Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a power tool for cataloging, managing, processing and exporting digital photographs. Starting with exporting your photographs from your camera to publishing and printing your work of art, Lightroom helps you automate your workflow, enhance your photos, and keep your work organized.
Workflow
From the moment you plug your camera into your computer, use Lightroom to manage your photos. You can save time later when using Lightroom to import your photos from your camera. During the import, you can apply keywords, build preview images, apply development settings and perform other actions applicable to the entire set of photos you are importing.
Lightroom makes batch processing easy. In the Library, metadata and keywords can be set on multiple images at the same time by selecting all the images you want to update and editing the metadata, and adding or removing keywords. In the Develop panel, development settings for one image can be applied to other images using the copy-paste development settings commands, synchronizing selected photos to the highlighted photo, or applying presets.
Organization
One of Lightroom's primary functions is as a cataloging tool. In addition to tagging photos with keywords and adding descriptive metadata, such as titles and captions, Lightroom offers collections, labels, ratings, and stacking to help you organize your photos and workflow.
Collections are virtual folders that can be used to create sets of photos. Use collections to create sets of photos you want to publish in different ways or to different destinations. The five different color labels can be used to indicate the status of each photo, labeling photos that need developed, required individualized attention, or are not going to be used now. Stacking is a great way to group shots and reduce clutter, particularly for exposure bracketed photos you shot for high dynamic range (HDR) photography, and shots you took for panorama stitching.
Use Lightroom to move, delete, or rename photos so it can synchronize the changes to file names and locations automatically and keep its catalog up-to-date.
History, Snapshots, and Virtual Copies
The History panel in Develop provides a way to let you go back to a specific step in the development of a photo. If you want to experiment with some different tweaks, you can save the current development settings by creating a Snapshot. If you prefer the original settings, you can easily reset your photo by going back to the snapshot. Virtual copies are a great way to create several developed versions of the same photograph for comparison or different applications.
Developing
In addition to applying brightness, contrast, saturation and other enhancements across an entire image, two handy tools let you control where and how enhancements are performed. The Adjustment Brush lets you touch up and enhance a specific area of an image. Graduated filters in the local adjustments panel lets you adjust enhancements gradually across the image. Graduated filters are particularly useful for landscape photography, where you may want to apply brightness and saturation to the foreground landscape without losing detail in the sky.
Presets and Plug-ins
Presets are saved development settings. Often, you will find that you develop all the photos from your camera using the same settings. Creating a preset lets you call up and use those settings quickly, and apply them during the import process. Many Lightroom users share or sell their presets. Instead of creating your own presets, you can save time by downloading special effects presets created by others.
Plug-ins are specialized actions that add functionality to Lightroom, and streamline processing and exporting. There are plug-ins available that add functionality like geotagging photos with GPS tracks, exporting catalog data, and adding watermarks to photos. Export plug-ins let you send photos directly from Lightroom to flickr, Gmail, TwitPhoto, Gallery and other destinations. In addition to Lightroom plug-ins, Photoshop actions can be used for post processing in Lightroom by creating a droplet of the action and applying it as a post-processing action during export.
Presets and plug-ins can be found online on sites like Adobe Lightroom Exchange.
Hot Keys
Learn the hot keys for the tools you use the most commonly so you can move through your workflow quickly. The Cmd, Ctrl, Alt, Opt, and Shift keys--depending on whether you use Windows or Mac OS X--are used not only for keyboard shortcuts, but can also be used to access alternative tool behaviors for the mouse.
Tags: development settings, your camera, your photos, from your, from your camera, Adobe Lightroom, create sets