Lightroom - beginner basics sought

[Onyx]

OK, so after either Stubby's superior teaching methods and/or superior Adobe sales representation at the Maximeet™, I decided to convert to Lightroom. Over the years I've trialed things and have used each Photoshop generation: PS7, CS1, CS2 to CS3; but have always found solace in the familiarity of Nikon Capture for raw conversion & processing.

This is going to be a huge step for me. It will fundamentally change the way I shoot (no longer NEF+Jpg), catalog, store/archive my photo collection - but I thought what better than using the "new year" excuse to make such a change. To do things right, I also spent the most of last night reformatting my PC and clean installed Vista SP1, all software and their updates (it was so time and bandwidth consuming but I'm hoping it'll be worthwhile in the long run).

So I've got an absolute clean slate. I figured out how to import photos into Lighroom, and it's currently taking its own sweet time to build the 1:1 preview thing (maxing out CPU usage at 100%). So with the "and then", where do I go from here?

The ITPC info - from what I recall Peter used it to caption and insert copyright notices. What else would be recommended to 'customise' things for me?

Keyword tagging - IIRC Peter had an extensive collection of categories already setup from his old image sorting/archiving program; but for a newbie - how/where should I start? Living/non-living, people/animal... and then my mind goes blank.

Any help appreciated - especially newbies in the shoes as me... if we share our learning experiences I'm sure we could mutually benefit from it.

[phillipb]

Chi, the way I did it, I imported the original raw photos that I already had, at the time it was around 2000 photos. I then took the painstaking task of clicking on each one and add tags.
The good thing is that once you type in a tag, you can just click on it for subsequent images.
The reason I did it this way rather then batching the process so that I could have every relevant tag for each photo. For example if I had a landscape from georges river, I would put such tags as RIVER, TREES, WATER, if I was facing the other way, I would just tag it as TREES and whatever else happens to be in the photo, that way anytime I want to find all photos containing water I can, regardless of location.
Hope this helps.

[mickeyjuice]

One of the great things about Lightroom is that there are plenty of resources around for it,including some excellent videos at http://www.whibalhost.com/_Tutorials/Photoshop_LR/01/ They're for v1, not 1.3, but well worth spending a little time watching.

Holding the ALT key when moving sliders is often interesting.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobe_lightroom/discuss/72157603456613565/

[ATJ]

Moved to a separate thread.

[PiroStitch]

Love lightroom! Was apprehensive at first when Adobe bought out Rawshooter but definitely a great program!

The default settings on first import set the tone curve to Medium Contrast, which it took me a while to figure out how to change it. Now I've set up my own preset to set the curve to neutral, turn off NR and colour treatment so that i get a nice base to work with.

One thing i didn't like about Rawshooter was that I couldn't trust the jpeg conversion, but in Lightroom it's fantastic! I only convert to tiff from LR now if I plan on doing anything additional to it in p/shop, otherwise it's straight to jpeg conversions.

Still learning each time I process, but definitely well worth it.

Just put up with the learning process and you'll definitely see the rewards Chi!

My workflow right now is to create a new catalogue per shoot and have all the photos and everything stored in that folder, rather than all over the place.

[firsty]

for a quick way to add key words
when you do your import add the basic key words for the set eg. : bathurst car race in the import dialog
then in library with it set to thumbnails
use the spay can at the bottom and select keywords in the drop down list to the right and add the key words like : formula ford race 2
then all you have to do is spay the thumbnails you want the new key words on
then you can add extra keywords when ever you like, like the car number if that driver was interested in you photos

then a search of the whole data base would bring up

bathurst = every single event in bathurst

bathurst car = every car event at bathurst

bathurst formula ford = every formula ford at bathurst

formula ford car 15 = every photo of that car anywhere in Australia

there is no need to put dates on anything as you can filter any of the above by date shot (from exif data, so set your cameras date)

as far as importing... I just download every photo for a month in the one folder (on an external drive) eg. 2008-02 straight from CF card and have lightroom just reference the files with out copying the files to a new location then as you add more file to the folder you only have to right click on the folder in the lightroom library then select synchronize and lightroom will find the new files and let you import them to the data base
every couple of days I back up the data base to the external drive ( I must get onto backing up the external drive )

[Onyx]

Thanks for the tips folks, lots to absorb. I'm working my way thru some of the tutorial vids around, but basically Stubbsy already covered most of those aspects in his demo over the weekend... and plus I can experiment myself.

I did find something I thought might be useful to others too, esp those who've switched over from Capture.

http://80.196.252.2/lgweb/

There are LR presets that aim to emulate some common Capture settings (eg. normal tone curve, colour mode I, etc).

[Yi-P]

So I've got an absolute clean slate. I figured out how to import photos into Lighroom, and it's currently taking its own sweet time to build the 1:1 preview thing (maxing out CPU usage at 100%). So with the "and then", where do I go from here?

Keywording, identity plate (very cool stuff), view settings, interface settings, developer presets, web gallery? Just a thought to get things started.

Do you need 1:1 preview for ALL your photos? Usually I use 1:1 render for those photos that require lots of editing in lightroom. A standard preview might suffice if you open just a couple of photos at their max resolution. But this is only a personal choice.

Not sure how many images you have imported so far, but it might be a good idea to put them in an organised folder manner. Say, organise them by dates and month/year.
Then, start organising the keyword sets. It all depends on what you shoot most.
You might want to organise things into their respective parents and children.
[Location]
--- Australia
------NSW
--------Sydney
-------------Opera House
---- USA
------ Nevada
------------- Las Vegas
[Events]
--- Weddings
--- Gathering
--- Graduation
--- [Racing]
-----[Track]
-------- Bathurst
-------- Eastern Creek
-----[Race Event]
------ V8 Supercars
etc....

Bear in mind that keywords are only aids that will help you find that lost photo in Lightroom, it will be written into the EXIF keyword section. IPTC data goes into metadata section and not from keywords. (It's a bit confusing at start, but once you figure it out, its easy)

The ITPC info - from what I recall Peter used it to caption and insert copyright notices. What else would be recommended to 'customise' things for me?

Are you a photojournalist, a stock photographer, or your agency require you to stick to strict IPTC standards? If not, then what in the IPTC metadata is not too much of an importance. Because your keywording in lightroom should take care of this.

I think I can go on forever and put everybody in confusion state...

Couple of sites with rich info about lightroom:
Great stuff to read over the weekend when you have nothing to do...

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/

http://projectphotoshoplightroom.com/ab ... =tutorials

http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/LR/Home

http://www.lightroomforums.net

[stubbsy]

Do you need 1:1 preview for ALL your photos?

For me yes - my workflow is to import everyting at 1:1 and leave LR to do it whil I do other stuff. When it's done I can then do my first cull using the 1:1 previews. This is quicker than waiting for it to render the 1:1 preview IMHO )I'm impatient). Then once I'm done LR will remove the 1:1 previews after a month since this is the default setting.

I add only copyright and Caption in the IPTC fields. Caption is there solely to use in LR/Mogrify to automatically add that text when framing the exported pic.

[digifrog]

Matt Kloskowski has a great resource for LR tutorials