Welcome to Pilot Imaging’s Lightroom Tips. Since this is our first tip ever, I thought we could go into some more detail about Lightroom. For those of you who don’t know, it is a catalog system. This means, it is used to catalog your photos while you make changes to them, as opposed to Adobe Bridge, which is a photo viewer/browser, where you can point directly to a folder and see the photos in that folder.
That being said, we encourage all of our clients to always be creative, do what you think no one has ever done before. Go out on a limb, literally stand on a limb and take a photo, lay on the ground, do something other than just holding your camera at eye level, perfectly horizontal with the ground taking your photo. You are a photographer, and according to your client, the best photographer out there, or at least the best photographer they could afford. Now it’s time for you to earn that title. Once all that thought and effort has gone into “making” your photo, now what? Way back in the film days we would send our film to the lab, have it processed and get back some beautiful prints; end of story. But now this is no longer the case. There is so much more we can do with our photography. We don’t want all that time we’ve spent “making” our photos to go down the drain by not knowing how to manage our files. I assume 99% of you are shooting digital and understand the benefits of doing so. I also assume that 50% of you are still shooting JPG. That’s okay, although it is our hope that eventually everyone will understand why shooting RAW is so important (tips for why shooting RAW is better will be for another day). If you are still a JPG shooter and have ventured into RAW by setting your camera to shoot JPG+RAW, there is a way to have Lightroom manage these files. And this my friends is our first Lightroom tip ever.
If you are a photographer who shoots JPG+RAW and you want to have Lightroom manage your files, I suggest that you have Lightroom only see the RAW file. This way you can make changes to the files and then export from the RAW and not the JPG. You can edit JPG files in Lightroom, but if you have the RAW file, there is really no reason to do so. Allowing Lightroom to see only the RAW files and not import the JPG is a simple task. It’s in our beloved preferences. PC users should go to “Edit” and then “Preference”, while Mac users should click on “Lightroom” and then “Preferences”. Click on the “Import” tab. Make sure the third option, “Treat JPEG files next to RAW files as separate photos”, is unchecked. This way, Lightroom will look for files with the same name, but different extensions, and will only import the RAW version. If you would like Lightroom to see everything, JPGs included, just check that box and you are good to go.
I hope you enjoyed Pilot Imaging’s first Lightroom tip ever. We hope to bring these to you as often as we can. Our goal is to help you be the best photographer you can be by offering photography tips and lab tips. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to call, email or Skype.
Until next time!!!
pilotimaging.wordpress.com 