Lightroom: How To Improve Your Photos

1. With digital cameras, we don’t pay per photo anymore.
2. Remember the secret of becoming a professional photographer? Press the “darn” shutter until the large memory card is full or the battery dies.

On my Canon Tags: Lightroom, I get 600 photos on a 16Gb memory card when I shoot raw and 2200 when I shoot in “high quality” JPEG. That’s a lot of photos! So how do you find the needle in the hay stack?

1. After importing the photos in Lightroom, I look at them in the Grid view as large thumbnails and delete all the “out of focus”, all the “wrong focus”, the “bad framing” …
2. I start to look at the photos in groups of 2 or 3 to 12 or 16 photos. It’s usually a scene. I select these photos.
3. Press N for the survey view. Nobody talks about it, but this what will give your better photos.
4. Press Shift-Tab to remove all the panels.
5. See the white border around the top right photo? That the currently viewed photos. Is it better or worst than the others?
   • If it’s better than type P for the Pick flag.
   • If it’s worst than the others then type / to remove it from your view. You are not deleting the photos. You are just removing them from your view. all these photos are still all there.

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