Skip to main content

Lightroom Mobile

Lesson 7 from: Lightroom Classic CC for the Professional Photographer

Jared Platt

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

7. Lightroom Mobile

Lesson Info

Lightroom Mobile

We are now into the third segment of this class and we get to work on Work Flow. So in order to do that, I'm going to need to show you a Work Flow from various different positions and different places and different reasons you would do things. So we're kind of move back and forth between all of our different devices, and explain why we would do certain things and when and all that kind of stuff. The first thing that we wanna do is look at Lightroom mobile because we haven't looked at that. We looked over at Lightroom CC, and of course, we did an entire two-day class before this called organizing your digital photo life. And so that is a real deep look at, in fact it's as deep as you can go because Lightroom CC is so simple. That's about as deep as it goes so we've got two days of content on that so if you're interested in really getting into that you can go to that class. But we looked at Lightroom CC, okay here's the deal. Some people are afraid that Lightroom classic, the word classi...

c means that they're shelving it, and getting rid of it and it's like oh that's the old way to do things. This is the new way to do things and so we're gonna stop supporting that. That's not what it means, I promise you that. So I've had conversations at length about that name and they understand that it's a challenging name. But they actually didn't wanna go pro because they're afraid that people will think only pros could use it or you're not a pro if you use this. And so I still think it should be Lightroom Pro but whatever so Lightroom classic does not mean it's being shelved. In fact they actually have more, they have more coders and more designers working on Lightroom classic than they do working on Lightroom CC. So just so that you understand Lightroom classic will continue to grow, and be that the main program for those who are professional and using that big work Flow. Lightroom CC is trying to be a simplified version and at one point it will probably have almost everything that we want from Lightroom classic in it. And then it'll be like okay now we're choosing between the two. This one has some bells and whistles that we use but they're not essential bells and whistles, and this one will be an amazing product. Three years from now you'll have like this incredibly fast zippy program that has everything you want in it. So we'll see how that goes but Lightroom classic is still being supported. It is still growing, it's still being designed and you will see things come into it. It's not being phased out. So I just wanted to make that clear so people don't freak out. Classic is just 'cause it's the classic, I don't know anyway alright. Let's go to the schematics really quickly because we're gonna talk a little bit about Lightroom mobile. And remember it right Lightroom mobile is going to look exactly like Lightroom CC, that's their purpose. They want it to look the same so Lightroom CC was designed so that it would look a lot like what you already have in Lightroom mobile. Lightroom mobile has shifted a little bit and adjusted in order to be very much like Lightroom CC. So anytime you put something in Lightroom CC the original goes to the cloud and that makes the original available to Lightroom mobile. The same is true if you go this way, you put something in Lightroom mobile, the entire file goes to the cloud and therefore it's available in Lightroom CC. And it's also available over in Lightroom classic and it's available over on the web. If you go directly portal in or on to another computer. So and as many seats as you have in your Cloud service, you can put that on as many computers you want. So if you have five seats, if you're paying for five seats, you can have five different computers that have Lightroom CC on them. Now here's the thing, lightroom classic only syncs one catalog to the cloud, that's it. That's a huge difference between that and Lightroom CC. So Lightroom CC can be on two computers while Lightroom classic is on one. You can't put Lightroom Classic on five different computers and have that sync to the Cloud, and have it sync up and down and up and down okay. Lightroom classic only syncs one catalog to the cloud and that's what why my Lightroom classic has one catalog with all of my stuff in it. And you've seen when I'm working here in Lightroom classic, you seen that I go up here to my working hard drive at the studio and I've got all my jobs in there. It's not one catalog per, it's a whole bunch of jobs, right. The question marks just simply mean that it doesn't have access to that drive right now, but because I always build smart previews no matter where this catalog goes. I can work on those files 'cause it's working on those little tiny raw versions in that file. So if we're on the road, this is gonna stay there. So this used to go on the road with me. Lightroom classic used to travel around on the road with me and I just always had it on a secondary hard drive so that I could be on my computer in the studio, which is a big iMac 27 inch. It's all the bells and whistles and then if I wanna go on the road, I would just eject the drive and I would plug it into my laptop, and I'd work on my laptop, and I would still have the same catalog. I just wouldn't have access to the original files. I wouldn't have access to all those smart previews. 'cause they're sitting on this drive with the catalog and I would run around and work on them. And then I got home I was just plugged that back in and then I will work on it again, so I was always working on the same catalog. Lightroom CC, the introduction of Lightroom CC changed all that because now of that cloud connection. I can leave the the original catalog, the classic catalog can stay and we're pretending this is my home computer. This is the main computer. I can leave it here. I don't have to travel with this because I can then just take my laptop on the road and here I am with my laptop, and inside of it I have access to everything that I need access to. Because all I have to do is put one little button on any collection and now it's on the road with me. And I run around on the road with me to work on it and then if I add something here it goes back over there so I don't have to take that disc with me on the road anymore. Now I can just take one little drive. Except when I come to teach here, I have to bring all this stuff with me so alright. I don't like to travel with a lot of stuff and so when I'm normally traveling, I don't really have to. And if I want to go even pare it down further. Instead of taking the laptop with me, now I can actually just take my iPad Pro with me. And the iPad Pro is a really fast, actually got a processor in it that's as fast as most computers. And so it's actually very, very good tool to work on, to adjust my images on and to synchronize those images of cloud either through wifi or through my cellular plan. If you click on the Lightroom logo right up here in the left hand corner. If I click on that, I get all of my settings right here and what I wanna look at is a, my local not my local storage sorry. My general and in the general, I have some options for auto add photos, auto add videos, add my copyright all that kind of stuff. And I'm also showing touches which allows that little red dot to appear. And then if I look at cloud storage and sync. There is where I could tell it whether or not to use that cellular data if I'm somewhere like Italy or whatever. I'm gonna turn that off simply because I don't want to get throttled. If you're on a plan that has limits on your data here in the US or abroad or wherever you happen to be. Make sure you turn that off and only use the WiFi. Now because I'm using cellular data, and I don't want it to take forever. I'm also telling it only to download Smart previews because I don't need to have all the full original files on here. I don't actually want them there because they're going to fill up my hard drive on this or the flash drive on this. And so I turn on that only bring the smart previews. So the original files are all sitting up in the cloud and I'm only bringing those smart previews down here to work on them here all right. And then I also wanna turn this prevent from sleep on because if I want it to work overnight to download stuff or upload stuff, you don't want it to sleep. So I just plug it in and then I turn it on and I tell it don't sleep just start sending. And it literally is a little computer doing everything it needs to do. So a laptop is pretty unimportant for my workflow if I'm traveling, so I'll be in Italy doing a workshop in November actually. So those of you who are in Italy. I'll actually be there. They actually have translators that are going to translate for people who speak only Italian because it's like an Italian wedding school. So I'm gonna be teaching there and I will literally just take my iPad with me. So I won't have to carry a huge backpack with laptop and hard drives and stuff like that. I'll literally take my camera bag and my iPad and I'm on my way and because I have my new A1, Profoto A1 flashes I literally have like a whole studio, all of my cameras and stuff all in one bag. It's pretty amazing like I'll be able to travel, lock to my wrist that's right. But I'm not going through Florence so I'm not worried as much about my bag. I'm going through Milan and most people have much more expensive stuff in Milan. So when you go through Florence, that's when you have to watch for those guys in the air. So anyway but yes I'm going to get a little chain. So those are the settings that you want to be aware of when you're in here. Now I'd showed you this one here in the general settings about auto add photos simply because that is a really good useful tool. If you're on your phone and you're taking pictures and you want those images to automatically go into Lightroom and then be synced to the cloud, and then sink back home. Make sure you turn that on that way whenever they come in, they'll go up to the cloud. And of course they'll follow whatever rule you've set up whether or not you wanna use cellular connection so if a cellular connection is off and it's like I'm not gonna use cellular connection. It will wait as soon as it gets wifi. It will start uploading so you get to chose if it's using cellular or Wifi. But the auto add automatically if you take a picture with any camera on your phone or on your iPad. It will automatically put it into Lightroom mobile and then that will automatically go up to the cloud which will automatically go down to all your devices. If you add video, you're gonna be sending video up which is much bigger than photos. I usually keep that off 'cause I want, I'll just choose which videos to put on there. But if you want to you can turn auto add video and it will also add video into your Lightroom catalog on your device and then it will send it up to the cloud, send it down to all the other devices alright. So Lightroom mobile is a very useful tool for uploading stuff, but let's talk a little bit about getting in. And remember because I have auto add photos on so I went into this general and I made sure that this was on. Because I have that on, if I put any photos into my system doesn't matter where it comes from. It could be in an email and I could say save this to my camera roll. As soon as something hits my camera roll, it goes right into Lightroom mobile. So now I'll be able to photograph with this camera and then, I'm gonna unplug here so you're not gonna be able to see it up there. But we're gonna do a little over the shoulder shot so that you can actually see what I'm doing here. But I'm gonna be on here and I'm gonna plug this in so this is a dongle that has basically it has a USB. And it's USB 3 so it's got a USB port in it, it's got a power port in it just in case you wanna keep your iPad powered while you're doing a lot of importing. But it's so the USB port and then I've got a cable that connects to my camera. And so I'm going to plug this into my iPad so we're just gonna plug that into the iPad like that. Then we're gonna plug the USB cable into that like that and then we're gonna take it and plug it into my camera. Now by the way there are also card readers but they're much slower. It's much slower to read from a card reader than it is to read from a camera because you have the advantage of the computer that's in here helping to boost the speed. So I'm gonna plug this into the camera like this no opposite way like that. And so I'm gonna turn the camera on and you have to make sure that the camera is alive. So if it times out, you gotta kind of tap the shutter and you'll see here that now we have an import dial box. This is not Lightroom's import dialog box. This is your phone or your devices import so on an iPad it's basically the iPad or the iOS is pulling this up. But you see how fast it came in, if I pulled up the same thing on this card reader right here. It would be like one then the next one then the next one and you're all bored listening to me say that. Think how bored you are looking at 300 photos come in that slow. You'd be like, it will take your whole lunch to get the photo so you can see which ones you wanna select. No you don't wanna do that, so just get the dongle, that's a USB 3 connection. So get the USB 3 connection to whatever device you're using and then just plug into your camera and then it's really fast. So now what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go through this, and I'm just gonna say there are certain ones. I want the cheesecake and I want these right here. I was talking to someone at lunch and talking about how unimportant food is to me but dessert is fairly important. (audience laughing) I will say that I live for dessert. I love dessert, in fact my younger brother Dane says, "That you should eat it first "because life is very uncertain." So eat your dessert then eat your dinner so anyway I live on desert. Anyway I'm gonna hit import. When I hit import, it's gonna import it to the camera roll because my software is doing that. That's what the iOS wants me to do so I'm gonna import the selected images. And it's gonna import them pretty quickly. See how every time it checks green it's imported so we're just checking those green dots there. Okay and then I'm going to keep them on the card. I don't need to throw them away from the car. Keep on the card so now I have two copies of the important files, one copy on my camera card and one copy inside of my iOS device. And so I can unplug this which means that we can actually tether back up so you'll be able to see it. And just wait for a second because what's gonna happen is it's gonna want to do iTunes. I hate iTunes okay so then we're gonna go, let me just get this running here there we go, okay. See there we going so that is the imported images inside of my device but if I go out of there, and I go to Lightroom. Those images will be coming in to here. You can see there's a synchronization going on right up here and there's there's my cheesecake and that was a very good cheesecake. It was Huckleberry cheesecake with it. It was very nice, very good so I have my cheesecake and this is really important to me because I want to photograph my food well instead of with a iPhone and notice that I've got the beautiful depth, the field effect going on which you can't get unless you go into the portrait mode in an iOS device which is really a dumb mode. So I'll I'm just gonna say is Apple is listening, that's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's really bad I can't like you take it in the portrait it's like sharp here and then all the sudden it starts blurring out right like back on their hair even though like if their hair is here. It's on the same plane as your eyes but it's blurring the hair right here instead of back there. It's just off so just use a real lens. Just use this lens with this camera and you're good So nothing beats a real camera folks. Okay so that's when we'll soap box for today. Yesterday it was Instagram. I always had to have a couple soap boxes alright so I got my cheesecake and it's uploading and notice that it's got a little check box right there. So I can pause the syncing but it's uploading all these imagery, I think it's done now. So it's done, so that's how quickly I've secured these files here but when you click on it. Notice that it says the original is local and the cloud has a backup. So this cheesecake photo is local and backed up in the cloud with the original file. You can see that just by clicking on that cloud. Now what I want you to notice about this is that this has just gone up to the cloud. And I can do some adjustments to it so let's do that before we ever go anywhere. Let's just take up the shadows just a little bit. Take the black down just a little bit and then let's go into the effects and grab the clarity and move it up just a little bit. And you'll notice that all of my effects, all of the things I can do a photo are right there just like in Lightroom CC. They're just right there and it's all in one area so I'm looking at photos on the left hand side and then all of my tools are on the right hand side. So I click here, I can click here for some presets and these are just basic presets Lightroom comes with and currently this question is bound to be asked. Currently you cannot install your own presets inside of Lightroom mobile, can't do it. You can do it on Lightroom classic. You can do it on Lightroom classic and you can do it on Lightroom CC. You can do it do it on both of those but you cannot do it on Lightroom mobile. However I know that this is going to start working at some point. They will make that connection happen because they know that people want that to happen. So let's just wait a little while and see how long it takes for that to happen. I've been waiting five years for them to be able to synchronize presets all over the place but I've been waiting a long time. Maybe that time has come. My crop tool is right here, by the way if you're in the preset area or in any of the local adjustments areas. Once you're there, you have to either say done and approve what you've done in there or cancel it in order to get back out to the rest of the tools. So then I can click on my crop and then I've got you know my basic crop tools. I can choose the aspect ratio of it, we'll just keep the original. I can lock in the aspect ratio. I can rotate it right over here, I can flip it and change it horizontally for that kind of stuff and I can also straighten it. So all that stuff is available to you and then of course gotta cancel out of there, and then you have three options over here that little plus button. You can either make brush adjustments. You can do a radio or you can do a gradient and those are exactly the same as what we did earlier today inside of Lightroom classic. So we have the same controls, you can actually paint in and out. So if I were to create a gradient at let's actually do a radial and if I were to make a radial right around that cheesecake like this and I can position it wherever I want to position it. And then I want to do something to the outside not the inside of the circle so over here I just simply click on this little black and white slash thing right here. I click on that and now it's doing it to the outside of that circle whatever it is I'm doing. Then I'm gonna go to the light area and I'm gonna decide. You can dark it up or lighten it up. I'm gonna lighten up the surrounding area and I'm also gonna come in here and I'm going to take the feathering. And I'm going to make the feathering and go up or down so I want it to be more feathered rather than less feathered. So I'm going to go up with my feathering and you can even if I click here. You can see that feathering and see how much feathering you've got. I like that feathering and then I can come in and just brighten it up a little bit, and I can go into the effects. And I'm actually gonna go so instead of Dehazing which would make things sharper. I'm actually gonna go the opposite direction and un-Dehaze it and it just softens it up even more. Makes a little foggy and light you know and airy and then I can move this around and decide where it's gonna be. And the really all I need is that front area with all of the sauce on it. That's the part I need, everything else is just gonna fall out right. And so now that I've got that where I want it. I still want some of the cheesecake to be more in focus and I don't want the berries to all get white like that so that I can erase this effect by clicking on the eraser. and I can choose how big my brush is going to be. So I'm in the eraser and I just feel like the brush is gonna be like that big and then it's going to be how soft is it gonna be. We'll do it like that and then what's the capacity of that brush. We'll just go about like that and then I'm gonna come in erase that. So I'm just gonna erase out so that the berries don't get that affect to them like this. And remember all of this, everything that I'm doing right now is also being done to the stuff in the cloud. And so once I'm done with my adjustment here if for some reason I wanted to go and turn on. Like say I wanted to go in and utilize my the luminance masking on it or whatever. So I wanted to further home masking. I can go back to Lightroom classic and use that luminous masking to get rid of that stuff too. So I can just so you have the ability to do a lot of work right here on your iPad. And now that, let's say we're done with that. We're ready to go with it. The other thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to add a little bit more clarity to it and all finished. So from here, yes. Can you also compare before and after in mobile? Yes, it's not the same. It's not a split thing. You just simply hold on it and there's before and there's after. Before and after, I like my after right. That looks pretty good so I'm going to then take this and share it. So I can share it via different platforms. Because I'm on mobile anything that's on my mobile device. So if I'm on my phone, I can share it to Instagram. But my iPad, I can't share it to Instagram because for some reason. They think that you shouldn't share to Instagram, it's stupid. Anyway some reason you're not supposed to share to Instagram from an iPad but you should from a phone. I don't get it. Anyway so I can't share it to Instagram from my iPad but I can share it to Facebook or I can share it to Twitter. I can share it to let you know Flickr whatever as long as I have the application on my phone I can share it to that application. So if you have one of those little Fuji or HP printers that print out in your pocket. You can share it to that and it will just print so we're doing that at Adobe Max just the other day. We would take pictures and adjust them and then hit share and literally the little print would come up and you just go boom and it starts printing. So it was awesome, we're just sharing little print stickers with people. It was super fun so you just click on this little share button up at the top right-hand no corner. So I click on that and if I hit share, it ask me size or do I want a big one, the original size or do I want a small one that's only 20 or 2000 pixels. So your smart preview, now this is the full file. So I have the full file. I think this is 20 megapixels or something like that. So all 20 megapixels can go out as a big document or I can just say I'm only sharing this to the internet. So I'm gonna to make a small 2000 pixel and there we go. I can save the image to my camera roll. I can send it to print. I can and if you click this more button anything that's on like save to Dropbox because I have Dropbox on my system. I can also click on that and that would be an option for me to save it to my Dropbox. I can share to Facebook and Twitter and Adobe Acrobat and the list goes on and on and on. And by the way if for some reason you wanna edit your photos. Both Adobe Fix and Adobe Mix are really good editing tools that have a lot of the controls that Photoshop itself has. Even like content-aware removals and stuff like that are available there. The one thing that's not available inside of Lightroom mobile is the retouching. So spot removal is not there, not yet but one point it will be but it's not there right now. But if you remove a spot in either Lightroom CC or in Lightroom classic, it will be removed here. It just doesn't have the tool yet in here 'cause remember camera raw in all of these devices. Question? The backing up to the import phase. Did you have the option to import directly into Lightroom. Upload those rolls and not keep them? So you're talking about importing 300 files. Do you have the ability to not save those onto your iPad and fill it up? You don't it's gonna keep the original file but later on in this work flow, you're gonna see how to get rid of that original file. So right now it's the full files here. The full files in the cloud, the full file is now on this computer in Lightroom So let's go to that so if I come here to Lightroom and I go up, so you get to choose. Remember in the preferences, we looked and we could choose where Lightroom was gonna put those remember. So this is perfect for you Nicole, just for you. It's for I know, I know I'm going to get there okay. So this is your specific location for this stuff to go to this computer and so you've chosen that location. So once you've chosen that location, you're gonna go here and you going to see from Lightroom CC that's the location that it's going to. And it's gonna be somewhere in here but you also have it inside of a virtual location which is the from Lightroom mobile. And it's somewhere in here as well. Okay so it's in various places. This is virtual here and over here is a physical location where it's been sent. So that photo is actually right there so you can see that photo when I open it up. You can see that it's got the same effect on it and if I go to the develop model. I can further work on that effect. Click on my radial, no where are you? Good one, maybe that affect hasn't come in yet, not yet. Oh you're right, thank you. See I didn't learn my own lesson so I toggle off the image and now you can see right up there that starts synchronizing because I toggled off the image. That's exactly right and so then it will come back in here in just a second, we shouldn't have to wait for very long. It just has to synchronize up. So you can see up here or what you can't see up here. There you can see up here that now there's a green little box right there. That tells you that it's all backed up and done. Right so good we've synchronized all of that so then we just have to come back here and we click on here and now there's the image. So it's all synchronized so now if I go to the develop module and I click on that radial, see that radial is there. And then I could come down and further hone that stuff with the range mask and I can just say okay, I only want the Luminous wise. I don't want it to apply things that are dark and then suddenly in sales, we're moving from the dark things and it's only brightening up the other areas. And so then if I turn off that selected mask overlay you can see that the dark things stay dark, which is kind of nice so I like that. So I further honed that image in a place that has a lot more controls. And I use my iPad as a, a place to put stuff on the cloud b, as a place to do sketches. Kind of play around with something and then c, as a place to share. That's what it's there for, it's not for critical editing. It's for kind of the beginning and the end of the process but not necessarily the main middle part. And that's simply because I can't get this thing calibrated perfectly whereas I can get this calibrated perfectly. And we talked a little bit about that the very beginning. We calibrate, there are monitors that we really, really wanted, critically think about our photographs on. So we have this image now and it's ready to go but okay so now we wanna talk about what do we do with these photographs once they've been delivered down to us because we have this whole set of photographs that were delivered to us. These photographs that were taken a couple days ago and then this one was taken one extra day earlier than that. These photographs are the ones that just got delivered. There's a full file here. There's a full file in the cloud and there's a full file here at the Lightroom CC level. So I want these photographs to be available to me here but it's a job, it's something that I've done. And I don't want it to be organized by, 'cause I'm an organized freak right. And so I like to put things where I want to put things and so what I'm going to do now. And by the way if I come over here so let's take a little gander at Lightroom CC over in our secondary computer. And when we go here, we can also see all of these photographs were brought here. I don't have the original files here because I told it 0% photos here. So I can work on these photos. I can play with them and by the way I can work on this photo and all of the same tools are available to me so if I go to the radio gradient, it's there and I can work on it. The one thing that's not in here is that I don't have access to the further tools. The new advancements to Lightroom classic are not in here just yet.

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.

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.

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.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES