Hi, this is Barbie Jeffers for the Mindful Eye in the Digital Dark Room.
Today I am starting a serious of tutorials on an introduction to the light room from the photographer who is just beginning to use the light room. This series of tutorials will take you through from opening light room from the very first time, importing your images in the light room. Processing those images and finally outputting the images, so let us jump in and take a look at the light room inter face.
When you open light room this is the inner face that you will see on the window on your monitor, across the top you will see the names of five modules that make up a bright room. There is the library module where you will input your images and make them available for processing to light room. The develop module where you process your images and the slide show print and when modules where you can create a slide show, print your images or out put them to the web gallery.
The inter face for light room is made up, up of three panels. A left sinner and right panel, and this structure follow the modules all the way through light room. The only thing that will be different is the content to each of the panel as you go for module to module. In the library module, and the develop module you will spend most of your time importing and developing your images.
Before we start importing the images, how ever let us take a minute to talk about setting up a file structure for your images. We knew Import your images from your compact flash card or other camera media card. Light room will body fault, store those images and you were picture folder if you are on a MAC or you are my pictures folder if you are on the PC. My suggestion and the suggestion of many light room experts is that you will not follow this default of light room. Instead, I will suggest that you set up a folder on your computer to contain sub folders of all the images that you plan to import into light room.
Having all of these images in sub folders under one folder will just make your light so much easy to going forward using the light room. You will notice that I set up a photo here called a light room images, and in that folder I got three sub folders of images that I plan to use in light room or process with light room.
And here under the pictures folders, you will notice that there is still a folder called light room, which contains light room catalog, and light rooms catalog contains information about the images that you process in lighting room. It contains the media data and any other adjustments you made to the images. The light room, the images them selves are not modified by light room. It is the catalog contains a sort of a template that can over light those images to reflect all the changes you made, so leaving the light room catalog in the pictures folders is perfectly okay because you are never going to modify that catalog has such by itself.
Back to our inner face, let us discuss a few preferences before we got started importing some images in the light room and the light room preferences can be found under the edit menu if you are on the PC, or under the light room if you are on the MAC. So click on preferences and we are going to go to the preferences dialog box, and the one where interested in here is the import dialog box. There are two selections here that were interested in, one is the show import dialog when the memory card is detected, and the other is the three JPEG files next to roll a separate photos.
Showing the import dialog box when a memory card is detected means that, when you have a card reader with a card attach to you computer. This will launch light rooms import dialog box automatically. If you do not want that to happen, do not click this selection. The selection to 3JPEG files next to row as separate photos as the one you might want to give a little bit of a consideration. If you, like many photographers shoot your images in row plus JPEG and you want to have your JPEG images brought into light room along with your row images, you must check this box, 3JPEG files next to row has separate photos. If you do not check this box then light room is only going to import the row images from your media card and your card reader.
In the middle section of the import preferences, you will see some information about the DNG creation or digital negative creation. The digital negative file construct was created by ADOBE because the camera manufactures each have a priority row format and there were some concern that in the feature. The camera manufactures may choose not to support folders forms of the row files, or folders formats so they are all files. So ADOBE came up with this DNG or Digital Negative File that is open in none priority.
They are several advantages to use in the DNG file; one is that they are smaller. Usually about 20% and 2 you do not need that separate sidecar XMP file to go along with your digital negatives that you do when you processing row files. So if you decide you want to use the Digital Negative option rather than processing you, row files and this are the settings that most people suggest that you use. A medium sides JPEG preview, preserves the row image so you will never touch it. Compress using a low slips compression with it.
Now you also have the option the a bad original row file in your digital negative, but doing this makes the file much larger and slows down the processing, so I would suggest that you not embed the row images. While were here in the preference box, go and click on the general preferences and there are a couple of things in here that I want you to see. Letting the most recent catalog is probably is a good options since unless you set up several catalogs for lot of things. You are going to be processing everything out of one catalog and that you have here a choice to select some sounds for to another value when you finish importing photos, or if you are, finish exporting photos.
The one section that we want to go through right now is this section at the button called goes to catalog settings. You click on these and you are going to go to the catalog settings inter face and what where interested in here is the demo data, so go across and click on the demo data, settings here. The demo data preferences and the one thing that I am particularly interested talking about here is to automatically right changes to your X and P file. Now if you are processing a row file and you plan to x port that row file to be used in camera wall, or to send to someone where they would be bringing it in to camera row or any other program. That does not process the abated media data, and then you need to export the X and P files with the row file.
However, if you click on this automatically right changes in to X and P, what that would do is to write those changes to the X and P file every time you make changes to the row file. In this close right room down, what you can do is leave this option unchecked and at the time you are ready to export your row file if should you need to do that. You can export the XMP size card file with it at the same time, so this keeps you from writing and updating the X and P file every time you make notifications to your row image but should you need it. You can always get it when you get ready to export those file.
Okay, so let us just leave that uncheck and close out our preferences settings. Now before we start importing the file to the computer. We are going to take a little break and let you take a look around your system to see how many images you have scattered all over your computer that you need to put in to one folder. For your light room images or does that you want to process in light room and it will let you take a minute to look at your preferences and set that up, and then we will continue with this first tutorial in this second section of that tutorial.
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