From the course: Using Lightroom and Photoshop Together

Using the exercise files

From the course: Using Lightroom and Photoshop Together

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Using the exercise files

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- [Instructor] You can follow along with the lessons in this course using the exercise files, or your own photos. In this video, I'll show you how to import the exercise files into a Lightroom Classic Catalog, and how to access the files that I use in a particular lesson. When you download the exercise files, I suggest that you put them on your desktop for easy access. And remember to unzip them. Now, let's make a new Lightroom Classic Catalog for just this course, to keep your actual photos separate from these exercise files. So I'm going to go up to the top of the screen in Lightroom Classic, and choose File and New Catalog. In the window that opens, navigate to your desktop, and then go to the Save As field and type in a name for this catalog. Let's call this Exercise Files Catalog. And then click Create. The new empty catalog opens in Lightroom Classic. Now you're ready to import the exercise files into this catalog. Notice that I'm in the Library module, which is highlighted here. If yours isn't, you can click Library. And then when you go down to the bottom left, you'll see an Import button. Click the Import button, and that opens the Import window. In this window, go to the Source column on the left, and you'll see a series of triangles. Click those to navigate down to the Exercise Files folder that's located on your desktop. Click Exercise Files, and make sure that there's a check mark next to Include Subfolders up here. Then go to the top of this window, and make sure that Add is selected, and then go over to the bottom right and click Import. And that's all you have to do to get Lightroom Classic to start importing your exercise files into this catalog. Here in the Library module, you'll see thumbnail-sized previews of all the exercise files arranged in a grid, and over on the left, is the important Folders panel. This panel shows you just the folders that contain images you've imported into the catalog, and at this point, that's just the Exercise Files folder here. You can see that I've organized the exercise files into chapters, and then within chapters, into tutorials. So let's say that we're working in chapter number four, and we're working on the Replace Background project, you can click on Replace Background, and you'll see just the files for that particular tutorial. Or, if you click up here on the Chapter Four name, you'll see thumbnails for all of those subfolders inside the Chapter Four folder. Now let's say we're ready to work on a file, all you have to do is click on its frame here, or you can select multiple files if that's what the project needs by holding the Command key on the Mac or the Control key on Windows, and clicking on the frame of other thumbnails as well. And then, if I tell you to open them in the Develop module to work on through the tutorial, you can go up to the Develop module name in the module picker, and click there, or just press D on your keyboard. Either way, that will open the first of those selected files here in the Develop module, ready for you to edit. Great, so now you've got the exercise files, or your own practice files, in a Lightroom catalog, and you're ready to go forward with this course.

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