Using the Lightroom Interface

Series Summary

Adobe Lightroom is a photography software program that allows professional photographers to manage and do post-production work on thousands of digital photos. It is organized into five features: library, develop, slideshow, print, and web, each representing and encompassing a work-flow step from image collection to gallery creation.

In this free video series our expert, Brandon Sarkis will show you how to use and customize the lightroom interface, how to use the modules and their control bars, and how to use stacks. He will also show you how to import and export images, how to use keywords, and how to use collections. Finally he will teach you how to customize the identity plate and give you some expert tips and advice on common troubleshooting issues to be avoided.

Video Transcript

"BRANDON SARKIS: My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to be showing you how to use Adobe's Lightroom software. Okay so, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to give you just a little idea of the interface and all of the setup. So we're going to open up Lightroom. There we go. And the first thing you'll see here is the main center window. That's your currently selected view. That's your main viewer window. And as you see, I've got it set up into just a random library here. And as you scroll through here and you can click on these different pictures, and you can double click on 'em and edit 'em, or scroll through it and look at your entire catalog, or whatever the chosen parts you're on. Over here on the left-hand side, you're going to see all the shortcuts to get through your library, on the library screen. We've got ways to sort through your Keywords and your "Collections." And let's see, this way you can go through that. I can go to a particular catalog, or you can go through the bottom and zip through them all, instead of going to the top screen. On the right-hand side, you're going to see, there's some modules here. This is our developed module. This is where you're going to apply all your adjustments to your images. You're going to develop a digital image. This is the "Slide Show module." This is going to be where you set up your slide shows, and you can go through 'em, and set 'em up. This is your "Print Module" which doesn't currently work under Leopard. We're waiting for an update to make that work properly on Leopard and it causes a crash for some reason. Adobe does say that Lightroom 1.3 is going to fix that. And over here is your web, this is a little interface module that allows you to upload your pictures to a web site, or to an online gallery, for viewing later. A really handy feature to have it all built right into this."