I downloaded the trial. I am not finding it as intuitive or easy as others are saying. Is there a tutorial that I can check out? Also wondering if for with the slideshow if there are options in the full version for different slide transitions. I have 18 days left on the trial.
What you need to know about Lightroom is that it's not some standalone program where you just open an image or two on a whim, edit and save the changes; it's an entire photographers management environment, for the entire process of storing, cataloguing, archiving and exporting (for the web, print or whatever) your photographs.
As such, it maintains its own internal "library" of your photos, which it calls a "Catalog" so I'll refer to it using the same from now on. So step 1 is make a Catalog. To then work with any photos they must be imported into this Catalog. You'll probably just want one Catalog and import everything into it, but you could have multiple for different purposes/segmentation. Anyway.
So say you've been off galavanting and got 50 new photos on your camera. You transfer them to your PC/Mac. You fires up Lightroom, and you go into the Library tab (leftmost of the top right "tabs" menu) and hit Import down the bottom left. A new window appears, with three panes; on the left, selecting where you want to import photos from, so here you select wherever you copied them to on your PC from your camera. The large middle pane will, once you've selected a folder from the left, show thumbnails and allow you to choose individual shots to import. Above this is the selection for how you want to import them. You'll probably want either Move or Add, depending on whether you've already copied the photos to the folder you want them to live in, or want to let Lightroom handle it. If you choose Move, the right pane will allow you to select where, or if you opt for Add, they'll get imported and left in their original location on your drive.
Let's just assume you've got that sorted. You've imported your 50 photos and you'll now be looking at the main Library tab, where you can review your photos. You can put them into "Collections" here, abstract groupings purely for your own organisational purposes, you can add comments, keywords, and various other metadata to each photo or groups of photos (by selecting multiple), and do some simple edits like upping the exposures.
I'll add at this point that the main power of Lightroom comes when working with .RAW images, so if you're not saving photos in RAW you'll miss some of the more advanced functionality (but nothing that I've mentioned up 'til now).
So. You've now got them imported, named into a Collection if so desired, and added some descriptions. If you now need to do any real editing, you jump to the Develop tab from the top right menu. You'll always be viewing an individual photo at a time in Develop, unlike Library's grid view. Also, you can press your keyboard's D key to quickly go Develop, and, initially non-intuitively, the G key to go back to the Library tab ("G" as it shows them in a grid view, see). Here you get a left hand pane for quick presets, the middle pane for viewing what you're up to, and the right hand pane for fine grain control (and here's where you'll miss some flexibility if you're not working with RAW images).
To go through all the possibilities with Develop's right hand pane would take a while, so I'll wait for some feedback before I jump into that. Instead I'll jump forward to...
So now you've done all your edits and want to actually do something with your photos. I really have no clue what the Slideshow, Print or Web tabs are for, I think they do stupid fangled things that are a bit useless if you know what you're doing; that or maybe I actually don't know what I'm doing. Anyway. I ignore those tabs. I just select any/all photos I've modified and want to do something with, from the little "slideshow" navigation bar at the bottom of the Develop window, right click one, and hit Export. This gives you plenty of size/encoding options, and... you're done. You'll then have some nice JPGs to upload here, or do whatever with.
@eyebrows Shit the bed. Ainchoo the helpful one this evening? Hows about you just write the manual and have done with it? Can I give you the prize for most epic essay of lightroom-related nerdery I have seen so far? Man.
"Did this help?" If not then I will eat a penguin.
I have the original version at home and love it. I have Lightroom 3 at work and find it a little more difficult just to import the pictures.
On a side note, did any of you see that there is a plug-in coming out that will let you layer and mask in Lightroom? How awesome will that be?! It is a Scott Kelby product called "Perfect Layers" I believe.
Wow..maybe I'm in over my head with this...maybe we should just close this thread and I should forget about lightroom..... @eyebrows Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly. When I have some time I'll see if I can wrap my brain around it. @katiegc24 ... lol... @vikdaddy Thank you @dejongdd I'm just trying to do basic things like highlight, shadow, etc...I have kind of figured those out. I have been using picnik and although I tend not to edit too much but I have had some fun playing around with some of the effects picnik has. I thought lightroom 3 would have those effects too based on some pics posted on 365. Also, would like to try merging photos like I have seen others do here. I just wanted to play around with it to see what I could do.
@eyebrows and I don't shoot in RAW, but that is another reason why I'd like to try lightroom to see if I might want to shoot in RAW sometimes to see the difference of JPG vs RAW.
I'm really just wanted to explore it (lightroom and maybe RAW) and see what it's all about.
Wow! Great advice here. I just wanted to add that I believe the trial version is exactly the same as the final product. At least that is what I found after trying it for a month and then buying it.
@cohare@eyebrows i'm looking into getting lightroom (hence searching for through the threads) but will obviously want to try the trial first. after you've done the trial and if you decide you want to buy the full product, will all the photos you've worked on/stored still all be there without needing to be re-organised? thanks for any help you can give me!
@grimbo I'm using what you might call a "special extended trial" version so I can't actually tell you for definite, *but*, I can't imagine it wouldn't. Registering would just unlock it and all your data should still be there perfectly accessible just as you left it.
@grimbo Once your trial runs out (or before) all you have to do is enter your serial number you get once you buy the product. I bought mine through the mail and just entered the code. All of my pictures remained. In fact, everything was exactly the same as when I was using the trial.
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As such, it maintains its own internal "library" of your photos, which it calls a "Catalog" so I'll refer to it using the same from now on. So step 1 is make a Catalog. To then work with any photos they must be imported into this Catalog. You'll probably just want one Catalog and import everything into it, but you could have multiple for different purposes/segmentation. Anyway.
So say you've been off galavanting and got 50 new photos on your camera. You transfer them to your PC/Mac. You fires up Lightroom, and you go into the Library tab (leftmost of the top right "tabs" menu) and hit Import down the bottom left. A new window appears, with three panes; on the left, selecting where you want to import photos from, so here you select wherever you copied them to on your PC from your camera. The large middle pane will, once you've selected a folder from the left, show thumbnails and allow you to choose individual shots to import. Above this is the selection for how you want to import them. You'll probably want either Move or Add, depending on whether you've already copied the photos to the folder you want them to live in, or want to let Lightroom handle it. If you choose Move, the right pane will allow you to select where, or if you opt for Add, they'll get imported and left in their original location on your drive.
So...
I'll add at this point that the main power of Lightroom comes when working with .RAW images, so if you're not saving photos in RAW you'll miss some of the more advanced functionality (but nothing that I've mentioned up 'til now).
So. You've now got them imported, named into a Collection if so desired, and added some descriptions. If you now need to do any real editing, you jump to the Develop tab from the top right menu. You'll always be viewing an individual photo at a time in Develop, unlike Library's grid view. Also, you can press your keyboard's D key to quickly go Develop, and, initially non-intuitively, the G key to go back to the Library tab ("G" as it shows them in a grid view, see). Here you get a left hand pane for quick presets, the middle pane for viewing what you're up to, and the right hand pane for fine grain control (and here's where you'll miss some flexibility if you're not working with RAW images).
To go through all the possibilities with Develop's right hand pane would take a while, so I'll wait for some feedback before I jump into that. Instead I'll jump forward to...
So now you've done all your edits and want to actually do something with your photos. I really have no clue what the Slideshow, Print or Web tabs are for, I think they do stupid fangled things that are a bit useless if you know what you're doing; that or maybe I actually don't know what I'm doing. Anyway. I ignore those tabs. I just select any/all photos I've modified and want to do something with, from the little "slideshow" navigation bar at the bottom of the Develop window, right click one, and hit Export. This gives you plenty of size/encoding options, and... you're done. You'll then have some nice JPGs to upload here, or do whatever with.
Did this help?
"Did this help?" If not then I will eat a penguin.
On a side note, did any of you see that there is a plug-in coming out that will let you layer and mask in Lightroom? How awesome will that be?! It is a Scott Kelby product called "Perfect Layers" I believe.
@eyebrows Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly. When I have some time I'll see if I can wrap my brain around it.
@katiegc24 ... lol...
@vikdaddy Thank you
@dejongdd I'm just trying to do basic things like highlight, shadow, etc...I have kind of figured those out. I have been using picnik and although I tend not to edit too much but I have had some fun playing around with some of the effects picnik has. I thought lightroom 3 would have those effects too based on some pics posted on 365. Also, would like to try merging photos like I have seen others do here. I just wanted to play around with it to see what I could do.
I'm really just wanted to explore it (lightroom and maybe RAW) and see what it's all about.