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[♪upbeat music♪] [ADOBE TV Presents] [♪♪] [The Complete Picture - with Julieanne Kost] [♪♪] Hi, and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost. In today's episode of The Complete Picture, we're going to answer a question that I get asked all the time, and that is, "How do you save the changes that you make to your images in Lightroom?" because most of you I know have used Photoshop, and so you're really used to opening a file in Photoshop and then having to do either a Save or a Save As to save those changes. But in Lightroom, you don't really have to do that. So let's take a look at how and when you would save your files. So I'm just going to start by kind of moving through the workflow a little bit. I will click on the Import button here, and we can just navigate to some images. I have this new folder called Memphis that has just a few images in my Photographs folder. I'm simply going to add them in place, but I am going to add some metadata--in this case my contact information-- and we'll add the keyword Memphis. All right, excellent. Then I'll go ahead and import these files. So what I wanted to demonstrate here was that all of that information has already been added. So if we look in the Metadata panel, we can see all my contact information, and if we scroll up to the Keywording area, we can see the keyword that's been added. Now, how about some other information? Let's say we wanted to go ahead and give three of these images one star. So I'll tap the 1 key. And then let's say these next three images I want to go ahead and label them with a yellow label, so I'll tap the 7 key. And maybe this image here I might want to flag as a pick, so I'll tape the P key. So now I've added a lot more information to kind of help me distinguish which images are which. And now let's even go over to the Develop Module and make some changes to these images. I'll start here at the beginning. These are similar images, so why don't I select all three of them down here in my filmstrip, and I'll turn on Auto Sync. What that does is it will automatically, when I make a change to this image, it will automatically make a change to all of my images that are selected. And I'm just going to go through here and kind of look at some of the presets. In fact, this one looks pretty good. You'll notice that I can just roll my cursor over any of the presets and it'll automatically show me a little display in the Navigator there. So let's go ahead and go with maybe the Direct Positive. That gives is just a lot of punch, and you can see that these two other images have also been updated. And then we'll come over here and maybe grab these three images, and we'll just cycle through and maybe scroll down a little bit more and just see if we like any of the changes here. Of course I also have some that I've made, so I've got some Select Color and some Toning changes that we can look at as well. These are just all presets that I have saved. It doesn't really matter to me. You can add one, of course, and if you don't like that, one of the great things is we can always go back and add another one. But let's just say that we're satisfied with those changes that we've made. Okay. So the way Lightroom works is every time you make a change it's automatically saving those changes into the database. So we really don't have to worry about that. However, it's when you start working with other applications that you might start getting confused. So even though we've made these changes, let's take a look at what this looks like in an application like Bridge. I'll return back to the Library. Let's take a look at this first image. I want to view this in Bridge, so let's go ahead and show it in the Finder. There it is in the Finder, and I'll just drag that down on top of the Bridge icon. And what that does is it redirects Bridge so that it shows me that folder full of images in the Content area. But as you can see, Bridge is not displaying those changes that we made in Lightroom. And if we think about it, it kind of makes sense because Bridge has no idea that Lightroom has a database, so it wouldn't know that we've made those changes. So let's do this: Let's go back here to Lightroom for a minute, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to push the information from the database into the files. There are two ways that you can do this. One is kind of manual, and then there's an automated way to do it. There's a reason that we have two ways, so let me show them both to you. The first way--the kind of manual way--is quite simple. I would just do a Select All or a Command or Control A to select all of the images that I've made changes to and then underneath the Metadata menu up here, I would simply choose Save Metadata to Files or Command or Control S. Now remember, what this is doing is it's taking the information from the database and it's pushing it into the files. It's still in the database, but now it's in the database and in the files. It's kind of like a nice little insurance policy, like if the dog eats your database, you'll still have all these changes saved to the files. So it's pretty cool. So now let's go back to Bridge, and you can see that Bridge is now displaying all those changes because it now has all of that information so it can display it properly. You can see that we've got our stars, you can see that we've got our color labels, and if I go ahead and select a file here, you can see all of that metadata as well as the keyword that we applied to it. So let's go back now to Lightroom again because that was kind of a manual way to do it. What if you just wanted to turn this on so that it automatically saved the metadata to your files? You can do that as well. On the Mac, you would go underneath the Lightroom menu and then you'd come down here to Catalog Settings. On Windows, you would go into the Edit menu and then Catalog Settings. And here in the Metadata area, you would go ahead and check on the Automatically write changes to XMP. So you're probably wondering why this isn't on by default. Well, really, it's a matter of speed. Let's say, for example, you just photographed a wedding and you've got 4,000 images that you're going to go through and you select 500 at a time and you're trying to change the white balance. Well, every time you make a change, Lightroom is going to be writing those changes to XMP. So if those images are all on a local hard drive and it's super fast, then it shouldn't really be an issue. But if they're on a network server and maybe they're slow, then this could actually slow down your performance a little bit. So that's why it's not on by default. But what I would suggest is just try turning it on, and then if you notice a performance slowdown, then you can go ahead and turn it off and just use the manual way. But I just leave mine on most of the time because then I don't have to remember to actually push the information from the database into the individual files. Okay. So that kind of explains how you save your files, but I want to give you a little bit more information as well. Let's go ahead and take a look at this in the Finder. What we'll see is we have a few JPEG files here. We've got a CR2 file, which is a Canon's RAW proprietary file format with an XMP file, and then we have some DNG files. So the JPEG files and the DNG files, when we take the information from the database and we write it into the individual files, as long as it's a standard file format, we can just add that information to the file. It's only with these proprietary raw file formats like the CR2 from Canon or the NEF from Nikon that we have to actually create this secondary sidecar file, this XMP sidecar file. So that's just something that you should know because when you look at your images in the operating system, you might be surprised because they're not going to look the same as they do in an application like Bridge or in Lightroom because those applications are smart enough to look inside the file and show you a preview based on all of those changes that you've made. But in the operating system, you're not going to be able to see those changes. Okay. Let's just look at one last scenario because this is important as well because you might not always start in Lightroom and go to Bridge, you might actually be in Bridge and make a change to the file. Let's say, for example, I have this first image selected and I'll use Command or Control R. That will just take me right directly into Camera Raw. I just want to do something that's really obvious, so I'll just convert it to gray scale and click Done. So now we can see that this looks gray scale in Bridge. And when we go back over to Lightroom, at this point, Lightroom is not really sure what you want. It doesn't know what should take priority: the changes that you made in Lightroom or the changes that you just recently made in Bridge. So it gives me this icon right here, and if you click on this icon, it will ask you basically which is more important. Should it import the settings from disk because when you made those changes in Bridge, Bridge wrote the settings to disk, or should it overwrite the settings, meaning, "Oh, no. Lighroom should take priority." Well, let's assume that we want our image black and white because we did that in Bridge. So what we would do is we would choose Import Settings from Disk, and it would go and read those settings, and it would convert the image or make the image appear as if it's black and white. Well, excellent. That wraps up this episode of The Complete Picture. As you can see, it's actually very, very easy to save your files in Lightroom. In fact, it saves it to the database for you. But of course if you want to push that information to the files--easy ways-- either select them all, Command S, to save it or just turn on that XMP setting in your Catalog Settings. Of course if you do make changes outside of Lightroom and you decide you want to incorporate those inside of Lightroom, all you need to do is simply click those icons, or it's actually underneath the Metadata area as well. You can simply Read Metadata from File. I'm Julieanne Kost. Thanks again for joining me. I hope I'll see you again next time on The Complete Picture. [♪upbeat music♪] [Executive Producer - Bob Donlon] [Producer - Karl Miller] [Director - Kush Amerasinghe] [Post Production - Erik Espera] [ADOBE® TV PRODUCTIONS] [♪♪]
