Lightroom 4 - Select, Rate and Prioritize Your Images

[Getting Started with ADOBE PHOTOSHOP LIGHTROOM 4] [♪♪] Hi and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost. [Julieanne Kost - Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist] We're going to take the next few minutes to learn how to select your images and view your images in the Library module as well as the method that will work the best for you as far as rating your images so that you can work with smaller collections of files as we move through the workflow. You've probably noticed that my library is much more robust now. I have imported a lot of other images. We didn't need to walk through that in the last video, but I just wanted to kind of update you as to why there's so many folders. We can see the Cliffs of Moher, the time lapse folder that we were working with before. But I want to work with some other images, so I'm going to go ahead and scoot down to this folder of Quin Abbey. What I'm looking at right now, this is the Grid view right over here, and we see that same icon that we saw on the Import dialog box a minute ago. We also have the Loop view so I can switch to seeing just 1 image at a time. Then I can use my arrow keys to move to the right to go through each one of the images. The left arrow key obviously takes us back, and you can see we're moving through the filmstrip down here. I have a certain kind of number of tools showing down here in the toolbar. Your toolbar might look a little bit different, but you can use this little disclosure triangle in order to either view or hide all of these different options that you can use, for example, for sorting your images or flagging or rating them. So that's why yours might look a little different. Okay. This is Loop view, and the keyboard shortcut for that is E. If I want to scoot back to Grid view using the keyboard, I can just tap the G key. So G and E go back and forth. Or if I want to zoom in on a specific image, I can double click on that image. And you'll notice what that took me to is the Fit view. Some people like the Fill view better, but that always crops your image, so I prefer the Fit view. And then you'll notice when I position my cursor in the image area here, it automatically gives me the Zoom tool so I could zoom in. Once I've zoomed in--and you can see I've zoomed in to 1:1; that's my default-- you can change that if you want to by clicking over here, but I prefer the 1:1 view. Once I'm zoomed in, Lightroom automatically gives me the Hand tool so I can then move around. If I want to zoom back out, I simply click, and if I wanted to return back to Grid view, I could double click and that would take me back to Grid. Your grid might also look very different from mine, and that's because I've gone under the View menu here and I've come down to my View Options. You can see that for my grid extras I like to see the expanded cells, but yours might be set to the compact cells, in which case you're not seeing as much information in kind of the slidemount area around the preview. So you might want to toggle that on to expanded cells, and then you can determine what you see in those expanded cells right down here in the Expanded Cell Extras. And there is a ton of information to choose from, so just whatever information you want to see, set up your expanded cells using these different options. In addition, if we click on the Loop view area, you'll notice that you can actually show information about the image while you're in Loop view. There's 2 different kind of previews. There's Loop Info 1 and Loop Info 2. Again, you can set these up with whatever attributes you want to see about the file. If I close this, I can toggle through seeing this set of information or this second set of information by just tapping the I key, or I can toggle this off. So just 3 keys will toggle you through that. Just keep tapping the I key. In addition, we have something called Lights Dim view which will actually dim back the interface, and that's the L key. So if I tap the L key, you'll notice the interface goes kind of dark. If I tap it again, then I've got the focus completely on my image. And of course I can use my arrow keys to go and view the next images to the right or to the left. To bring back the interface, tap the L key again. Two other quick shortcuts. The Tab key will hide your panels on either side. Tap the Tab key again and it brings them back. And Shjft + Tab hides not only your panels but also the Module Picker across the top as well as the filmstrip. Of course I can still see the tools down there. If I want to hide those, that's just the T key. But don't forget that they're hidden. You'll want to bring them back with the T key again. And I'll use Shift + Tab to bring back the rest of the interface. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about how we're going to rate your images. Lightroom has a variety of different ways you can do this. You can do it with flags, and there's kind of 3 different flags. You can have the unflag state, you can have the flag as reject and the flag as a pick. We also have the ability to use stars, so there's a 1 through 5 star rating system, and there's also color labels. I think probably the most common reason to use a flag would be if you're simply looking for the best image out of a chute. So maybe you were doing a corporate headshot and you simply want to select the best portrait. The reason to use the flag rating is kind of when you have a hierarchy. So maybe you photographed a wedding and you want to put all of the images that are going to go on the Web, you might want to give them 1 star. The images that are better than that and you want to include in your album, you might give them 2 stars and then maybe 3 stars to the wall portraits. Okay? It's really going to depend on what you photograph as to what your preference will be. The color labels are quite nice as kind of reminders. I use those if I know that I'm going to convert an image to black and white or if I know I want to print an image, I might give it a color label of red or green. We can't see those color labels right now, but again, remember we have all these different options on our toolbar to see different things. Here I could use this to color label. Let's look at some of the shortcuts. I'm going to actually go through this chute here because there aren't very many images, just 24. The first image, I always like to take a picture of where I am because that just helps me with keywording later. In this image I'm just going to leave it alone. And then I'm going to go through this chute just to refresh my memory as to what is in this chute as well as I'm going to flag with a reject any of the images that I really don't want-- the blurry ones of my foot or ones that I just know that I'm never going to use. I'm going to go, using the right arrow key. I'll move from one image to the next. All I'm looking for are the images that I know I'm never going to use. You might not do this step, but for me it kind of refreshes my memory as to what the photographs are that I have to choose from. For example, this image. I really don't want this image. I will never use this image. I'm going to flag it, and I can either use the icons right down here in the toolbar-- see the little flag with the X icon?-- or I can just tap the X key to set this as rejected. Then I move to the next image, and I move through my chute trying to see if there's other images that I would like to set as rejected. Let's say you don't like this image at all and you want to reject it. I'll tap the X key. And we'll just keep moving through, not taking a lot of time, but there we go. Okay. I've gone through the chute, I've rejected the images I don't want. I'm going to return to the Grid view by tapping the G key. Now I can use the Filter bar at the top to look for those rejects. The flag is an attribute, so I'll select that, and then I'm going to click on the flag with the X and it shows me all of my rejected files. If these are really terrible images that I do not want, I can select those images and then I can tap the Delete key or the Backspace key on Windows. Lightroom is going to give me 2 options at this point. I can either delete the images from disk, in which case Lightroom is going to take these photographs and put them in the trash can or the recycle bin, or I can simply remove them from the Lightroom catalog. Remember, when we imported the files we were really making Lightroom aware of where they were on disk. But we might not want those images to show up in the Lightroom catalog, yet we might not want to throw them away. So if you don't want to throw them away, be sure to choose Remove. I actually don't want these images, I never want to see them again, so I'm going to delete them from disk. Because none of my images match this filter, I don't see any of them. But I can just click None in order to return back to all of the images in the Quin Abbey folder. Let's go ahead and take a look at the star ratings now. I'm going to change to a different folder of images because in this folder I have a lot of images that are similar, and I think that in this case what I want to do instead of just going to Loop view and moving through each one, I actually want to take advantage of 2 other views that Lightroom has, the Compare view as well as the Survey view. I'm going to select this whole range of these snails that I photographed. I can select them down here in the filmstrip by just holding down the Shift key and selecting that range. And now I can either use this icon to go to Compare mode or I can just tap the C key. This is a great instance of when I might want to use the Tab key to hide those panels so that I can see my images a little bit larger. What I have is on the left side I have my Select and on the right side I have my Candidate. My goal here is to move through all of these images and as I find an image that is better over here in the Candidate than my Select, I'm going to promote my Candidate to the Select. And we can use these icons and these arrows right here to move through our images and then promote the ones that we like. I don't really care for either of these, so I'm going to select the next photo. That one didn't quite make it with focus, so we'll go to the next one. I like this image better than my Select, so I can either use the up arrow or this icon right here to promote it. And you can see how the pink snail went to the left. I like this image better, so I'll use my up arrow to promote it. On these 2 images I would like to check focus. But before I zoom in on it, I want to make sure that the lock is set here so that I will zoom in on both photos. That way I can zoom in to check focus, I can move around, and I can see quite quickly that the image on the left is more in focus. Clicking on it again will zoom it back. I'm going to leave the one on the left as my Select. Then we can continue moving through to see if we like any of these other images. And in fact, I like this one even better, so I'll use the up arrow key to promote it. We'll scoot on through. By the way, you can see down here in the filmstrip the Select has the white diamond and the Candidate has the black diamond. We'll just keep moving through the rest of the images until we're finished. So what I've just done is out of all of those snails I've found the 1 image that I like the best. It's this image right over here, and it's got a small highlight, a white highlight around it so I know it's the active image. Now I want to flag this as a pick. In order to do so, I'm just going to use the keyboard shortcut P for pick. Now when I return back to the Grid view, we can see that this image has the flag as a pick. Let's scoot down to another sequence of images, maybe this sequence right here, but instead of using the Compare mode I'm going to use the Survey view right down here. It's this fourth icon. The keyboard shortcut for Survey, by the way, is N. What I'm looking for here is just the best image, so I can start removing the images that I don't like by hovering my cursor on top of them and then clicking on the X icon. Or you'll notice that this first image has the white highlight. If I don't want this image, I can tap the forward slash key and it will automatically remove it. Then I can use my arrow key to move to the next image-- so now we see this image has the highlight-- and again use that same shortcut and move through the images, removing the ones that I don't want until I'm left with the images that I do like. So this might actually be a better way of maybe creating a triptych or selecting maybe 3 out of 10 images that you want to use together as a story. I accidentally took down the wrong one, so what I'd like to do is add one back in. Again, I can use my filmstrip to do this. And by just holding down the Command key on Mac or Control key on Windows, I can click on an image to add it, and then we could subtract the image that I don't want. Again, if I want to rate these or label these, all I need to do is make sure that the one that has the white highlight is the one that I'm selecting, and then we could go ahead and add our stars. You can see that these actually already have stars. I'm not quite sure how that happened. It must have been in the rehearsal of the demo. So what I'll do is I will add 2 stars to this instead. The stars are really easy. It's 1 through 5. Those are the keyboard shortcuts. Although I could add them in other ways, let's just tap the 2 key. I like this one better, so I'm going to add the 3 star by tapping the 3 key. And this image I don't like quite as much, so I'll tap the 2 key. When we go back to Grid view, you can see, sure enough, there's my 2 star, there's my 3 star, and there's my 2 star images. Of course if you want to make a quicker edit-- for example, if I just want to star rate 1 of these images of the sand-- I don't necessarily have to go into Loop view. I can simply click on an image and tap the 1 key to give it 1 star, move to another image, tap the 1 key, and so on. In fact, we even have a tool called the Painter tool right down here in the toolbar. If I select that, you'll notice that I can load my Painter tool with a variety of different options. For example, I could load it with the pick flag or with a rating. So let's load this with 1 star, and that way all I need to do is click on top of the thumbnail for the image and it will automatically rate that image. So that's a little easier than having to select the image and then tap the 1 key. All right. When we're finished, you can either click the Done button down here in the right or tap the Escape key to put the Painter tool back. Once we've gone to all of this effort to either pick our images with a flag or rate them with a star rating, how can we quickly just see those images that we've starred? Well, we do that with the Filter bar here. Remember when we went to the attribute and we looked for the attributes that had the reject flag? We can take that off and then look for something like our 1 stars or greater. So now we can see all of the 1 stars in that folder. If I choose the 2 star attribute, now we can see those are 2 star or greater. If I only want to see the 2 stars, then I would say the rating is equal to 2 stars as opposed to equal to or greater than. So filtering is a great way to narrow down what you see. But filtering is a little bit temporary, right? If I click None, we're going to go back and see all of the images. If I want to make a more kind of permanent collection of images, then I'm going to use the Collections panel. So let's tap the Tab key and bring back our panels. So far we've only been working with the folders. These folders mimic your hard drive, right? They are a representation of your hard drive. If you move a file around here, it's going to move on the hard drive. That's very different from your Collection area. The Collection area is all virtual, meaning that your photographs are going to stay in the exact same place that they are right now on disk, but you're going to make these virtual collections. There's 2 different kinds of collections. Before I start making collections, I'm just going to use the keyboard shortcut - to see my thumbnails a little bit smaller so that I can see more images at one time. Okay. Now, these collections. If I click on the + icon, we can create basically a regular collection, a smart collection, or a collection set. A collection set is just a folder. But that's okay. We'll start with that. We'll call this Ireland. That's just my set. It's just a folder that I can put collections in. So I'll click Create. There's the set. It looks like a shoebox. Now we're ready to add a collection. I'll use the star again and create a collection, and we'll name this collection Ireland Portfolio. I'll go ahead and put it inside of the collection set, and you'll notice that it automatically selected the Ireland collection set. When I click Create, we can see that Ireland Portfolio collection. I don't have any photos in that collection yet. I need to return to the Folder area. Let's look at my Ireland folder and let's go, for example, to the Bishops Quarter folder. If I like this image, I can select it, and then clicking inside the thumbnail for the photograph we can drag that into the Ireland Portfolio. If I like this image, we'll do the same thing. So I've added 2 images to my portfolio from this Bishops Quarter folder. But now I can go into my other folders as well, select images that I like, and then drag and drop them into the portfolio. But, you have to understand, I'm not moving the images around on my hard drive. All I'm doing is I'm telling Lightroom which images I like so that Lightroom can create a virtual kind of collection of these images. So I'm not taking up more disk space, I'm not doubling the files anywhere or duplicating them. This is just virtual. These images still reside in the same location on my hard drive, but it's a great way to make a collection of multiple images from different folders. All right. That was the first kind of collection. By the way, if you take an image out of a collection, if you decide that this image you don't want anymore, if you just tap the Delete key, it only removes the image from the collection. The image is still in the folder, it's still on your hard drive. All right. The second kind of collection is a smart collection. Let's click on the + icon, and then let's select Create Smart Collection. I'm going to name this One Star or Greater of Ireland. I'll go ahead and put it inside that same collection set called Ireland, and now I have all these different search criteria that Lightroom's going to use to automatically find the images that match the criteria and put them in a collection for me. For example, I want to make sure that my rating is greater than or equal to 1 star. But if I simply check Create right now, it will look through all of my photographs. Right now I haven't isolated this in any way to only look through the Ireland images, so I'm going to click on the + icon right here, and for my second rule I want it to only look in a specific folder, and that folder has to contain Ireland, because I have a folder called Ireland in my Folder panel, and all of these subfolders are in that. So now when I click Create, Lightroom will automatically go out and collect all of those images that are 1 star or greater and put it in this smart collection. And the reason that it's a smart collection is that it is constantly or dynamically filtering my entire image library. So it's looking in Ireland, it's looking for my 1 star or greater. If I change my mind and go, "Oh my goodness, these do not deserve 1 star," if I tap the 0 key to remove that star, those images are automatically removed from that smart collection. There is one thing that I can't do in a smart collection that I can do in a regular collection, so you should just be aware of this. I cannot have a custom sort order. If I wanted to reorder these images, you'll notice that Lightroom does not support a custom sort order in a smart collection, because remember what I said. It was always constantly dynamically filtering all of my images. So if I want a custom sort order, I can still use maybe the Filter menu to find all my 1 star images, but then I would pull them into a regular collection, because in a regular collection I could say I'm going to drag this image, I want this image to be first, and then maybe this image second, then we'll go to this image third, and that way I'm creating this custom sort order so that I can take this to my other modules like the Book module or maybe the Slideshow module and all of my images will be in the correct order. And just one important safety tip, because not all of you are going to use collections. Some of you might just want a custom sort order in your folder structure, right? So I'll move back up here to Ireland. You should know that if you're in a parent folder that has subfolders, you cannot have a custom sort order. So see again, I try to move this but Lightroom says that I cannot. If I move to the childmost folder, to the bottommost folder, then I can rearrange my images any way that I want. It's just that if you're looking at this topmost folder that contains all these other subfolders, if you changed a custom sort order in a subfolder, how would that reflect back on the main folder? So again, just know that you have to be in the childmost folder in order to get a custom sort order, and if you don't want to rearrange your files here in your folder structure but you do want a custom sort order, simply move down to the Collection area, create just a regular collection, and then you can sort these into any order that you want. That wraps up this video on how to sort and view and rate your images. I'm Julieanne Kost. Thanks for watching. [ADOBE PHOTOSHOP LIGHTROOM 4] [Crew - Kush Amerasinghe, Erik Espera, Karl Miller] [Presenter - Julieanne Kost - tv.adobe.com/evangelist/julieanne-kost] [ADOBE TV]