From the course: Retouching and Color Correcting Photography Portraits

Settings for Lightroom

From the course: Retouching and Color Correcting Photography Portraits

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Settings for Lightroom

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- [Instructor] For this course, I'll be working in Lightroom classic. But you can also find many of the features in Lightroom. Lightroom classic gives you lots of options when it comes to preferences. I'll show you the ones I prefer. Open preferences. Under general, I uncheck showing the splash screen, and then I check prompt when starting up Lightroom. This is beneficial, if you have more than one catalogue you work with. In external editing, you can choose how you want Photoshop to open a file if it needs more advanced editing. My preferences are TIFF, Adobe RGB, 16 bits with a resolution of 300. I choose TIFF because it's a universally supported format. I work in Adobe RGB color space, and 16 bit gives me much more data to work with than eight bit. I'll talk more about all of these in chapter three. And last, uncheck stack with original. I really like to see the photographs next to each other so I can compare them instead of hidden,underneath each other. Now go to interface and make sure medium gray is checked for both main window and secondary window. Uncheck tooltips and index number. Now close that up. And we'll open up catalogue settings. under general, you have a chance to decide how often you want Lightroom to back up. Now remember that this is only backing up the catalogue settings. It does not backup your photographs. Under file handling, choose the size that preview the bigger the preview, the faster it will load when working one to one. But it takes longer on import and the previews take up more space. So decide how long you'll need them. Choose a shorter time if you edit quickly. Under meta data, have the changes written into the XMP. This is really helpful if you want to import the image into another Lightroom catalogue. Your settings will go with it as an XMP file. What you do with the rest of these is really up to you. Now let's set up the workspace. How do you set this up really depends on your workflow. I like to have the sidebars and the top and bottom showing. But you can always reduce the size of the filmstrip by pulling this down. I closed everything else except for the navigator. It's easy to open these things up again if I want to see a collection or a folder. Now select the tool options from this pull down menu. I like sorting, rating, navigate and thumbnail. But this is again one of those personal preferences and it really depends on your workflow. At the top of the right sidebar, make sure that Histogram is activated. We're going to be using this a lot during the course. And finally, make sure quick develop is open. And that's it, Lightroom classic is ready to use.

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