Streamlining Adobe Lightroom • NEW Weekly “Tips and Tricks” Series.

 
The more pho­tos we take, the more pho­tos we need to edit, and the more we need to retouch, back up, search and find. Dig­i­tal imag­ing has been great in many ways, like instant review and approval, but it is not mak­ing our lives any eas­ier when it comes to time spent in front of the computer.

Pho­tog­ra­phers need con­stant access to our pho­tos; we need them to put port­fo­lios and pro­pos­als together. After every assign­ment we need to retouch and deliver the files. Clients will invari­ably request changes, other ver­sions or dif­fer­ent res­o­lu­tions. When a job is com­pleted, we often need to update our web­site and blog and start putting new pro­pos­als and pre­sen­ta­tions together.

To make things event more inter­est­ing, with recent devel­op­ments in telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, our clients are expect­ing that we deliver files right away, and from any loca­tion. That is a chal­lenge that we did not have before. All this put together is what I like to call the “con­stant image cycle”.

Chal­lenge 1
• The more pho­tos we take the more tools we need to man­age, orga­nize, and find them.

Chal­lenge 2
• Need to con­stantly access images to get assign­ments (pro­pos­als, port­fo­lios, pre­sen­ta­tions, etc.), edit shoots (select best images, retouch, etc.) and deliver final assets.

Chal­lenge 3
• Pho­tog­ra­phers are expected to deliver images almost instantly and from any location.

All these “chal­lenges” rely on the same non-renewable resource: Time.

Using Adobe Lightroom as a database
I have been a Light­room user, beta tester, instruc­tor and evan­ge­list since ver­sion 1. Actu­ally, I remem­ber beta test­ing the very first ver­sion under the secret code name “Shad­ow­land.” I now use the soft­ware almost every day.

After all these years and play­ing with the app almost every day, I have dis­cov­ered many great ways to stream­line my work­flow, mostly by using Light­room as a data­base. Start­ing next week, I’ll be shar­ing a weekly tip on this blog. Some tips might be famil­iar to vet­eran Light­room users; some approaches might be entirely new. Some will help you to get things done quicker, while oth­ers will entirely replace out­dated steps. I hope you join me on this project, and as always feel free to ask ques­tions, com­ment on the tip of the week, and sug­gest improvements.If you are inter­ested in other top­ics, please let us know here (and get a chance to win a $100 Ama­zon Gift Card!).

UPDATE 20130115 Tip & Trick #1, and Tip & Trick #2.

UPDATE 20130214 Tip & Trick #3, and Tip & Trick #4

If you have spe­cific ques­tions or want to learn more, we are now offer­ing vir­tual one-on-one ses­sions to give you cus­tomized solu­tions and per­son­al­ized train­ing no mat­ter where you are in the world. Sign up now!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2013 at 07:35. It is filed under Consulting, Marketing, Photography, Technology, Visuals and tagged with , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.