My Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4 Fundamentals & Beyond Series are i-Compatible.  To add them to your iTunes library, go to File>Add Folder, and select the folder or folders from your purchased DVD or download. Then sync Movies on your iPad or iPhone. (Sorry I don’t have instructions for Android and other devices, but if they support MP4 videos, they will play my videos.)

Lightroom 4 Fundamentals & Beyond: Over 10 1/2 hours of training on 55 videos, for beginners and intermediate Lightroom users!

“These video tutorials are fantastic. The best way to learn how to manage Lightroom 4. I had seen very good tutorials on Lightroom 4 on lynda.com and kelbytraining.com, but for me these ones by Laura Shoe are really the best. More examples, more details, very well explained. Besides being an expert on the subject, she knows how to teach it.” Ricardo M.

“Laura Shoe is a born teacher, presenting all the complexities of Lightroom clearly and concisely. I feel such comfort just having her Fundamentals and Beyond at my fingertips because I know when I get stumped working on a photo in Lightroom, I can quickly find the solution in Shoe’s well-laid-out course. I don’t have to pour through my quickly and incoherently taken notes; I just sit back and let Laura explain her Lightroom tips to me and this complicated yet wonderful software opens up before me as simple as the alphabet! (Well, pretty close!)” Joe D.

“This is the second tutorial I have purchased from Laura shoe and her teaching style is amazing. She makes everything look easy because she walks you through each step- as if she is holding your hand. I am not the most technical person- but she makes me feel at ease. It is as if I’m at a seminar with her. I would recommend this tutorial for anyone who is just starting out in Lightroom or already is proficient but wants to know a little more about some of the features they don’t use” Julie K

Read More Customer Reviews

In the Collections panel there is a smart collection called Without Keywords, that if you click on it, does display all photos in your catalog that have no keywords:

Without Keywords Smart Collection that Lightroom Ships With

The problem is, that as as soon as you add one keyword to a photo, it disappears from this rule-based collection, because it only shows photos with ZERO keywords.

Here’s a great tip to better keep track of photos that you haven’t finished keywording:

(I believe I heard this idea both from Victoria Bampton, and a reader, Will D.):

• Click on this Without Keywords smart collection
• In Grid View, select all these photos (Ctl/Cmd-A)
• Using the Keywording Panel, give them all the keyword “without keywords“:

• Create a new smart collection by clicking on the plus at the top right in the Collections panel:

• Set up your new smart collection as follows:

• When you are ready to do keywording, click on the Not Finished Keywording smart collection. When you truly are done assigning keywords to each photo or group of photos, remove this keyword from the photos by deleting it from the Keywording panel (or unchecking it in the Keyword List panel.)  The photos will then disappear from this smart collection.

• From now on, as you import new shoots, add this “without keywords” keyword in the Import dialog, so that they automatically start out in this smart collection.

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When you are in Lightroom, you are looking at Lightroom’s catalog. You can read more about the relationship between the catalog and your photos in my earlier post, About Your Images and the Lightroom Catalog.  In a nutshell, the catalog contains all the information about your photos, all the work you do on your photos, and some snapshots of your photos, but not the photos (original raw files, jpegs) themselves.  If you open Lightroom and it is blank, you have a catalog with no information about any photos, but your photos are almost certainly still sitting safely on your hard drive as they were before.

Assuming you aren’t just starting out with Lightroom, why would the catalog be blank?  It is usually because for one of various reasons, Lightroom forgot about or couldn’t find the  one you were working with, and therefore opened up a blank new one.  Often, in the menu bar you can go to File>Open Recent, and your “real” one will be in the list — simply select it to relaunch Lightroom with it.  If there are no catalogs in the Recent list other than the one you are in (at the top of the list, with a checkmark next to it), then you will have to tell Lightroom where your catalog is. If you know where it is (perhaps you moved it), go to File>Open Catalog, and navigate to it — it will be an .lrcat file. Once you highlight it and click on Select, Lightroom will relaunch with this catalog.

If you don’t know where your catalog is, first check for it in the Lightroom folder within your Pictures folder.  If it is not there, then out in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder, do a search of your hard drive for .lrcat files.  Find the most recent one (based on the Date Modified) that isn’t in your Backups Folder. (Your search will bring up all of your catalog backups — it is best not to work with one of these unless you can’t find your main one.  If you do have to work with a backup, copy it out of your backups folder first — perhaps into a folder called “Main Lightroom Catalog”.)  Once you find the catalog in Mac Finder or Windows Explorer, a quick way to launch Lightroom with it is to double-click on it.

The most common scenario that leads to this issue is when users move their Lightroom catalog to an external hard drive.  In this post on moving your Lightroom catalog you will find information on how to to accomplish this so that Lightroom knows to look for the catalog there.  After you set this up, you must remember to plug in your hard drive before you launch Lightroom. If you don’t, and when you get the warning message you click “use default catalog”, Lightroom will open up a catalog in your Pictures folder — and if there there wasn’t one there already, it will be a new one and will be empty.

Where can you turn if you need more help? I do offer private online instruction, which you can read about on this page. For free troubleshooting, I would turn to lightroomforums.net — a great community of Lightroom users and experts.

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There is certainly much that you can do in Photoshop that you can’t do in Lightroom.  The key questions are, do you need or want to do enough of those things to justify the $699 price tag, and are you willing and able to invest the time and money to learn this complicated program?

The first thing I recommend is that you get very comfortable with all of Lightroom’s Develop tools. Many people who have used Lightroom for years still haven’t explored or mastered all of its tools.  (Of course an excellent way to learn them is with my Lightroom Fundamentals & Beyond video series.)

Amongst serious amateurs and pro’s, usage of Photoshop  for photography purposes runs the full spectrum  — some are completely satisfied with just using Lightroom (more and more with each new Lightroom release!), some take some percentage to Photoshop to do more complicated work, and others take all their photos to Photoshop to do more complicated work or to use actions they have built or purchased.  I personally take about 5% of my straight photographs to Photoshop to do work I can’t do in Lightroom.  I also use Photoshop for creative compositing. Let me be clear that if you decide not to add Photoshop to your toolkit, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t serious about your photography — Lightroom is very powerful by itself.

Here are My Top 10  Reasons Why You May Want or Need Photoshop

1. Complicated Object Removal & Movement

Lightroom’s spot removal tool is more powerful than a lot of people think (here’s a tutorial on using it), but it still has significant limitations — it’s just a circle, and it doesn’t have very much intelligence behind it in terms of what it replaces an area to be fixed with. Photoshop’s patch tool and content aware heal, move and fill features are quite powerful and impressive. You can remove or move things in Photoshop that you definitely can’t in Lightroom, and in situations where you are doing a lot of simple repairs that Lightroom can do, they can often be done faster in Photoshop.

Removing this telephone pole took less than a minute:

2. Sophisticated Retouching

The Liquify tool in Photoshop is very popular in retouching, for the big tasks of making people or parts of them thinner or more defined, but also for more subtle work, such as enhancing cheek bones and eyes. Photoshop also allows you to very quickly and more precisely select and make changes to faces and skin, and has many other tools that professional retouchers use as well. (We have all seen the fashion magazine examples — you can go all the way towards this, or make more subtle changes.)

That said, if all you need to do is get rid of some zits, brighten and whiten teeth and the whites of eyes, make the eyes pop with come saturation and clarity, saturate lips, soften skin, and/or reduce the appearance of circles under eyes and wrinkles, all of this can be done in Lightroom, with the spot removal tool and adjustment brush. (Here’s a video tutorial on the adjustment brush.)

Here’s an example of basic retouching with just Lightroom (a bit overdone — retouching oneself can get addicting!):

I would put photo restoration under this category as well — you can do some basic cleanup and color work with Lightroom, but when the going gets tough, you will need a more powerful tool.

3. Complicated Selections

I use Lightroom’s adjustment brush all the time to make local changes to photos, and when I need to affect something up against an edge, I turn on its auto-mask functionality, which protects me from spilling over the edge. This tool therefore allows me to make some pretty complicated selections. However, auto mask’s edge is very abrupt (there is no feathering control), so if I am making a dramatic change, the result is sometimes too obviously fake. In addition, auto mask does not work well next to fine detail, such as hair. Here’s an example of where I used auto mask to affect the background around my head. I can get away with it if I darken the background, but not if I brighten it up more than subtly:

Limitations of Lightroom's Adjustment Brush Auto Mask Feature

Photoshop, on the other hand, has very powerful tools to make complicated selections, with a lot of control over edges. It takes time to build the skills to make selections such as this, but it is doable.

4. Merging Multiple Exposures with HDR

When I am photographing a scene with a lot of contrast — very bright areas and very dark areas, I will often bracket my exposures and merge them automatically with Photoshop’s HDR Pro feature. This is not possible in Lightroom. (You could instead by Photomatix or another HDR plug-in.)

Three Bracketed Exposures and the Final Merged Photo (Right)

5. Merging Photos into a Panorama

If you have a very wide scene that you can’t capture in one photo, or want to make a very high-resolution photo by stitching together several of pieces of your scene, you will need Photoshop or another program to merge them.

6. Wide Angle Perspective Correction, New in CS6

I debated whether to put this new feature in the list, as whether this one matters to you will depend on what kind of shooting you do.  Shooting with a wide angle lens can really distort the size and shape of objects up close.  If it is important to you to correct this, it cannot be done in Lightroom.  Here’s an example – notice in the before shot how wide the side table next to the sofa is,  how distorted the vase is, and how long the TV and stand appear, compared to the after.

Before and After Adaptive Wide Angle Lens Correction

7. Creative Compositing

Whether you wish to simply put one photo on top of another and blend them, or take an object out of one photo and put it in another, this is a task for Photoshop.

8. Applying Artistic Filters

The closest thing Lightroom has to artistic filters is negative clarity, which can smooth out skin and also create a glowing effect, and simple blurring (in the adjustment brush).  From Lighting Effects to Oil Painting to sophisticated new Blur filters, there are dozens of artistic filters in Photoshop.  Here’s the new Oil Painting filter:

9. Designing Brochures, Business Cards, Posters, and Other Graphics

We can do more and more in Lightroom to combine text and photos, with the Print module’s Custom Package functionality, added in Lightroom 3, and now the Book Module, new in Lightroom 4.  Both allow you to output your designs as jpegs.  However, they both still have many limitations in layout and text;   just as quick examples, you can’t tilt photos,  apply drop shadows or other styles to text, or add other graphic elements, such as lines and shapes.  If you find yourself unable to achieve a layout you have in mind, it may be time to turn to Photoshop.  (Yes, you can achieve even more with InDesign, but for those like me who don’t want to also purchase a professional design program, and who already are purchasing Photoshop for other reasons, I find it to be quite powerful.)

 10. Video Editing Capabilities

A lot of photographers are now shooting video with their DSLR’s as well. While Lightroom 4 added basic video editing capabilities — the ability to trim off the ends of a video and do basic Development work — it is very limited.  Video editing is now in the Standard version of Photoshop, and I find it quite impressive.  You can combine multiple videos, edit as needed, apply adjustment layers and filters to all or parts of your videos, etc.

These are the top reasons that come to mind for me to continue to invest in Photoshop. If you have Photoshop, what are yours? Leave a comment below!

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The traditional stand-alone Photoshop CS6 full version will be $699, and the upgrade will be $199. Photoshop CS6 Extended, which contains the ability to create and manipulate 3D objects, is $999/$399. Note that video editing has moved from the Extended version to the Standard version. Upgrade pricing is available to owners of CS3 or later (though for CS3 and CS4 owners, it will expire Dec. 31, 2012.)

You can also gain access to Photoshop CS6 by subscribing to Adobe’s new Creative Cloud subscription service. Click here to read my next post discussing these two different alternatives.

Purchase CS6 or get more information at this Adobe link.

Photoshop CS6 contains everything that the Beta version did. Amongst the highlights for photographers in are:

• Adobe Camera Raw 7, with the same new Basic panel, adjustment brush, graduated filter, and tone curve new controls as Lightroom 4
• Content aware patch tool, for better patch repair/replacement
• Content aware move and extend tool, to move, extend and copy objects
• New blur filters with dynamic on-screen controls and preview
• Adaptive wide-angle lens correction
• Color Range selection enhancements to easily select skin tones
• More intelligent auto-correction in curves and levels

Since CS6 is the same as the Beta, I will refer you to my Beta posts for more information:

What’s New in Photoshop CS6 (Beta)

Video of My Favorite New Features

Here also is a nice PDF summary from Adobe of what is new in Photoshop CS6.

In this short video, I will show you how to move your photographs to another hard drive, working completely in Lightroom.

(Once you hit the play button, click on the sprocket wheel in the bottom right of the video screen to increase the quality to 720p. It’s still not up to my DVD video standards, but it is better, at least!)

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Additional Resources:

Moving Your Lightroom Catalog

Importing Photos into Lightroom

Click here for the Photo Whoa deal.

Deal ends 10 pm PT Monday, 1 am ET Tuesday / 5 am GMT Tuesday. (In the interest of full disclosure, I do get a percentage on each sale — but I don’t promote what I don’t believe in.)

This release candidate fixes more bugs (on top of those fixed in the first release candidate), and adds support for several new cameras.  In addition, we have two nice new features:

• Support for 32-bit HDR TIFF files.  Now once you have merged multiple exposures using Photoshop’s HDR-Pro, you can do the tone mapping using Lightroom’s Develop module.  Note that 32-bit PSD’s are not supported, so be sure to save in Photoshop as a TIFF.
• New Lens Corrections tools for fixing purple and green fringing.  In the Lens Corrections panel, there is a new Color tab, with the Lightroom 4.0 Remove Chromatic Aberration checkbox, as well as the new purple and green controls. For automatic correction, click on the eye dropper and then click in the purple or green fringe in your photo (while zoomed in to 1:1 or greater), and Lightroom will detect and set the sliders appropriately to correct it.  Amount controls the strength of correction, and colors between the two Hue triangles are affected.

• New local purple/green defringe controls in the adjustment brush and graduated filters.

For a complete list of bug fixes and new cameras supported, see this Adobe post.

For an excellent article by Eric Chan of Adobe on purple and green fringing and how to fix it with the  new defringe controls, click here.

“I have many duplicates of photos on my hard drive and in Lightroom.  If I click on All Photographs (or some subset) and sort by capture date, I can see the duplicates side by side, but I can’t figure out how to easily see which folder each of the duplicates are in, so I can decide which to delete and which to keep. I know I could right-click on a photo and choose Go to Folder in Library to jump to the folder, but I don’t want to jump to it, I just want to know what it is.  Is there an easy way?”  Kathy

Lightroom to the rescue!

For this type of work, I recommend displaying the folder name above your image thumbnails, along with file name, capture date and time, and copy name. Go to Grid view (G) in the Library module, then up in the menu bar, View > View Options.  Set “Show Grid Extras” to Expanded Cells.  Then down in the Expanded Cell Extras section, choose these four fields.

Now I can see that this photo is in my 11-04 Zion National Park folder, as well as what the file name is and the capture date and time:

If this photo were a virtual copy, I would see a “copy name” to the right of the folder name. For more on using the Copy Name field to document your virtual copies, see this post.

If seeing the folder name isn’t enough and you want to see the whole folder hierarchy, you can open up the Metadata panel (bottom right in the Library module), and hover over the Folder name field:

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Below is my early take on the options.

 Overview of Pricing and Options

The traditional stand-alone Photoshop CS6 full version will be $699, and the upgrade will be $199.  (Photoshop CS6 Extended, which contains the ability to create and manipulate 3D objects, is $999/$399. Note that video editing has moved from the Extended version to the Standard version.) Upgrade pricing is available to owners of CS3 or later, though for CS3 and CS4 owners, it will expire December 31, 2012.

As before, you can also purchase the stand-alone version of various bundles of subsets of Creative Suite software which include Photoshop CS6.

The Creative Cloud is a subscription plan — for an annual fee, you have access to:

• The entire Creative Suite of software (Photoshop CS6 Extended, Illustrator, Lightroom 4*, InDesign, Muse, Acrobat X Pro, Flash Pro, Flash Builder, Dreamweaver, Edge, Fireworks, Premier Pro, After Effects, Audition, SpeedGrade, Prelude, Encore, Bridge, and Media Encoder)
• Integration with Adobe Touch apps (purchased separately)
• Cloud storage (20 GB) and sharing
• Tools for publishing apps and websites
• Access to new software features as they become available — i.e. in advance of stand-alone purchasers who must wait for a new stand-alone release (18-24 months? longer?).

For more information, here is the Adobe home page for information on the Creative Cloud.

Note that Lightroom 4 is listed as being available in the Creative Cloud later in 2012.  I have no idea how much later this means.

A one-year Cloud subscription is payable in advance. The base subscription breaks down to a monthly fee of $49.99, but owners of at least one individual Creative Suite product (e.g. Photoshop), CS3 or later can get the first year for $29.99/month.

Which Version Makes More Sense?

Of course this will depend on your needs and interests. To weigh the two, I would start with the following three questions:

How Many Products or Services Would You Like to Use?

If you are a graphic designer or other rich-content creator, you most likely use many products in the Suite. In this case Cloud pricing becomes very attractive. It is a harder case for photographers though, as many of us use very few products.

I would highly encourage you to review the products yourself, but my take on it is that if you are a photographer, and plan to continue doing photo work only (and basic video editing, which Photoshop CS6 now can do significantly more of), you may only need Lightroom, and possibly, for more complicated work, Photoshop.  If you are eligible for upgrade pricing on both, you can get the stand-alone versions of both for $199 + $79 = $278, far less than the $360 first year and $600 planned subsequent year Cloud pricing.  If you  are not eligible for upgrade pricing, the stand-alone price is $699 + $149 = $848, compared to the Cloud price of $600, and the Cloud becomes more of a contender. If a third product interests you or the cloud storage and sharing are compelling to you, the case for the Cloud starts to become an easier one.

How Up-to-Date Do You Want to Be?

Adobe has told analysts and investors that its goal over time is to get all or most of its customers onto the more-profitable subscription plan, so they have a great interest in making cool new features available to Cloud subscribers well in advance of stand-alone purchasers. That cool new image de-blur technology they gave us a glimpse of, but is not ready for CS6?  My guess is that it will make it into the Cloud well in advance of CS7.  Adobe has stated that Cloud products could be updated weekly or monthly.

Are you committed to staying in the Cloud?

With a Cloud subscription, you always have access to all of the latest and greatest, but when you cancel your subscription, you walk away with nothing.  Conversely, when you purchase the stand-alone products, you own and can use them forever.  Be aware that with the Cloud subscription there is also no price guarantee from year to year — when your subscription comes up for renewal next year, the price may or may not be $49.99.

If You’re On the Fence, Consider Giving it a Try

According to the Adobe FAQ, if you purchase the annual subscription and cancel within 30 days, you can receive a complete refund; if you cancel within the first 6 months you  receive a 50% refund.  CS3 and CS4 owners beware: if you decide to switch from the Cloud to the stand-alone version of CS6 after December 31, 2012, you will have lost your eligibility for upgrade pricing.

When Will CS6 and the Cloud Be Available?

The date has not yet been announced, but when you pre-order on the Adobe site, it gives an “estimated” date of May 7.