Lightroom Newbie - What Do I Do To Get Started? Totally Lost - Shooting RAW

[sonicbuffalo_RIP]

Hi.....I want to begin shooting in RAW, and as I have never shot RAW (shame on me), I need some advice on getting started with LR5. Any tips and must knows will be appreciated. I think I can learn it from the short video I watched, but how steep is the learning curve? My problem is getting to know the keyboard shortcuts I think. Any helpful comments will help me I'm sure.

Thanks.

Chris

 

[rwdflynavy]

I'm fairly new to LR as well. After you import your photos, click the Develop tab and you have lots of options to adjust the exposure, clarity etc., just mess around and figure out what you like. Easy to reverse everything you try if you don't like it. Just try the various options to figure it out. You can crop, straighten and do significant tweaks pretty easily.

Once you figure out what works for various types of shots, you can easily develop presets to speed up your workflow. Plenty of video tutorials online to help you learn.

Enjoy!

 

[jrleo33]

The following is a link to several video tutorials on Adobe LightRoom. Youtube has several more if you type in Adobe Lightroom on the Google Search-engine. These videos are a good starting point.

Lightroom Training Videos « Julieanne Kost's Blog

 

[Dave_W]

LR is very intuitive. Give it a try and I think you'll see it's much easier than you anticipated it to be.

 

[Krs_2007]

Adobe has great videos on all of their products free of charge. Also YouTube is another great place. Its really a fairly easy product to started on, just make sure you watch a video on how LR works with catalogs and such so you can organize you photos.

 

[Horoscope Fish]

Hi.....I want to begin shooting in RAW, and as I have never shot RAW (shame on me), I need some advice on getting started with LR5. Any tips and must knows will be appreciated. I think I can learn it from the short video I watched, but how steep is the learning curve? My problem is getting to know the keyboard shortcuts I think. Any helpful comments will help me I'm sure.

Lots of tutorials out there for learning Lightroom... Start here, perhaps: Learn Lightroom in a Week (Day 1)

Another good source is Adobe TV for Lightroom

....

 

[SteveH]

My best tip is to make sure you add keywords and metadata to your photos as you import them.... As your collection grows you can search by location etc if your pictures are tagged properly.

 

[sonicbuffalo_RIP]

My best tip is to make sure you add keywords and metadata to your photos as you import them.... As your collection grows you can search by location etc if your pictures are tagged properly.

I think I've stumbled onto one of my new problems...when using Elements I just used the cameras date as a file, and when I imported my pictures into LR, the ones with the dates did not show up. I have sorted over half of my over 5000 pictures into files that I labeled in Elements. Those did show up as a file in LR. How do I get the ones with dates to show up in LR? Thanks.

 

[SteveH]

I think I've stumbled onto one of my new problems...when using Elements I just used the cameras date as a file, and when I imported my pictures into LR, the ones with the dates did not show up. I have sorted over half of my over 5000 pictures into files that I labeled in Elements. Those did show up as a file in LR. How do I get the ones with dates to show up in LR? Thanks.

Are all your files in one folder? I use separate folders for each date, and name the files in the camera as DSC-001, 002 etc. The camera s also set not to start at 001 each time the SD card is wiped.

Try moving the files that are not showing up into a different folder, and then importing that new folder.

 

[sonicbuffalo_RIP]

I think that's what I'll have to do....rename each file and then import them....I guess I fell behind in book keeping.....lol

 

[SteveH]

If you set the camera to maintain the numbering even when you wipe the SD card, you can take 1000 shots before you get a name conflict.... And also, set Lightroom to import into dated sub-folders, that way, it will automatically organise your shots by date for you - all you have to do is add keywords to the tags, and you can even sync that across all shots in one import if you need.

 

[carguy]

Hi.....I want to begin shooting in RAW, and as I have never shot RAW (shame on me), I need some advice on getting started with LR5. Any tips and must knows will be appreciated. I think I can learn it from the short video I watched, but how steep is the learning curve? My problem is getting to know the keyboard shortcuts I think. Any helpful comments will help me I'm sure.

Thanks.

Chris

Hey Chris. I strongly recommend Scott Kelby's Lightroom 5 book. It's a great resource from day 1 with the app and setting up your image catalog, etc.

Link: The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter): Scott Kelby: 9780321934314: Amazon.com: Books

Also search YouTube for some very helpful Lightroom tutorials.

 

[kluisi]

Hey Chris. I strongly recommend Scott Kelby's Lightroom 5 book. It's a great resource from day 1 with the app and setting up your image catalog, etc.

Link: The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter): Scott Kelby: 9780321934314: Amazon.com: Books

Also search YouTube for some very helpful Lightroom tutorials.

This...I've been using it free on Safari Books Online (I get a free subscription from my employer). I'm almost through it and it has been a great help.

 

[nickt]

I think that's what I'll have to do....rename each file and then import them....I guess I fell behind in book keeping.....lol

You should not have to rename anything. My memory is sketchy though. Every picture I owned including some duplicate named pictures were all stored under My Pictures. Some loose, some in subfolders. Then I just imported the whole My Pictures. I think there is a box to uncheck to select importing of suspected duplicates. Initially had that off, but keep it on for new imports. Maybe your pictures that were not imported were suspected as duplicates.
Since my pictures were all under My Pictures, I 'added' them rather than moved. My old folder structure remained. Going forward, I do exactly what Steve mentioned above. New pictures go into a 2014 folder in a sub folder named with the current date. If you moved pictures outside of lightroom, rt click on the folder in the left pane and syncronize again.

I think if you want to start over, you can remove everything from left left pain. Rt click and remove. If you do this on a folder it should confirm that it is removing from Lightroom, but not the actual files. (Maybe just try on one folder before doing the entire collection at once.) So remove folder, re-do the import and choose to import (add) and give the ok for importing suspected duplicates.

 

[sonicbuffalo_RIP]

Thanks everyone.....you've all been great! I will learn (have to now)....but it might be a little slow at first! Well....I checked in Elements to see if I had copies of all the sub files....I did so I deleted the sub files and created new headings or main files. That was a huge mistake because it ended up deleting half of my pictures.

Good thing I have everything backed up on a Seagate external. I am now restoring. What a pain in the keister. I guess it was time to clean house and re-orgainize.

 

[SteveH]

Thanks everyone.....you've all been great! I will learn (have to now)....but it might be a little slow at first! Well....I checked in Elements to see if I had copies of all the sub files....I did so I deleted the sub files and created new headings or main files. That was a huge mistake because it ended up deleting half of my pictures.

Good thing I have everything backed up on a Seagate external. I am now restoring. What a pain in the keister. I guess it was time to clean house and re-orgainize.

Its much easier to get organised at the start than after a couple of years... Believe me! Its much more fun to be taking photos and editing them than to sit re-organsing them!

 

[sonicbuffalo_RIP]

Well....I got all my files restored....and they're pretty much sorted by file names....but I still have to create some new folders...most of these pictures were on cruise vacations....5 years of cruising. Have to rename the files for each particular cruise by date.

 

[nickt]

Just do all the moving from the left Lightroom pane so things stay in sync. And be aware you can add key words in bulk too in Library view. Either tag a whole group, or there is a spray tool to quickly tag individual pictures with key words.

 

[FastGlass]

I use LR4 for all my importing and learned a ton from online video's. But with me I don't use it an everyday basis so I soon forget how I did this or that and trying to find the video again was to time consuming. So I ordered the training video. Huge huge help.