If you are in Seattle or can travel in, don’t miss this chance to learn in a small class setting!

In this two day hands-on workshop, learn the fundamentals of Lightroom, concentrating on the Library and Develop modules where you manage, edit and enhance your images. With hands-on practice, learn how to organize, backup, manage, edit, fix and enhance your images, and the basics of working through large shoots efficiently with collections, presets, and synchronized settings. Learn how to move back and forth between Lightroom and Photoshop, and finally, to create jpeg and other copies of your images to share with others.

Click here for details and to register.

Read the description for this free 90 minute overview, and register for it, on my webinar page.  Don’t wait — it will fill fast!

Lightroom can really make your life easier, if you know how to ask it to. Here are a few tips for finding things or getting places quickly:

1. You’re working with a photo or folder in Lightroom, but need to go out and view it in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder. Lightroom can get you there – Right-Click (Ctl-Click on a one button mouse) on the photo or folder, and choose Show in Explorer/Finder. Lightroom will launch an Explorer or Finder window, with the photo or folder selected.
2. In Lightroom, you finally found the photo you have been looking for, by scrolling through your catalog or doing a filter. But where does this photo live — what folder is it in?  Lightroom can get you there.  Right-Click on your photo (Ctl-Click on a one button mouse), and choose Go to Folder in Library.  Lightroom will jump to that folder in the Folders panel.
3. If instead of going to the folder, you want to jump to a collection the photo is in, choose Go to Collections, and choose the collection from the list. (There won’t be a list if the photo isn’t in any collections).

Photo Right-Click Options

Enjoy!

If you have a folder in Lightroom such as your Pictures folder, but you are not sure that all of the photos in that folder and its subfolders have been imported in Lightroom, you can have Lightroom check for you!  Right-click on the folder, and choose Synchronize Folder.

The dialog below will show you how many new photos it found, if any, and give you the option to import them.  I recommend checking Show import dialog before importing, so that you can be sure that you really do want to import them.

In the Import dialog, uncheck any photos you don’t want to import, choose Add in the top center to add to the catalog without copying or moving, and then click Import in the bottom right.

Lightroom will also look for missing photos (with question marks) in your catalog. I don’t recommend checking the box to remove them using this process — it is much better to go through them in the Library Module and decide if you want to remove them or find them.

Scan for metadata updates is independent of the new photos process. This looks for any changes to your files that other programs, like Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw, have made. You can check it if you work with other programs and want to see if your files are up to date.

Enjoyed this article? Enter your email below to sign up for updates on new content:

CAPTCHA Code:

Wondering what the Lightroom 4 Beta looks like and/or how to use the new features successfully?

I still have some spots left in this FREE 90 minute webinar, Saturday January 28 at 10:00 a.m. PST (6:00 PM GMT.)  This is my last one on the Beta!

Register here:

If you can’t attend, you will find a recording of an earlier one here: Lightroom 4 Beta Recorded Webinar.

(Updated 1/30/12) Soft proofing is new in the Develop module of Lightroom 4 (the Beta at this point). It allows you to get a better idea of what your photo will look like in print when printing with profiles, and what it will look like when you export to sRGB or another color space. If your photo has richly saturated colors, for example, when you soft-proof you will see them become muted, since many printers and papers, as well as sRGB, can’t display them so saturated. When you print to paper, your photos will also lose contrast, as paper whites are never as bright as monitor whites. Soft proofing allows you to preview this, and then if necessary, make further adjustments to your photo to optimize it given the constraints of your chosen output method.

I will have much more to say for beginners on this topic, but for those already using soft proofing in the Lightroom 4 Beta, I wanted to show you two ways to display the original next to the proof as you work on the proof. (Thank you to Mike for the question that prompted my idea for this post.)

With Soft Proofing checked in the toolbar below your photo, as you make your first Develop adjustment, you will be asked to either make the original the proof, or to make a proof copy.

1. If you prefer to make your output / proof adjustments on the original, choose Make this a Proof.  Then to see both versions side by side, type Y to view Before and After side by side.  Next you will change the definition of “Before”: in the History panel, right-click on the History step that immediately proceeds your first proof adjustment (or the top step if you haven’t made any yet),and choose “Copy History Step Settings to Before”.

2. If you prefer to have a separate proof copy, you will choose Make a Proof Copy.  Normally you can’t view two different photos (or a photo and it’s virtual copy) side by side with Before/After, but for soft-proofing, the Lightroom team has brilliantly built this in. (I didn’t know this at first so I had posted a work-around, but I have updated this post with the direct way.) Simply make sure you have your proof copy selected in the filmstrip, go to Before/After (Y), and in the toolbar below the photos, choose “Master Photo” from the Before dropdown.

With either method, only the proof will change as you work.

Finally, no need to go to Photoshop for soft proofing!

Enjoyed this article? Enter your email below to sign up for updates on new content:

CAPTCHA Code:

Do any of these happen to you?

• You have to crop a photo, perhaps because it isn’t straight or you applied lens corrections, but the crop cuts out something you really need?
• Something in your photo is right on the edge of the photo, and needs to be moved up a bit?
• You need to fix two things that are really close to each other, and the spot removal tool won’t let you?

If so, you will want to watch my 5 minute video here showing some cool tips for using the Lightroom spot removal tool.  They won’t always work, but when they do they are quite handy. These tips apply to all version of Lightroom, and to Camera Raw as well.

I find that the more I challenge the spot removal tool, the more I discover that it can do for me.  Yes, it still has its limits, but it is much more powerful than it initially appears!

Related Content:

Video on the fundamentals of using the spot removal tool (with some advanced tips, too)  from Lightroom Fundamentals and Beyond: A Workshop on DVD in which I teach the fundamentals of using the spot removal tool (as well as some advanced tips).
Putting One Spot Removal Fix on Top of Another
The Difference between Heal and Clone in the Spot Removal Tool

Enjoyed this article? Enter your email address below to sign up for updates on new content:

CAPTCHA Code:

To be honest, I don’t download a lot of presets from the internet.   I personally have limited mental bandwidth for add-ons, and there are so many out there that they can be hard to sift through.  However, I agree that done right, they can add great value.  It can be very efficient to use a good creative preset or set of presets, since I can get 90% of the way towards making a photo look great with just one or a handful of clicks in one panel rather than having to sift through all of Lightroom’s Develop sliders, plus I can get cool looks that I never would have thought of creating myself.

Occasionally I hear about some presets that I just have to check out, including X-Equals XeL Black and White Toolkit of over 300 presets. They are designed to emulate the look of 54 classic black and white films, as well as 4 antiquated processes, and the workflow ingeniously follows the traditional black and white darkroom workflow (as I understand it — truth be told, I only had a couple months of film/darkroom experience):

1. Simulate black and white capture:

• Choose your film type from 54 choices (with a set of presets for each, covering black and white mix, tone and grain)
• Choose your color filter or color mix

2. Simulate darkroom work:

• Choose your paper contrast grade
• Adjust your contrast (with “curve kicks”)
• Dodge and burn (with graduated filters)
• Solarize / special effects
• Toning  (Sepia, Selenium, and 5 more)

The toolkit  also has a cool set of presets to reproduce four antiquated processes ( Tintypes, Daguerrotypes, Cyanotypes and Ambrotypes).

Continue reading »

In this 65 minute video from my January 11 Lightroom 4 Beta webinar, I give you a tour of the new features, and explain the basics of how to use them.

I wish the audio quality were better, but it is what it is — rest assured that my Lightroom DVD products have higher quality audio and video.

(Note: I have also added one more free live webinar, for Saturday, January 28. Click here for details and sign up.)

Please enter your email below to be redirected to this and other free videos.

(If you are not already on it, this will add you to my newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time once you receive an email