Ask Tim Grey

Today’s Question: I’ve started using Lightroom after previously using Adobe Bridge to manage my photos. The color labels I had applied to some of my photos now appear white. How do I get the original color back?

Tim’s Quick Answer: You can recover your original color labels in Lightroom by either changing the color label definition to the Adobe Bridge defaults, or by repeating the assignment of color labels so they reflect Lightroom’s definitions.

More Detail: When you assign a color label to an image you’re actually just adding a word to a metadata field. Software such as Adobe Bridge or Lightroom then presents a color based on the word in metadata. The problem is, Bridge and Lightroom use two different definitions for color labels. For example, Bridge uses the term “Select” for the red color label and “Second” for the yellow color label”, while Lightroom uses the more logical approach of using the name of the color for the label definition. If you have color label values in metadata that don’t match the current definitions in Lightroom, the label will appear white.

One quick solution is to simply change the definition of color labels in Lightroom to match the terms used by Bridge. You can do so by going to the menu (while in the Library module) and selecting Metadata > Color Label Set > Bridge Default.

If you prefer to use the Lightroom definitions for color labels, you can leave the color label definitions set to “Lightroom Default”, and then change the color labels assigned to your images based on the original label you had applied. To work across your full catalog you could first choose All Photographs from the Catalog section of the left panel in the Library module to view all photos in your catalog.

Then press the backslash key (\) to bring up the Library Filter bar. Make sure there aren’t any other filters applied, and then in the Metadata section click one of the column headers and choose Label from the popup. Click the name of the label you want to change, such as “Select” for the red color label assigned in Adobe Bridge.

With a filter established based on an “incorrect” color label definition, you can choose Edit > Select All from the menu to select all of the images that have the wrong color label definition, and then assign the correct color label. In the case of the “Select” color label assigned in Adobe Bridge, for example, you could press the number six (6) on the keyboard to assign the red color label based on Lightroom’s definition.

Today’s Question: I have a stand-alone version of Lightroom. If I go to the subscription version of Lightroom CC what happens to my existing catalog? Will it be integrated into Lightroom CC automatically?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Your existing catalog will not be integrated automatically. In the case of a subscription for Lightroom Classic CC, you would need to simply open (and upgrade if necessary) your existing catalog. With the new Lightroom CC you would need to migrate your existing Lightroom catalog.

More Detail: Because Lightroom (both the existing Classic version and the new CC version) employs a central catalog to manage your photos, it is important to properly manage that catalog. When it comes to switching version (or upgrading to a new major release) that involves updating the catalog itself.

When you switch from a standalone version of Lightroom to a subscription to Lightroom Classic, or when upgrading from an older version of Lightroom, you can simply open your existing catalog in the new version of Lightroom CC. If the existing catalog is from an older version of Lightroom, you’ll be prompted to upgrade the catalog the first time it is opened. You can then continue using that upgraded catalog normally with the new version of Lightroom Classic.

If you are switching to the new Lightroom CC, there is the additional step of migrating your existing Lightroom catalog to the format used by Lightroom CC. To do so, launch Lightroom CC and then choose File > Migrate Lightroom Catalog from the menu. You’ll then be guided through the (very simple) process of migrating your catalog so you can start using Lightroom CC without losing any of your metadata from your existing Lightroom catalog.

In both cases the process of updating your catalog is very simple. The key is to make sure you go through that process to ensure you preserve all of the information about your photos, with no interruption in your image-management workflow.

Today’s Question: How can I make a folder of images from Lightroom Classic to try Lightroom CC, as you recommended during your recent webinar?

Tim’s Quick Answer: When you want to test Lightroom CC (or any other software for working with your photos), I do recommend that you create copies of a variety of images to use for testing. From Lightroom Classic, you can use the Export feature to copy images in their original format to a test folder on your computer.

More Detail: Before testing out new imaging software, especially when that software is focused on managing your photos, I consider it imperative to create test copies of some of your photos to use for testing with that software. I also recommend that the duplicate photos be a representative sample of the file formats and capture types that are typical in your workflow.

If you’re managing your photos with software (such as Adobe Bridge) that does not employ a central catalog, you could simply copy a representative folder to a new location, naming it in a way that will make it clear this is a test copy of that folder.

With Lightroom you can create such a test folder by selecting images within your catalog that you’d like to use for testing, and then using the export feature to make copies of the original images.

After selecting the images you want to use (such as by using the Edit > Select All command on the menu to select all of the photos in the current folder), you can click the Export button at the bottom of the left panel in the Library module.

In the Export dialog, you can select the location where you want to copy the photos in the Export Location section at the top of the dialog. If the selection of images also includes video clips, you’ll want to turn on the “Include Video Files” checkbox in the Video section as well, selecting “Original, unedited file” from the Video Format popup. In the File Settings section you should select “Original” from the File Settings popup. This will cause copies of the original image files on your hard drive to be created in the folder location you’ve specified. Note that for raw captures this export will include an XMP sidecar file that includes the Develop module adjustments you’ve applied to the image.

With the export settings established, you can click the Export button to process the images. Once the process is complete, you’ll have copies of your photos in the folder you specified, ready to be used for testing with Lightroom CC or any other software you’re considering for your photographic workflow.

Today’s Question: When is the right time to replace a hard drive? For a 2 terabyte drive when is it “full” to the point the data should be moved or copied to a larger storage device?

Tim’s Quick Answer: I tend to make the decision about “upgrading” to a larger hard drive for photo storage based on timing. When I’m getting close to having only about a month or so of storage remaining, I will upgrade to a drive with greater capacity.

More Detail: Of course, this specific timing depends on a variety of factors. In some cases you may need a bit more buffer in terms of time, just in case a big project comes along or your schedule gets full to the point that it is difficult to make time for an “upgrade” project.

For me, as long as I don’t have any extended trips coming up soon, a one-month storage buffer usually works just fine. For example, I tend to capture around 300 photos per day on average when I’m actively photographing. That would translate into about 225 gigabytes per month for me, based on raw captures that are about 25 megabytes in size.

Of course, wanting to be conservative, that means when I start to see that my hard drive has less than about 300 gigabytes free I’m going to start planning for a storage upgrade. That includes choosing how much extra capacity I might need for the new drive, as well as selecting a drive based on various other criteria such as overall performance.

When I buy a new hard drive, I always buy three of the same type, so that I have two backup drives to go with each primary drive. After purchasing the drives, I can copy my photos and other data from the existing drive that is getting full to the new drive that has plenty of capacity. I’ll generally hold on to the smaller drives that were replaced by the new drives, so that I have an “extra” backup for a period of time. Eventually I will then repurpose the drives that had been replaced for other storage, unless they are getting old to the point of needing to be retired.

Note that I outlined the steps I recommend for a “storage upgrade” in an article featured in the August 2014 issue of Pixology magazine. This and all other back issues are available to subscribers. More details can be found here:

https://www.greylearning.com/courses/pixology-magazine

Today’s Question: Is it possible to process videos in Photoshop CC?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes! You can apply adjustments to video clips within Photoshop, and then render the result as a new video for use in other projects.

More Detail: When you open a video clip in Photoshop, your initial impression may be that you’ve opened a still photo. The only real clue that you’re working with a video clip is that the Timeline panel will be presented automatically when a video is opened. You can access this panel at anytime by choosing Window > Timeline from the menu.

On the Timeline panel you can zoom in or out on the timeline for the video, and move the play head slider back and forth to locate specific areas of the video. For example, you could move the play head to a representative frame in the video, to be used for applying adjustments.

You can then apply creative filter effects to the video just as though it were a still photo. In addition, other adjustments are available. You might, for example, want to add adjustment layers to alter the appearance of the video.

When you’re finished applying the various adjustments, you can render a version of the video that includes your adjustments. To do so, click the Render Video button (it has a curved arrow icon), and choose the filename and location where you want to save the resulting video. You can even save the video with all adjustments intact as a Photoshop PSD file, so that later you can open this PSD file to refine existing adjustments or add new adjustments.

Today’s Question: Do you keep video captures in your Lightroom catalog and on your photo drive, or do you have a completely separate drive only for video?

Tim’s Quick Answer: For videos captured for the same basic reasons I capture photos (generally “artistic” purposes), I manage video captures right alongside my still photos, within my master Lightroom catalog. The only time I don’t import videos into my Lightroom catalog is if they are for a specific project outside the scope of my normal photography, such as when producing educational video courses.

More Detail: There are two basic categories that my video captures might fit into.

The first category is for the educational videos we produce though my GreyLearning website (https://www.greylearning.com). Because these are generally “one-off” videos for a specific production purpose, I file them separate from my other photos and do not import them into my Lightroom catalog. So, when we’re in the field producing educational content, all of the videos and audio we capture go onto a separate hard drive used for producing the educational video content. The stills I capture along the way generally get included into my regular Lightroom catalog, because they are typically photos I might want to use for other purposes.

The second category represents videos that go right alongside my photos. Sometimes, for example, I might be photographing a beautiful Alpine stream, and I decide to capture some video clips as well. Those videos are “artistic” in a manner of speaking, with the potential to be used in a photo slideshow to supplement the still photos, for example. The point is that I think of them in the same general context as my still photos. These get imported into my Lightroom catalog, and stored right alongside the photos captured during the same trip or outing.

In other words, videos that are captured based on the same basic motivation as my still photos get treated just as though they were still photos. Lightroom does a pretty good job of managing video clips right alongside photos. Just note that metadata updates (such as keywords) can’t actually be written directly into the video files themselves the way metadata updates can be saved to still images.

Today’s Question: When I’m adding text to an image that I’ll be sharing online, I’ve noticed the “Only Web Colors” checkbox. Do I need to turn this on when selecting a color for an image I’ll share online?

Tim’s Quick Answer: No, the concept of using “web safe” colors is largely outdated, and not an issue you need to be concerned about with today’s web browsers. When selecting colors in the Color Picker dialog, you can therefore leave the “Only Web Colors” checkbox turned off.

More Detail: In the early days of the World Wide Web, web browsers (and in many cases the computers being used for browsing) were not able to display a particularly large number of colors. As a result, the notion of “web safe colors” was developed.

Because only a limited number of colors could be presented by certain hardware when the World Wide Web was first developed, it was important to use “web safe” colors when creating a web page in order to ensure the colors could be presented accurately.

Originally, there were only sixteen colors defined as standard “web safe colors”. You could certainly employ colors beyond that number if you wanted to, but the appearance of the colors would not always be accurate depending on the capabilities of the computer (and web browser) being used to present the page. The number increased to 216 colors later, but now this concept can generally be ignored.

The vast majority of computer systems and other devices used to browse the web can present 8-bit per channel color (or better). Therefore, it is not necessary to limit yourself to only the “web safe” colors when selecting a color to use in an image or graphic that will be published online.

In other words, at this point there is no need to worry about the concept of “web safe” colors. I do, however, recommend embedding a color profile (preferably using sRGB) for photos that will be displayed online, in order to help increase the potential for the most accurate presentation possible for the image.

Today’s Question: I recently was browsing some old files using the current version of Bridge CC. When I double-clicked on a file in Bridge, it didn’t open in Photoshop CC [2018]. I went to the menu to use “File Open With” but the only option listed was Photoshop CC 2017; no other choices were listed. So how do I change default preferences for opening old files from Bridge?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Assuming you have Photoshop CC 2018 installed, I would first make sure you have enabled the startup script for this latest version of Photoshop in Adobe Bridge. Then you can confirm the file type association for the applicable file types to ensure they open properly in the latest version of Photoshop from Bridge.

More Detail: When you install a major update to Photoshop that gets installed as a new application rather than simply updating an existing application, a new startup script will be enabled in Adobe Bridge. The first time you launch Bridge after such an update you should see a message asking if you want to enable the script.

If you chose not to enable the startup script at that time, you can still enable it in the Preferences dialog within Bridge. From the Adobe Bridge menu on Macintosh or the Edit menu on Windows choose Preferences. Then, in the Preferences dialog, go to the Startup Scripts page. Turn on the checkbox for Adobe Photoshop CC 2018.

You can also go to the File Type Associations page to confirm that applicable file types (such as TIFF and PSD) are associated with the latest version of Photoshop. Locate the file types you want to open with Photoshop and click the popup, choosing the latest version of Photoshop to set the association.

After making these changes, click the OK button to close the Preferences dialog, then quit and re-launch Adobe Bridge, and you should be able to open files in Photoshop by simply double-clicking on the file you want to open.

Today’s Question: I take seriously your point about having only one drive will al my photos on it. I am currently at about 75,000 images and increasing by about 20,000 per year. At the moment I have them all stored on a 2TB external drive and backed up on another 2TB external drive. I have about half a terabyte on each left but as we approach a New Year I thought it would be time to invest in two new drives. Would it make sense to get a 3TB or maybe even 4TB capacity drive, so that I minimize the number of times I have to keep replacing drives? I’d be interested to know what size drives you have.

Tim’s Quick Answer: In general I don’t feel there is a need to “rush” to replace a hard drive until you’re getting close to the point that it is full. When you to replace a drive, I try to balance my future storage needs with the potential for even better storage devices becoming available over time.

More Detail: If you have some sense of approximately how many photos you tend to capture in a year, it is relatively easy to estimate when you will reach full capacity on a hard drive you are using to store your photos. Let’s assume, for example, that each raw capture on your camera is about 25MB in size. If you are capturing about 20,000 photos per year, that adds up to 500,000 megabytes, or about half a terabyte each year. In this example that means it will likely be about a year before you reach full capacity on the drive, so I would probably want to replace the drive in about six months or so.

When it comes time to replace the drive, I would probably opt for a drive that will provide about another two years worth of capacity. In this example that would mean buying the 3TB drive rather than the 4TB drive. Of course, you may prefer to opt for the higher capacity drive to allow for an upgrade to a higher-resolution camera, if you think you’ll be capturing more video as part of your photography, or if you simply anticipate doing more photography in the next couple of years.

With this approach, in two years you would be due for another upgrade, but that also means you will be able to take advantage of new developments in storage. For example, solid state drives (SSD) provide a number of advantages, but are still quite expensive compared to traditional hard drives. In a couple years that may have changed somewhat significantly.

There are other factors to consider, of course. In my case I am using 4TB hard drives even though my total photo storage requirements are currently at about 6TB. But in my case, because I travel so extensively, I want to have my photos (or at least most of them) readily available while I’m traveling. I therefore prefer to use a ruggedized USB-powered hard drive, and there isn’t a 6TB (or larger) option available.

So, I’ve made a compromise based on my specific priorities, but I continue to hope that an appropriate 8TB drive will be available in the near future.

Today’s Question: I see multiple instances of Photoshop, Lightroom, and Bridge in my Creative Cloud app window (I am an active subscriber). Which am I supposed to download? I only want desktop-based workflow. Help?!

Tim’s Quick Answer: The latest versions of the Adobe applications included in the Creative Cloud are nominally the 2018 versions, but they appear in the Creative Cloud application without a year. Older versions include a year as part of the name. Thus, you only need to update applications that don’t show a year in their name, and you may want to uninstall versions identified with the year 2017 or earlier.

More Detail: One of the benefits of a subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud is that you will receive relatively frequent updates to the applications, with new feature additions and bug fixes. Periodically, however, Adobe releases more significant updates to the applications, and updates the version number as a result.

Adobe recently shifted to an approach of presenting a calendar year in place of a version number, although a version number can still be found in the “About” dialog and on the splash screen for the various Creative Cloud applications. In the Creative Cloud application, under the “Apps” tab heading, you can find the current status of your applications, including the option to update or install new versions of the applications as they become available.

If you see an “Install” button to the right of an application, that means the application (or major new version) is not currently installed. If you see an “Update” button to the right of the application name that means the application is installed and a new update is available. Finally, if you see an “Open” button, that indicates the latest version of the application is already installed.

For applications that you use, and that are shown on the Apps list without a year as part of the application name and with an “Install” or “Update” button to the right, you will probably want to click that button to install or update to the latest version.

For applications with a year of 2017 or earlier as part of the application name, and for which you have installed the 2018 version of the application, you can uninstall the application through the applicable “uninstall” application through your operating system to remove that application from your computer. I recommend that you wait to perform this step until after you have installed the latest major release and have confirmed that new version is functioning properly.

For Lightroom users, note that the latest “desktop” version of Lightroom is Lightroom Classic CC. If you are not interested in the cloud-based version of Lightroom, you should not install the “Lightroom CC” application, but instead continue to work with the “Classic” version.