Using the exercise files

- If your membership includes it, I've put together a collection of exercise files. These are a series of my own personal photos as well as a few pieces from client work and some photos from my good friend Robert Vanelli, who's a portrait photographer. What I've done is try to pull together a collection of images that will represent typical problems that you'll see. Now, in some cases, I've already partially corrected the images so that we're only focusing on the task at hand. So if we're talking about adjusting the color of the sky, the image may already have its tone properly fixed.

What I'm trying to do here is just really zero in on the specific problem so we can fix just that. These are a series of DNG files. Some of them are high dynamic range DNGs which were created using multiple exposures. You'll find the class available in the online library that walks you through the Lightroom workflow of using bracketed photos to create RAW DNG files that have high dynamic range. Now this is often helpful as it'll give you greater flexibility as you work. Other times, I've just taken different RAW files from many different formats and standardized them to the DNG format.

This will allow people to use the digital negative format and make it easier to keep a clean lesson folder and to ensure that the files work with older versions of Lightroom. Go ahead and download those files, and get them onto your computer. And I'm going to show you how to bring them into Lightroom. Now, keep in mind that these are files that we're making available to you only for educational purposes. So please be certain that afterwards, you delete the files. Let me show you how to bring them in. You'll want to launch Lightroom.

If it's already running, go ahead and quit. Holding down the option or the alt key, launch Lightroom. This'll give you the ability to create a new catalog. Let's make a new catalog called Quick Fixes. This'll hold just the files from this class. In the future, you can hold down the alt or option key and select another library to switch. I'll go ahead and create that library. And Lightroom launches. Now, let's import.

I'll choose file, import photos and video. And I'll navigate to the downloaded folder. I placed it on my desktop. I'll include the option for subfolders. And now, all of the images inside are shown. What you'll see is a wide range of images with many different problems. These are the types of photos we'll be working on today. And for the most part, they're RAW images. Choose check all.

And then click the import button to add them. You'll see that the folder is added to the library. If you twirl this down, you'll notice that there are subfolders for each exercise. So, we'll start with section one. And this'll show you all of the images for that section. Now that you've got the images loaded, or if you still need a little bit of time, go ahead and get those on your system. And when ready, jump to the section that's most interesting to you, and we'll get started.