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Lightroom CC- Interface Tour

Lesson 3 from: Lightroom Classic CC for the Professional Photographer

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

3. Lightroom CC- Interface Tour

Lesson Info

Lightroom CC- Interface Tour

I've got one more question. So I've been uploading everything to my hard drive, and then it'll go into Lightroom Classic, so if I wanna drop everything into the Lightroom creative cloud, the catalog is gonna be stored on the computer itself, and then how do I just double check to make sure everything's going into that hard drive, the external drive that I've got? And you're using Lightroom CC, then? Yes. Not Lightroom Classic? Yeah. Okay, so let's go over to our secondary computer, and we're gonna actually go through, right now, so this is a good segway, we're gonna go through where everything exists, in both Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic, just so you can see the difference, because you gotta understand the difference between all these things before we can go any further today. And did you have a-- Yeah, I just wanna tack on one question, kind of to lease, because it's kinda in the same zone. Gut asked, "If you're uploading stuff to CC, "it goes into Lightroom Classic.

"Lightroom Classic uses that little Smart Preview. "It doesn't upload the four-resolution file." So there was a concern, that they didn't want to have it do that and then delete the four-resolution file on the cloud. That's not gonna happen, though, right? No, Lightroom will never delete anything without like doing (beeps). (laughs) The red alert, yeah. "Don't delete, you're gonna lose this, it's gonna take--" You know, it tells you, "you're losing this file if you do this." So you don't have to worry about that. But in this process, you're gonna see what happens, but that person might misunderstand. If you put something into Lightroom CC, and the full resolution image goes to the cloud, the full resolution image goes down to Lightroom Classic. The full resolution. So you have three places full resolution. You have it on this computer, you have it on the cloud, and you have it on your classic computer as well. It's in three places. Cool. Okay? Got it. The only time Smart Previews get involved is when you upload from Classic up to the cloud. It sends a Smart Preview, and then the Smart Preview gets delivered everywhere, and I'll show you that just in a second here. So let's go into Lightroom CC right now, and if you're looking at this set of files, I'm going to go into the view and change it to the square grid, just so you can see some of the tags. If you look here, there's flags, and there's stars, and stuff like that. So you've seen all of that before inside of Lightroom Classic, but what you haven't seen is this. Do you see that little guy right there? That tells you it is a Smart Preview or a proxy image. It is not the original image. Because I imported this from Lightroom Classic, and so the Smart Preview went up into the cloud, and it came down here, so it's not the full one, it's a proxy image. So I can still work on this file. This one here is a proxy image. This one here is a proxy image right there. So I've got a proxy image here. I can work on it all day long. I can play with it, I can adjust it, I can do all sorts of stuff with this. I can burn and dodge, but it's not the original. I can still share it, because the proxy image is a really good file. I share proxies all the time, and you wouldn't know the difference, so most every image that I put on Facebook or on my Instagram account come from proxy images. It doesn't come from the original, because I hardly ever do it from my computer. I do it from my phone or from my iPad. That's where I share stuff. And so I'm rarely sharing stuff from my desktop, which means that I'm never actually sending you the original file, except now that we have Lightroom CC, some of those might end up being original files, because I'll have uploaded them from Lightroom CC. So let's see where these are, and remember, if we go to the preferences, in the preferences, there is an option, right below in the local storage area, the advanced preference allows you to choose where the original photos are going to be located, should you choose to save some of them to your hard drive. So if I were using Lightroom CC as my primary input device, that's where I was going to put all my photos, I would make sure that I changed this location to an external hard drive, so I would hit change location, and then I would search for an external hard drive, and I would put it on that external hard drive, not on the internal pictures folder here. But because I am not using this computer as a primary input source, and I'm just using it occasionally to input stuff on, mostly I just wanna see stuff on this computer, then I'm going to keep it in the pictures folder, and remember I chose to put it right here in this folder. I made a folder, I simply went to the pictures folder, and I clicked on make a new folder, and I make a folder for my photos. So that's the folder it's gonna go into. I would create that folder and then do choose down here, and that's what creates this folder, and then inside that folder is the actual original. See that originals? And then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All right? And then you'll start to see folders just increasing in here, and it's gonna organize them for you. Lightroom CC organizes your photos for you by date they were shot. That's it. You don't choose how it's gonna organize them. It does it for you, it knows where they are, it will always know where they are, it will be in the cloud, it knows where they are there, and it then sends them down to Classic, it knows where they are there, so it's just gonna organize them for you, whereas those of you who are in Lightroom Classic, you could organize in five different-- you know, you could put one on this hard drive, one on this hard drive, one on this hard drive. You could have stuff all over in 50 different hard drives, and then you could be looking at them all at the same time. You're the kind of person that likes to put stuff in places, and you like to know where everything is. That's great. There's a lot of people who get confused by that. If you're the kind of person who gets really really confused, and you don't know where any of your photos are, it's time to let Lightroom just do it for you. And that's what's gonna happen here. Lightroom will do it for you, and then Lightroom will just park it up in the cloud. My biggest problem with people who were allowing Lightroom to do stuff for them in Classic, was that they didn't know what Lightroom was doing, and then they didn't know where they were, and they weren't backing them up, but now Lightroom is just backing them up for you. So now Lightroom is taking them, putting them in its own organizational structure, and backing them up on the cloud, so it's kind of getting rid of all of your problems that you're creating for yourself. Yeah? So, this is for the professional photographer. CC's doing all of this for you, are you then having to go back to Classic, and then move everything again later, for client shoots or anything? I'll show you that in a minute. Yeah, that will be answered. This is double workflow. It's not double workflow when you see what's going on. So you'll see in just a minute how this all plays in. It's no more work than what you're doing, it's just a different way to do it. So this is where all your files exist, inside of this Lightroom CC photos folder. I named that folder, so that's where my photos are, they're all divided up into dates, you can see them right here, and then right next to it is the Lightroom library. And that's where all of the stars and all that kinda stuff are. If you didn't change this location, it would put them in the pictures folder, and it would put them right where it wants them to be, and you would not know where they are, because it would just put them wherever you want. So I would suggest, if you're going to put all of your photos on your hard drive, make it an external hard drive, come here to the location of the local storage area, click on change location, and then choose a place to put those photos. Now you can also click on this right here. Store a copy of all originals locally. If I click on that, no matter what this is up here, it's going to store one photo of everything you import locally. And if something's out there on the web that needs to be downloaded, it's gonna download a local copy of it. So you will always have a local copy of those images. Always. So you can either choose to have all local copies, or you can choose to have zero percent, and it'll put them all on the cloud, or you can choose some variance of that, and it will choose based on intelligent decisions, based on how much you use photos, and how much you start them, and whether you're adjusting them. It will save as much as it can, and then it'll release the rest to the cloud. But no matter what you choose, your full file is always in the cloud. Always. So that's where those are, and as I import stuff, and let's just start with an import process, so I'm just gonna grab some photos, and I'm just gonna plug them into a computer, and I'm going to hit the-- oh, photos wants to import them. So I'm going to hit the plus button here, because we're gonna add some photos, and I'm gonna click on the EOS digital, because that's this card right here. If I plugged in a phone, it would actually see the phone, and it would import from the phone, and if I had other disks, I could navigate to those disks. And then I have all these photos here that I want to import, and I can either select all of them, or I can un-select all of them, and just go through and choose the ones that I want to import, which is very similar to what you're used to in Lightroom Classic, so let's just select all of them, and then I can choose. Remember, everything inside of Lightroom CC is gonna be organized based on those albums, because you notice there was no folders area anymore. Lightroom Classic has folders, and then it has collections, and then it has publish services. It has all sorts of different ways to look at your images, and you can physically move your stuff around in the folders area. That doesn't exist in Lightroom CC. So it's all based on those albums. And so I can choose to create a new album, and I can call this album My First Import. And then hit create. So now it's going to go to an album called My First Import, and then I'm going to hit add 71 photos, and I'm gonna actually un-select these, and I'm just gonna add... let me just add these photos here. 'Cause I don't wanna spend too much time importing. So there we go. We're just gonna add those images, add six images. There, it's done importing. But notice that this is now syncing seven photos. They're on their way up, so it's doing a synchronization right now, and then if I wanna find those photos, there's recently added photos, there were six photos added one minute ago, that's the first way I can find it. I can also do it by when they were shot, so I can do it by date, or I can go down to first import, and I can see all of those images there. Those are the images that I first imported. And all of the original files are now going up, and I want you to see. See these little check boxes here? That means it's done, it's been uploaded. If you see a little squirrely-like thing, a squirrel in a hamster, or whatever, those little squirrel cages, then that means it's uploading. So those are all done. So they're sending up to the cloud. They're available here, but if I go to those photos, so let's hide this and go to the photos here. So they're 2017, there. See, they're right there. But they're gonna start disappearing pretty soon. As soon as it confirms that they're there, and it needs more space, it's just gonna start throwing those away, because they're gonna be in the cloud. So what I've just shown you, then, is me adding something to Lightroom CC on a computer that's not storing any of the information. It's just a dummy computer and it's throwing it up to the cloud and I'm all secured. So if I happen to be in Iceland and I want to secure my files, I've done it. So let's look at where photos are inside of Lightroom. Most of you are probably very aware of where they are. But if you look here in the folders area, I have multiple hard drives attached. So the Macintosh hard drive is obviously attached, because it's in the computer, and then I've got a traveling drive that's attached. And I've also got my working catalog drive, which is this thing, which is attached. And then notice that I've also got portfolio drive and my studio working drive. Those aren't attached, because they're back at the studio, but if you look at my studio working drive, I've got a lot of stuff in there, and it's being used by Smart Previews, so I can click on any of these, so I can go up and choose some images, so I could go up here to this. Let's see, I'll go to this set here. And those are all proxy images. So I can go to them and I can work on them. So I can click on an image. Let's just find some JPEGs in there, and then there's some raw images in there, so let's just go find some raw images, like this one, say. And that one is a DNG, but see how it has a Smart Preview right there? So that's a Smart Preview, which means that I can work on it even though I'm not anywhere near my computer. I'm not near the actual hard drive, okay? But where are these? They're just wherever I told them to be. So when I import something, I can say "import." So if I go to the import dialog box, and I can choose where I'm pulling the photos from, and then I can choose where I'm putting the photos. I can choose any hard drive, or I can add a new hard drive, and I can put them there, so I can just put photos on a new hard drive every time, wherever I want. And I can just totally mess myself up and confuse myself and put things in all sorts of different places. So that's where everything is, wherever you put it. So there's no way to really answer, "where do things go in Lightroom Classic" because you can do it wherever you want. So wherever you put them, that's where they are. However, the difference is that in Lightroom Classic, you'll notice that if I go to the hard drive, and I go over to my pictures folder, my catalog is not in here. The catalog for Lightroom CC has to be where it wants to be. But the catalog for Lightroom Classic is actually in my external hard drive, so if I go to my working catalog drive here and open it up, there's my catalog, there's the catalog we're working on, here's the backups for it, here's the cash, there's the settings. There's all this stuff that's associated with it, and it's all in one place, but I choose where it's gonna be, and that way I can take this catalog with me and show you what you would see if we were on my computer at home. So that's the big difference between Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic, in its catalog structure, where you put stuff, how you import something. You noticed on Lightroom CC that there was no options as to where you were gonna put the photos. It just said, "Do you wanna import these? "Yes, okay, done. That's it. That's all you get." Whereas in Lightroom Classic, you can say, "I wanna import them from here, "I wanna move them over here, "I wanna make copies on the way, "I wanna make duplicates on the way, "I wanna put them in this folder, "And I wanna do several other things, "and add some key words," and whatever, you know. You can do a lot of stuff inside a Classic. And I am coming at this class assuming that almost everybody here has used Lightroom Classic. I know we have one person in our audience that hasn't used Lightroom Classic before, but I'm assuming most people have. If you've never used Lightroom at all, then our prior class, Organizing Your Digital Life, your digital photo life, Organizing Your Digital Photo Life. We've just finished it, it's two days, and it goes through the very basics of starting with Lightroom CC, as well as some of the stuff we're talking about today, so if you wanna check that out, you'll have a much more comprehensive introduction to a very basic structure of editing in Lightroom CC. So that is where everything is. When you are working in Lightroom CC, there is a difference in the way that it uploads. And I mentioned that, and I just wanna show it to you really quickly. And we'll go into more detail after the break. But I want to show you where that is, so the difference between Lightroom CC, when it uploads, it just does it. You don't get to choose. Everything that you put in is going up there. So it's just simple. Put it in, it's in the cloud. Whereas Lightroom Classic, you'll notice that we have collections down here, and things are organized by collections, kind of similar to how they are in Lightroom CC, where they're organized by albums. But if we go to a collection, and I want to put it on the cloud, first I have to tell it to start Lightroom Mobile up here, so I click on that, where it says Jared Platt. Yours will say your name, not mine. You click on that, and then the top one is gonna say start Lightroom Mobile. And you hit the little play button, and then it will say sync with Lightroom Mobile, and you can pause it, just likr you can pause Lightroom CC, so if you ever notice that Lightroom CC is slowing down, or Lightroom Classic or CC is slowing down for some reason, look up at the little synchronization thing, and if it's moving, pause it, and then things will go faster, because your computer is slowed down by network access activity. Drop Box, Google Drive, all those kind of syncs really slow a computer down. So if you're slowing down, stop, and stop yelling at Lightroom, and then just go and say, "Okay, "maybe I should just pause all my network activity "and then start working." And you'll find that it speeds back up, so just a little hint for you. So you start there, and then once you've started there, go into your collections, and any collection-- so I'm just gonna go down to my working collections here, and you'll see that there's a difference between this one and this one. This one has a little sideways lightning bolt, and this one has a square, and when you hover over it, it turns into a lightning bolt. If I want to synchronize a folder, I simply click on it. So I'm just gonna click. And now the lightning bolt stays active, and now that job, see how it says syncing photos? It's now synchronizing photos up to the cloud. That's how you determine what is synchronizing to the cloud and what's not. The only thing you don't get to choose is anything you put inside Lightroom CC is gonna come up to the cloud, and it's gonna come down. So in Lightroom Classic, everything in the cloud, that is sent by Lightroom Cc, is going to come down. And it's gonna secure a full original file here inside of your computer, that has Classic running on it. It's gonna suck it down, and it's gonna put it wherever you want it to go. And we'll talk more about that...

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Lightroom® CC Ecosystem PDF
Film Presets

Ratings and Reviews

user-200a2a
 

Really like Jared's teaching style...has a great sense of humor & education to support anything he says. Learned a tremendous amount and feel comfortable & confident that I understand the basics and how to take advantage of the LIGHTROOM ecosystem. Good job....this was my first Creative Live purchase and am very satisfied.

JennMercille
 

Before I took this class I used Lightroom Classic CC as a culling tool more than for editing. Jared Platt showed me how to speed up my editing workflow, and rely more on Lightroom Classic and less on Photoshop, which cut my editing time nearly in half. Platt teaches in a holistic style with humor, demonstrations and tons of knowledge that is easy to follow. I really enjoyed this class, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to speed up their workflow or take advantage of the new mobility features that Adobe has added to the Lightroom platforms.

Candy Smith
 

Jared does a great job of getting over the fear of the changes that my photography friends were talking about when the cloud went into effect. He really encourages you to take full advantage of all that is available with the CC subscription across all your devices. Huge time saver which I appreciate as I have many projects going at the same time. I now travel way more than I thought I would, and Jared helped me move into a more mobil form of editing so I can use my time more wisely.

Student Work

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