TUTORIALS | LIGHTROOM CC - WORKING WITH YOUR PHOTOS

These past several months we’ve focused on Adobe Lightroom Classic and how I use it in my digital scrapbooking process. This month, we’re switching gears and we’ll be looking at cloud based Lightroom CC, more specifically how to work with our photos.

Bear with me… this is going to be an image-heavy blog post. That’s because I’m going to show screenshots in both the desktop version of Lightroom CC and the iPad version. What good is an article about a cloud based photo storage solution with no discussion of the cloud, right? ;)

The first thing we usually want to do is to upload or import our photos so we can see them and get them ready for use. On my desktop, I’ll click in the upper left hand corner on the + Add Photos icon. This will bring up a folder where I can select my source. I can import my entire downloads folder or just click on the photos I want with Review for Import.

You can either add to a new album, an existing album or no album at all. Albums, as you might expect, are just groups of photos.

I have my iPad set to automatically add photos from my camera roll so I don’t HAVE to import my iphone photos.

If I had some photos using my big camera that I wanted to put on my iPad, I could put a copy on iCloud Drive or in a Dropbox folder and add them that way. I would click on the three dots in the upper right hand corner, then the arrow next to Add Photos, then click From Files and then I can browse to where I have my files stored.

Lightroom CC has People View which is much like the facial recognition feature in Lightroom Classic. Because most of my photos are of people, I’m all about any timesavers in identifying the people in my photos so I have that option turned on.

Once my photos are available, my first step is to check People View and see if it correctly identifies the folks in the new pics. I can access People View by clicking the tag shaped icon on the bottom right. This brings up the Keyword panel and shows me any automatically identified people. If they are facing away from the camera or not recognized for another reason, I can just start typing it next to the unnamed icon and it will try to autofill. I can also add other keywords like place or theme at the same time.

Now, I can look through the photos that I’ve imported (or have been automatically added for me) to add additional keywords and ratings. On the bottom left you can change the view to different grid views or a single image. The spot for ratings and the pick/reject flags are on the bottom center. You can increase the size of the images in either grid view using the slider on the bottom right.

On my iPad, I can click on a photo from the main view to bring it up full screen. If I click on the star icon on the bottom right side, I get the same set of star rating options and pick/reject flags as the desktop version. I can click the same tag shaped icon to bring up the keyword panel to add multiple keywords.

Let’s say I uploaded a large group of photos but decided to delete a few blurry ones. On the desktop, I can highlight multiple images, and either pull down to Delete in the Edit menu or click Alt backspace to delete them. I get a scary red box that wants to ask if I’m sure.

It’s quite similar using the mobile version. To select multiple images,  I can click on the three dots to access the select window. There, I can highlight several photos and click the trashcan icon. You can delete a single image after clicking on it to bring it up fullscreen. I’ll get the same scary red box.

So to recap, we’ve imported or uploaded our photos, added keywords, people and ratings. We’ve also deleted images we don’t want to keep. We can use one of these photos on a scrapbook page, post it on social media or share it with family & friends. Next month, we’ll learn about searching for the photos we want in Lightroom CC & mobile and we’ll edit them for digital scrapbooking.

See you next time!

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Stacia