Lightroom: Upgrading and Revisioning

Its taken me a few lean years but finally I’ve just upgraded from LR3 to LR6. In the process I’ve learned that I could have been doing somethings better, and one large catalog is not so good. So I’m starting from scratch all over again.

Now, I’m scrutinizing Kevin Kubota’s Lightspeed Workflow (from a CreativeLive session) and setting up Kumu, Goodsync and LR (presets and templates) so that I can reprocess my image storage and management (since 2003) and perhaps gain greater management control over my growing database of images; as well as forward some of my, stagnating for too long, personal work goals.

Having installed the application, re-tasked an ineffectual backup hdd to be my main file storage device, set up my file structures, and started tweaking LR6 with import defaults and Catalog Filters, I’m using a dummy file set of some 700+ kids football fotos that need to be processed before the weekend, as I still need to setup Kumu properly and get my “Client” data entered in chronological order.

That means going back to 2003 and completely rebuilding my file storage system. Its a lot of work, but in the end, if ever one of my models or clients asked for a new copy of a photo, I’ll be able to find it more easily (although I may need to re-edit them all over again, in some cases)

Similarly, this should allow me to sort through a backlog of personal work that has been sidelined for far too long. Now, the task-in-hand is to finish optimizing the LR6 Catalogue and saving a Default that can be duplicated for each job on demand, and add some presets.

And, on the subject of presets, some not so common ones, these are, “Print Presets” also, “Free Presets” from On1, …also, “Brush Presets” from Gavin Seims and of course, Kevin Kubota’s (not free but very good) Presets for Lightroom.