I’m not a huge fan of HDR images; most of the time they look obviously over processed though when they’re well executed and the processing is understated they come off very nicely. I think the trick to good HDRs is to use the larger capture range simply as a mechanism to get enough data to put together a lower noise image with slightly better shadow detail. Perhaps I’m just a traditionalist, but I think it’s best to think of HDRs as split ND filters without be forced to have a straight line for the split.

Camera Setup

A while back, I wrote an article on the way I setup my camera when shooting HDRs and multiple exposure images.

Sizing your brackets is something of a question. Some reputable sources suggest the bracket size (i.e. how many stops between exposures) depends on the camera. That’s probably the ideal solution. That said, I’ve never seen a difference between 1 stop and 2 stops on my 40D, so I don’t use that. When I’m shooting HDRs, I set the bracket size based on how much I need to go under to get the brightest highlight detail I back. In other words, if I think I need to shoot 2 stops under to keep the sky from completely blowing, I use a 2 EV bracket. Remember, I want dark things to be dark in the final image, just not black, so massively overexposing them isn’t helpful to me.

With respect to focus, one thing is important; focus must not change between exposures. Where to focus is another problem, even with a lot of depth of field choosing whether to focusing at infinity, the hyperfocal point and even on a subject are complex enough to warrant an article on their own. Even when I have lots of depth of field, I still tend to focus on the most important subject.

Processing

For me all processing starts with importing into Lightroom. For HDRs, I don’t do any processing to them beyond the import defaults. From there, it’s off to Photoshop.

Photoshop is what I use to do HDRs; I don’t really do enough to justify buying special purpose software for it. If you’re coming from Lightroom via the merge to HDR edit in option, you should be at the Merge to HDR window, if not, you’ll want to load your images and merge them to HDR. I do this in 32-bit mode and then do the HDR tone mapping by switching the image to 16-bit (or 8-bit) color as a separate step. This gives me an opportunity to set an undo point if I need to go back and fix something in the tone-mapping step.

In the case of this image, the tone mapping was done using the Local Adaption method. After that’s done, it’s just a matter of tweaking the image to get the desired look.

For this, I created a selection of the top half of the image, and feathered it by about 100 pixels. This has the effect of creating a graduated split filter, but in mask form, so I can do just about anything I want in the two halves.

To the top-half of the image, I applied a curves adjustment that darkened the mid-tones and darks to bring out some cloud detail. To the bottom-half of the image, I applied a curves layer to slightly brighten the mid-tones and darks and a warming photo filter to make the rocks less blue.

While I may have been able to do these adjustments when doing the HDR tone mapping, I find that this gives me a bit more control. In addition, in my experience, you just have to play with the adjustments; there are no set rules for what to do.

In the right circumstances an HDR can be the best solution to dealing with huge dynamic range scenes especially when there is an irregular border between the brightest and darkest areas rendering traditional split neutral density filters useless.

When I installed Lightroom 3 over my installation of Lightroom 3 Beta, I ended up with a couple of extraneous entries in my the Autoplay list in Windows 7. I don’t know why they weren’t removed considering the rest of the beta was removed, but that’s just how

A quick Google search for removing Autoplay handlers in Windows 7 turned up two locations in the registry:

1. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ AutoplayHandlers \ Handlers \ <handler>
2. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ AutoplayHandlers \ EventHandlers \ <EventName>

These apply to Windows 7 and the specific Autoplay Handler for a 64-bit system is Lightroom3BetaAutoPlayHandler64, I assume for a 32-bit install of Lightroom 3 Beta that the last 2 numbers would be 32 instead but I don’t have any 32-bit installed of LR3 Beta to check with.

Indeed there was an entry in the first location named Lightroom3BetaAutoPlayHandler64 and multiple references to it in the second location under MixedContentOnArrival, ShowPicturesOnArrival, and UnknownContentOnArrival. Deleting these, however, did not remove the now broken entry from the Autoplay window when inserting a media card.

Further searching in the registry turned up 2 more locations where this key existed. The essayist way to find them is to search for Lightroom2BetaAutoPlayHandler64.

One set of keys is in Handlers and EventHandlers under HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ AutoplayHandlers. The others are likely in either the default user or any other users under HKEY_USERS. Searching is still the best way to find them. Removing the entries from any other place they pop up should clear out the extranious entry in the Autoplay dialog that pops up when you insert a media card.

I don’t understand why I ended up with both global and user specific instances of the Lightroom 3 Beta Autoplay handler, or why the uninstallation of Lightroom 3 Beta 2 didn’t remove them even though the rest of the application was removed, but there you go.

Like CS4 and CS3 before it, Photoshop CS5 comes in two flavors extended and regular. The difference is more than a few features and a partly sum of money; $150 if you’re upgrading, $300 for a new license. What Adobe doesn’t make clear, at least I can’t find anything on it, is the difference in features between Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 extended.

Photoshop CS5 Features

Unfortunately, this is as good of a chart as I can come up with based on what I can find on Adobe’s website. If you notice a correction or omission, drop me a line in the comments and I’ll update the chart.

Upgrades: Pricing and Eligibility

Fortunately, Adobe is still providing a wide verity of upgrade paths at various price points.

Upgrading to Photoshop CS5 Extended will cost either $349 or $899 depending on what version you’re upgrading. Users of Photoshop and Photoshop Extended starting with CS2 will pay $349. Users of Photoshop Elements (6, 7 or 8 on Windows; 4, 6, or 8 on Mac OS) will pay $899.

Upgrading to Photoshop CS5 will cost either $199 or $599 depending on whether you’re upgrading a previous version of Photoshop ($199) or a previous version of Photoshop Elements ($599).

Development defaults are the way Lightroom applies baseline development settings to an image on import or reset. Defaults are the best way to apply common settings that apply to all images from a specific camera, like sharpening and noise reduction, and not for creative styling or effects.

Unlike presets, development defaults change every development setting except white balance when they are applied. This means they can’t be used to selectively change the way an image looks.

Customization

The selection of development defaults can be customized, beyond the basic camera model, to allow more fine tuned control over their application.

These options are:

• ISO setting
• Camera serial number

In addition to user created development defaults, there is a global default that Lightroom uses when it can’t find a user created default for the selected options. This default can’t be customized.

Defaults can be customized though the Preferences Dialogbox.

How Lightroom Chooses the Default to Apply

The selection criteria Lightroom uses is simple. Lightroom looks for a default that exactly matches the settings (model, ISO and/or serial number) it’s asked to use or it applies the global default.

This can be annoying since you must save specific defaults for all combinations of ISO and serial number (if you use serial numbers) for your camera(s). If you use 1/3 or 1/2 stop ISOs that means you’ll be saving many nearly identical defaults.

In the case of an EOS 1D Mark 3, from ISO 50 to ISO 6400 in 1/3 stops increments that’s 18 defaults to create and save.

Creating and Updating Defaults

Defaults can only be created or updated in the Development Module. Further, updating a saved default is no different than creating a new one. There is only one procedure.

1. Choose an image that meets the criteria you’ve chosen for your defaults. For example, if you’ve selected to use ISO specific defaults, choose an image from the camera and ISO you want to save a default for.
2. Set the sliders the way you want them. The settings should be good in general not necessarily good for every image from your camera. Remember, these settings should be your starting point for processing an image not the ending point.
3. Next, save the settings. To do this, hold the alt-key (option on Mac) and click the button that now reads “Set Default…” (This use to be the reset button).
   

   By holding alt (option on Mac) the reset button becomes the Set Default button.

4. Finally, you will be prompted with a warning you that the changes cannot be undone. Click “Update to Current Settings” to save the default.
   

   The "Set Default Develop Settings" Dialog box: Clicking "Update to Current Settings" will create or update a development default. Clicking, "Restore Adobe Default Settings" will rest the default.

Tips

What I like to do is create a series of images of a generic scene at each combination of settings I need. Something like an X-Rite Color Check card makes a good target. Since I only narrow my defaults to ISO; that means creating an image at each ISO setting for each camera model I have.

I keep my defaults out of my normal Lightroom image organization. After import, I move them to a sub folder named for the camera in a folder called defaults. This way I have a set of known images that I only ever make my “default” adjustments and I can easily find them.

Resetting Defaults

There are two ways to reset defaults.

To globally reset all defaults, there is the “Reset all default Develop Settings” button in the “Presets” tab of the Preferences dialog. This will remove all saved defaults from the system. From this point forward, images will use the global default when imported or reset.

To reset a specific default only, you click the button “Restore Adobe Default Settings” in the same dialog box that came up when you create a custom default.

Presets and Defaults are two mechanisms Lightroom provides that can lead to an increase in efficiency. They each provide a similar functionality by allowing you to save develop settings but do so in a very different ways.

Differences Between Presets and Defaults

Defaults and presets do similar things, that is, apply basic development settings to an image. However, the similarity stops there.

Defaults are the settings Lightroom applies automatically to every file on import or when you reset it. They change every development setting except white balance. Further, development defaults always apply to a specific camera model. However, they can be made more specific beyond that.

Presets are saved settings that can be applied at any time in develop (or even form the library module) as well as at import. They differ from defaults in a number of ways. First, they can be applied to any file on import regardless of the camera or settings it was created with. In addition, the settings they change can be limited so they can be used for creative effects.

When to Use Each

Like most things, there is no absolute rule about how presets and defaults should be used. However, they do things differently and that makes them more or less suitable for different tasks.

Defaults have the advantage of being specific to a camera or ISO setting. Because of that they can be used to apply specific levels of noise reduction and sharpening to different cameras or at different ISOs.

Presets on the other hand can be applied to any image; either as its being imported or later on. While they can certainly be used to set and reset baseline settings they can’t be tied to the “Reset” button in develop. Presets are best used to provide artistic effects or a consistent feel to images during processing.

In practice, I use defaults to set sharpening and noise reduction only and presets to apply more commonly used creative effects.

Creating Presets

Presets are created in the Development Module by left clicking the plus icon on the preset pallet. When you do so you’re presented with a dialog box that asks you for several pieces of information:

• A name – this should be something that makes sense based on what the preset does (i.e. old B&W photo for a preset that simulates and old photo)
• A folder – this is how Lightroom organizes the presets in the preset pallet.
• What settings to save

When you’re done, click Create to save the preset and add it to the Presets panel in the Develop Module as well as the Develop Settings context menu in the Library Module.

Updating Presets

After you’ve created a preset, you can change the settings the preset applies by updating the preset.

You do this by right clicking on the name of the preset you want to update in the preset panel and selecting Update Preset from the context menu. Again, you will be promoted with a dialog box asking you which settings you want the preset to apply.

Applying Presets

Presets can be applied in a number of ways, the three most common are:

• Presets Panel in Develop
• Development Settings context menu in Library
• At import

The first two methods are straightforward; clicking on a preset will apply the preset to the currently selected image.

Applying a preset on import, can be a useful feature, however, there are a few gotchas with respect to the import dialog. This is especially the case if you’re trying to setup the preset ahead of time.

1. Settings changed in the Import dialog box are saved between imports. That means, if you set a preset to do a fancy effect on one import, it will remain set on the next import too.
2. The Import dialog only saves the settings if you close it by clicking Import. This means if you open it, make some changes, then click cancel to leave the box the change won’t be saved.

Applying Presets on Import

To apply a preset on import at the time you’re importing images:

1. Open the Import dialog
2. Change the Development Settings field in the Information to Apply section
3. Import the images by clicking import. Easy as pie.

Changing the Development Settings (presets) box (highlighted in yellow) will set a preset to be applied on import.

However, if you’re trying to set or unset a preset with out importing any images you have a few more hoops to jump though.

First is getting the import dialog to open.

Lightroom requires you to feed it images to get to the import dialog. The easiest way to do this is to stick a flash card in the computer with some images on it. Alternatively, you can open a single image from somewhere on your computer using Import Photos from Disk.

Once the Import dialog box is open:

1. Make sure the Show Preview check box is checked (highlighted in red)
2. Click the Uncheck All button (highlighted in yellow)
3. Change the Develop Settings and click Import.

This will save the develop setting and not import any extra pictures you’ll have to delete.

Key areas for changing import settings with out importing extra images are Show Previews (red) and Uncheck All (yellow).

Last time we covered shooting the image, this time we’ll cover the first half of post processing, specifically how I blended images to address the depth of field short comings of shooting at f/8 and the processing done in Lightroom 2 to add punch.

One of the reasons that I put so much effort into getting things correct in the camera is it cuts down considerably on the amount of work that needs to be done in post processing. Though you’ll never completely avoid post processing, the less you have to do, the better off I think you are.

After the jump we’ll cover what I used for default processing settings in Lightroom, as well as how I blended images in Photoshop to get what I wanted in focus, in focus. As well as how I tweaked things back in Lightroom to get the color and punch I wanted.

Tethered Shooting and Default Processing

One thing shooting tethered does is allows for the quick application of standard sharpening and processing to the image as I’m shooting them. There are two ways to go about applying processing settings when using Lightroom’s auto import. The first is though Lightroom’s camera defaults, the second is though a develop setting set in the Auto import settings dialog.

Both methods are certainly useful; however, for this project I choose to only use the camera defaults since I wasn’t going to do any further processing on the laptop and didn’t know exactly how I intended to process things.

If I had wanted to apply some serious processing effects, like say make the images highly saturated B&Ws or look like Velvia film, applying a development preset would have been more appropriate.

Details Pallet defaults for my EOS 1D Mark 3

Since I hadn’t configured the laptop for the 1D-III yet, I did have to setup my defaults for it first. My basic default configuration is to set the sharpening and color profile. For the mark 3 I set the Details pallet as shown to the right. Next, I insure the profile box in the “Camera Calibration” pallet is set to Adobe standard, which I use as my reference profile.

This isn’t necessarily the best or only setting, it’s only what I find works well in my situation with my camera and lenses.

Finally, to save the settings as default you can either use the “Set Default Settings…” option under the Develop menu, or simply holding alt (option on Macs) and clicking the button labeled “Set Default” in the lower right corner of the right pane.

Editing

In my opinion, editing is what separates the boys from the men. A mediocre photographer who rigorously sorts the chaff from the wheat will usually present a better portfolio than a great photographer who can’t or won’t edit his work.

Even in this case, where the shot was directed towards a goal, there was still some editing to be done. I ended up with about 10 final frames with  minor differences in subtle placement of some of the popcorn and focus.

I knew from looking at the shots as the loaded while shooting and from experience that working at f/8 wasn’t going give me enough depth of field to keep both of the popcorn containers in sharp focus. What I would need is two images, one with the front container in sharp focus and one with rear container in sharp focus.

Blending two Images in Photoshop

With the two images selected, it was time to do some tweaking in Photoshop. I could have done some light room work first, but by combining the images in Photoshop I save having to try and sync changes across slightly different images. This is more or less straight forward due to the hard edges involved.

Below is more or less what I did to blend the two images. For projects with soft objects or those with irregular surfaces more advanced masking techniques

Step 1: Open the two images in Photoshop.

Step 2: Use quick mask, or the lasso selection tool to select the area around the subject you want and use copy and paste to insert it into the second document. In this case I’m copying the sharper front container and pasting it into the image with the sharper rear container.

The area in red on the right hand image is what will be copied and pasted into the lefthand image.

Step 3: Create a layer mask on the new layer by selecting the layer and clicking the layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers pallet.

I use a lot of margin in my selection and then mask off what I dont want as it gives much better control over how the layers blend.

Step 4: Switch to the layer mask by clicking on the layer mask thumbnail and begin painting the mask in black to hide the area around the subject we don’t want to show. For this, I used the polygonal lasso tool to select along the edges of the container, and feathered them by 1px to fill the bulk around the container and the paintbrush with a fairly hard edge around the rest.

Remember in masks black hides completely, white shows completely and the shades of gray in between reveal (or hide) what they cover partially.

Step 5: In this case, there was also a minor shift in lighting between the two images; this resulted in the pasted container having a slightly darker appearance than the original. To correct this I added a contrast/brightness adjustment layer used the clipping mask feature (alt-left-click the border between the two layers to clip to the top layer to the bottom one) to adjust the new container without adjusting everything or adjusting the layer permanently.

That’s all the processing that was done in Photoshop to blend the two images. I know this is a bit light on details because the actual steps will vary to some degree from image to image depending on what is being blended.

Back to Lightroom to add some Punch

The product is now at least in focus where I want it to be, but there are still some things that can be cleaned up and a bit more punch can be added.

First cleanup, there are a few spots on the background that show up as less than pleasing out of focus blurs. These are quickly taken care of with the clone tool set to heal in Lightroom.

Now to fix a couple of small issues, the very bottom of the background just above the popcorn isn’t quite the right red (it’s a bit more violet either due to over exposure or light leaking around the gel on the flash). This is corrected by using the hue slides in Lightroom to shift that color a bit more towards red. In addition, I want the popcorn will look better if it was a tiny bit more saturated, so up goes the yellow saturation slider.

Adding some contrast, contract controls the difference between bright and dark areas; higher contrast in this case will make the darks a bit darker and the brights a bit brighter. Lightroom presents a couple of ways to change the overall contrast, you can use the slider in the basic pallet or you can adjust the tone curve in the Tone Curve pallet.

The image after blending in photoshop.

The image after tweaking in Lightroom.

Because I’m now working on a TIFF from Photoshop by default the tone curve is set to linear, so it reflects the image properly as it came from Photoshop. For this, I want to tweak it a bit so I changed the tone curve from linear to medium contrast.

Punch; well that’s what Adobe’s engineers called the clarity tool before marketing toned down the name at least. In this case, though, I want to use clarity’s local contrast boost to add some punch to the image to about +21.

With that, we come to the end of our first round of post processing. From here, the image is ready to print. The key things to take away are by controlling as many elements as possible during the shoot post-processing can be reduced. Had I had some more powerful lighting or a tilt-shift lens, I could have even avoided the blending step even further simplifying post processing.

What’s left to do? Well I was originally planning to add a “neon” style banner that says hot popcorn and after that is printing. So, that will be next time.

I just finished up helping a fellow photographer and friend setup and calibrate his new Dell 2407WFP LCD display and yet again I am reminded how much I really hate dealing with color and color profiling.

What settings should you use to calibrate your display?

In Michael Reichmann’s From Camera to Print, Jeff Schewe comments that instead of specifying the traditional D65 white point and gamma-2.2 you should simply profile your display at the native white point and gamma. The argument being that because the video processing chain (i.e the OS, video card, and monitors) are 8-bit the extra translation step forcing D65 and a specific gamma requires can actually create or increase errors in color.

This makes a lot of sense, the less you have to alter the color values as they go through the video chain the better off you’ll be.

However, using native settings may work for Jeff in his environment and with very high end displays that come from the factory already very close to gamma-2.2 and 6500k white point.

Chances are if you’re on a budget or are a hobbyist and are using a lower end display, the display’s native state will be nowhere near where you want it, photographically speaking.

Problems with Native Gamma and White Point on Mid-Range Displays

We had initially calibrated his displays at the native white point and gamma-2.2 (as I had assumed mine was), as close as the Spyder 3 pro software will go to Jeff Schewe’s recommendation.

His old 19″ panel looked good, clearly the backlight on that was already very close to 6500K one way or another.

Things didn’t work out so well with the 2407WFP. Initially it looked good, however, it wasn’t a day later when I got a call from him complaining about everything having a blue cast. Sure enough a trip back to look at the setup and lo and behold there was definitely a blue cast to everything on the 2407WFP.

Fortunately merely recalibrating using the D65 gamma 2.2 target and colors were back to being neutral where they should be.

As such, when color calibrating a Dell 2407WFP, my experience leads me to recommend setting your profiling software to use D65 or 6500K and a gamma of 2.2 and not native for either white point or gamma.

As always your mileage may vary.

P.s. As with any trouble shooting situation, it’s important to insure that you eliminate or control as many variables as possible. In the case of looking for the neutrality of a display post color calibration, a neutral gray target or un-toned black in white image is a good place to start. In my case the first image I was presented was a Mockingbird against blue sky with a Lightroom Post-crop vignette applied to it over, the vignette was clearly also blue-white even after the rest of the image was neutral. It turns out that his old monitor simply wasn’t able to render the light blue color in the vignette that the 2407WFP was, and so he wasn’t expecting the actual behavior of Lightroom’s post-crop vignette.

This is the third segment in my series of Photoshop Lightroom keywording tips. Last time I covered how to create keyword files that you could import into Lightroom as an easy way to build large keyword databases. This time we’ll cover the last two ways to add keywords from within Lightroom. The final two methods are the most frequently used and probably straightforward of the three methods.

Probably the easiest way to add keywords to the database is to type them into the “Click here to add keywords” box (or the larger box above it). In addition to adding the keywords typed to your photographs, new keywords are also added to Lightroom’s keyword database.

The Lightroom 2 Keywording Panel

There are a few tricks here though. First, the “click here” box supports what I’m going to call Lightroom’s arrow syntax. That is you can use the right-angle-bracket or greater-than symbol (>) to specify the relationship between two keywords. In this case, the arrow points towards the parent so you enter the child keyword first then the parent. You can also repeat the arrow to create deeper hierarchies in a single command as well.

The exact behavior of the arrow syntax does change depending on whether or not one or more of the keywords are already in Lightroom’s keyword database. If none of the keywords entered are in the keyword database, Lightroom will create a new hierarchy with the right most keyword at the top and each successive keyword being a child.

For example, entering “keyword 1 > keyword 2 > keyword 3″ produces the hierarchy shown in figure 1.

If a parent keyword exists in the database, Lightroom will intelligently append the new child keyword to it.

For example, for a database similar to what’s shown below in figure 2.

Typing “grandchild > child” would add the keyword grandchild under child as show in figure 3 below.

Finally, if the child keyword exists in two hierarchies the arrow is necessary to specify which of the two keywords should be used.

For example if you have a keyword database as show below in figure 4.

Now say you wanted to keyword a picture of smoked salmon you would need to type “salmon > food” so Lightroom doesn’t create either a new top-level keyword. Which is an important point to remember, Lightroom isn’t able to disambiguate identical keywords nested in different hierarchies and when presented with such a situation instead of guessing it creates a new top-level keyword instead.

The third and final way to enter keywords is through the Create Keyword Tag dialog box. This can be accessed though either the + icon on the top of the Keyword List panel or by right clicking on an existing keyword and choosing either “Create Keyword tag” or “Create Keyword Tag Inside” from the context menu.

The Lightroom 2 Create Keyword Tag dialog box.

The Create Keyword Tag dialog box exposes all of the functionality you had available to you when creating a keyword file. The dialog is very straightforward; you enter the Keyword you want in the Keyword Tag text box. Synonyms go in the synonym box. The 4 check boxes allow you to tell Lightroom how to handle the new keyword and how to apply it to images and exported images.

This concludes my series on keywording in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. I hope this has provided some insight into how Lightroom handles adding and building keyword libraries. On parting word of warning, in my experience, the biggest pitfall is failing to put some thought into your keyword hierarchy before starting it. Sorting and reorganizing poorly thought out keyword hierarchies can only be done though the Keyword List pain and is quite time consuming and frustrating when the list gets exceptionally long.

In Adobe Photoshop Lightroom there are many places where you might want to expand or collapse multiple items all at once; the Folders list, Collections list, or keywords list for example.

If you hold the alt key (option on mac) and click the triangle next to the entry to expand or collapse it, it will expand or collapse that entry and any sub entries that can also be expaned or collapsed.

Taking it a step further alt clicking on the panels themselves will switch them into solo mode, where only the active panel will be expanded, and everything else will just be a title. You can tell if the panels are in solo mode because their open/close arrows go from being solid to being dotted.

One final tip, control (command on a mac) clicking a panel title will expand or collapse all pannels on that side of the screen.

Last time I talked about what makes good keywords and started talking about how to get keywords into your library software. This time we’re going to cover how to create a keyword import file to get many keywords into Lightroom quickly.

Importing a keyword file saves a significant amount of time and allows for almost all of the options that can be set in the Edit Keyword Tag dialog to be set ahead of time. The two options that can’t be set directly are Export Containing Keywords and Export Synonyms. But you can set specific keywords not to export as well as assigning synonyms to them.

The keyword file format is quite simple. Each keyword is entered on a single line. Indented lines denote that a keyword is a child of another. It’s very important, the indenting MUST be done using tabs not spaces or Lightroom won’t interpret the file properly. Finally brackets ([ & ]) and braces ({ & }) can be used to change the meaning of a word. The easiest way to explain this is through an example.

Figure 2: The results of importing the file from Figure 1.

Figure 2 shows how the sample keyword list in Figure 1 was actually imported. The keywords Red-Shouldered Hawk and Fairy Bluebird are a lighter gray because they aren’t assigned to any images yet, nor do they have child keywords. The keywords in braces are made synonyms of the keyword that it’s a child of, as can be seen in Figure 3. Finely keywords surrounded in brackets are set not to export (figure 4).

Figure 3: Red-shouldered hawk example with synonyms. (Click image to enlarge.)

Figure 4: Non exporting keyword after import. (Click image to enlarge.)

Now that we know the markup, we can quickly start to build large databases of keywords in our favorite text editor or even a spreadsheet program that can export tab-delimited text files. The following screen shots show the same keyword file opened in Excel and Notepad.

Keyword file being edited in Notepad. (Click image to enlarge.)

Keyword file being edited in Excel. (Click image to enlarge.)

The final step is loading the keywords into Lightroom. We do this through the Metadata menu, and Import Keywords. Selecting Import Keywords will bring up a standard open file dialog box through which you navigate to the text file you saved your keywords as. When you’ve selected your keyword file in the dialog box, click open and Lightroom will begin processing the keyword file. After a few moments, the Keyword List panel will be populated with your new keywords.

Metadata > Import Keywords menu

A couple of things to note, the import process will not remove keywords it only adds more. In addition, it doesn’t try to figure out where you want things blended. That is if you have a category “Bird” like in the example above, and you import another file of keywords that also has a Bird category but it’s not indented the same and under the same keywords, Lightroom won’t match them up. It will simply add another group of keyword to the keyword list.

If you already have a bunch of keywords and want to add a bunch more the safest way to do that using the import keyword method is to first use the Export Keywords menu command to create a file that matches your existing keyword list and edit that. In this case, you can also delete any keywords that aren’t relevant to what you’re trying to add to keep the file more manageable.

Next time we’ll look at the other two methods of adding keywords to the hierarchy, manually adding them to the keyword list and using the “Click here to enter keywords” text box.