Lightroom 4 exporting

Got it. The program is amazing me so far. Excellent. What type of changes are most of you folks making to the raw files? I know each file is different, but on an average photo, why type of changes are you mostly doing?

Frodge wrote in post #15947614
Got it. The program is amazing me so far. Excellent. What type of changes are most of you folks making to the raw files? I know each file is different, but on an average photo, why type of changes are you mostly doing?

Depends on what I am shooting but for me the most common things are cropping, white balance and highlight recovery.

I didn't notice highlight recovery. I noticed highlight and shadows.

Frodge wrote in post #15947665
I didn't notice highlight recovery. I noticed highlight and shadows.

Sorry yeah, it is called highlight. Drag it to the left to recover highlights.

I guess I'll have to fool with it until I get used to all the settings. I was playing with contrast and the color saturation too, which made a lot of photos look a lot nicer.

One thing to remember is that Lightroom itself Does Not Store Photos. It has tools to manage moving files around and organizing them on your hard drive, but lighroom itself only stores what is basically an address book. So be sure to keep that in mind when it comes time to back stuff up. The lightroom library is only a small part of the total data, and you still need to hang on to the actual files. Lightroom "import" can copy images off an external drive to an internal one, or make a new copy of files already existing on your drive, but you should still take time to be sure you understand the dataflow. What data are you storing where? Your "Catalogue" in the Library module is NOT a reference to how things are actually stored on the harddrive, but rather a sorting above and beyond that.

This is where a huge part of the power of Lightroom comes from. While photos will remain where they were placed on your harddrive within the OS level filesystem, Lightroom can maintain a directory of 'photos' independent of that. These are just references, but it lets you group copies of the same photo in different collections and even apply different development settings to each copy. The same 'source' image sits on your harddrive, and lightroom can then 'develop' it into different black and whites, and a a host of colour versions, all for the cost of a very small list of settings that get applied to the base source for each 'version' of that same image.

Once you get into it, you will most likely really love what you can do with multiple copies in a non-destructive environment. Lets you do so much with a fraction of the storage space.