Understanding the Lightroom Catalog System

you you you in this tutorial we're going to look at Lightroom I'll explain exactly what it is also how you should set it up from the very first time you use it and I'll also explain the catalog system so if you were confused about any of those things this tutorial should answer those questions ok so first of all just what is Lightroom well from the Adobe website they say Lightroom is the essential tool for organizing editing and sharing your photography and of course it is it does a wonderful job of doing all of those things what I want to talk about though is the organization and editing part of Lightroom now for me the organizational part if you like is the sensible part and the editing part is the sexy part now to get to the sexy part you need to make sure you've done the sensible things so the first thing you need to know is that Lightroom does not store your photographs ok unlike all the software that does Lightroom does not do that ok what it does do though is it creates a catalog and that catalog is an image locator that points to your photographs so if you think about a real world catalog an actual physical catalog you would flip through the pages you would find the item that you want you would order it and somebody in a warehouse would go and locate it put it in a package and send it off to you now Lightroom it's kind of similar to that it creates a catalog and in that catalog are all your images and when you click on an image in Lightroom it will go off to where your images are stored and I will allow you to edit it so it's the same source of thing okay so the thumbnail images in Lightroom and not the actual images they're just exactly like a catalog they're just little thumbnail images of the actual item or in this case the actual photograph so when you click on the image Lightroom will go and find it ok so because lightroom does not store your photographs it is up to you to have a sensible system of storing your photographs and that's what we're going to take a look at well first of all a warning okay and the warning is this it's extremely important to have a consistent workflow right from the very first time you begin to use Lightroom you have been warned now it's very true if you begin using Lightroom without sent or properly so you haven't set up properly you will have problems and you will actually break Lightroom and you'll become very frustrated because it won't work properly and it's so easy to set it up you just have to have this sensible part remember the sensible organizational part you just need to make sure you've got that bit right so let's take a look at that then so all about good housekeeping and managing your images so the first thing you would need to do is to create a photograph of a folder now you can call this folder whatever you want a simple name would just be to call it photographs but you could put your name at the start to be honest you could call it whatever you want but photographs kind of makes sense doesn't it and then that photo should be saved to an external drive okay because what's going to happen is that folder will fill up hopefully with thousands and thousands of photographs and you don't really want them clogging up your computer it's much more sensible to have them on an external drive and if you really could you would back that external drive up to another one but that's for you to decide right so let's get back to those thousands of photographs that you've already taken now we need to get them into that main photographic folder so the first thing you should do is create individual folders okay and name those individual folders now a good system to adopt perhaps would be date location and event okay so it could be the date you went to Paris so you've got your date and location there you went to Texas State location that type of thing event wedding barbecue whatever is it's up to you it doesn't really matter as long as you adopt a system that you're happy with and your existing photographs would then go into those individual folders which would live in the main photographic folder stored on an external drive all very simple isn't it now what about new images well what you do at new images is you can either connect your camera to your computer or pop in the SD card into a card reader whilst Lightroom is open now when that happens the import dialog window will appear and you've got the chance then to create a new folder and transfer those images from your camera or your card into that new folder which again will live in the main photograph folder so it's very simple as a very simple housekeeping okay your job is to create that main photographic folder and keep it safe okay and eventually you will tell Lightroom whether photographic folder is okay so consider your main photographic folder the warehouse where all your photographs are kept so let's have a look at the catalog concept then Lightroom will create a catalog okay now you can create as many catalogs as you want in Lightroom it makes sense I think to just create one but I will give you a call of examples where you would create more than one catalog so perhaps you may be sharing your computer with a friend or a family member so you would have a catalog each okay or perhaps your wedding photographer and you wish to save all your images separately from your personal images so you would have a Lightroom catalog specifically just for your weddings and a lightning catalog specifically for your personal photography okay and if you wanted to or your wedding for photographs or your client photographs or whatever they can still be saved with your personal photographs it doesn't matter because they will all as you know P in individual folders but it's entirely up to you okay I think if you are working for a client I think it's good to have two catalogs personal and client work if you're not working you don't do any commercial work at all then just AB the one catalog that's all you'll ever need okay now of course that Lightroom catalog is linked to Lightroom and your main photographic folder which is living on that external drive is linked to the catalog so select an image in Lightroom and the catalog will go and find it from your main photographic folder okay as simple as that really so carrying on with the catalog concept then let's have a look at what happens to your photographs so currently you can see on the screen there's a raw file okay and it's living in the main photographic folder which is linked to the catalog which is linked to Lightroom now when you start editing that photograph okay you will never ever do any changes to that photograph it will remain constant in apps safe and sound in that main photographic folder so anytime you edit a photograph the whole process is non-destructive and that file that photograph will remain untouched what happens though is that Lightroom will create what is called a sidecar file right which is an XM p file now all that file is is a text file which will contain all the edits that you have created in Lightroom so for instance and you open your image off in Lightroom you correct the exposure you change the you know the brightness the shadows colors whatever you do to him all those moves that you make when you're creating that edit are saved into this text file this XMP file so when you shot light boom down and you open it up again and you click on the image that you've been editing you know seamlessly it will also apply all the previous edits you've done which are saved to this XMP file so it's a great system it's non-destructive and it never ever changes your original photograph now I should mention that there is another system different to this sidecar file system and that's the digital negative the DNG system and you've got the option when you import your photographs to convert them to DNG now all a dmg file is it's exactly the same it's it will make sure your photograph is never changed its non-destructive but it basically combines those two files together the original file and the XMP file into one file now it works exactly the same and it's entirely up to you which you do I would say 50% of my photographer friends do the sidecar XMP system which is quarterly on the screen and the rest of them will do the digital negative both work exactly the same and just remember the XMP file it's only a very small text file doesn't take up a lot of room and I would say that I use the system because it's the system I've always used or it's entirely your choice both work exactly the same now lastly that's let's have a look at the RAW processing flow what actually happens to your image so there's a raw image it's millions of pixels or red green and blue and all the data of laughs photograph all the information okay the first thing you're going to do obviously you know you're going to put it into the main photo folder sorry into its individual photo folder into the main photographs folder which is linked to the catalog okay now what Lightroom will do is it will extract the data from that raw image okay and it does that by using a RAW processing engine no it looks nothing like that engine but I just like that graphic um but leave us to say Lightroom will extract the image data and what it also does then it's it creates a new RGB preview which is going to live in Lightroom and it will also pop in that extra image data and it will all live in the Lightroom environment now that extra image data is really really useful because what it will take from the raw file is the aperture size the ISO shutter speed even down to what type of lens you used to take the photograph and this is all really useful and when you actually begin your editing so let's take a look at what that looks like in the Lightroom environment now when you first open Lightroom it will create a catalog for you and that catalog is generally saved wherever your operating system normally stores photographs so for Apple Mac there's a dedicated area called photos and for Windows it's the same thing now it creates a catalog to get you started but we are going to create a new catalog and name it and keep it safe with our photographer folder ok so let's have a look at how we do that very simple I'll come up to the menu at the top and I will just simply click on new catalog then what I need to do then is to locate where my photograph folder is now I can see here I know it's on might one of my external drives I amigas HDD and there's my photographs folder so I'm going to click on that to make sure it goes in there and as you can see there are my folders with individual events and obviously containing the photographs from each event now I will save as now you can call it whatever you you like I'm going to call it my photographs okay and simply click create what Lightroom will do now is it will close down and reopen and it will reopen with the new catalog my photographs it's as simple as that so what you need to do now is just to simply import your photographs now you can import whole folders obviously Lightroom is great because gives you the opportunity to look in that folder and just pick the photographs that you want to import you by all means you can import them all or just the photographs that you think you're going to be using generally you'll import them all but let's just see how we do that so if I click on the import button okay all I need to do now is to locate where my photographic folder is and I know it was on this like the sorry the hi Omega HDD and there is their local photographs if I expand that there are all my individual folders and I can click on one of those and bring in you know whatever photographs I want very simple now again this is just to show you and what the interface looks like and how easy it is to set up a new catalog you know in a future tutorial we'll actually do the whole process of important photographs but just to show you what it looks like so let's have a recap the first thing you need to do is to put all your existing photographs into individual folders name them sensibly and in a good system and pop all those individual folders into a main photographic folder and then when you open Lightroom up for the first time I would suggest that you create a new catalog very easy the drop-down menu just select create new catalog name it okay and I would then put that catalog into the photograph folder so what you have then is a main photograph folder with all your individual folders in from all the events and places where you've taken photographs and you would also have the catalog in there all on that external drive and that is what I would do it's all very simple to do now hope you've enjoyed this video and it's explained perhaps some of the things that you never understood I hope it's made it a lot clearer now obviously in future and tutorials we'll look at the sexy part of editing but I can't stress enough that you need to get this sensible part right and as you can see it's very easy get the sensible part right and you'll soon be onto the sexy part and creating these wonderful edits okay so you liked the video just hit the like button and subscribe for future tutorials okay my name is Frank Minghella perfect photo company and I will see you on the next tutorial see the floor plan and make them all the best half the purpose votes company take a photograph make the mold I swear for two company

Channel: Perfect Photo Company

Views: 150,209

Keywords: adobe lightroom catalog, lightroom, catalog, lightroom for beginners, lightroom tutorial, lightroom filing system, lightroom course liverpool

Id: nsqD7YI1hrY

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2016