Lightroom and Photoshop Tutorials, Tips and Training by Laura Shoe

Spend Your Time in Line or At the Beach Learning Lightroom!

May 152012

Waiting for the light to get good so you can shoot? In line at the DMV? Relaxing on your summer vacation? Whip out your iPad, iPhone, or other MP4 video-compatible mobile device, watch my Lightroom videos, and learn how to take your photography post-processing to the next level!

My Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4 Fundamentals & Beyond Series are i-Compatible. To add them to your iTunes library, go to File>Add Folder, and select the folder or folders from your purchased DVD or download. Then sync Movies on your iPad or iPhone. (Sorry I don’t have instructions for Android and other devices, but if they support MP4 videos, they will play my videos.)

Lightroom 4 Fundamentals & Beyond: Over 10 1/2 hours of training on 55 videos, for beginners and intermediate Lightroom users!

“These video tutorials are fantastic. The best way to learn how to manage Lightroom 4. I had seen very good tutorials on Lightroom 4 on lynda.com and kelbytraining.com, but for me these ones by Laura Shoe are really the best. More examples, more details, very well explained. Besides being an expert on the subject, she knows how to teach it.” Ricardo M.

“Laura Shoe is a born teacher, presenting all the complexities of Lightroom clearly and concisely. I feel such comfort just having her Fundamentals and Beyond at my fingertips because I know when I get stumped working on a photo in Lightroom, I can quickly find the solution in Shoe’s well-laid-out course. I don’t have to pour through my quickly and incoherently taken notes; I just sit back and let Laura explain her Lightroom tips to me and this complicated yet wonderful software opens up before me as simple as the alphabet! (Well, pretty close!)” Joe D.

“This is the second tutorial I have purchased from Laura shoe and her teaching style is amazing. She makes everything look easy because she walks you through each step- as if she is holding your hand. I am not the most technical person- but she makes me feel at ease. It is as if I’m at a seminar with her. I would recommend this tutorial for anyone who is just starting out in Lightroom or already is proficient but wants to know a little more about some of the features they don’t use” Julie K

Don’t Forget to Keyword Those Photos! How to Keep Track of Them So You Can

May 142012

As much as I like to come across to you as perfectly organized, I have to admit that I am not always as disciplined as I should be about immediately completing my keywording of photos after I import them. During those organizational spurts that I go through to clean this up, it would be nice to be able to get back to those photos that I need to finish.

In the Collections panel there is a smart collection called Without Keywords, that if you click on it, does display all photos in your catalog that have no keywords:

Without Keywords Smart Collection that Lightroom Ships With

The problem is, that as as soon as you add one keyword to a photo, it disappears from this rule-based collection, because it only shows photos with ZERO keywords.

Here’s a great tip to better keep track of photos that you haven’t finished keywording: Continue reading »

Help – Lightroom Lost All My Photos!

May 112012

This is one of the most common, and certainly the most stress-filled request I get for help. You open up Lightroom, and there is nothing there — all the photos you have imported and worked on are gone. Fortunately, this usually isn’t the disaster that it at first seems to be.

When you are in Lightroom, you are looking at Lightroom’s catalog. You can read more about the relationship between the catalog and your photos in my earlier post, About Your Images and the Lightroom Catalog. In a nutshell, the catalog contains all the information about your photos, all the work you do on your photos, and some snapshots of your photos, but not the photos (original raw files, jpegs) themselves. If you open Lightroom and it is blank, you have a catalog with no information about any photos, but your photos are almost certainly still sitting safely on your hard drive as they were before.

Assuming you aren’t just starting out with Lightroom, why would the catalog be blank? It is usually because for one of various reasons, Lightroom forgot about or couldn’t find the one you were working with, and therefore opened up a blank new one. Continue reading »

Ten Reasons Why Lightroom Users May Want to Buy Photoshop

May 092012

Photoshop CS6 started shipping yesterday, so I anticipate that a lot of photographers not currently using Photoshop are wondering if they should consider it. I am assuming for the sake of this article that you are already using Lightroom. (If not, you may want to read this post, which talks about why I think pro’s as well as amateurs who really care about their photography should.) The question here is, do you need Photoshop too?

There is certainly much that you can do in Photoshop that you can’t do in Lightroom. The key questions are, do you need or want to do enough of those things to justify the $699 price tag, and are you willing and able to invest the time and money to learn this complicated program?

The first thing I recommend is that you get very comfortable with all of Lightroom’s Develop tools. Many people who have used Lightroom for years still haven’t explored or mastered all of its tools. (Of course an excellent way to learn them is with my Lightroom Fundamentals & Beyond video series.)

Amongst serious amateurs and pro’s, usage of Photoshop for photography purposes runs the full spectrum — some are completely satisfied with just using Lightroom (more and more with each new Lightroom release!), some take some percentage to Photoshop to do more complicated work, and others take all their photos to Photoshop to do more complicated work or to use actions they have built or purchased. I personally take about 5% of my straight photographs to Photoshop to do work I can’t do in Lightroom. I also use Photoshop for creative compositing. Let me be clear that if you decide not to add Photoshop to your toolkit, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t serious about your photography — Lightroom is very powerful by itself.

Here are My Top 10 Reasons Why You May Want or Need Photoshop Continue reading »

Photoshop CS6 Now Available

May 072012

The Creative Suite 6, including Photoshop CS6 is now available for download or shipment. . It is available for pre-order now, though it won’t start shipping for up to 30 days. (The website “estimates” May 7.)

The traditional stand-alone Photoshop CS6 full version will be $699, and the upgrade will be $199. Photoshop CS6 Extended, which contains the ability to create and manipulate 3D objects, is $999/$399. Note that video editing has moved from the Extended version to the Standard version. Upgrade pricing is available to owners of CS3 or later (though for CS3 and CS4 owners, it will expire Dec. 31, 2012.)

You can also gain access to Photoshop CS6 by subscribing to Adobe’s new Creative Cloud subscription service. Click here to read my next post discussing these two different alternatives.

Purchase CS6 or get more information at this Adobe link.

Photoshop CS6 contains everything that the Beta version did. Amongst the highlights for photographers in are: Continue reading »

Running Out of Space? How to Move Photos to Another Hard Drive

May 032012

I am running out of space on my internal hard drive, so I need to move some or all of my photographs to an external hard drive. I know I am not the only one facing this issue, as I get questions from readers at least once a week on how to do this.

In this short video, I will show you how to move your photographs to another hard drive, working completely in Lightroom.

(Once you hit the play button, click on the sprocket wheel in the bottom right of the video screen to increase the quality to 720p. It’s still not up to my DVD video standards, but it is better, at least!)

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Additional Resources:

Moving Your Lightroom Catalog

Importing Photos into Lightroom

Don’t Miss the Photo Whoa Deal on Photography E-Books from Craft and Vision!

Apr 292012

If you are a Craft & Vision e-book fan as I am, you may be interested in this great deal from Photo Whoa — through Monday, April 30 only! 40 quality e-books for $89 — less than $2.25/book!

Click here for the Photo Whoa deal.

Deal ends 10 pm PT Monday, 1 am ET Tuesday / 5 am GMT Tuesday. (In the interest of full disclosure, I do get a percentage on each sale — but I don’t promote what I don’t believe in.)

Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate #2 Available!

Apr 262012

Adobe today released a second release candidate for Lightroom 4.1. This second release candidate has been released to the public for broader testing and feedback in advance of an official Lightroom 4.1 release.

This release candidate fixes more bugs (on top of those fixed in the first release candidate), and adds support for several new cameras. In addition, we have two nice new features:

Support for 32-bit HDR TIFF files. Now once you have merged multiple exposures using Photoshop’s HDR-Pro, you can do the tone mapping using Lightroom’s Develop module. Note that 32-bit PSD’s are not supported, so be sure to save in Photoshop as a TIFF.
New Lens Corrections tools for fixing purple and green fringing. In the Lens Corrections panel, there is a new Color tab, with the Lightroom 4.0 Remove Chromatic Aberration checkbox, as well as the new purple and green controls. For automatic correction, click on the eye dropper and then click in the purple or green fringe in your photo (while zoomed in to 1:1 or greater), and Lightroom will detect and set the sliders appropriately to correct it. Amount controls the strength of correction, and colors between the two Hue triangles are affected.

New local purple/green defringe controls in the adjustment brush and graduated filters.

For a complete list of bug fixes and new cameras supported, see this Adobe post.

For an excellent article by Eric Chan of Adobe on purple and green fringing and how to fix it with the new defringe controls, click here.

Lightroom Quick Tip: Seeing Folder Information in Grid View

Apr 242012

Here’s a question I got this week:

“I have many duplicates of photos on my hard drive and in Lightroom. If I click on All Photographs (or some subset) and sort by capture date, I can see the duplicates side by side, but I can’t figure out how to easily see which folder each of the duplicates are in, so I can decide which to delete and which to keep. I know I could right-click on a photo and choose Go to Folder in Library to jump to the folder, but I don’t want to jump to it, I just want to know what it is. Is there an easy way?” Kathy

Lightroom to the rescue!

For this type of work, I recommend displaying the folder name above your image thumbnails, along with file name, capture date and time, and copy name. Go to Grid view (G) in the Library module, then up in the menu bar, View > View Options. Set “Show Grid Extras” to Expanded Cells. Then down in the Expanded Cell Extras section, choose these four fields.

Lightroom set view options for grid view
Now I can see that this photo is in my 11-04 Zion National Park folder, as well as what the file name is and the capture date and time:

lightroom-display-folder-name

If this photo were a virtual copy, I would see a “copy name” to the right of the folder name. For more on using the Copy Name field to document your virtual copies, see this post.

If seeing the folder name isn’t enough and you want to see the whole folder hierarchy, you can open up the Metadata panel (bottom right in the Library module), and hover over the Folder name field:

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Which to Buy — the Stand-Alone Photoshop CS6, or the Creative Cloud Subscription?

Apr 232012

As I mentioned in my last post, Adobe today announced the upcoming release of both the CS6 Creative Suite, including Photoshop CS6, and Adobe’s new Creative Cloud subscription service. There are now therefore two ways to purchase Photoshop CS6 — as we are accustomed to, through purchase of the stand-alone traditional product, and now also through the new Creative Cloud subscription service.

Below is my early take on the options.

Overview of Pricing and Options

The traditional stand-alone Photoshop CS6 full version will be $699, and the upgrade will be $199. (Photoshop CS6 Extended, which contains the ability to create and manipulate 3D objects, is $999/$399. Note that video editing has moved from the Extended version to the Standard version.) Upgrade pricing is available to owners of CS3 or later, though for CS3 and CS4 owners, it will expire December 31, 2012.

As before, you can also purchase the stand-alone version of various bundles of subsets of Creative Suite software which include Photoshop CS6.

The Creative Cloud is a subscription plan — for an annual fee, you have access to: Continue reading »