them on the cloud and then gave the card back to him. It was all secret so he had no idea. And when he started looking through his pictures, he saw these photos so I was pretty happy with my sneaky, my stealthy work. So anyway, so I'm gonna look through these photos. Now I put them up on my cloud and so on the way home from the wedding, when I was on the plane, I was able to look on my iPad. So I'm gonna go to my iPad because rather than looking at them here, I'm gonna look at them on my iPad. So I went here, let's see, I'm gonna go to, there we are, so I was looking at them here. And you can see on the iPad, actually I'm gonna have to, there we go, okay. Now you can see on the iPad that as i scroll through, these are the images that I took. You can see that that says Raw up in the right-hand corner. So that tells me what kind of photograph I'm looking at. If there was just a JPEG that I'd taken from a camera phone or something like that, it would show up as something else. You can see at this top left-hand corner, there's one that says DNG, so it's a digital negative, which is another raw type of file. So you get to know what those are. And on the iPad, you can actually, with two fingers, you can click, so if you jut click with two fingers, it'll show you different amounts of information. So this one shows you what kind of camera took it because you can see the actual filename as a dot NEF so it's a Nikon camera. You can see, if I double-click it again, you can see this one is shot two eight, this one's a shot of two eight at a 400th of a second. So it's showing the actual information right there, two eight 100 ISO at 1/200th of a second. So that, and if I do it again, I can get rid of all of it so that I can just look at the photographs. And then if I do it again, let's see, there, so then I can get star ratings and flags. So you see the checkboxes means that it is flagged. It's a pick, I like it. And so these are the ones that I picked. You're only seeing the ones I picked, I threw the rest away. So, but what I need to do is go through these photos and find the ones that are actually the best photographs. So I click on here and I would just scan through and this is the way I look through them on the airplane. Just like this. And I'm looking for the best ones. I really like that one quite a bit, I think she looks good. And so I'm going to, over on the right-hand bottom side there's a little star, I click on that. And once I'm in that mode, I can just swipe up to the left and it gives me stars. See, as I swipe down or up, I get a number of stars. And so I'll give it four stars. And then I can also go up on the right-hand side and I can pick, or if I come down I can reject it or no flag at all. So I've got two different ways to register whether I like something. So I can either reject it or pick it and I can give it stars. And those stars then show up here on, so once I go away from that, when I go back here, and I go back to Lightroom CC, then you'll see that those stars all show up here as well. So I'm gonna look through my photos and there, see, there's a five star. And then that other four star's right there, see that? So there's four stars there with a flag. So that's the other one that I like. And I actually like this, I like this five star one here, too. So now, if I want to sort by those, so once I've done some of that picking and I've flagged some and I've starred some, I like them, then I can go up here to this little funnel-looking thing right here and that sort of will start to hone down the images that we want to use. So I'm gonna click on that and then I can choose to show only my four star images and above. So there's my four star images and above. Or I could just say, oh, only show me the ones that are picked and above two stars. So there's the two stars and picked. So I can kind of sort those things. And I can also sort by whether it's a video. And so this is an important thing, by the way. When you put photos into your Lightroom CC, it also puts those videos in. So you can look at your videos from here, you can watch videos here, and you can send them to the cloud. So your videos are getting stored in the cloud, as well. And your videos can then be seen in your other devices. So it's not just photos, it's also videos that you can see here. So you can sort by just videos or just photos and then you also have the ability to look through keywords that have come in. So if you've added keywords to this, and we'll talk a little bit more about keywords later, you can find those keywords here and you can sort by them. You can also sort by the cameras that have been shot. So I can only look at the Nikon images and so now I'm looking at just Nikon images and just two star and above. So see how I'm honing down those images and finding the images that are very specific to what I want? So, and then I can also choose locations. So if I happen to have a GPS on my camera or on my phone, your phone always has GPS on unless you specifically tell it not to, so pretty much every photo you take with your phone is gonna have a GPS on it. So you can always just click on here and say, oh, I want to see only the things that I shot in the United States or in Italy or something like that. So it's very easy to hone down and find the images that you really really want to work with. Over on the right-hand side is where all the adjustments are and we're gonna go through those in our next segment. But I want you to see at the bottom, this is important stuff right here. Those keywords that I talked about that are up here in this Keyword dropdown, they're added here. So if I see that all of these images here have a bride in them then I can type in Bride and I add that to all of the images. So now if I search for Bride, it's there. There's also, you know, trees in there, et cetera. So I could add those kind of things in there. But there's something really amazing about the Lightroom CC that I'm gonna show you soon that comes to, comes to work with those keywords. So you should add keywords now. If you're gonna work in CC, and you're adding keywords, make sure that you are looking at conceptual keywords. So for instance, love. Love is a great keyword to add to a wedding and a bride and a groom or a mom, a dad, and a daughter. That's a great keyword because Lightroom CC, along with the cloud, now has the ability to look at your photographs and intelligently figure out what they are and I'll show you how to do that later. So the only thing it can't do is computers don't know how to identify love yet. So things like love and commitment and stuff like that, you kind of have to, you want to keyword those things for yourself. Anything that you think would be helpful for you to find photos. Like for instance, humor. If there's something funny or sweet or cute, I'll keyword that because then I can always say, I want to find a cute photograph of my daughter. And if I notated it as cute, then I can be like, oh, there's all the little cute ones or all the humorous ones, so that's really easy to find stuff. So that's where you do keywords is in this tag-looking thing. And then below that is the info panel. And the info panel is where all of the information about the photograph shows up including where it was taken. So I'm just gonna go here and click on just this one so you can see it has no title and caption because I need to enter that. So a title and caption is really helpful when you're posting something on, say like a blog, or if you're posting it on Facebook, because it can use some of that information to create the text around the photograph. Also, in finding the photograph, if you want to put in the location and the city and the state and the country, that's helpful to you to find it as well. And remember you can highlight all of the photographs in the setting and then you can say, well this was shot in California and it was in, see how it's putting a map in there now? So it's saying, oh, it was shot in California so it's somewhere around here. But I can then say where it was shot. But as I do that, it'll barrel it down and tell exactly where it is so that way we can find it. If I look at something that has a GPS on it, it'll actually show me the GPS coordinates and it'll show me exactly where that photograph was like within a foot or two of where that photo was taken. So anything from an iPhone or something like that, in this map you'll actually see the location for that, okay. So that's really good information about your photographs. And at the very bottom, this is how you figure out what you've got. So I click on an image and you can see, it says, Synced and Backed Up. That means that the original image is here and it's in the cloud as an original image. It's Synced and Backed Up. Local, I have the original file. In the cloud, I have the original file backed up. So I know now that this photo is super protected, super secure. If you take Lightroom Classic, remember we showed you in the schematic that if you take Lightroom Classic and you put a photo into Lightroom Classic, it will only send up the smart preview. Which means that if I came back here and was looking at Lightroom CC, it would have sucked down from the cloud, it would have sucked that preview down. Not the original because Lightroom Classic doesn't put the original in the cloud. So if Lightroom Classic doesn't put the original in the cloud, then Lightroom CC can't pull it down. So instead you would be seeing a note here that says, locally, it's just a smart preview, it's a proxy, alright. So this is really good information to know. So it's important for you to pay attention to that because you want to understand what's where. You never want to be in the dark about where your photographs are. Recapping. When we're using Lightroom CC, which is the much more simplified version of Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC will do all of the organizing for you. If you import into it, even if it's already on your computer, it's going to make a copy of it and put it where it wants it to be organized. Lightroom CC will organize everything for you by date in whatever location you choose. From then on out, you have no say over what it does with the photographs. It's gonna simply take those photographs, organize them by date, and then it's gonna throw them up in the cloud as a backup for you so that everything that you have on your computer is also in the cloud. If you use the preferences, you can choose how much of the original files you want to keep local. I would suggest that on a big computer that has lots of space, you turn it to 100% and let it keep all of it local. It'll send it all to the cloud and then you'll have everything in the cloud. Then, if you have a Mac Air or some small laptop that you want to take and travel with, that's when you want to turn it to zero percent or 20% or 25, 30%, something like that so that it's not taking up your whole hard drive with the same photographs. And if you turn it down to like 20%, it will intelligently figure out which images you want to keep. It knows based on if you've edited them, whether you've starred them and flagged them and if you've put keywords and stuff like that. It can figure out, these are the favorites. I'm gonna keep these local and I'm gonna let the rest of them stay in the cloud. You can also tell a particular image. So if you go in your View and go to Square Grid instead of Photo Grid, see how all that information is there, like stars and flags? There's also a little dropdown menu right there, Synced and Backed Up, right. So you can tell the status of that, as well. If this was not synced and backed up, if for some reason it wasn't the original file here, it was just a proxy, this little button would turn so that I could click on it and say download it and it would make this one stay local. So this button right here will allow you to force one image to be local. So if there's a whole series of images that you're like, I always have to keep these local because I'm always working with them and I'm on planes and whatever, you could go through and click them all. But all of mine are local here because this has all the photos on it. Now over here, none of these are local or most of them are not local. So if in there I go up to my View and do the square detail, so you can see here that there's going to be less of these. So let's just go to this and let's look for an image that's not, see that? So Synced and backed Up but I don't have it stored locally because see how it's a gray checkbox? If I click on that, it's now downloading that photo and that one photo will stay locally on this computer regardless of whatever else happens. So I can choose which images I want to stay local on and which ones so individually I can do that, alright. Will you be able to tether with the new Lightroom CC and if yes, will it be faster than Lightroom Classic? Okay, so here's the deal. Those of you who are tuning in and you're wondering what's different about Lightroom Classic versus Lightroom CC. Lightroom CC is very simple right now. Let me tell you the story behind that. Lightroom Classic was built 10 years ago on completely different code. And so it is something that can't go into the next 20 years because the code is wrong. You can't keep building on an older code. And so that's why Lightroom CC is here. Lightroom CC is built on brand new code, it's built from the ground up so it's gonna be much much faster. There's gonna be things that aren't in Lightroom CC right now and I'll bet you there's a ton of users out there that are looking at it going, what did they do with this, what did they do with that. It's all coming. This is a one dot O, right? And so stuff is going to come in to Lightroom CC that is not there right now and it's gonna happen quickly. Like there's gonna be stuff coming all the time, right. So watch for it. By Christmas, you'll have more Christmas presents under the tree because it'll be Lightroom Christmas presents. So you're gonna have plenty of stuff that's gonna keep coming in and I would imagine that at some point, tethering will come in. But that's why we have Lightroom Classic because until Lightroom CC has everything that Lightroom Classic has, Classic will still be there. And it's still gonna be, and by the way, Lightroom Classic has been updated, too, and it's much faster, it's got a whole bunch of new things in it. It's being updated as well. And they have more coders working on Lightroom Classic than they do on Lightroom CC. So don't anyone out there think that Lightroom Classic is going away and they're just kind of shelving it and throwing it away, it's not what's going on. They're giving us two options. One's a simplified, streamlined version that will continually get better and get more of the features that we know and love. And Lightroom Classic is staying there and continually building up. But for most people, what's in Lightroom CC and what will be in Lightroom CC very shortly is enough for them to be super happy with what's going on. Bob has a question. By default, Lightroom CC stores the catalog in the Pictures folder on my Mac. How do you change that default location? I want to move my catalog off of my computer's hard drive. First of all, what would you kind of recommend-- Okay, I don't recommend the catalog being off the computer. Catalog should stay on the computer because that's the fastest location for it. That's why Lightroom puts it there. But the preference, in the preferences, to tell it where to put the photos. The photos can be on some other computer, no problem. In fact, I recommend it. Or a different hard drive, right? Different hard drive. Did I say other computer? I meant another hard drive. Yeah, I recommend it to be on a different hard drive simply because that puts those photos, which are precious, on a thing that's not constantly being used. So I don't want it to fail. Plus, I like having mine on a RAID one system so that I have duplication going on at the same time. But other people might want to put it on a bigger hard drive and most computers nowadays are kind of limited to the amount of hard drives you can put in them. You know what I mean, we're getting smaller and smaller. Especially Macs, they've just kind of thrown away the idea of having multiple hard drives in a computer. And so for me, I have no options so I put it outside. If you have like a PC and you've got one of those big towers and you've got like slots for 30 different drives, go ahead and put your drive internal but just have a separate drive that's just for photos, right. So you just want your photo drive to be a photo drive not the same drive that's also running your iTunes and your mail and your this and that because that's the thing that's gonna die first. So that's my recommendation on that. Just keep the catalog internal where it wants to be and then put your photos external if you want to put them somewhere else. If you delete a selection of pictures from your computer, will it also delete from the cloud? My storage space is full and I want to move all photos to cloud without keeping it on my computer. Okay, so if you're in Lightroom CC, if you delete it from your computer, it will delete it from the cloud so that's not the way to do it. If you're on Lightroom CC and you want the stuff to go to the cloud and you want to limit what's on there, all you gotta do is come in here, go to that Preference, go to that Local Storage, and just take that slider and go (swish) and lower the slider and things will start disappearing from the hard drive but they'll be up there. Okay. Alright? Got it. But you manually select that, right? It's just one slider. It's just a slider. You just go (swish) like that and it'll, remember it'll keep what it thinks you want and it'll throw the rest in the cloud. And then you can choose, no no, keep these images here, by simply selecting them all and saying, you know, keep this on. But remember, if you're having storage issues on your computer, the easiest way to solve that and still keep the photos local is to simply go here to the Advanced area and change the location and go buy a hard drive external and stick it next to your computer, plug it in, and then you're fine. So that would be my preference. The only time I like to do this limited version is if I'm on a computer like this and this is my travel computer. That's when I would go in and set this thing to zero percent so that nothing is on this hard drive. And it works miraculously well to have nothing on this but I still have access to those photos. Sounds good. So you may have partially already answered it for me but I have my catalog on my desktop and then I have probably 10 bays and then I have, I think, five externals plugged in also. And I currently, with the current Lightroom Classic, as I run through terabytes, I plug another one in and then new sessions go into that one. With the new Lightroom CC, do I have to pick one hard drive for my photos to go to or can I continue to just have multiple hard drives that the photos are on and then my catalog is on my primary? That's the idea is that you wouldn't, two things to answer that question. Number one, is that you might not be the person to use Lightroom CC as a primary. If you have that many photographs, you're probably not the person that should be using Lightroom CC as your primary photo organizer. You should be using Lightroom Classic the way you are using it. So some people are gonna use Lightroom Classic as their main photo editor and they're gonna use Lightroom CC as this amazing little extra thing. And I'll show you what that's about. We'll go the opposite direction. Here, today, we are starting with Lightroom CC for people who just like photographs and they're not running around shooting hundreds of thousands of photographs a year. Those people, that are like my mom, is going to use Lightroom CC and she'll never even touch Lightroom Classic. And then there might be other people here that will use Lightroom CC and then they'll go into Lightroom Classic when they need something extra. Because they all work together, they all tie together. So like for instance, who uses Lightroom CC here right now or Lightroom Classic right now? Okay, so anybody like the book module? No, you use the book module? Okay, so, if you started using Lightroom CC as your primary because you weren't a photographer, you were just, so you could use Lightroom CC as your primary source. But because you have the Creative Cloud, you also have access to Lightroom Classic. And so all of this stuff also ends up on your Lightroom Classic so you could just go over to Lightroom Classic and make a book. So it's all tied together and all those photos will be there. So you have the ability to go back and forth between the two but you choose one to be the primary editor that you're gonna use. For me that's Lightroom Classic but I'm using Lightroom CC as this amazing tool off to the side, right. And then other people are gonna use Lightroom CC as their main thing and they're gonna use Lightroom Classic if and when they need it.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Lightroom® CC Ecosystem PDF
Film Presets

Ratings and Reviews

JennMercille
 

This class blew my mind! As a full-time professional photographer, with a very complicated workflow (that is next to impossible to explain to my assistant) I cannot express how essential this class is to overhauling and simplifying my workflow. I am so excited to finally be able to split my workflow between multiple laptops and work stations WITHOUT having to build a server at my studio. I love that I now have a framework to start building a new organizational and backup system that I can easily train others on, and mobilize quickly. With all of the changes and improvements that Adobe is bringing to Lightroom CC & Classic, this class is integral to understanding and utilizing the program to its fullest potential! Jared Platt is a wonderful teacher and this class especially is perfect for novices and seasoned professionals alike!

a Creativelive Student
 

I was lucky enough to participate in-studio for this class. Jared is a great presenter and broke down the complicated Lightroom CC vs. Lightroom Classic changes. His conversational style of presenting kept things interesting and participants involved. This course was much more than just learning what the programs do. Jared walked through sample workflows to show when and why you would use the multitude of sliders and editing tools within the program. The course is worth every penny! Topics will remain pertinent well after newer versions of Lightroom CC and Classic are released.

agcphoto
 

I won't be able to watch all of this, but I purchased it anyway. Jared's ability to address the technical as well as the artistic aspects of Lightroom is unparalleled. He is one of my preferred presenters, especially for Lightroom. I especially appreciate how he has clarified the differences among the versions of Lightroom that are available. Thank you Jared!

Student Work

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