lightroom

Lightroom 2.0 tips: improve your photo workflow through better use of color labels

For this post I will focus on color labels, and how they can really help your workflow if used properly. For the pedants out there, I’m using the American spelling of ‘colour’ as it is American software!

Now I don’t know about you, but when using Lightroom, I use a combination of color labels, ratings and ‘pick’ or ‘reject’ to mark my photos - lots of people do it different, but here’s my approach:

• Color labels indicate the state of a photo (whether I have processed it/where I have uploaded it to/other status)
• Ratings indicate how good I think the picture is
• Pick or reject flags are used to decide whether I keep or delete a photo

Color labels are by default: red, yellow, green, blue, purple and custom (not a color I know!).

I use color labels to indicate whether a picture has been accepted by a stock library, uploaded to Flickr, processed in black and white and so on. But a real problem is when coming back to my library after a break, I often don’t know exactly what I meant when I assigned a photo a ‘purple‘ color label 4 months previous. Problems can arise when you start using a color for different purposes over time.

The solution: edit your color label values to text you that means something to you via the Metadata menu as pictured below.

You get presented with an edit dialog, where you can change the default values and save as a preset.

Once saved, all you have to do to apply them to a photo is to right click a photo/group of photos and apply.

Result:You can then use your new label set in all the different metadata filters and searches, with meaningful names as opposed to Red, Blue, Green, Yellow etc. It’s much clearer and more useful to search and find photos with label values that actually mean something.

Bonus tip: The clever thing about color labels is that all they really are is a set of textual labels that get applied to the label metadata property of a photo. Combine that with the fact that when you create new label default sets you do not change any values already applied to photos (i.e. editing the red default label leaves photos still with a Label of ‘red’) and you have the potential to create several sets for different purposes, i.e. one related solely to stock libraries, one related to Flickr, one related to your family photos etc. You can switch between color label sets using the Metadata > Color Label Sets > [NAME OF YOUR SET] menu option, and then start tagging photos and filtering to your hearts content.

This is the first of hopefully many posts on how to use Lightroom more effectively - hope this helps!

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© 2008 Al Power.