Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 for Digital Photographers Only

Chapter 3. LIBRARY MODULE BASICS

Improvements to the Library module in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 have been substantial and welcome. This is a key module for Lightroom. It helps you import, sort, delete, rank, and organize your files, whether you have 100 or 10,000 or more. It is also designed to make your work go faster and more efficiently. That is very important for so many digital photographers who want to spend less time at the computer and more time behind the camera lens.

You will find some excellent tools here to help you edit and catalog your photos. It is important to keep in mind that every organization program has certain ways it works best, and that is true of Lightroom. In this chapter, you learn what the basic capabilities of Library are. The next chapter walks you through actually using Lightroom's Library with specific examples.

An Overview of Library

In figure 3-1, you can see how Library is structured. When you see all of the things you can do in Lightroom, it is easy to get overwhelmed. This diagram simplifies some of the main things you can do in Lightroom. What you may notice right away is all the arrows. You can easily move from one function to another, which helps give Lightroom its speed and efficiency.

Library has three main functions:

• Import. Lightroom does not recognize your photos until you tell it where they are by importing them into its view. This does ...