AV News 192 - May 2013
Ask yourself, does your current filing system allow you to do this. If you travel
extensively you may wish to use general keywords such as; year, country,
state, county, town, city etc. In addition you may also use more descriptive
keywords such as; flowers, boats, castles, churches, people etc. For
example, if you need to retrieve all your images of boats photographed on
the Ohio River taken in Pittsburgh during 2010 then simply type 'Pittsburgh'
+ 'Boats' + '2010' into the Library Filter facility. You may well have over
75,000 images on your computer, 900 of which were taken in Pittsburgh but
only 25 contain boats. Within seconds your 25
Pittsburgh boat images will appear as previews
on the screen, without you even searching
through any folders, it's that quick and it's that
simple.
Lightroom also provides a host of useful
editing functions although these are named
'Develop', almost a throwback description from
developing wet process prints. The main control
panel for accessing various editing modes is
shown here. As you might expect the usual
adjustments are provided for tweaking colour
temperature, exposure, brightness and
contrast, vibrance, saturation, and highlight
recovery, together with crop, graduated filter,
and even red eye removal. All these are
available from within the 'Basic Develop' menu.
Additional to the 'Basic' are other useful and
more advanced Develop menus for tweaking
Tone Curves, HSL/Colour/B&W, Split Toning,
Detail, Lens Correction, Effects and Camera
Calibration. For those that don't have Adobe
Photoshop on their computer they can make
lots of edits with fine tuning of images directly
from within Lightroom. However, for those that
do have Photoshop then Lightroom at the click
of a mouse button also provides the useful
facility for editing the original or a copy of their
image in Photoshop. By choosing to edit a copy
your original image remains intact and both original and edited image will be
indexed within Lightroom Library. This is a good example of two pieces of
software working harmoniously.
On the top right of the main screen sits a row of seven module buttons
entitled Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, Web. The latter three
are probably self explanatory, but the Map module is both interesting and
unusual. This allows images to be tagged by GPS Metadata from your main
camera or mobile phone camera.
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