Editing your Photography

EDITING YOUR PHOTOS

The purpose of editing is to distill your photo shoot to the very best images. During the course of a shoot, we all make images that don’t reﬂect our best work. It is important that you remove or separate these outtakes from your best quality work before you begin the photo correction process. Otherwise, you will spend a lot of time correcting images that won’t ever be used.

Mountain biker, Fr uita, Color ado. Olympus E-3, 35–100mm lens, 1/200 second at f4, ISO 250

Why Not Keep Everything ?

As your photo library grows, the amount of upkeep and work it takes to store and manage it grows exponentially. If a photo is out of focus, your subject blinked during the shot, or you forgot to take the lens cap oﬀ, delete the image! There is no need to manage and sort through photos that you’ll never print, display online, or e-mail to a friend. If you are uneasy about deleting photos, burn a DVD of each shoot before you perform your edits; that way, you’ll have a full archive of every photo you’ve taken.

Reviewing Images in Lightroom

Begin by isolating your recently imported shoot from the rest of the images in your catalog in one of two ways:

■ If the shoot you want to edit comprised the last items imported into the catalog, clicking the Previous Import heading in the Catalog panel will display only those images, provided they were all imported in a single session.

■ If these photos weren’t the last ones you imported, or your photo shoot spanned multiple cards and imports, navigate to the Folders panel, click the disclosure triangle next to the hard drive where your images are stored, and navigate to the speciﬁc folder containing your photo shoot. You created a separate folder for each photo shoot, didn’t you?

Once you’ve isolated the recently imported photos from the rest of the collection, you’ll want to begin viewing the photos using the two most common methods for viewing them: the Grid view and Loupe view.

The Grid view is Lightroom’s default method of displaying photos and is often referred to as the thumbnail view, because your images are all displayed as small thumbnails

in the main content window. The size of the image thumbnails can be adjusted by moving the thumbnail slider to the right for larger thumbnails or to the left for smaller

thumbnails. The Grid view is useful for sorting and organizing your image library.

You can switch to the Loupe view by clicking the Loupe View icon below the thumbnail grid or by pressing e on your keyboard.

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Tip To add ﬁlenames to the display of images in Grid view, CONTROL-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) and choose View Options from the context menu. In the View Options dialog box, choose Expanded Cells from the Show Grid Extras pull-down menu.

The Loupe view is best for editing images, checking focus, and comparing images side

by side. As you perform your image edits and image corrections, you’ll need to zoom in to check the details or focus in your photos. This is easy to do in Lightroom’s Loupe view: Click the image to zoom immediately into 1:1 view, the best option for checking critical areas of your photos, since every pixel in your photo

is displayed as one pixel on your monitor. The 1:1 view is the only way to really see onscreen all the detail that’s present in your

photos. Therefore, 1:1 view should be used for checking focus.

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Tip To return to the Grid view, click the Grid View icon to the left of the Loupe View icon, or press G on your keyboard.

You can scroll and pan through your photo by dragging the light gray rectangle in the Navigator panel to reposition the portion of the image displayed on screen.

Alternatively, clicking and dragging the image itself will allow you to reposition the ﬁeld of view quickly.

While in the Loupe view, use the left arrow and right arrow keys on your keyboard to move to the previous or next image, respectively, stacked in the Filmstrip at the bottom of the screen. Or use Lightroom Filmstrip’s scroll bar to jump quickly to any image in the shoot.

Tip If you’d like to cycle through a limited number of images, ﬁrst select them in the Filmstrip. Use the LEFT ARROW and RIGHT ARROW keys to toggle through the selected images. The image surrounded by the lightest gray highlight is the image currently being displayed.

If you are working on a laptop or smaller monitor, hiding the side panels provides more screen space for previewing photos. Along all four sides of the Lightroom window are small, outward pointing triangles. Clicking one of these triangles will hide the user interface elements along that edge of the screen. When working on my laptop, I often hide the left and right panels so that I can concentrate on the editing process.

To reaccess the left and right panels, hover your cursor over the side of the screen and the panels will temporarily appear to allow you to perform your adjustments.

When you want to concentrate on the photos without any distractions, Lightroom provides a feature called Lights Out, which dims all the user interface elements. You can cycle through all three of the Lights Out modes by pressing l on your keyboard or by choosing Window > Lights Out and then choosing the appropriate option: Lights On, Lights Dim, or Lights Oﬀ.

Tip You can adjust the Lights Dim mode by accessing Lightroom’s Preferences window (Lightroom > Preferences on Mac, Edit > Preferences in Windows), and then selecting an alternative Dim Level or Screen Color.

Now that you’re comfortable navigating through your photos in the Lightroom catalog, it’s time you began the editing process. Lightroom provides three separate methods of “rating” photos: color labels, star ranking, and ﬂagging. All three methods serve as tools for labeling some photos as superior. While there

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is no “right way” of using these three rating methods, I’ll go through each type of rating system before demonstrating the system I use for rating and editing my photos.

Applying Color Labels

The colored label system is the most popular of the three rating systems, because it provides the easiest method of visually distinguishing between diﬀerent ratings. Colored labels

are popular in most image editing programs including Adobe Bridge,

Expression Media, and Photo Mechanic.

You can add colored labels to your photos by choosing Photo > Set Color Label and then selecting a color of your choice.

To apply colored labels quickly, you can use these keyboard shortcuts:

■ Red

■ Yellow

■ Green

■ Blue

To remove a label altogether, press the keyboard shortcut a second time or choose Photo > Set Color Label > None.

Adding Star Ratings

The star rating system works along the same principles as the color labeling system. Star ratings can be applied by choosing Photo > Set Rating, and then choosing the appropriate number of stars.

For faster rating, press keys to to assign the corresponding number of stars. Some photographers think that because the rating system oﬀers a higher degree of objectivity (a photo with four stars is better than one with only two stars), this system works more eﬀectively when collaborating with others.

To adjust the star rating of a photo, you can either type in the new rating (1 to 5), or use the bracket keys—left bracket ([) or right bracket (]) to decrease or increase a photo’s rating, respectively. To remove a rating entirely, press (zero).

Star ratings are displayed in diﬀerent places on the photo, depending on whether you are working in the Grid or Loupe view.

In the Grid view, a rating is displayed in the lower-left corner of the thumbnail.

In the Loupe view, the star rating is displayed below the image preview along with

the icons for rotating an image or toggling between the Grid and Loupe views.

Using Flagging

While both the color labels and star rating systems allow for a high degree of ﬂexibility, the ﬂag system oﬀers only three choices: Flagged, Unﬂagged, or Rejected. Flagged photos you want to keep are called picks, photos destined for the trash are rejects, and the rest are unﬂagged.

You can apply the ﬂag rating to photos in three diﬀerent ways:

■ Choose Photo > Set Flag, and then choose the appropriate ﬂag rating (Flagged, Unﬂagged, or Rejected).

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■ Press the keyboard shortcut p for pick (ﬂagged) or x for rejected.

■ In the Loupe view, click the pick (the light colored ﬂag) or reject (the ﬂag with an X) ﬂag icon.

To remove a ﬂag rating, press u for unﬂagged.

Tip While the ﬂag system may be the simplest and most logical method to use, it can be a bit limiting because there are often several degrees of photo quality within a shoot. For example, a photo can be above average, very good, or portfolio-worthy. For that reason, it is often beneﬁcial to use a colored label or

Edit Like a Pro with Editing Shortcuts

When using all three ranking methods, pressing the SHIFT key while pressing a keyboard shortcut (such as 6 for a red label) applies the red label and

advances to the next photo.To advance to the next photo in the series without playing ﬁnger twister, you can enable the Auto Advance feature from

the Photo menu (choose Photo > Auto Advance). This will automatically advance to the next photo as soon as a color label, star rating, or ﬂag is applied to an image.

star rating as your primary method for ranking photos.

Rating Strategies

With all these options, deciding where to begin might be a little overwhelming. Should you use color labels, star ratings, or ﬂags? If you have a smaller image library, your initial choice doesn’t matter, so you should use the system that makes the most sense to you.

When you start working with a larger number of images, it pays to put some thought into developing a system that uses the ranking system to describe both the quality of the photos for editing purposes and the status

of the photos (what corrections need to be applied next).

The following table shows a sample rating system that uses both star ratings and color labels to deﬁne the photos that are preserved and employs the reject ﬂag to send photos to the trash.

While this may be a more detailed system than you currently need, it is one example of how you can begin organizing photos within your library by quality and workﬂow status. Of course, Lightroom can store your photos with or without labels. Using a system like this one makes it easier to see the status of a photo at a quick glance in Lightroom.

Rating

Description

Send to trash

Missed photos, out of focus, poorly exposed, and so on

One star

Above average images from a ﬁrst round of editing

Two star

Very good images, typically the best two or three images from a single shoot

Three star

Unassigned

Four star

Among the best images in your photo collection

Five star

Highest quality and most treasured images—select photos for a portfolio or ﬁne-art gallery

Red

Images that need captioning and keywording

Yellow

Images that need image corrections

Green

Layered Photoshop document

Blue

Part of a series (image sequence, panorama, or high-dynamic range image)

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Performing the First

Round of Editing

Some editors have an uncanny ability to select the very best image in a shoot from across the room while speeding through images in the Grid view. The rest of us will want to take a more methodical approach to editing, typically making multiple passes to narrow down the photo shoot into a few superlative images.

As we progress through the editing process, I’ll discuss the practical uses of the label and rating systems and introduce Lightroom’s ﬁlters.

Here is a step-by-step method you can use quickly to ﬁnd the best images from the shoot:

Step 1 Enter the Loupe view by double- clicking an image thumbnail or pressing

e. Using the Loupe view makes it easier to judge overall composition, expression, and focus than using the Grid view.

Step 2 Hide the panels on the left and right sides of the photo by clicking the gray triangles at the right and left sides of the screen or by pressing tab. This gives you the

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maximum amount of screen real estate in which to view your photos.

Step 3 Choose Photo > Auto Advance.

Step 4 Advance through the images quickly, looking for images that stand out from the bulk of the images in the shoot. Don’t worry about whether picture A or picture B is better. You can narrow your choices in the second round of editing. For now, concentrate on picking any photo that elicits a positive, emotional response. Press

to apply a single star rating. Remember that Auto Advance will move you to the next image as soon as you apply a rating. If you’re indiﬀerent to the image, use the arrow key to advance to the next photo.

Step 5 If you encounter a poorly composed or out-of-focus photo, press x to ﬂag it as a reject. Notice that the photo’s thumbnail is grayed out in the Filmstrip, indicating it is a reject.

Using Lightroom’s Filters

After you’ve completed your initial round of editing, you’ll have three groups of photos: the one-star photos that are the above average images from the shoot; the unlabeled photos that didn’t elicit any reaction from you; and the rejects that are destined for the great pixel bin in the sky.

To help you isolate the photos you want to view from the multitude of images in your collection, Lightroom provides a series of ﬁlters that let you show and hide photos based on any number of image criteria. After your ﬁrst round of editing, you’ll want to ﬁlter the photos to display only the rejected images

so you can send them to the trash, and then restrict the one-star photos so you can perform a second, more reﬁned edit on these images.

To eliminate your reject photos, you’ll need to ﬁlter the images based on their ﬂag rating using two diﬀerent methods:

■

Choose Library > Enable Filters (or press cmd [Mac] or crtl-l [Windows]), and then choose Library > Filter by Flag > Rejected Photos Only. This will display only the photos containing the reject ﬂag in the Filmstrip,

Grid view, or Loupe view.

■

In the Grid view, near the top of the screen, is the Library Filter bar. Click the Attribute heading. Next, click the Reject ﬂag (the rightmost of the three icons) to display only the reject icons.

Create a Filter Preset

Whenever you use a Lightroom ﬁlter on a regular basis, it’s worth creating a custom preset to make these ﬁlters even quicker to access and easier to use. For example, if you use the second ﬁlter method mentioned in the preceding section in the Grid view, you can click the Custom Filter pull-down menu at the far right of the screen and choose Save Current Settings as New Preset. In the

New Preset dialog box, name this new preset

Rejects Only and then click Create.

Filter presets are saved in all three of the commonly accessed ﬁlter locations:

■ Choose Library > Filter by Preset and then choose the preset name.

■ Choose the preset from the Library Filter bar at the top of the thumbnail in the Grid view.

■ Choose the preset from the Filter menu located immediately above the Filmstrip in both the Grid and Loupe views.

These are but a few of the ways you can use ﬁlters to limit the display of images in your catalog. Images can be ﬁltered by virtually any image attribute, from labels and ratings, to

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keywords and captions, to the camera or lens used.

The more familiar you are with ﬁlters, the more quickly you will be able to access and work with photos in the Lightroom catalog. As we continue the discussions on editing and correcting images, I will provide additional examples of how you

can use ﬁlters in your workﬂow.

Once you’ve ﬁltered your reject images from the rest of the shoot, I recommend giving these thumbnails a quick review to ensure that

1 Choose Librar y > Enable Filters.

2 From the Libr ar y Filter bar, choose Filters Off.

3 From the tool str ip Filter menu, choose Filters Off.

these are the images you want to delete. Once you’ve conﬁrmed that these are all rejects, you can delete the photos by choosing Edit

> Select All or by pressing cmd-a (Mac) or ctrl-a (Windows) and then pressing delete. Lightroom will show a dialog asking whether you would like to remove the images from the catalog or delete them from disk. Selecting Delete from Disk removes the images from the catalog and sends them to your trash or recycle bin.

Isolating the First Round Selects

After deleting the outtakes, you’ll be presented with an empty-looking catalog because you’ve deleted all of the images matching the reject

ﬁlter. You’ll need to clear the ﬁlter to return to all the images in your catalog. You can do this via any of the three ﬁlter menus.

Tip Forgetting which ﬁlters are active is one of the most common mistakes Lightroom beginners make. If you ever have difﬁculty ﬁnding photos in your library, always disable all ﬁlters, check to make sure you’re viewing

All Photographs in the Catalog panel, and then start the ﬁltering process over again.

Now that you’ve disabled the Rejects Only ﬁlter, you’re able to again see all the images remaining in your shoot. You won’t necessarily see all of the images in the catalog because you still have Previous Import selected

in the Catalog panel, which is limiting the images displayed to those included in the last import session.

At this point, you’ll want to isolate the one-star images to perform a second round of editing. Although you can use any of the three ﬁlter locations to accomplish this step, I prefer to use the Filter menu from the tool strip above the Filmstrip. Clicking the Filter text to the left of the pull-down menu causes a special ﬁltering strip to appear.

In this new Filter menu, click the one-star icon.

Using this menu gives you the ability to reﬁne the search further by including greater than, less than, or equal to ratings. This allows you to ﬁlter images with only one star (equal to) or one or more stars (greater than). For the second edit, you’ll ﬁnd this kind of control

to be very helpful. To start, set the ﬁlter to

display images with ratings of greater than or equal to one star.

Performing

the Second Edit

During the second edit, you are taking a more critical pass through the images

to get to the best photos from the shoot. At this stage, you’ll perform comparisons to ﬁnd the best image from a series and to check expression and focus more carefully, so you can leave the session having identiﬁed your very best work.

Comparing Images

Frequently, you’ll have multiple photos of the same scene or composition and you must select between images taken a fraction of a

second apart that contain only the slightest diﬀerences in expression, gesture, or focus. In many applications, narrowing a large group of images is a daunting task because

you can view only one photo at a time. In Lightroom, however, editing a large group of images is easy with the Survey and Compare editing modes.

For this shoot, I asked the mountain bikers to take multiple passes across a large hill to improve my odds of getting a great picture.

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Using a Second Monitor

When performing the second edit, I ﬁnd a second monitor very helpful for comparison purposes. One of the signiﬁcant improvements in Lightroom 2 is support for multiple monitors. If you have a second monitor, click the second monitor icon at the far left side of the tool strip to launch a Lightroom window on the second monitor.

Lightroom uses the second window to provide an alternative editing view. While my tutorial and

screenshots will concentrate on working with a single monitor, you can access any of these views on a second monitor, giving you multiple views of the editing process.

After my ﬁrst round of editing, twenty images received one star. Obviously, I need to reduce the amount of photos to ﬁnd the one or two best out of twenty similar frames. Here’s how I’ll do it:

Step 1 I select all the similar images from the shoot in the ﬁlmstrip by selecting the ﬁrst in the series and then shift-clicking the last image in the series to select all the images in between.

Step 2 I enter Survey view by clicking the Survey View icon in the tool strip, or by pressing n.

Step 3 In Survey view, Lightroom ﬁlls the screen with my selected images. Each photo displays its star rating, and the currently selected image shows a white highlight

to separate it visually from the rest of the images. Hovering the mouse over an image causes the pick and reject ﬂags to appear along with a white X in the lower-right corner of the thumbnail. Since the reject ﬂag has already been used to designate photos

destined for the trash, I won’t use it in this context to avoid throwing images away inadvertently.

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Step 4 Instead, I visually move across the images, removing those in which the expression or body position is obviously inferior to other images in the sequence by clicking the X at the bottom of the thumbnail. This removes the images only from the survey and deselects them in the

Filmstrip; it does not delete them or change their rating.

Step 6 The Compare view is used for comparing two images simultaneously. The ﬁrst image is called the select and the second image is referred to as the candidate. I like to think of editing in the Compare view as a game of “King of the Hill.” The select is on top of the hill and the candidate is trying to knock the select oﬀ its throne. In this way,

I can narrow the remainder of the similar images very quickly by comparing the candidates to the select.

Step 5 Using the Survey view, I cull the initial selection of 20 images down to 12 images that require a closer look than I’m able to achieve in the Survey view, but that I can easily accomplish in Compare view.

Step 7 I enter Compare view by clicking the Compare View icon in the tool strip or by pressing c on the keyboard.

Step 8 In Compare view, labels at the top of the screen designate the select and

candidate, and subtle icons in the Filmstrip connote the same designation. A black diamond indicates the select and a white diamond indicates a candidate.

A thin, white outline is used to designate the active image that will receive any ratings that I apply using keyboard shortcuts.

Step 9 I click the Swap icon to replace the select with the candidate. I don’t use this icon as often as I use the next item in the list, the Make Select icon.

The Make Select icon replaces the current select with the candidate. I use this when the candidate knocks the select king oﬀ the top of the hill.

The Left and Right arrow icons are used to advance the candidate image.

Step 10 I click Done to exit Compare mode and return to Loupe mode.

When working in Compare mode, you will most often be comparing the ﬁne details in the image. Zoom in to the image by clicking inside either photo. I use the

Hand tool to scroll through the image. Both windows scroll simultaneously.

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I can use arrow keys to advance the candidate images or use the Compare icons located on the right side of the tool strip.

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I usually want both images to scroll simultaneously. If you’ve changed camera position or if the subject has moved to a diﬀerent area of the photo, you can unlink the scrolling by control-clicking (Mac) or right-clicking (Windows) and choosing Unlink Focus from the context menu.

Step 11 Next, I continue through the images in the series comparing the

candidates against the select image until I ﬁnd one or two shots that are, by all accounts, the best images from the series. For my sequence, I’m able to select the single best image from each of my two

models very quickly. I give each image two stars to set each apart from the other images in the sequence.

Step 12 Finally, I click Done to exit the Compare view and move on to the next sequence of images, repeating the above steps until I’ve performed a second pass through all of the one-star images in the shoot.

Quick Develop

From time to time during the editing process, you’ll encounter an image that needs minor image corrections before it can be critiqued eﬀectively. This may be an incorrect white balance setting, slight over- or underexposure, or a predominant color cast. The Quick Develop panel gives you a limited set of image correction tools designed to help you make a quick adjustment to your image so that you can judge the image more eﬀectively. More extensive image correction tools are contained in the Develop module and are covered in great detail in Chapter 14. For now, make sure you are objectively selecting the very best images in the shoot for further reﬁnement.

To give you an example, two images show the sun rising up over the horizon to create

a brilliant backlit ﬁeld of grasses. In the ﬁrst image of the series, I forgot to change my white balance from the Tungsten setting I used for the previous shoot indoors.

Since both images are camera raw ﬁles,

I can perform a nondestructive change to quickly alter the white balance to the image on the left using Quick Develop.

By hovering my cursor over the right side of the Lightroom window, the Quick Develop, Keywording, and Metadata panels appear.

Changing the White Balance setting from As Shot to Cloudy corrects the white balance problem, allowing me to compare these two photos accurately.

The image correction options available in the Quick Develop panel are stripped- down versions of those found in the Develop module.

Detailed instructions on using the tools in Quick Develop are referenced by corresponding tools in Chapter 14.

After all images in the shoot are edited, you can adjust the ﬁlter to display only the two-star and higher images by clicking the second star in the

Filter menu of the tool strip.

This narrows the shoot down to the very best images to which you’ll want to add a descriptive caption and several keywords that can help you to ﬁnd these images easily as your image library grows. Before you do that, however, add a colored label to indicate

that these photos are ready to proceed to the next stage in your workﬂow and have metadata added. This allows you to come back to these

images quickly in case you are

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interrupted or go on another photo shoot. To recap from earlier, we’re using the red color label to indicate images that are ready for captions and keywords.

To apply the red label to all your two-star images, return to the Grid view (G), choose Edit > Select All, or press cmd-a (Mac) or crtl-a (Windows), and then press to apply the red label to all images.

Adding Metadata

Metadata is information used to describe the contents of the photo and to provide information on the technical attributes of a photo (lens used, shutter speed, aperture,

ISO sensitivity, and so on). Lightroom uses metadata for ﬁltering images based on user- selected parameters and for ﬁnding images based on content. Metadata is critical to the success of managing a large image library, because text is the only method by which we can search. Lightroom cannot help you ﬁnd your photos of mountains unless you include metadata labeling them as such.

To ensure that you will always ﬁnd the photo you’re looking for, learn to leverage metadata for ﬁnding and organizing images quickly. When used correctly, metadata adds richness and depth to your image library.

The current tools available now are just the beginning. In the very near future, you can expect to see intelligent image corrections that read image metadata to “know” what type of corrections to make.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, let’s ﬁrst look at metadata today: how it is created, how it is used by Lightroom, and how you can get the most out of your photos, with a minimal time investment. None of us wants to spend our days cataloging photos. It’s a bit like ﬂossing—we all know that we should to it, but we often ﬁnd better things to do. In this section, I’ll give you some helpful tips that you can use to make your images easier

to ﬁnd today so you can spend your time taking photos, not searching for them on your computer.

Where Metadata Comes From

The term metadata is used in a number of diﬀerent contexts depending upon the

user, but most would agree that metadata is information that describes an asset. This asset can be a CD, DVD, photograph, video clip, or web page, and the metadata can describe technical information about the asset or descriptive information that provides context. For example, if you look at a track on a music download service, you’ll see that the digital ﬁle containing the music has a number of diﬀerent attributes: artist, album, track listing, track duration, genre, rating, and so forth. These are all examples of technical metadata. This allows you to ﬁnd the track by searching for the genre “rock” or the artist’s name.

Like the music data analogy, the more descriptive metadata you apply to your images, the richer your image collection becomes.

Using a combination of the star rating system

and a descriptive keyword, you can ﬁnd the 15 best travel photos you’ve taken from a library of 20,000 images. Or perhaps you want to ﬁnd all the snowboarding photos you took in 2008. You can do that all by adding just a little bit of descriptive metadata.

By now, I hope that I’ve convinced you of the need to begin adding captions and keywords to your images. Next, I’ll show you how to begin adding metadata and provide strategies on making the most of the information you add.

Types of Metadata

As mentioned, two distinct types of metadata can be used: technical metadata, which provides information about the size of the ﬁle,

the ﬁle type, and the camera and lens used, and content metadata, or caption.

In Lightroom, you can view this information in the Metadata panel on the right side of the Library module. If the Metadata panel is still hidden from your editing session, pressing tab will bring back the panels on the left and right sides of the window.

As you’ll notice, the copyright and creator information entered during the import process is displayed in this panel along with

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the aperture, shutter speed, focal length, and ISO sensitivity for the photo.

Tip You can learn a great deal about the creative aspects of photography by looking at the metadata for your photos. Metadata makes it easy to understand how adjusting your aperture and shutter speed affects your ﬁnished photos and helps you take creative control of your camera.

The Metadata panel’s pull-down menu oﬀers a range of metadata display options. These presets show or hide speciﬁc metadata ﬁelds, allowing you to work more eﬃciently by displaying only the information you need. For example, the Large Caption preset is particularly helpful for performing the next step in the workﬂow: captioning.

Adding Captions

Let’s face it, adding captions is probably the least exciting aspect of digital photography. As photographers, we like to think of ourselves as artists, not archivists or librarians. Yet if you think about the greatest photographs

of all time, the level of contextual detail the photographers retained is incredible. Take, for example, the famous photo of the ﬂag raising on Iwo Jima taken by Joe Rosenthal. In the government archive, the registry provides the following caption:

Photograph of Flag Raising On Iwo Jima 02/23/1945

On February 23, 1945, during the battle for Iwo Jima, U.S. Marines raised a ﬂag

atop Mount Suribachi. It was taken down and a second ﬂag was raised. Associated Press

photographer Joe Rosenthal captured this second ﬂag-raising. Now part of U.S. Navy records, it is one of the most famous war photographs in U.S. history.

While that caption may have been written well after the photograph was taken, the level of detail included helps provide the contextual information that adds signiﬁcantly to our appreciation of the photograph.

Think about how this level of caption information would enliven your family photos. Unfortunately, most family photos are like this one from my family’s collection. It’s a great photo, but we don’t know when it was taken or who, exactly, is in the photo.

Photo Credit: National Archives and Records Administr ation

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If you are a professional, or would like to turn pro, descriptive captions become essential for ﬁnding photos that meet a speciﬁc photo request from a magazine or catalog and they ensure that you have the correct names of the people in the photo.

To limit the amount of time you spend captioning your photos, I recommend adding captions only to the best photos from each shoot. This is another reason for adding

a star rating and a colored label, because these ratings and labels can help you quickly see which images from the shoot deserve a caption. It’s much less intimidating to write a caption for six images than for hundreds of images.

Going back to your Lightroom catalog, you should have a collection of images from

the most recent shoot that contain both two stars and a red label, indicating they need captions. If need be, reﬁlter your catalog

to display only images that meet these requirements.

In the Metadata panel’s Metadata options pull-down menu, choose Large Caption.

Beginning with the ﬁrst red-labeled image, enter a descriptive caption in the text ﬁeld below the Caption heading.

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The caption doesn’t have to be long- winded or overly detailed. Include just enough information to address who, what, and where the photo was taken. The time and date the photo was taken is automatically embedded within the photo by the camera, so most photographers don’t manually enter this information.

After writing the caption, move on to the next image in the series, but don’t change the colored label just yet. You’ll still want to apply keywords before moving on to image corrections.

Keywords

Descriptive keywords are the most commonly used tool to search for information within a library of any kind. Think of the last time you made a purchase in an online bookstore. You probably typed “photography books” into the search ﬁeld and found this book’s title and dozens of others.

An eﬀective keywording system distills the essence of the photo into a few short, descriptive words or phrases. Possible keywords for this image might include Fruita, Colorado, Mountain Biking, Adventure, Outdoors, Desert, and Adrenaline.

You’ll notice that keywords include both descriptive terms about what’s actually happening in the photo along with ideas or

emotions the photo connotes. These are more conceptual in nature and are very valuable if you intend to license your photos for stock sales.

Tip If you are interested in developing a stock library for sale, be sure to visit several popular stock photography websites and look at

the way keywords are used. Often, a photo will have dozens of keywords describing its content and the possible connotations. Here are a few of the most popular sites:

www.istockphoto.com www.gettyimages.com www.photos.com

There is no perfect keyword list that works equally well for all people in all situations. Begin adding keywords as you need them, and eventually you’ll hone in on the keywords you use most often. Lightroom is structured to allow you to build on a keyword list over time, making it easy to adapt your keywording strategy as your photo library evolves.

The simplest way to begin adding keywords to your photos is through the Enter Keywords ﬁeld found in the Keywording

On the Web

For more information on working with Keywords in Lightroom, visit www.perfectdigitalphotography

.com/workﬂow.php.

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panel. All you need to do is select one or more images in Lightroom’s Grid view, and then type in a descriptive keyword. Lightroom will automatically apply that keyword to the photo and add it to the Keyword List panel, if the keyword isn’t already present.

Once a keyword is added to the Keyword List panel, it is easy to add the keyword to other photos by clicking the image thumbnail and dragging the thumbnail on top of the keyword. Select multiple photos by shift- clicking to select contiguous images, or cmd- click (Mac) or ctrl-click (Windows) to select noncontiguous photos and drag them onto the keyword in the Keyword List panel to apply keywords to multiple photos simultaneously.

Searching with Keywords When you

need to search for an image with a particular keyword, you can go through any of the ﬁltering methods described so far or single- click any of the keywords in the Keyword List panel. This performs an instant search for the keyword of your choosing.

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Alert! Syncing Keywords Back into Original Files

The keywords and metadata you apply in Lightroom aren’t automatically written back into the original ﬁles. Instead, the information is stored within the Lightroom catalog and is embedded within the photo when you export photos using Lightroom’s Export module. This is a sound approach and shouldn’t cause concern for most users. The only time this arrangement could cause a problem is if you use another application to access the original ﬁles instead of exporting photos from Lightroom. In this case, your metadata would be separated from your photos.

The moral of the story: If you’re using Lightroom to edit your photos, be sure to export your photos in Lightroom before opening them in other applications. We’ll cover the Lightroom Export module in Chapter 17.

If you’d like, you can manually sync Lightroom’s metadata back into the original ﬁles by ﬁrst

selecting the images, and then choosing Metadata

> Save Metadata to File, or by using the keyboard shortcut CMD-S (Mac) or CTRL-S (Windows). Lightroom will then write the metadata back into JPEG, TIFF, and PSD ﬁles and will create a separate metadata ﬁle called a sidecar XMP ﬁle for storing metadata in raw ﬁles.

After you’ve applied your captions and keywords, select all the images within the shoot currently containing the red label and apply the yellow label by pressing . You’re now ready to move on to the next phase in the workﬂow.

Collections

Before moving onto the next chapter, I’d like to show you one last feature in Lightroom that will help streamline the editing process. Collections are, as the name implies, groupings of images that you’ve determined belong

together. You can build collections of your best images to serve as an impromptu portfolio,

images that need to be printed, or images that ﬁt a certain theme. For instance, in gathering photos for this book, I created a collection of images called “Perfect Digital Photography.” Collections serve an important role in ﬁlling in the gaps between other ﬁltering or sorting methods.

Four types of collections are used in Lightroom:

■ Quick Collection

■ Collections

■ Collection sets

■ Smart collections

Quick Collection

I like to think of the Quick Collection as a means of quickly gathering images together. For example, if I’m looking to put together a slideshow, I’ll search through my image library and add to the Quick Collection the photos I believe will best ﬁt the theme and tone of the slideshow. You can use the Quick Collection to make similar, informal groupings of photos quickly and easily.

To add photos to your Quick Collection, drag a photo’s thumbnail onto the Quick Collection label in the Catalog panel, or press the B key.

Tip Pressing the B key both adds and removes images from Quick Collection, making it easy to accidentally remove an image from Quick Collection. There are three ways to check your work and prevent any accidental removals:

■ In the thumbnail view (Grid view), a small gray circle in the upper-right corner of the thumbnail (shown at right) indicates that the photo is part of the Quick Collection.

■ Whenever you change the status of the image, a textual overlay appears in the lower third of the main Lightroom window. This unobtrusive reminder can

help you keep tabs on whether the photo

has been added or removed from the Quick Collection.

■ Click Quick Collection in the Catalog panel to view the photos currently stored in your Quick Collection.

Collections

You are limited to one Quick Collection at a time, because a Quick Collection is meant to be a temporary holding place for photos that will later be moved. When you need a more permanent solution, look to collections. You can create as many collections as you need. Like the Quick Collection, collections are great for grouping photos for any number of diﬀerent purposes.

To create a collection, click the ﬂy-out menu on the right side of the Collections

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panel. From this menu, choose Create Collection.

In the Create Collection dialog, name your Collection, and then click Create.

Add to your collection by dragging photos onto the collection name. Clicking the collection name displays only the photos contained in your collection.

Collection Sets

If you build a large number of collections, you may ﬁnd it easiest to store your collections

in collection sets. Think of collection sets as ﬁle folders for your collections, designed to help you organize and limit the number of collections visible in the Collections panel.

To create a collection set, click the ﬂy-out menu on the right side of the Collections panel and choose Create Collection Set.

In the Create Collection Set dialog, name your new collection set and click Create.

Then drag your existing collections onto the collection set to nest them inside the set.

Smart Collections

The most powerful of all the collection tools, smart collections are like active ﬁlters that automatically gather images meeting a predeﬁned set of parameters. For example, to make it even easier to see which photos

need captioning, create a smart collection that looks for images with the red label. The smart collection will automatically add any photo containing a red label to the collection.

Create smart collections by choosing Create Smart Collection from the Collections panel ﬂy-out menu. Next, specify the rules

the smart collection will use when gathering images. Here, for example, you can specify that all photos in this collection must have

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been taken with a speciﬁc lens, must contain a speciﬁc rank, or must have been shot at a designated ISO setting. Lightroom will read

your photo’s metadata to determine whether or not an image belongs in the smart collection.

For this example, I’ll create a smart collection that searches for images with a yellow label, which indicates they are ready for image corrections. After titling the smart collection, I’ll create a rule allowing only images with a yellow label into the collection.

You can group your Collections and Smart Collections into Collection Sets, which are organizational tools for grouping

together your Collections. Click on the Create

New Collection icon, then choose Create Collection Set and give it a name. You can drag your Collections or Smart Collections onto the Collection Set listing to group collections within the collection set.

As you’ve seen in this chapter, Lightroom provides a number of tools you can use for editing, organizing, and sorting photos and the ability to create presets for your most commonly used tasks. Lightroom brings this level of attention to your image corrections

as well. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to make your camera raw ﬁles shine with the tools found in the Develop module.

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H OW T O : T HE P HILOSOPHY OF E DITING

by Bert Fox

As a former photo editor for National Geographic and now Director of Photography for the Charlotte Observer, my most important role is to help develop my photographers’ eyes and abilities to tell a story through pictures.

Often, photographers get mired in the process of taking a photo. They remember struggling through the harrowing windstorm or chasing the light, but they lose

focus of the original story they meant to tell. This colors a photographer’s opinion of that photo, often adding more weight to the picture during the editing process. As an editor, I bring the approach of someone who wasn’t there. This allows me to ﬁnd “moments” that speak

to me, without being jaded by the ease or diﬃculty of taking that photo.

The role of an editor is as important for serious amateur photographers as it is for my staﬀ

photographers. By cultivating an objective eye, like an editor, and having others edit your work, you will gain a deeper understanding of the photographic process and become a stronger photographer.

In honing your editorial eye, look for pictures that move you because they speak about love, or hate, or revenge, or terror, or about virtues like honesty

or generosity. I look for the human nature or the personality that comes out of the scene. I’m looking for the subtleties in the environment, the drama of the

human condition, or the elegance of form, structure, and line.

I look for images lacking “visual noise,” annoying light or color, or objects that take away from a picture’s impact by cluttering its visual message. Pictures,

like good writing, need clarity to tell their stories. The photograph’s center of interest should grab the eye while the remainder of the frame supports it. If

numerous parts of the picture compete for the viewer’s attention, the picture fails.

Great photographers don’t just “grab” moments.

They lead the viewer through their pictures by orchestrating the scene. No, I don’t mean arranging the people, but rather arranging scenes through your choice of lens and point of view to carefully create a backdrop driving the viewer’s eye to the most important part of the picture. As a supportive background emerges, photograph emotive moments between your subjects. If I can read your subject’s

feelings hours or weeks later on my monitor, you have succeeded.

Remember that the camera is an objective viewer of the scene, while the photographer’s view is highly subjective. Think like a camera when you make pictures. Take control of the entire frame. Make it support the moment. And stay with a scene. Don’t take

a few frames and walk away. You should be ﬁlling up cards with pictures as moments emerge.

Don’t settle for simplistic pictures, because simple pictures won’t hold a viewer’s interest. As an editor, I seek complex pictures with compositional order and layering of elements that capture a moment. National Geographic photographer David Alan Harvey is a master of the layered picture. He brings disparate moments together within diﬀerent corners and layers of the frame. From their enjoinment, a meaning emerges that is more than the sum of its parts. Look closely at the subtle and nuanced pictures in his book Cuba. Their meaning transcends their moments.

If I ﬁnd two dozen great pictures from a magazine assignment, we have the beginnings of a successful story. For a newspaper, I may need only one photo, but that photo needs to highlight the subtle and

often complex aspects of a story. Wonderful pictures alone are not enough. Together, these images must create a narrative. The photographer must lead the viewer through a story by creating pictures that set the scene, introduce a crisis or dilemma, and end with resolution. It is analogous to writing a novel. No one wants to read a story that repeats its fourth chapter again and again. Picture stories are no diﬀerent. If 10 of the best pictures from an assignment say the same thing, all but the strongest frame are gone.

Whether you’re on assignment or holiday, think about variety. Think about varying your shooting perspective from tight, to medium, to loose. Bring the viewer into the scene with ever-tighter frames that eschew the surroundings for the moment. Plan to photograph diﬀerent subjects that together give the

viewer a broad perspective. Look for diﬀerent qualities of light. Midday sun may be dreadful for landscapes but ideal for details and moments.

Seek out rituals—birthdays, baptisms, and burials.

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Rituals present the symbols of culture, manifested not only in ceremony, but also in its trappings, such as clothing

and song. From rituals emerge the fabric of the human condition. Dig into the event by going beyond obvious snapshots and ﬁnding interpersonal and memorable moments. Ask yourself how a National Geographic photographer would shoot this scene.

Capturing moments like these, perfect in every way, is a diﬃcult thing. It’s almost as if the demons of disorder are in charge when you look through the viewﬁnder. You have

to wrestle them into submission by making the unimportant elements of the image recede and the important parts of the picture jump to the forefront.

You have the ability to photograph in all the ways I’ve described. It takes time, patience, and humility to listen thoughtfully to critical comments others make about your work. So it is important for you to choose an editor you respect. These can be amateur or professional photographers, artists, or even a family member. But they need to identify great photos and also articulate why a given picture wasn’t as successful as intended.

So get out there and build a network of friend-editors who provide constructive criticism about your photography. They can be as close as a family member or a distant as someone in an online social network. But they should be able to describe why pictures are successful or why they fail. They should provide you with constructive criticism. By working with and listening to this group, you can use their feedback to shape the pictures you make and guide you toward a successful style