• 
• 
• 

Lightroom Quick Tips

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Sleeping Screech Owl, Rye, New Hampshire

The owl has nothing to do with my post this week, but I thought I’d show it because this little guy is a good reminder that winter can be a great time for wildlife photography because you can often find species in your area that aren't normally around. It seems that in my neck of the woods (coastal New Hampshire,) there is often a cooperative owl that migrates down from northern climes to entertain photographers. Last year, it was a great grey owl. This year it’s this screech owl who has been sitting in a tree adjacent to Route 1A in Rye, N.H. for about a month. Check local birding hotlines and listserves for potential opportunities in your area.

Now for this week’s official post, I’ve put together five Lightroom tips that should help speed up your workflow on a daily basis:

1) Keyword Sets. In my recent post, New Year's (Workflow) Resolutions (outdoorphotographer.com: community/blogs,) I discussed the virtues of keywording your images in order to better organize your image catalog. The Library module in Lightroom, makes it easy to add keywords by using the Keywording and Keyword List panels. You can type keywords right in the “Keyword Tags” box, or in the “Click here to add keywords” box. If there are certain words you use on a regular basis, consider creating keyword sets that contain these terms. You’ll see the Keyword Set box at the bottom of the Keywording panel. You can add a keyword to an image from a keyword set by just clicking on the term. When you select multiple images in Grid view, clicking on a keyword adds it to all the selected images. Lightroom comes with a few sets installed—Outdoor Photography, Wedding Photography, Portrait Photography—but to harness the power of this feature, you need to create your own sets. For example, I’ve created a keyword set named Northeast States, which is a set of the most common states I shoot in. No more trying to type Massachusetts correctly! To create a set, click on the arrows next to the current keyword set name and choose Edit Set. You can toggle through your keyword sets by typing Alt-0. Also, when you hold down the Alt key, you will notice that a number appears next to each keyword in your current keyword set. Type Alt+ the number to add that keyword to your currently selected image(s.)

2

2) Spray Painting Keywords. Another way to add keywords to an image is by using the Painter tool. Look for the paint can in the Library tool bar (it’s under the grid). If you don’t see the paint can, click on the downward-facing triangle on the left side of the tool bar and select Painter to add it to the tool bar. Click on the paint can, and it will bring up a choice of metadata you can add—choose keywords, then type in the keyword you want to add. You can also type multiple keywords separated by a comma. As you mouse over images in the grid, the mouse pointer will turn into a paint can. Click on an image and the keyword(s) will be added to that image. If you select multiple images, the paint can will apply your keyword to all of the selected images. Once the keywords are applied, the mouse pointer turns into an eraser and you can then click on an image to remove those keywords. You’ll notice the painter can also be used to add labels, ratings, metadata presets and more.

3

3) Refine Photos. This little-talked-about Library menu item can be handy when doing your initial edits in a collection. When I fist download a shoot, I go through my images and flag potential keepers by hitting the “P” key (for pick) when that image is selected. Once this first run-through is complete, I click on “Refine Photos” from the Library menu. This marks the unflagged photos as rejects and unflags my picked photos, automatically filtering the collection to show only flagged and unflagged photos, which means the rejects will no longer be visible. (Don’t worry, the rejects are still there and you can get them back into view by changing the filter to “Rejected Photos.”) Now I can repeat the process to further refine my edit, by flagging the final keepers from the initial selects and using the Refine Photos command again. Once I'm sure I’ve got the photos I want to keep, I easily can delete the rejects by clicking on “Delete Rejected Photos” from the bottom of the Photo menu.

Add Comment