The Most Asked Lightroom Question From Over 700 People

Last week I had two stops on my Lightroom 3 Live seminar tour. We hit Phoenix on Wednesday with nearly 400 people and Indianapolis on Friday with over 300. First, the crowds were great. Everyone was just so psyched about learning Lightroom in a start-to-finish day like we covered. What’s always interesting for me though, is that I get out from behind my desk at the office and find out what questions are really bugging Lightroom users out there.

This past week, one question won above the rest, hands down. Ready for it? The question was: How many backups do I have to save of the Lightroom catalog? You know, when you quit Lightroom you can set LR’s preferences to backup your catalog. By default it will do it every week or so, but you can tell it to backup every time you quit Lightroom if you want. Well, each time it backs up it saves a folder of your backup. If you’ve got a decent sized catalog, those folders can grow to take up quite a bit of space and I heard from a lot of people wondering how many of them they should save.

My answer: none. Yep. I don’t save any. In fact, I don’t use the backup feature for Lightroom. Instead, I back up my computer every night. I make a fully bootable backup using Super Duper for Mac. Acronis makes something similar for PC as well as many others. Just Google “PC Backup software” and you’ll find them. That’s it though. There’s not much more to it. (I do also have a Time Machine too so I can always go back to another day’s catalog if I wanted to.) But I have a daily backup of my entire computer so, if my Lightroom catalog ever goes bad or crashes, I’m covered. I just go to my backup drive. Not to mention if my computer ever crashes, I’m covered as well – not just Lightroom but EVERYTHING is backed up. Actually my hard drive crashed last Monday right before I left for the week and that backup came in really handy but that’s a whole other story

Anyway, that’s my report from being on the road last week teaching Lightroom. A big thanks to everyone in Phoenix and Indy for making me feel right at home. And for lot’s of “oooooo’s and ahhhhh’s” throughout the day (sorry, inside joke – you had to be there)
Seriously though, I had a ton of people come up through out the day saying that they read the blog and just wanted to say hi. If you’re in Tampa, Arlington (Dallas), or Philly then I hope you’ll try to catch one of the next seminar dates.

Winners to the Lightroom 3 Live Seminars

We have a winner! Actually a few of them. You’ll get an email from me in the next few days (unless you’re in Phoenix) with the info you need. Thanks for stopping by and I hope that, even if you didn’t win, you’ll still try to come out for the seminar. See ya!
• Maria Weber – Phoenix
• Ryan Rittenhouse – Indy
• Sarah Smithers – Tampa
• Fred – Philly
• Lisa Hall – Arlington

Win a Free Ticket to the Lightroom 3 Live Seminar!

This week I’m starting a 5 city tour of the Lightroom 3 Live seminar from Kelby Training. First I head to Phoenix, then on to Indianapolis, Tampa, Arlington and finally Philadelphia. This is an absolute fantastic chance to come out and learn Lightroom from the ground up. I even recorded a quick video about the day that you can watch below.

But… I wanted to give you a chance to win a free ticket to the seminar. So here’s the deal. Leave a comment with the city you’d like to attend the seminar in (here’s the dates of all the seminar stops) and I’ll pick 1 winner for each city later today.

HINT: I’m running a similar contest over on my Google+ page. If you add me to your circles and leave a comment on the post there, you could actually have two chances to win a ticket

Good luck and I hope to see you there! Oh and as always… if you are attending make sure you come up and say hi. I always love to hear from friends of the blog

Lightroom Presets – Wedding Fairytale Glow

Happy Monday Lightroom peeps (that’s hip slang for “people” which I’m not sure even makes sense )

• Before I get to the presets, I’m starting a 5 city tour of the “Lightroom 3 Live” 1-day seminar this week (Phoenix, Indianaplolis, Tampa, Arlington, and Philadelphia). Make sure you’re following me on Google+ and keep and eye out here as I’ll be giving away some tickets to the seminar.

• Now for the presets. Here’s an update and an extra version to a preset I released a while back. I see a lot in family portraits and wedding/engagement photos. There’s two versions: one with a dark edge vignette and one iwth a bright edge vignette (last time I only released the dark edge preset). I find it works best on portraits and photos that tend to be brighter in nature (notice the sky is blown out in the before version already). But give it a try on anything because I’ve seen it work great on close up portraits as well. That’s the cool thing about presets – they’re easy to try and easy to undo if you don’t like it. Let me know what you think.

To install:
1) Unzip the preset zip file on to your desktop
2) Go to the Develop module. NOTE: YOU MUST BE THE DEVELOP MODULE
3) Go to the Presets panel on the left. Right click anywhere in it and choose Import.
4) Select the .lrtemplate files you unzipped in Step 1 and click Import NOTE: DO NOT IMPORT THE ZIP FILE

• Click here to download the presets
• Click here to see a sample of the preset.

Tip – Wanna keep people from seeing your metadata?

Have you ever published a photo somewhere (Flickr, your website, blog, etc…) and some one emails or comments to you and asks “Why’d you shoot that photo at f/16? Don’t you think f/11 would have been more appropriate?”. Or perhaps you’re delivering them to a client and you simply don’t want them to know all of the camera info (maybe you got a killer shot with a point-n-shoot but you don’t want them to know it ).

I call them Metadata Creepers. They creep into your images that you unknowingly posted all of the metadata for and look through only to ask you semi-irrelevant questions. Well there’s a way to automatically get rid of your camera info. When you go to File > Export and the Export dialog opens, you’ll see a small checkbox called “Minimize Embedded Metadata”.

Turn that on and Lightroom will keep any copyright information in the metadata but it’ll remove all of the camera-related stuff. Hope that helps. Have a great weekend everyone!

Lightroom Presets – Fall Foliage

Well, it’s that time of year where the trees start changing color. When I grew up, my dad was absolutely meticulous about our backyard, so the fall season only reminds me of many days of raking leaves after school

As an adult though, I can enjoy the season much more (since I live in Florida and don’t have to worry about leaves anymore). Last week I co-taught a landscape photography workshop in the Northeast. We had the chance to photograph places in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and saw some absolutely beautiful scenery and gorgeous fall color. I realized, as I was going through my photos, that I was making some of the same tweaks to many of “fall color” photos so I made a preset for it. Here’s a quick example of the kind of photo I found it works best on.

Before (click for larger image)

After (click for larger image)

For me, it tends to work great on photos without much sky but lots of trees and color. Also, I found it worked best on photos that were taken on semi-overcast or cloudy days. Believe it or not, overcast or cloudy skies are one of the best times to photograph fall foliage. Sunrise and sunset are great times as well if you have nice soft light. For me personally, I always find that overcast skies help make those colors and details in fall foliage stand out. And that’s where this preset really came in handy. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

• Click here to download the Fall Foliage Presets
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• Follow me on Twitter

Presets – Landscape Graduated Filters

Hi everyone (presets below – quick story first). I’m teaching a landscape workshop in the northeast this week with legendary photographer Bill Fortney. We’ve been having a blast so far. It’s a great group. Lot’s of laughs and each day just keeps getting better. The weather has been nearly perfect (nice and warm for this Florida-loving guy). We’ve been photographing some small towns and great fall color, so I figured I’d share a couple of my photos. One was from our sunset shoot. We were actually at a small church when I turned around and saw it. The moon and the slight touch of color from the setting sun on the hills caught my eye. The other is from our morning shoot earlier today. Not much done to them. Some cropping and a quick Exposure, Blacks and Vibrance adjustment. I did have to clone out my shadow in the church photo, but Content Aware made it about a 3 second fix.
(Click on the photo for a larger version)

Anyway, on to the presets. This week I’ve got some updates to my graduated filter presets. Since I’ve been shooting a lot of landscapes over the past couple days, they’re getting use a decent amount. I used to adjust the Exposure setting in the Graduated Filter but lately I’ve been digging the Brightness setting better for skies. Since Graduated Filters are mainly used over sky, I figured I’d make some changes. Now, there are literally a ton of ways I can go with these presets so I’ve decided to get fairly specific and create presets for blue skies. When you download them, you’ll see they’re listed in -1, -2, and -3 increments (they’re not actual photography f/stops though, just the overall darkness level). You’ll also see that I’ve included placement for 3 locations. Top Third, Bottom third, and Middle. The top and bottom probably make sense since we typically try to position a horizon at the top third or bottom third. However, after looking through some of my photos, I’ve realized that when there’s another subject in the photo the horizon will often need to shift toward the middle which is why I included that one. Oh, and there’s also separate presets for vertical and horizontal photos because Lightroom has issues with presets created for just one or the other. Finally, there’s a few other settings thrown in there to help enhance the sky as well as any clouds in the sky. Whew! That sounds like a lot for some simple presets doesn’t it? The good news is all you have to do is click on them to use the preset.

That’s about it for today. I hope you enjoy ‘em. Let me know what you think. Thanks

• Click here to see a sample of the presets.
• Click here to download Matt’s Graduated Filter Presets

Lightroom Q&A

Hi folks. Here’s another quick round of Q&A’s.

Q. If I make changes to a preset I’ve created (or even one of the wonderful presets that you’ve created for us), how can I update the preset without creating a brand new one?
A. First off, thanks! Glad you like the presets. Flattery will always get your question answered If you have a preset that already exists and you make some changes to it, first make sure the changes are the current changes you’re making to a photo that’s selected in Lightroom. Then, just right click on top of the preset name in the Presets panel and choose “Update with Current Settings”. You’ll get the same dialog that you normally get when you create a preset and you can click on the settings that you want to update/add.

Q. But how do I right-click. I don’t have a two button mouse?
A. Get up to speed with 1990′s technology and get a two-button mouse (sorry, had to say it)
If you’re on a Mac laptop you can either a) Control-click or, b) Put two fingers on your trackpad and click.

Q. Is there any way that I can preview what my photo is going to look like when I export it in the sRGB color space?
A. Nope, Lightroom doesn’t have a soft-proof feature. Here’s the thing about exporting your photo into sRGB though. Even though Lightroom is technically a ProphotoRGB color space application, chance are that what you’re seeing on your screen is an sRGB photo. AdobeRGB and ProPhotoRGB really only come into play when we’re printing. Your screens though, typically only display an sRGB photo. So whether it’s sRGB, AdobeRGB or ProPhoto, it’s not going to look different on your screen.

Q. Can I resize my image in Lightroom without exporting?
A. No. You can crop to a specific dimension but you can’t resize. Actually, you don’t really want to resize your original in LR. Remember, the images you look at in LR are your negatives. They’re your original source files. You’d never do permanent damage to your negatives back in the film days and the same goes here. If you need to resize then go to File > Export and you can do it there.

Q. I watched your “Importing Raw + JPEGs” video a while back. I understand that Lightroom won’t import the JPEGs with the Raw files unless I tell it to, but what about moving and backing up. Will it move and/or backup the JPEGs to the same folder I tell it to for the raw files?
A. Yep, Lightroom will move the JPEGs to the same folder you tell it to move the raw files to. And if you have LR backing up your photos on import then it’ll backup the JPEGs as well.

Q. Is there a way to evenly space or display a ruler when creating templates for the print module? I want to evenly distribute 3 images across a page.
A. Yep. If you go to the Rulers, Grid & Guides panel in the Print module (on the right hand side 3rd panel down), you’ll see a “Show Guides” checkbox. Turn it on and Rulers are one of the options there. There’s even a “Grid Snap” option that should help you align things more easily to the rulers and grid.

Catch My Lightroom Classes At Adobe Max in LA This Week!

If you’re planning on being at Adobe Max in LA this week make sure come by to say hi. I’ll be teaching two Lightroom sessions on Wednesday.

• Lightroom Presets and Output (Wed: 9:30-10:30am)
• The Lightroom Crash Course (Wed: 11-12:00 noon)

In the first class we’ll go over the different ways to get your photos out of Lightroom whether it’s for print or the web or even slideshows. Plus, we’ll go over lots of preset ideas for making your photos look great with just one click. The 2nd class is basically a quick Lightroom bootcamp. I’ll take you through the entire Lightroom workflow from a high level so you can see what it has to offer. We won’t dig down deep into any specific topic, but rather look at Lightroom as a whole and all the things you can do with it. It’s an absolute perfect class for beginners who are just getting into Lightroom or anyone who’s been thinking about using Lightroom but hasn’t started yet. I hope to see you there. Even if you don’t come to a class, if you see me roaming aimlessly around stop and say hi