Infratech Civil

Product:  Adobe Lightroom Classic  |   Subject: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic

In this exercise, we will learn about Adobe Lightroom Classic. 

Step 2 – Digest

This section will continue with a sample workflow to explain how I work with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. In the last section, we covered the entire ingest process, which was to take all the photos from the media card, copy all of those image files into an appropriate folder on my hard drive, and then import all of those images into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. You can see that I've imported all 37 photos from the D drive, and they exist in the 2016-03-17 cherry blossom folder shown below. 

The photos have a little bit more information. Now I'm just going to show you how I prepare the photos before I can retouch all of the photos. You will notice that some photos sort of look normal, and some photos look abnormal. That is because I like to shoot in a portrait orientation, which means the camera is tilted to the vertical, and you will get a nice long photo. So I will use the Rotate button to rotate all of the photos taken in portrait mode. You will notice certain photos have a portrait look to them, making them better when they're in the portrait mode. I am just going to go ahead and do all of the portrait modes, and then I'll see you at the end of that. 

One thing I want to mention, especially when you're doing many files, like so and you want to apply the same effect to them, you just have to select those photos, and then apply the same effect to them, and in this case, they're going to both rotate. There, I've gone ahead and quickly rotated all of those images that needed to be rotated. 

Now what I'm going to do in my next step with all of these photos is to quickly go into the loupe view. Then make sure that these are the photos that I want to work with. So what I'm going to do is very quickly, I'm going to flag the photos. I'm going to press P to flag it as a pick, and I'm going to move to the next photos and flag the photos that I like and can work with.

Now that I've flagged all of my photos, I want to work only with flagged photos. What I'm going to do now is work with the library filter. If the library filter is not available to you, you can go ahead and find it on the View menu, just click the show filter bar. Or you can use the keyboard shortcut backslash. Now that the library filter is active, I want to select the attribute, and I want to select all photos that have the flag on them. So I'm just going to click on the attribute then the flag icon. It is going to filter all of those photos very quickly. These flagged photos out of the 37 were only 17 that I thought were very good, and I want to spend some time working with them.

 Now 17 is a manageable number, so I don't have to go through and clean them up a little bit more. One other thing that I could potentially do is I could work on some of the metadata. I could add a few more keywords. I could create many things if I wanted to make the stuff more relevant to myself, my shoot, and the catalog itself. Since there are only 17 images out of 37, it's not that many photos to work with. 

The next step for me would be to develop module and work with each of these photos individually. I have my own presets that I bought from certain marketplaces, such as graphicriver. You can also find it from independent photographers who also sell some of these presets. 

But Lightroom also has its own presets. 

So, I will work with some of these presets here to make sure that images show up well. These presets are based upon what you can find on the right-hand panel in the basic panel menu, adjusting the color, adjusting the white balance, adjusting the temperature change, and so on. 

So as I work with the develop module, I'll find that certain photos are not that great, and I don't want to work with them. If I find that a photo is not great enough, I will unflag it because I don't want it. Then soon, I will only be working with a much-reduced set of photos that I think make that story for that session, that photoshoot that I did earlier today. Once I'm ready for that, I will ensure that all of these photos go into a collection. In this case, the targeted collection is the quick collection. So I'm just going to select all of the photos and add them to the collection. That way, I can work with it. I'm going to go into my quick collection, and you can see that there was one photo there In the quick collection that didn't belong. I'm going to remove it from the quick collection. All of these photos in the quick collection are the ones that I'm going to work with. Next, I'm going to right click on the quick collection and then say save the quick collection. I'm going to call it Cherry Blossoms in The Morning

Then I'm going to select to clear the quick collection after saving.

 You will notice that I have a brand new collection called cherry blossoms in the morning. The quick collection is now empty. I can work with the new collection now. 

So, in summary, that was the entire digest process for me. So to quickly recap, we had imported all the photos, then I went through, I flagged some photos, then I added some keywords if I needed to add just a few more bits of information to the metadata that made sense to me that made sense of the catalog. That just made sense to my overall workflow. Then I went into the develop module, tweaked a few things here and there. And then, I added all of the photos that I wanted to work with into the quick collection and then saved all of those things into its collection because now I'm going to export that collection and show it off in my portfolio. 

This portfolio is going to be the third process in this three-step workflow. The first step was the ingest process, which we covered in an earlier section. The second step was the digest process, which is essentially what this section was about. The third step is about exporting all of the photos in the collection for whatever purpose that I want.

 In this case, it's going to be part of an online web portfolio. So in the next section, I'm going to show you what that export process looks like. I hope this video has been helpful, and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out.