Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 for Dummies®

Chapter 6. Organizing and Developing from the Library

In This Chapter

• Using different viewing modes to evaluate your photos

• Leveraging the adjustment tools in the Library module

• Applying flags, ratings, and labels to manage, organize, and sort

• Adding metadata

• Batch renaming with templates

• Using keywords to describe your photos

• Applying information with the Painter tool

• Finding photos with the Filter bar

One of the first tasks I perform when working with a batch of newly imported photos is to weed out the worst of the bunch. I keep anything that has at least some redeeming quality, but any poor exposures or photos with improper focus are sent straight to the trash. I do want to note that, even though photos I flag as rejected are deleted from disk, I do retain an archived copy of my original import as a fallback. This provides me with enough peace of mind to be a tougher critic of my own work, which I feel is integral to my own growth. That's one of the things I really like about Lightroom; it gives me the tools I need to evaluate my work in an efficient manner.

An additional result of this tough love editing process is that I won't have to spend any time organizing, sorting, or applying additional metadata and keywords to photos I'm not going to keep. But that is just my approach to this process. I've structured this material in the context of a common workflow scenario to illustrate how certain ...