Looking at Lightroom 6. Help please.

[Braineack]

It's 6mo

 

[wrangler5]

I've used LR since LR3 (I think it was - I actually tried LR when it was first offered as a free trial, but didn't start using it until later.) And I started using PS when I switched from film to digital in 2002. PS is an immensely powerful graphics tool, originaly designed for graphic artists, but photographers figured out how to use some of its capabilities to edit their images. Its power comes from the vast array of tools available, and this is what makes it so intimidating for beginners. It certainly was for me when I first started.

LR is a package that can manage digital images from initial organization (Library tab) through editing (Develop tab) to output via Printing, Web dissemination or Slide Show creation. (There's also a tab called Map, but I have no idea what its function is.) The database (Library) took a bit of getting used to, but I found that my own scheme for organizing photos into a folder heirarchy by year with subfolders under each year for individual events was easy to incorporate into LR once I got used to starting there to create the new folders as needed. You do have to "Import" your images into LR from the camera or card, but I use that step to (automatically) rename files to my preferred date and time format and dump them into a single folder named Initial Import. That's the folder where I always do the intital review and purge of images I don't want to keep. Once that's done, I can decide whether to move some or all of the images to folders that already exist, or to new folders that I create just before I move the files. If I'm involved in an ongoing event, like a weekend long family reunion, I can import images throughout the weekend and let them sit in Initial Import until they're all there, and then review everything at once. As others have noted, as long as you use LR to do your folder creation and your file moving and deleting, it will always keep track of where your images are. Mine are actually on 2 external drives - the most recent years on one and older years on another.

The editing power of the Develop module in LR increases with every iteration. Virtually all of my image output is 8x8 black and white prints, and I can now do all of my cropping (LR now has perspective adjustments as well as the usual crop and rotate functions) and almost all of the B&W conversion tools right in LR. I have subscribed to the PS cloud version for several years, for those (increasingly) rare situations where I needed to edit a particular image at the pixel level. And I now have printers that can output suitable B&W images directly from LR - I used to have to export images as JPEGs and print them from another computer that drove dedicated B&W printers, but my new printers can take the output directly. As others have noted, LR never touches the original file (I shoot RAW files if the camera allows it), and even the printing is nondestructive. Only the rare PS-edited image gets permanently changed, but it just ends up as a TIFF file in the same folder as the original, still-untouched RAW file.

Like some others, I am concerned about becoming locked into Adobe's subscription model and at the mercy of their periodic pricing decisions. (As PS users now are - PS can only be used on a monthly subscription basis, at whatever fee Adobe wants to charge.) This is why I prefer to pay for standalone copies of LR as long as they're available. I recently bought a standalone upgrade to LR6, but I won't have to buy any further upgrades as long as LR6 continues to do what I need to do. And having evaluated how little I use PS, I recently cancelled my subscription the cloud version of PS and bought the most recent version of PS Elements. It can do the kind of pixel-level editing I (occasionally) need to do outside of LR, and I now have a completely standalone photo suite which I can use without having to make further payment to Adobe, hopefully indefinitely, but at least until such time as Apple revises OSX to the point where these versions no longer work.

For a new user of these Adobe tools I'd strongly recommend that you start with Lightroom. There are LOTS of instructional videos available from Adobe for free. I frequently end up looking at ones done by Julianne Kost - she's one of the many names that show up on the splash screen when LR opens. She's done a whole bunch of them covering virtually all of the functionalities of the program. I usually end up looking at one after I've done a search for a particular step that I want to take, but I believe she has some that are designed to start at the beginning and walk a newcomer through the basic operations. If the OP doesn't find what he wants in the Terry White videos I'd suggest looking at Ms. Kost's - I think they show up through the Lightroom Help area of the Adobe web site.