Adobe Lightroom 3 Course

Welcome to this VTC course on Lightroom 3. During this course we'll be looking in detail at the five modules in Lightroom: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, and Web. We're going to start out by exploring what Lightroom is and what it does and the difference between Lightroom and Photoshop. We'll look at how Lightroom, Bridge, and Photoshop all work together. We'll then look at the Lightroom Interface and discover the five modules, then panels within these, and the Filmstrip. We'll also look at ways to customize the Lightroom Window. Catalogs are the central feature in Lightroom so we'll look at how to create a Catalog and how to import images into that Catalog. We'll then look at Metadata options including adding Key Words to images, how to make backups of your images as you import them, and how to create import presets. From importing your images we'll move to the Library Module and we'll look at different ways to view your images here including the Loupe and Grid Views as well as Compare and Survey Views. Because folders in Lightroom don't always show all the images which are in the underlying folders on disk we're going to look at how the contents of Lightroom's Catalog relates to the underlying Operating System file structure. To help you quickly process a shoot I'll show you ways you can quickly classify images to find the best of them including using Pick and Reject Flags, Color Labels, and Star Ratings. We'll look at Lightroom Collections including the previous import and Quick Collections as well as collections that we create ourselves and Smart Collections. There are numerous reasons you might want to add Metadata to your images so we'll look at Metadata options and how you can keyword images and add copyright data to them. So that you can easily find images within your Lightroom Catalog, we'll look at the Filtering options available on the Filmstrip as well as through the Filter Bar shown here. To use your images in other applications you need to export them from Lightroom so we're going to look at how to export images and how to create watermarks that can be applied on exporting images as well as being used in other modules in Lightroom. If you have Photoshop installed, then Lightroom can interface direct with Photoshop so I'm going to show you how to send images direct from Lightroom to Photoshop as well as how to merge images to panoramas, process HDR sequences, and assemble images as layers in Photoshop. The Develop Tools in Lightroom are very powerful and we'll begin our look at these by looking at the Quick Develop Panel in the Library. We're then going to progress to a detailed discussion of the tools in each of the Panels in the Develop Module. While most editing tools in Lightroom apply to the entire image, there are some fixing tools that can be applied to just portions of an image so we're going to look at the Graduated Filter, the Adjustment Brush, and the Spot Removal Tools, and how you can use them to fix just parts of an image. Presets allow you to apply fixes to images with a single click and we're going to look at how to use Presets to develop an image as well as how to create your own and to use those that you find on the Web. We'll also see how to compare the image before and after fixing it. Having finished with the Develop Module, we'll move forward to look at the Slideshow Module and how it can be used to create and play Slideshows from within Lightroom. We'll then look at the Print Module and how to print everything from one image to creating custom picture packages for multi-image printing. So that you can display your images on the Web, we'll see how to create a Web Slideshow in the Web Module and how to upload it direct to a website from inside Lightroom. Finally, we'll look at the Publish Services which are new to Lightroom 3 and which allow you to publish images from Lightroom direct to online sites such as Flickr, Facebook, and SmugMug. We'll also look briefly at some problems you may encounter as you work with Lightroom and how to solve them. While Lightroom 3 at first look might seem simple enough to use, under its hood there are a lot of features which can save you time and help you work efficiently with your images. Throughout this course, my aim is to give you a detailed look at the tools in Lightroom that will help you every day in your photo processing workflow. I'll show you how to get your images into Lightroom and how to develop and share them so that you can turn around the images from a shoot within hours rather than days. Regardless of whether you're a professional photographer or an enthusiastic amateur, I know that Lightroom has the ability to make you more productive and to reduce some of the tedium involved in managing and developing a large number of images.  

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