Lightroom 4 exporting

Is there a way to work on files and export them all at once when you're done with your session? Or do you have to export them individually when younare done editing?

Just highlight the ones you want and then do File-->Export.

They will all be exported with those settings.

So I can edit individually, an then highlight, then export? How do you highlight more than one at a time?

left click on the 1st iamge go left or right depending where your at then press shift and left click to highlight on any image after that job done

Frodge wrote in post #15944625
So I can edit individually, an then highlight, then export? How do you highlight more than one at a time?

There are lots of ways.

• You can shift click to edit a contiguous group as described above.
  
• You can ctrl click to add individual files to a selection.
  
• You can flag all the ones you like as picks while you are editing.(Hit the 'P' key) Then just select all the picks. -- This is what I usually do.
  
• You can add the ones you like to a collection or quick collection while editing and then export that.

add keywords and search by that would be another option.

My favourite is to give star ratings, typically 1-3, 3s being raw photos that I feel are suitable for sharing with limited adjustment. 2s being something that can probably be salvaged with editing to get something interesting, and the 1s are mostly a "hopefully I have something better, but will settle for in a pinch". Edited stuff gets coloured whatever 6 gives you. I will either sort and export from a collection the entire collection of 3s, or 6 if I'm not done editing.

Some times I will use the 'pick' element if I'm taking a more selective sample of the collection.

Sorting functions are your friend.

Also is there a way to put your watermark on the done product in a batch? Does it need to be done one by one? If you can't do it in lr, is there a simple and effective way to do it in batches in cs2?

Frodge wrote in post #15946918
Also is there a way to put your watermark on the done product in a batch? Does it need to be done one by one? If you can't do it in lr, is there a simple and effective way to do it in batches in cs2?

Yes, can be done in batch. During the export there is a watermark option that will apply it to everything in the batch.

If that option does not give you the flexibility you need you can take a look at the mogrify plugin which has even more options.

The nice thing about adding the watermark at export time is that only the exported images have the watermark.

I wish there was a way to flag watermark states as meta-data while editing in the main window. (ie, select option for contrast and location. Maybe one photo in the whole group would work better with a light stamp in the lower left while the rest of the batch would be best with a dark stamp in the lower right.)

Is there a anything like that which I have missed so far, or some option for a plugin that works like that?

I already exported a whole bunch of files to one of my folders. How would I go about going back and watermarking them at thi point?

Frodge wrote in post #15946961
I already exported a whole bunch of files to one of my folders. How would I go about going back and watermarking them at thi point?

Just export them again.

So I need to duplicate the files do that I have one set without the watermark and one set with it, correct? I just started using Lightroom yesterday, so excuse my ignorance. Is there a step by step somewhere where I can read up exactly what I do?

Don't duplicate them. Either overwrite the old ones or delete them and re-export.

Consider LR itself the source of your master files. The exported files are for sharing with customers or others. If you decide later you want a copy without a watermark you can always export it again.

So when I import into Lightroom, where exactly are the master files after editing located. They are unchanged in the folder I originally imported them from......

Frodge wrote in post #15947147
So when I import into Lightroom, where exactly are the master files after editing located. They are unchanged in the folder I originally imported them from......

What lightroom stores is not an edited image. It is an original image plus a database of the changes you made. In other words, in the file system, you will oly ever see the original RAW file. But lightroom has all the changes in it's catalog.

This is great because you don't have to have two copies of the same image. I would recommend changing lightroom's settings to save XMP files. XMP files is like a list of the changes you made in lightroom. These files are very small and the advantage of saving them is that if anything ever happens to your lightroom catalog you will not lose your work.