This week in Digital Imaging, we were introduced to the Adobe Lightroom software and were asked to create a catalog to import and organise our images.
I chose to create a couple of different catalogs as I had quite a few personal images mixed up with my study images. I found the process to create the catalog and import the images easy at first but my first roadblock was trying to figure out why my raw files would not come over in the import.
After thinking on this for a little while I remembered that they were saved as a proprietary NEF, Nikon specific file. I opened the NEF raw files in Adobe Bridge, Used the filter to bring up only the raw images and not the JPEGS, selected all images and opened in camera raw. Once in camera raw, I again slected all images and saved them as the DNG file. From there I was able to easily import them into Lighroom.
I will be doing a bit more research to see if there is a function within Lightroom to convert the NEF files to DNG at the time of import so as to save having to go through two other programs first.
My Lightroom catalogs are easily accessible from the “My Pictures” destination on my PC. I have them all stored in one main folder titled ” Lightroom Catalogs”.
I especially liked the ability to create a metadata preset that can be applied to all of the images at time of import and found this function easy to use and set up.
Finally, my images were imported into Lightroom.
Amber Lyons Photography 