In this tutorial, we’re going to briefly discuss the different modules available to you in Lightroom. Don’t worry, you don’t need to follow along or do anything with your exercise files quite yet. I mean, do follow along, but just watch what we’re doing. So when you load Lightroom, you’ll notice that if you have this top panel pulled down on the right side… And by the way, to load up the top panel, you can press F5. That’s the hot key to bring it down or pull it up. On the left side of that top panel you have the identity plate, and on the right side you have the module picker. You can also press the arrow by the way, other than the hot key.
So we’re going to spend literally all of our time in the Library and the Develop Modules. This is because… Well this is my own opinion, and I think for most photographers they would probably agree, most of the other models that are built into Lightroom Classic are sort of legacy functions. I’m going to talk about what they do, but some of you might find some use in them. But for the most part, we’re using other applications when we need to do the things that some of these things can do. I’m going to discuss why in just a moment.
So we already know that the Library Modules are placed for file management: Importing, exporting, organizing. Everything that we’re going to do, this is Bridge built into Lightroom, and it’s the Library Module. From the Develop Module, this is where, again, a huge chunk of our time is going to be, because this is where we’re actually raw processing our images using Adobe Camera Raw that’s built directly into Lightroom’s Develop Module.
Map Module in Lightroom
The Map Module is a geo-tagging function where basically, if you have geo tagging turned on on your images, it’s going to show you where these images show up on this worldview. And you can sort, you can organize, you can do all kinds of… But it’s fairly self explanatory, okay? There’s not too much stuff going on here. And some of you might find using this… Especially if you’re a landscape photographer, maybe there’s use for this in terms of knowing where these images are captured in case you want to go back and revisit them, I don’t know. But some of you might find some use there. Then you have the Book Module. The Book Module is… I love it, love it. So right now I’m trying to select the Book Module, and apparently… I just did the update to Lightroom and it says “SFNT read library error.” So thank you Adobe, that is currently not working, but that kind of serves its purpose anyway.
Book Module
So the Book Module is the place where you can take your catalog of images and organize them into different kind of book layouts. Now we are a serious kind of portrait studio, and to create album layouts we don’t use this module. And the reason why is because it’s a bit dated, and it’s functionality is a little bit limited. We want to use software that’s really designed for album layouts and book layouts and that kind of stuff, and we’re going to get that through third party software, like say for example, Fundy Album Designers, or Fundy Designer.
So that’s the software that we are typically using, and because it’s a lot more powerful, its auto design functionality, its layout functionality, everything is much more powerful than what you get inside of Lightroom. But what the Book Module does give you inside of Lightroom is the ability to export directly to Blurb, which I think is another Adobe-based company that does printing and things like that. Again, I would highly recommend, if you want to print books, if you want to do printing, use something else. But if yours is actually working, you could potentially use the Book Module to do some limited layout options.
Slideshow Module in Lightroom
Then you have the Slideshow Module. The Slideshow Module is just like it says, it’s going to be used to create a slideshow out of the images that you have available in your catalog. And once again, everything is pretty much what you see is what you get. You can turn off borders, whether you want it to cast shadows. You can control how long you want it to play for the duration, music you can select from. But once again, if you’re trying to create serious slideshows, I don’t know that this is necessarily the right piece of software for you. The best benefit of Adobe and the slideshow function is that if you have this pulled up on a computer and your client walks in, you can basically just go and hit play. And it’s not going to show you a messy view, it’s just going to show you the slideshows.
But to create actual slideshows like professional slideshow products, or even just slideshow products that we like, we’re generally going to use a different piece of software for that. But this will give you a fairly trimmed down simplified version of slideshows. But once again, everything is going to be very straightforward. You choose your slide length, your cross fades, whether you want it to repeat or not. It’s all what you see is what you get, and you’re just going to choose your options the way you want it to look.
Print Module – Lightroom
Now, moving over to the Print Module, this is really what you would use if you wanted to do some test printing on your own. Maybe you want to print a contact sheet, whatever it might be that you want to do. But again, for printing, and this is going to be fairly simple and straightforward. You’re going to just go through the right side, you can adjust your margins. Again, everything is what you see is what you’re going to get. And you can choose the printer and the print resolution or whatever. But for printing, we’re not doing our own professional prints. Usually for most people that I know, even most professionals, they don’t do their own professional printing, they leave that to a professional print house. What they might do is they might print a test image at home, or maybe they’ll print something just to show a client before they send it off to get the final print. And that’s where you can use the Print Module to do that kind of stuff.
But most people that I know that are doing printing, they’re just going to use a professional print house to actually dial in those adjustments. We use Bay Photo for all of our printing, and they have their own software application called Bay Photo ROES. And it’s a much more powerful printing application where we can use it to actually upload our images and then create different frames, and organizations, and margins, and mats, and borders and all sorts of things. Whereas this is pretty much just going to be a standard print coming out of whatever printer you got. And most of us don’t want to invest in the type of printer that would create professional images, because they’re expensive, the ink is expensive, and maintaining them can be very expensive.
So once again, limited functionality, but that’s what it does. And then you have the Web Module. This is probably the most dated of all of them. But the Web Module is going to let you create these little web galleries. Once again, something that… And what it’ll do is basically when you export it, it’s going to take all those images and export it with the HTML to create a custom gallery website. But again, most of us have professional options when it comes to galleries. For example, for websites we’re going to use Squarespace because it’s super easy, intuitive, uses the latest web standard. This is like old school flash-based HTML-based web design that really is not good.
In addition, if we’re using galleries like professional galleries, we might use SmugMug, we might use Pixieset. There’s plenty of different gallery options for presenting your images and making it far simpler than trying to create these galleries from your Lightroom catalog. So once again, this is, again, a very, what you see is what you get. On the left side you’re just going to pick these different templates, and on the right side you’re going to choose the different options, site info, and it’s going to export them, and then you’re going to put the HTML on your server, and… It’s crazy. I don’t really know why these are still in here, especially because literally 99.9% of the photographers that I know are only using the Library and the Develop Modules. Those are the ones that are useful, that’s where we’re going to spend all of our time, but I do want you to know that these other ones are available.
If you don’t want to see them, right click and just turn them off. And that’s what I’m going to do now, I’m going to right click and de-select each one of these so that they’re not even a distraction, we’re not even seeing them. We’re just going to focus in, in Library and Develop. But now you know, and now you know what you’re not really missing. So since you’re not missing anything, we can temper back that FOMO that we all get, like, “Oh man, am I missing out on all these different modules?” No. No you’re not missing out on what the other modules can do.
But if you have any things that you need, if you need any suggestions on print guides or anything like that, just let us know. Make sure that you’re posting online in our Facebook groups. So for Lightroom and post production, we have a master post-production group on Facebook. It’s free to join, and we can answer any questions that you might have. But for the rest of this course, it’s Library and Develop Module only. And we’re going to dive straight in, because in the next chapter we’re going straight to the Library Module, and that’s where we’re actually going to start using all the files that you guys have downloaded, and we’re going to start working through things together. So let’s go to that point now. Did I say point? Point. I said something. Let’s go to that place.
