Very new to lightroom and going through a few tutorials but also trying to figure out how to organise my photos. Adding lightroom is probably going to change a few things. Currently, what I do without lightroom is that I copy the raw photos to my hard drive in appropriately named folders, such as England2012, for example. I work the raw photos in camera raw, save a tiff version with any layers and also save the jpg version. Once I have finished with a particular folder I then move the photos (not the folder) over to my shared network drive which gets backed up daily. So, I know I can import photos in Lightroom, I can keep the naming standards that I currently use and then I would make the initial edits to the photo in lightroom instead of camera raw. Then what? Do I then select the option to Edit in PS, create any additional layers, save my TIFF and my JPG as before? What about when I move the photos over to my shared drive? Not sure if I want to do that in lightroom. Do I want lightroom to keep track of all my photos or just the ones that I am currently working on? If I move the photos outside of lightroom then obviously lightroom will complain that it no longer knows where that particular folder is. Actually, I would normally delete the folder from my hard drive once I have finished working the photos and moved them to my shared drive. Any help would be much appreciated.
I don't use Lightroom to actually organise my photos - I do that myself as you do. I export from Lightroom as TIF - then edit those in Photoshop and create JPGs for web etc. I often delete the TIFs as I can easily recreate them by exporting them from Lightroom again. I only save layered files if I think I may go back and re-edit them later - which is rare - in which case I save PSDs from Photoshop.
Similar to Oy I don't use LR to organise my stuff. Use it to import onto the hard drive, edit and export as a tiff to a sub folder in the main folder and then import into PS for final tweaks and to create a JPEG. I keep the raw, tiff and JPEG and if I do a lot of work in the shop with numerous layers keep the PSD. I periodically clear the folders out of LR as it gets cluttered and isn't a very clear interface for numerous folders in my opinion.
Interesting! Seems very different than the tutorials I have watched so far. So, you import, edit in lightroom and then export. Export basically takes the raw files and creates Tiff files then? Do you guys export to the same directory so that raw and tiffs are in same place? That's what I do now manually without lightroom. So, once exported just open the tiff in PS and do any additional tweaks and save the jpg version. Ok, sounds easy enough. Ta.
I choose the filenames in the Export dialogue - usually to include the RAW file number as it's easier to relate the two later
Use the custom name function on the import and it will rename your raw file and can export with a different name if you wish. Can also sequentially number if you've deleted some from what you import. I end up with a main folder and then in that the imported raw, tiff and JPEG and sometimes a psd folders.
I don't see a custom name function when doing an import. Where exactly is it? I am using the latest and greatest lightroom.
I do use Lightroom to organise my photos. I have a catologue for this year's images, and everything else goes in an archive catologue. I can't say I have noticed a massive drop in performance with really big catologues, but my PC isn't a supercomputer. I rename my images on import to "shootname" and number them sequentially. I import the images into a folder within this year's folder.
