The Digital Photo Experience

"Please make backups!"

 
Lightroom is a great tool for organizing your photo library, working with images and making prints and web galleries. Here are five quick tips for working with this great program.

1)  When fine-tuning any adjustment sliders, hover your mouse over the slider itself and use the up and down arrow  keys to adjust the values in a controlled manner. Shift+arrow makes big changes, ALT+arrow makes small changes.  Arrows alone make medium changes. This allows you to make more controlled, precise changes than using the mouse to drag them up and down.

2)  When using this method to fine-tune a slider, you will often find that as you make an adjustment that your brain registers the change first before truly seeing the new image. For example, when changing the tint slider towards red of an image that is too green, you will first just see too red before seeing the image as it really is now. To avoid this, trick your brain! Close your eyes for a half-second as you change the slider. When you open your eyes, the change has already been completed and your brain will register the image as if it is new. It is much easier to evaluate the image since you don’t have the bias of too red to overcome.

3) Lightroom catalogs are databases. Databases need fast hard drives capable of many reads and writes! The best solution for a catalog would be one of the new SSD hard drives, but they are still very expensive. Ensure that you have at least a 7200RPM hard drive. You can store your pictures on another, slower, drive if you can’t afford a gigantic, fast drive. My catalogs sit on a local RAID 0 array while my photos sit on a Drobo Pro connected via iSCSI.

4) Organize your plugins! The same can be said for many other aspects of Lightroom, too. Below is my Lightroom folder on my RAID array, where I store everything except for my photographs. Lightroom presets I’ve downloaded get stored here first, then imported into Lightroom. My Wacom preferences get backed up here, as do backups of my own presets. All of my Lightroom plugins are also downloaded here, then installed from this location. If I ever have to reinstall Lightroom, reload a plugin or need to recover my presets, they are all right here and there’s no running around searching for everything.

5) Don’t forget to backup your presets! Develop, import, print, adjustment brushes and more. These presets save an inordinate amount of time and keep you from making mistakes by automating the tedious task of repeatedly selecting settings. The easiest way to find your presets folder is to go to EDIT – PREFERENCES then choose the PRESETS tab. Click on Show Lightroom Presets folder. Make sure this Lightroom folder is part of your backup plan. You do have a backup plan, right? No backups make for a sad puppy.