Art P. Suwansang
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a program that influences and redefines the way we work with our images as photographers. Before the advent of such a program, most of us would store our images in various folders, in our hard drives, and use the operating system – Adobe Bridge – or another file browser to view our images. If we shoot RAW and want to process our images, then that is another story. We can use the proprietary software that came with the camera, or use Bridge, in conjunction with a plug-in known as Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) to read the RAW images. Notice that our keyword here is 'plug-in,' which means ACR is not part of Bridge, but rather it is an add-on component. On the surface this might not seem like such a big issue. However, as the size of the digital RAW files keeps getting larger with every new camera release, and resolution increases, the abilities of add-on components to work efficiently, and effectively, slowly diminish. Hence the introduction of Lightroom, a digital imagery processing engine and a digital asset management program built into one. With Lightroom, we are now able to process our images, whether they are RAW, JPEGs, TIFF or PSD, right from within the program, which eliminates the use of plug-ins such as ACR or slow proprietary software. Additionally, since it is also a Digital Asset Management (DAM) program, if set up properly, it can store and organise the digital images for you, which helps to eliminate loss and corruption of digital files. The benefit is faster image editing, quicker adjustments, and a highly organised library (database) of all your digital images.
On the surface if you are familiar with ACR then switching to Lightroom and using it to process your images should be a breeze. The more complicated part is how to set up your Lightroom properly and effectively. Adding to this confusion, there is no single way to set up Lightroom, there are multiple ways, depending upon your workflow. With that said, some of you might now wonder 'how should I set my LR up?' Well, it starts from understanding three new and different concepts that are the foundation of how LR functions. Once these concepts are explained you should have a better idea of how to set up LR for your needs.
With this new program come new concepts that we need to learn, the good thing here is that once the concepts are grasped, it is not hard to understand the set-up. These concepts are Library, Catalog, and Collection; for some of us this might not be new, but for others this can be completely unfamiliar.
Starting with the concept of Library, this is the place in where all the images that you downloaded reside within LR; again these can be RAWs, JPEGs, TIFFs, or PSD. Think of your LR image Library as planet Earth. Some of the facts about our planet, in terms of territorial boundaries, are that we have continents, countries, states or provinces, and so forth. Currently, some of these territorial boundaries, such as continents, are set and can contain many countries, and each country’s boundary is then set within its respective continent. How does this compare to LR? If the LR Library were planet Earth then the folders can be compared to the continents, and the sub-folders within those main folders would be like the countries within the continents. Within each country there are always states or provinces, so think of the digital image files as the states or provinces. So how does all of this work? Like natural or territorial boundaries that rarely move or change, the digital images files are stored within subfolders and folders that do not change. However, if the LR Library is Earth then we are presented with one big problem, how do we know where the files are? This leads us right into the next concept of Catalog.
What is Catalog? Catalog in LR is similar to XMP sidecar files for our digital RAW files. The difference is that instead of storing all the XMP next to the image files as a sidecar, LR now consolidates all of those pertinent adjustments, keywords, and metadata information for all of your digital images into one file, known as the Catalog. Now that we know what a Catalog is, how does this relates to our concept of the Library. Let’s think of our Catalog as a world map, it is only appropriate since we have the planet Earth as our Library. Essentially, the Catalog in LR is like a map of the world, which references and defines all of the boundaries so that we can easily see them. In this case the map or Catalog tells LR the locations of the images so that they can easily be found and Catalog stores the adjustments, keywords, etc, as they are assigned to the images.
Lastly is the concept of Collection. In essence, Collection is not part of LR primary storage and digital image management system. Rather, it is a tool that allows you to organise your images differently. Continuing the analogy, Collection can be compared to the variety of maps, topographical, political, etc, but, in this case, Collection is a virtual folder in LR that allows you to consolidate images from different sessions together without physically moving the files from their storage location. The benefit of this is that your storage system takes up less space, and because the files are not accessed physically but rather just referenced, the chances of corrupting your data also decreases. To visualise this let’s look at, for example, wedding photography. Every client will have at least one kiss shot at the conclusion of the ceremony. Perhaps you’ve photographed 30 weddings in the current year and would like to view and organise all of the kiss shots, from all of the weddings, into one folder without moving your files on the hard drive. Before LR there were only a few ways to do this, and one of them involved making a duplicate of each of the kiss shot files and copying all those duplicates into one folder. This, however, is not the most practical use of your time or the most efficient use of your hard drive space and you will constantly run out of storage space because of the file duplication. With Collection in LR, this virtual folder works out of our map of the world, the Catalog. Since the Catalog knows where all of the images are physically located, it can just reference them in these virtual folders. Which means that every time an image is added to the collection, it is not physically moved from the folder that it was originally stored in. The upside to this is less storage space usage, minimal image file corruptions, and easier storing of images that fit your specific needs. In other words, there can be limitless collections and each of them can contain images from many different sessions combined together.
So, to review the concepts – LR Library is the place where all of your images are located within various folders. The Catalog is the means to find the location of the images physically stored on your hard drive. This Catalog also contains all of the information pertinent to all of the stored digital image files, such as, the various adjustments, crop, keywords, star colour and flag rating, to name a few. Finally, Collection is, in essence, the virtual folders that work based on the Catalog. Inside these virtual folders, the files are only referenced and never physically moved on the hard drive. Now that we understand the concepts of storage that works in the background, we can set up Lightroom based on what we need.
Understanding the ways Lightroom (LR) works and deals with your files is one thing, setting up and finding a storage idea or concept that fits your needs is another topic all together. LR offers such a broad range of set-ups, and it doesn’t help when there are many numerous set-up suggestions out there. One possible set-up involves creating a new catalog for every single client that you’ve photographed for. The claimed upside to this is smaller catalog size, which supposedly translates to a faster more responsive LR. The downside is searching for an image across a span of multiple catalogs, which means that you would need to open up most, if not all, of your catalogs to search for one image. The catalog and image files could easily be scattered on the hard drive or computer, which makes it hard to find and/or back up. And lastly, many of us would be stuck using LR on just one computer, the machine that initially imports the images into LR. If we are stuck with one computer, what happens if the hard drive should fail or the computer malfunction? Not only are we at risk of losing those images, the down-time also holds up our workflow.
This led me to devise a new way of utilising LR to store images. Since the program was designed with a Digital Asset Management System, let’s use this capability to its fullest potential, hence I have added a new concept to Lightroom: Singularity Storage Concept (SSC) – for short I’ll call this Singularity. Singularity simplifies how LR works with and stores your digital images, by storing the Library and the Catalog in one place, it allows for scalability, portability, flexibility and minimal down-time.
The set-up for Singularity is based on the two basic concepts of Lightroom, the Library and the Catalog. Singularity should be set up on a portable or an external hard drive to maximise its potential. This will not only offer portability, but also knowing that the images are not stored in a hard drive inside one computer gives Singularity flexibility. In terms of scalability, Singularity can expand with your infrastructure and digital needs. For instance, let’s say you start out with a 500GB external drive and find that three months down the road you need more space. Well, amazingly enough the content on the 500GB hard drive can be copied to a 1TB hard drive and you can continue to add images to your library. Singularity also makes it easy to back up, either in real time using RAID mirror, or passively for off-site storage, as everything is stored on its own hard drive, resulting in a safe storage solution for your precious image data. Because Singularity combines the catalog and images on to one hard drive, it is no longer computer dependent. This means that the Singularity set-up will allow you to run your library from any computer which has Lightroom installed. So, we can all now say good-bye to hold ups from computer malfunctions.
Understanding the concepts of Lightroom and organising your set-up in terms of access to imagery, flexibility and storage capacity makes Lightroom an invaluable tool. Portability protects you from being tied down to one computer and limited to a singular work site. Effective use of your time allows you to spend more time on the quality of work you make available to your clients and testifies to the professionalism you bring to the marketplace.
Born in New York, Art P. Suwansang had the additional benefit of growing up on two shores, in two cultures. This duality has repeated itself in his choice of careers, giving him a proficiency in the worlds of logical thinking and creative inspiration. Originally studying computer engineering at Cal Poly, Pomona, Art was smitten by the photographic image and finding his passion, changed his life's path to photography. Graduated at the top of his class, Art now joins the rank of elite instructors at Brooks Institute. Art also continues to serve as a mentor at Brooks, providing technical and field advice for lower division students. Art Suwansang has already established himself in the professional world through his growing wedding photography business.
