in the lightroom kitchen

Just a quick post this Monday morning, folks. Fellow photographer Ed Brydon had excellent questions in response to my post on Lightroom last week. His questions reminded me of something that, once I understood, made a big difference to my learning curve.

In our class, Laura Shoe explained that the Lightroom catalog basically stores recipes for how images are “baked”. It does not store any images. This is why you can save your Lightroom catalog in a different location from where you store your images. Within your LR catalog you can keep different recipes for the same image. Think of it as several recipes to make cheesecake. There’s New York cheesecake, lemon cheesecake, and strawberry cheesecake, etc. Each of these recipes will have similar ingredients but sometimes in different quantities and there may be some ingredients that will be entirely different. There is no lemon in strawberry cheesecake, right?

So what are the ingredients in a Lightroom recipe? Well they are the values you pick for Temperature, Tint, Exposure, Blacks, Clarity, etc. and any adjustments you make for example cropping, healing, and cloning. The combination of these ingredients and how they are applied will ultimately determine how your image looks. To apply these different recipes to your RAW image, you would create a virtual copy for each cheesecake you’d like to make. The nice thing is that you can create a virtual copy at any time so you can create one after you applied some of the standard ingredients and before you start to customize your image further. For example, I can work on an image to adjust the temperature and tint and exposure before I create a virtual copy to further bake it into a black and white image using the grayscale sliders in Lightroom.

Once I am ready to serve my cheesecake, I will export the image to a JPEG and save a copy to use on my blog. Thanks to Laura’s advice, I won’t bother to keep that copy after I’ve posted it to my blog because I can always go back to my Lightroom recipes and make another copy anytime I need it. Once again Lightroom doesn’t store any images only the recipes to make those images.

I hope this helps people who are just starting out using Lightroom like I am. I am a firm believer in having a good fundamental understanding of programs before going too far. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section below or on the Facebook page.