Viewing photos - Lightroom Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now that you have some photos in Lightroom, you probably want to take a look at them. So let's talk about how to view photos in Lightroom. And as we do this, you'll start to get acquainted with the Lightroom interface. When you're looking at photos, you'll often start by choosing which photos you want to view. That's done over in the column on the far left. If that column isn't open, then click this icon at the top of the column. When you want to see all your Lightroom photos, select all photos in this column, or you can narrow down which photos are displayed by other categories in this column. For example, you might want to see only photos that you recently added to Lightroom, or you may want to see photos you recently edited. This one really comes in handy. You can also see photos by the date on which they were taken. And here you can drill down by year, by month, and even by day. I'll collapse that category. There are some other categories here, including albums, which we'll talk about later in the course. For now, just remember that you can view only the exercise files by clicking the exercise album that you made earlier. So that's how to narrow down which photos to view. There are also controls for how photos are displayed. The default view of photos and videos is this Photo Grid view, where different items fit like a puzzle. You can access this view at any time by going to the bottom of the screen and pressing the first icon, the photo grid icon. If you click the next icon, the square grid icon, that takes you to another grid view, this Square Grid view where the spacing is more even and you can see some information about each photo. A quicker way to get to the grid views is to press a keyboard shortcut, the letter G. G is one of the shortcuts that's really useful to remember because it will take you back to a grid view, no matter what you're doing in Lightroom. So I'll press G again to cycle back to the Photo Grid view. In either of the grid views, you can change some things about the way photos are displayed. You can use this scroll bar to scroll up and scroll down to see different photos, and you can change the size of the thumbnails, making them bigger so you see less thumbnails, or smaller so you see more of them. You also can change the sort order of the thumbnails by going to this Sort menu here and choosing one of these other options. I'll choose Reverse Order to reverse the thumbnails from top to bottom. There are some other icons at the bottom of the screen for accessing other views of your Lightroom photos. By the time you see this movie, there will be a Compare view icon here that lets you compare pairs of photos to narrow things down to your favorites. And there's Detail view, which you'll use a lot. To see a large view of whatever photo you've selected at the moment, click this Detail button or press the letter D on your keyboard, another shortcut to remember that fills the center of Lightroom with whichever image you've selected. You can move through your photos in Detail view by pressing the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard, or you can bring up a film strip by going over to the right side of this bar at the bottom and clicking the Show Film Strip icon. Now, you can click on photos here in the film strip to see them in Detail view above the film strip. If you want to hide the film strip again, just go back to that same button and click there. So now that you know how to view photos that you've added to Lightroom, let's move on to the really good stuff, how to edit your photos in Lightroom, which is the focus of the whole next chapter.