Читать книгу Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic For Dummies - Rob Sylvan - Страница 30

You initially enter information about your photos into the catalog with the help of Lightroom Classic’s Import function. As each photo is imported, Lightroom Classic writes its metadata and its location on your hard drive into the catalog. While you continue to work in Lightroom Classic, everything you do with your photos is automatically saved in the catalog in real time (there is no “Save” command in Lightroom Classic). When I say everything, I mean everything — from keywords and ratings to exposure adjustments to collection membership and virtual copies.

Because of this design feature, Lightroom Classic is referred to as a metadata editor, meaning that when you edit your photos with Lightroom Classic, you don’t edit the pixels in your source photos. This feature is also referred to as nondestructive editing because all the adjustments you perform in Lightroom Classic are only stored as a set of metadata instructions — in the catalog, of course — that Lightroom Classic uses to create its internal preview files and to create copies of your original files during output (such as when exporting copies, books, slideshows, and prints). People who shoot raw might be more familiar with this concept, but it’s a huge paradigm shift for those who shoot JPG, or who are used to editing JPG, TIF, and PSD files in an image editor such as Photoshop. Take a moment to let that sink in because it will make your life much easier moving forward. In light of this, it’s vitally important that the catalog is well cared for and protected.

Lightroom Classic has a catalog control panel (of sorts) that displays important information and provides tools for its care. It’s called the Catalog Settings dialog, and you can see it in Figure 2-4. Choosing Lightroom Classic ⇒ Catalog Settings (Edit ⇒ Catalog Settings for Windows) from the main menu gets you there.

FIGURE 2-4: The Catalog Settings dialog with the General tab active.

The General tab allows you to control the following:

 Information: Displays the catalog’s location, name, creation date, last backup date, last optimized date, and file size. Click the Show button to open the folder containing the catalog in the Mac’s Finder or the Windows File Explorer.

 Backup: Configures the frequency with which the catalog backup function is run.

Any long-time user might remember there was an optimize option on that panel. It has since moved to the menu under File ⇒ Optimize Catalog. Clicking Optimize Catalog performs a little database housekeeping on the catalog to reduce its size and improve performance, which is generally most helpful on very large catalogs (more on this in the section, “Optimizing your catalog”). Backing up and optimization are important enough topics to warrant their own sections, so I do the smart thing and provide them next.