If you missed Part I and Part II of this series, you can find them here and here. Now that you have transferred your images from your SD/CF card(s) into a designated folder, you now have a location where Lr will always be able to find the RAW images as long as you don’t move them or the folder. Lr can be set up to open a dialog box each time the application is launched that will allow you to open an existing catalog or create a new one. I suggest creating a new catalog for every shooting project. Lr catalogs can get extremely cumbersome if all your images are in one catalog. If you do choose to create one catalog, keywording will be paramount in your process in order to organize and search through hundreds, if not thousands, of images.
Create a new catalog and name it the same as the folder you created for your images: YYYYMMDD_Project_Name. Save your catalog in the main folder that holds your RAW images or in the folder named Lightroom Catalogs that is created when Lr is installed. Once the catalog has been created, import the images into Lr. After importing your images, make sure you create keywords. This will help you be able to search and find images that are assigned to that keyword. Process your images further by using ratings and flagging to cull and organize your images into smaller subsets. You can start editing your images in Lr, open them from Lr in Ps (CMD+E) or a combination of both. This is what makes Lr a great choice for your primary application to use when processing your images. If you open it in Ps from Lr, when you are done, just close it out and choose to save it. It will automatically save back into Lr.
You can learn more about the amazing things both Adobe Lr and Ps are capable of here. Again, some photographers will say they prefer one over the other, but where Lr lacks Ps can make up for it, but Lr however, can make post-processing much quicker and was built specifically for photographers.
Tune in next week for the final installment of this series…
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