Mastering Lightroom Classic CC - 3: Cull & Organize

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from online photography training.com welcome to my video series and mastering Lightroom classic CC oK we've imported our images into Lightroom now we have to separate the wheat from the chaff we have to figure out which are the images we like the most those are the images that we're going to process right away and we're going to figure out which images we like the least and those are the images that we're probably going to delete and Lightroom offers many different ways for us to go through our images and figure out which are which and we're going to go through all of those in this video now to begin with we're going to be working a lot with what Lightroom calls the tool bar the tool bar is this little strip that is directly below the images if you don't see that hit the T key on your keyboard T for tool bar the T key will toggle that tool bar on and off also be aware that the functions and tools that are displayed in the tool bar will vary as you move from module to module and even vary by what view you're in so right now we're in grid view and you could see what's here and if I change to loop view that's the single image view the keyboard shortcut that for that is e you can see that the tool bar changed it has different functionality now if I hit that G for the grid view again you could see it changed again and you could actually control what is in that tool bar if you go to the far right of the toolbar you'll see a little downward facing triangle and if I click on that you can see that there's different things there and if you want one to a pair appear like I want the painter to be here let's say I'll just click on that and it added it to the toolbar and if I click on that again and take that check mark away from painter you can see it takes it away so if I'm ever doing anything and I have functionality in my tool bar and you don't and you're in the same view as me and the same module as me go to that little downward facing triangle and make sure that you have it included so we have this toolbar we need to go through our images as I mentioned there's all different ways we could do this the most direct way and maybe the easiest way is to just add a flag to the images there's two different types of flags one is a white flag and that's kind of like a keeper we're gonna keep that image that's a good one the other one is a black flag and that's a rejected image that one is when we're probably going to end up deleting and then of course there is no flag at all that is an option as well now as you go through the images there are some keyboard shortcuts to pick one of the two flags if you want to keep an image let's say now first of all I'm in grid view I should probably not be in grid view as I do this so I'm gonna go to loop view that single image view and hit the e key on my keyboard you could see down here in the filmstrip I'm on the very first image that's usually what you do you go to the first image and work your way through all the images now let's say that I want to put a colored flag on this image there's a couple different ways I mentioned there's those keyboard shortcuts which really is the easiest way the other way is you could go to the tool bar and just do it right here you can see there's the keeper flag right there that stands for a pic so now when you look at the film strip down here and you look in the corner of the image you see it has a white flag that means that's a pic if I didn't want the white flag the other flag is that rejected flag right there so I'm setting it as rejected so I click on that and you could see that it has that little black flag on it now now if you want to remove the flag it doesn't matter whether it's a white flag or a black flag hit the U key on your keyboard that stands for unpick so we're unpicking it now I mentioned it's a lot easier with keyboard shortcuts to put a white flag on your image that's a pic so you hit the P key P as in pic and that will give you that white flag on the other hand if you want to reject the image just hit the X key on your keyboard to reject the image and you'll get that black flag and again if you want to one picot hit the U key now we could quickly go through these images let's say I like this image and I want to hit P I'll hit the P key on my keyboard but you see how it just sits there by default that is what Lightroom will do but it would be a lot faster if you would aught of ants meaning I would hit that P key it would flag the image then move to the next image in the film strip there's two different ways you could accomplish that in Lightroom the first way is just turn the caps lock key on so I have caps lock on now and when I hit the P key I'll automatically advance to the next image so I could keep doing this by hitting either P or X or if I'm undecided on an image let's say I'm undecided on this I could hit the U key to make it an unpick and it will move to the next image or I could just use the right arrow key on my keyboard and just keep moving throughout the film strip or of course I could take the mouse and just click on an image if I prefer now the other way you could auto advance instead of using the caps lock key is if you go up to the top photo menu and you go down to Auto advanced see it's right there just click on that and what it did is it has that active you can see that Chuck mark next to it so now we have Auto advanced turned on so I could easily go through these very quickly it will Auto advance through all the images and that's an alternate way of doing it instead of pushing in the caps lock key so use whichever is best for you now we could go through the images very quickly now so I could hit the P key for this one P key for that one P key for that one undecided about that one let's say so I'm gonna hit the U key and that one's good now for those of you that are new to photography this may look like it's grossly under exposed but I shot raw and I didn't want to blow out the sky so it's really what I call exposed for the sky what everyone calls expose for this guy not just me if you go to my website I have an article that explains this it's exposed to the left exposed to the right expose to the middle there's all different ways you could expose your images because a raw file is so it could contain so much dynamic range it could use utilize the entire exposure latitude of your camera and capture all the detail in those very dark areas and when we process this image and go over to the develop module you can see that I could just open up shadows and it will look perfect so even though it may look underexposed it's really exposed properly for the scene so I'm gonna go through the images real quick I could hit this you you and typically I don't delete a lot of images so I would go through and I usually just flag my best one so I'll save that P key to pick it for just the ones I really want to process right away on the other hand the ones that I'm undecided about I'll just hit either the right arrow key or the U key and go through those very quickly the ones that really stink I'll X those right away and I'll delete them so usually for my workflow and again there's no right or wrong way to do this you do this any way that you're comfortable with I'm just going to go through and I hit the U key a lot so I'll go through these u keys even though this image kind of stinks right but I'm not sure so I'm gonna just keep hitting the U key that's a little better than the previous one but I'll keep hitting the U key it's not one I want to process right away it's not one I want to necessarily delete from my hard drive so I'll just keep hitting the U key and go through them until I see one I really like for these actually I should go back like I think it maybe was this one or this one I don't know one of these for instance after I process became this so it gives you an idea what you can do with Lightroom once you process the image so this is actually one of these images I don't know which one so we'll just keep hitting the U key and go through until I really see some that stink and I know I have some that really stink towards the end so we're gonna get rid of those so we're keep hitting the Shu key I was doing some HDR brackets here in case you're wondering so there's one that's really underexposed not quite as underexposed properly exposed overexposed overexposed now these ones these just didn't work I was doing brackets here as you could see and I really just they didn't really turn up so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna hit the X key on these so I'm gonna get rid of these I'm gonna delete these eventually off my hard drive totally so I'll hit the X key and you can see how when I hit the X key it gives it that black flag and it kind of Gray's out the postage-stamp view of the image in the filmstrip so I'm gonna go down and I'm just gonna X out all these because they really didn't do what I expected them to do so we're at the end and I have them all like stuff so I have some that are picked most that are unpicked and several that are rejected I want to get rid of these rejected images to do that go up to photo then down to the bottom you could see there's delete rejected photos now there's a couple different things you could do first of all there's remove photos remove photo all right not plural if I click that it will remove my one active photo and it will give me the option of just deleting it from the Lightroom catalog and leaving it on my hard drive or deleting it totally taking it out of Lightroom and putting it in your trash bin so you'll have the choice if I chose that one or this one here we could just cut to the chase and just remove it from the catalogue it's gonna stay in line on the hard drive but it's out of Lightroom or this one delete rejected photos which all the photos that are rejected all that have that black flag will get rejected so we're going or get delete it so we're gonna click on that and this will give us the choice do I want to delete these totally from the disk or just remove them from Lightroom and leave them on the disk I'm gonna delete these totally from the desk get rid of them so I click on that and they're gone so it's as simple as that now they're not in Lightroom anymore so that's how you could quickly go through and edit or go through your images and pick the ones you want to process now there's some alternatives to the flags if you don't want to use the flags you could either put a star on it a star label or a color label and you could put up to five star labels so you could either give it one star two stars three stars four stars or five stars or if you prefer you could put a color label on it you could put a red yellow green blue or purple on it you also could put combinations you could put a white flag with three stars with a yellow label if you want so you could really designate images in a very specific way to you how you're going to work with it now if you prefer to put a star on your images instead of the flag or in addition to the flag what you could do is just hit the numeric key on your keyboard that is the number of stars you want to use so on this image if I want to give it three stars I would hit the three key on my keyboard and when I do that you could see it flash down here that it set the star rating to three and if we look down here at the filmstrip you can see it has three stars now in the corner and after I hit the three key on my keyboard it advanced to the next image so I could give this one let's say four stars and I could give this one one star so I could keep going through and do all these different star ratings to the images alternatively or in addition to you could add a color label now I mentioned that we have red yellow green blue and purple you could easily add them by clicking on any of the color labels by the way I didn't mention it but you can want to add a star to this image let's say you could just click on the pertinent star rating so if I want to add a four star rating to this image just click right there and I added a four star rating to that image in advance to the next image now on this image if I want to add a color rating we could just use the numeric keys on our keyboard red is six yellow is seven Green is eight blue is nine and poor lonely purple does not have a keyboard shortcut so if you want to add purple to your image you have to click here or you have to go up to the top menu which I believe the Thunder library and set filter or not filter where is it I never do it yeah it's under the photo menu it's under set raiding no set color label right there purple and we could do it that way sorry about that I never do it by the menu it's so much easier to hit the keyboard shortcut so if I want it hit and I want this to be read the six key on your keyboard so that kind of goes in you know flow as far as one through five are the number of stars six seven eight nine are the color labels and you can see when I did read it kind of gave it a little red tinge around the border of the image so if I want to do yellow on this one I could do seven and that one is now yellow and it said set color flag to yellow so you could do all these different settings to designate what images mean what you don't have to use these flags star ratings and color labels just for sorting your imported images you could do or you could use them for other functions for instance if I sold an image and I want to designate images I sold against images I didn't sell I could give these sold images a star rating let's say a five or give them a color label of yellow or something like that and that just means to me and only I would probably know this is that anything with a yellow label or is an image I sold so something like that so you could go through and give the images either the flag the star rating or the color label for whatever reason you want it now the reason why you might want to do that there are sorting options that so you could help you find these images later so if you want to find all the images you sold the images that contain a color label you could go down here and see where it says filter and it's kind of grayed out if I click on this one this is just going to show the images that have the pic or white flag label on them it next to it if I click on that that is showing the pics and the unpicked images if I click the next one it will show all three so it's showing it's basically showing everything if I want to undo these just click them again and we're undoing them so be aware of that a lot of people get confused about this sorting they click on let's say their pics then they'll click on a color label they want to look at the ones that are color labeled yellow and when they click on it they're not getting anything because they're actually getting the ones that are picked and have a yellow label instead of just one or the other so be aware that you have to kind of turn the one off to turn the other one on so if I just want to see yellow label now I could do that and it's very easy to kind of find images so in your sorting process if you have images you sold the yellow color label it's very easy to find them right here you also could use the drop down and do some other sorting that we're going to get into that in a future video when we talk more about finding and sorting things in your library that's a little beyond what we're doing in this video right now so we have these images kind of labeled the way we'll want them and maybe there's some that are very close and we want to figure out which one's the best there's a couple different function there's a couple different functions in Lightroom that allow you to kind of compare images now I mentioned in previous videos that there's different views we have grid view right here on the left and this shows all your images in a grid we have a loop view right here which is that single image view next to that there's this XY view that's compare view and the best way to utilize this is to select all the images first that you want to compare now I have these images right here at the beginning that are all kind of similar they're all taking on the becks back steps of the buffalo History Museum there's the statue of Abraham Lincoln and there's a little pond they call it Mirror Lake in the background so that's all very similar images and I want to compare them all to each other and see which one's the best so I'm going to click on one here and I could eat select them all by going to the last one I want to compare and hold the shift key in and that will select them all in the film strip if they're not in a role like this what you could do is click the first one that you want to select and then hold the command or control key in the command if you have a Mac ctrl if you have a PC and then just quick click on the subsequent images you want to select that may not be in a row now again I am going to just select these right in a row here so I have those all selected now I want to go to compare mode you could click right here or you could use the C key on your keyboard and go to compare mode now when you're in compare mode we have the selected image on the left this is our are selected for lack of a better way to put it the candidate is on the right do I like this one or this one better so you're basically going to select them or compare them two at a time and determine which one's the best with the current best one being on the left hand panel so this is my selected image do I like it better than this one no yes I do I like this left one better than the right one so I could just hit the right arrow key and it will go from the filmstrip to the next image and show it over here as the candidate so there's that one um I still probably I don't know I think I like the candidate better because the sky isn't as blown out as this one so I want to get this one over here because this is now my new selection if I go over to the toolbar I could trade the places with this key here or I could just simply move it over right here with this little icon so I'm going to click there and it put it over here and it went to the next image over here on the right panel now which one do I like better the left one or the right one the light one the right one has a more kind of wider view I kind of liked that one so I'm gonna switch it so I like that one and we went through all our images already so this is our selected image now one thing if I go back again if you zoom in by clicking on the image you'll zoom in equally so you could kind of compare focus and see which one's sharper and you could drag them around and they'll drag around equally like that what you also could do is if you go to the Navigator up here in the top left-hand panel if you don't see it click on that little triangle to open it and you can grab this little square and drag it around and look you know what the pixels of your image and see which one is the sharpest and which one you may like best click on any of the images again you zoom back out so you've determined that you like you know this one the best so to get out of compare review just hit either G for grid-view or e for loop view and when you do you'll open up into loop view when I hit the e key with the image that I like the best out of these seven images selected or displayed so that is compare that's how you could compare one image to another now another way you could do it is use what Lightroom calls survey mode you could look at more than one image we could look at all seven of these images at one time select them all again I have them selected let's get into survey mode you either could click right here or use the keyboard shortcut n I'm not sure why it's N but you'll see them all okay so I see all my images here alright this one here that I'm real close up to Abraham Lincoln's back I don't like that one so I want to get rid of it so basically when you're using survey mode its you're looking at you're trying to find the worst one and you're getting rid of the worst one so this is the worst one in my mind so I'm going to click X so that one's gone now you can see they repositioned in enlarged a little bit all right this one's sky is a little bit blown out so I'm going to get rid of that one all right this one - skies a little blown out we'll get rid of that one now you can see how they got a little bigger this one again the skies a little blown out now I kind of like these three alright now it's starting to get more difficult which one do we like which one don't we like alright this one is slightly crooked I could straighten it of course but you know let's get rid of that so I have these two very similar now we have a wider view and we have this more narrow view which one do we like better well I don't know they're both pretty close but let's say that I like the one on the left the best so I could X this one out and I like that one now we could give this it already has a flag a white flag you see but you could give it a flag you could you know um undo it now I have auto-advance on see so I went to the next-gen image that sometimes why I don't like auto advance on up here I like this off and I personally prefer to use the caps lock key to advance through my images that way when I'm doing something like this I don't Auto advance automatically I only Auto advance when I want to and I'll turn on the caps lock key when I want to so again there's no right or wrong way - whichever way works best for you so we like this one the best and we've determined that this is the one that we're going to process first so that's all different ways you could mark your images for whatever reason in this case usually for calling for the ones you want to process first and the ones you want to delete totally and then the ones in the middle that you're undecided about what I found is sometimes my best images don't strike me right away meaning I've taken in this case you know 60 something images and when I went through them all I deleted maybe a dozen of them but of the other 50 something images there are a couple that I really like but then a week later two weeks later I find one how did I miss that one and it looks better to me and often that's my most popular image so always revisit your folders weeks months years later and you'll be surprised that you'll find some gems that you didn't catch the first time around now one little tip I want to give you a couple little tips before we end this video when we're looking at our images sometimes it's difficult to really tell if the image is sending good because the screen is so busy we have these panels we have the top panel where it's his library developed we have the left and right panel and we have the bottom film strip if you want to just temporarily remove the panel so you could see your image all by yourself all by itself there's three different ways you could do that the first way is to hit shift tab so hold the shift key and hit the tab key on your keyboard and you're closing down all those panels and you're seeing your image all by itself hit shift tab again and you bring those panels back another way you could do it is you could hit the L key on your keyboard we call that lights on or off or lights dim let me explain hit the L key once and we call this lights dim you can see how kind of dim those panels they're still there but they're dimmed out hit the L key a second time Nets lights out hit the L key another time and we're back where we started so lights dim lights out then lights on so that is the L key the other way you could look at your image without distractions is hit the F key on your keyboard for full screen hit the F key and we see our image in full screen and that's the way I usually do it kind of enlarges the images to fill the screen and you get a better look then you could hit the F key again and you're back to this view so that will help you hopefully better look at your image without those distractions of the panel's bothering you and maybe obscuring what you see another recommendation I can make real quick I just thought of is the color of this border if you right-click on the border a little menu pops up and you can see how you could go from white to a light gray to a medium gray to a dark gray to a darker gray to up black a lot of times especially with colors it's difficult to really recognize that maybe the image is too saturated or maybe not saturated enough if you're using one of the borders at the extreme meaning a very white or light gray border or a black border it's much better to use one of the middle Gray's so right-click on the border and pick either medium gray dark gray even darker gray any of these three would probably work usually I keep mine on dark gray that's very neutral and it won't adversely affect your eyes in such a way that you're not seeing the colors in a true relationship to each other for lack of a better way to put it so make sure again they use this border put that at the correct shade of gray basically so that you could see your image in its best light so that's a lot of different ways you could sort images you could put flags on your images and you know while I'm thinking I want to show you one more thing sorry if you look up here when we import our images we're in this catalog view of previous import when you're in this view that's fine because a Lightroom automatically go to this view so you could see your import well when you're in this view if you want to sort these in a custom order you won't be able to meaning if I want to take this image and I want to drag it over here so it's right after this image or between these two images I can't do that I'll get this warning the current li.selected source does not support custom order well what we could do is go to the actual folder that contains the image now I know it's this folder right here if you have about a bazillion folders it might be difficult to do that so what you could do is just right-click on the image and then what you go to is go to folder in library right here click on that and you'll go to the actual folder that contains the image now if I want to take this image and drag it so it's between these two images it will so I could actually custom sort these images very easily when I'm in the folder view now one thing to by default when I imported these images you see it's just showing these dates you may remember that I had parent folders here I had Buffalo History Museum for this one and for that one I probably had Buffalo zoo I don't remember so what you could do is if you want to see those parent folders displayed over here on the left-hand panel right-click on one of the folders in this case this folder right here and go to show parent folder now it will show that parent folder and I could see that fire file folder hierarchy do that for this folder as well right click go down to show parent folder so now I see this hierarchy well maybe I'd like to see the hierarchy all the way back to the root folder so I'm gonna go on to one of the two folders I just allowed the view to come through either Buffalo zoo or History Museum it doesn't matter which one just right-click on that and go to show parent folder now I have my raw files it's in the photos hard drive I have my raw files parent folder and I have each of the other folders that are beneath the raw files folder showing and then I have the actual folders that hold the images under those so I could see the entire file folder hierarchy now whenever I import images they're actually going to display the folder hierarchy automatically and so I recommend you do this so you get a better idea where your images actually reside on your hard drive and if you have Lightroom closed you could know that where they are so in this file folder hierarchy so that's it finally for this images before I think of something else I should add to this video and it becomes an hour long I'd like to thank everyone that watches my videos and thank you to everyone that likes and shares my videos that's the way the best way to get the word out about the videos thank you very very much I really to appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 69,693

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, cull, organize, loupe view

Id: KSoCYzFhmEo

Length: 32min 34sec (1954 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2018