In the middle you will see either a load of small thumbnails, or one big image. In the panel on the left, called the Navigator Panel, you will see a little panel called Folders, and in there you will see your images. As time goes on and you import more and more images, they will show up here too. Now, there are lots and lots and lots of things you can do here, and you will want to learn them as you go ahead, but for now, we are going to ignore great swathes of it, so that we can concentrate on just the essentials. Now that you have imported some images, you will see them in the Library module! Lightroom will get to work importing your photos, and you can go and have a cup of coffee, or if it's after 12, wine ? Viewing Your Images When you’re happy with everything, simply click the Import button in the lower-right corner of your screen. These are all super useful things, but until you have a system in place like the one we teach you in Launch into Lightroom, they are perhaps best left well alone There are many other options on this right hand side panel, like renaming your files, applying Develop settings and adding keywords and so on. Once you have went ahead and created a catalog, you will probably get some basic tips and hints from Lightroom (which are not that much use at all, but at least they are something!) and then.a blank screen like this: For the sake of ease, you could go right ahead and store this in the default location, which will be the Pictures folder of your hard drive, but of course you could choose a new location if you wish. That's because without a catalog, Lightroom can't do very much at all!Īt this point, it will give you the option to choose where to store it. When you first open Lightroom, it will ask you to create a catalog. Your actual image files will reside wherever you have asked Lightroom to save them to, and LIghtroom will simply keep track of that file - and everything associated with it - in the catalog. What is important to note here (and a common source of confusion for new Lightroom users) is that when you import images into Lightroom, you are not actually saving any files within Lightroom itself, but rather simply importing a "reference" to the file into the catalog. This catalog contains all the information about your image files, including where they are stored, any tags or keywords, along with any editing steps you might take, such as changing white balance or applying color toning. Taking your images into the Develop ModuleĮxporting a high quality JPEG for printingĪs you can guess, it's not going to be a quick post, so you might want to wait until the kids are in bed before you read this one ?.īecause Lightroom is a management system, it uses something called a catalog to keep track of everything you do to your images. Importing your first photos from your memory card What happens when you first open Lightroom
To try to help out any new Lightroom users out there, what I want to do today is to give you a step by step guide on how to get started with Lightroom, right from the beginning. We'll cover: It has taken me quite a few years to figure out Lightroom, and right at the beginning I really wish I had someone leading me through the process step by step - it would have saved me so much time and allowed me to concentrate on getting good images, rather than having to spend hours and hours sorting out my mess!
We all know that learning a new piece of software can be daunting - this is especially true when we're talking about Lightroom, which has so many modules, panels, buttons and options that you might not even know where to start!