We were recently approached by MyPhotoSchool to take part in a 4 week online Lightroom course run by George Cairns . We are no strangers to Adobe Lightroom software, and use it on a regular basis, however having actually never been taught it formally, we jumped at the chance to take part.
Week 1.
The first assignment was pretty straight forward. The task was to import 3 images from a memory card, assign keywords on import, geo-tag said images and make a few simple edit adjustments using a virtual copy and the develop presets in the Library module. As someone who has been using Lightroom for the last 5 years this was simple, but I learned a very valuable lesson straight away! I never understood keywords in Lightroom, because I never bothered finding out. Little did I know they are going to be extremely useful in the SEO for my WordPress website, to help the search-ability and presence of my website. Its also a great way to add to organisation of my images which are stored on an external drive when completed. Such keywords as the shoot location, shoot type and shoot style can help recall a whole list of images according to the given keyword search. No more trying to remember each shoot when putting together a blog post or updating the website portfolio, it brings organisation to the chaos.
The same can almost be said for geotagging, which proves helpful by recalling images by venue and location. Here are my three images I chose to edit using the develop presets in the library module.
Image 1 – I love taking silhouettes to convert them to black and white, its been a shot that we do as often as we can. Here I’ve chosen a black and white preset which I use for all my wedding images, which has a good level of contrast, and slightly faded blacks.
Image 2 – I love the image, it was a quick pull something out of the bag kinda shot because it was dark by 5pm. It needed a bit more punch, so again I picked one of our pre-made develop presets from the library module which adds a bit of contrast.
Image 3 – another black and white conversion with our favourite black and white preset turns this image from stunning colour to dramatic, pulling all focus on to the couple.
I found the instructional video very east to follow, informative and clear in exactly what to do which is perfect for newcomers to Lightroom. When it came to submitting the assignment however, even as a tech person I was pulling my hair out. I had great issues getting all of the images to upload to the ‘My Images’ module, and even more trouble getting them across into the main text body. George however was most helpful in addressing the problems I was having, and it turns out there were some issues for the tech support team to iron out.
So first week went well, keep an eye out for week 2 soon
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