Updated December 22, 2011 (followers have been making good suggestions and asking germane questions.) Also a suggestion from Rob Sylvan of both NAPP and his own Lightroomers.com.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom — more commonly known simply as “Lightroom” — is an amazingly intuitive program to use. That is why we use it for teaching in our workshops. We have some recommended settings for Lightroom that may make your life easier in the long run. While this is written for those who are using version 3.x, the same principles may be applied to 2.x.
It should be noted that these are suggestions that work for us. Others may find settings that work better for them. And in the next blog, we’ll talk about maintaining the health of your Lightroom catalog.
Many who come to our workshops call or e-mail in a panic, because they have bought a new computer, or the old one crashed, and they lost their setup, Margo’s Tweaks, and other presets. The following is what works well for us. It may serve as a useful guideline for others.
Except for a very few instances, Mac’s CMD and PC’s CTRL do the same thing, so if you see CMD (Command), you know I am referring to you Mac users, and for CTRL (Control), PCers.
Start by going to your Preferences (Lightroom > Preferences for Mac, Edit > Preferences for PC). Make sure the General tab is selected, and copy the settings below, except for Completion Sounds which is a matter of personal choice. Under the Import Options, I do not check off the box beside Show import dialog when a memory card is detected, because Lightroom has an annoying habit of coming up whenever you plug something into one of your USB ports.
Under Import Options, for those who use folders in their camera, you may want to consider checking the box for Ignore camera-generated folder names when naming folders. Since we never use different folders in our cameras, this is a non-issue for us.
At the bottom of the window above is a section called Catalog Settings. Click on Go to Catalog Settings, and the following window will pop up:
Again, match the settings above, except for the Location field. Yours will look different depending Continue reading
