Seán Duggan is a fine art photographer, author, educator, and an Adobe Certified Photoshop Expert with extensive experience in both the traditional and digital darkroom. His Lightroom Viewfinder series provides photographers with the tools they need to effectively use Lightroom for organization, editing, and printing. 

Merging a Travel Catalog with your Main Catalog

by Seán Duggan

Lightroom is an essential tool for the traveling photographer, allowing you to not only work on your images as your trip unfolds, but also to just enjoy them more while you’re still on the trip. Reviewing images at the end of each day, editing them, working on sequences and image pairings, is also a great way to notice visual themes and trends in your own image making during the trip. You may not always be conscious of these as you are taking the photos, but taking note of these potential creative paths during the image review process can suggest new directions, as well as help you clarify existing ideas for the types of images you want to make.

In the Lightroom Viewfinder episode below, I provide an overview of my Lightroom travel catalog setup (including regular backups and keeping the drives safe from loss while on the road). Then I’ll show you how to import the data from the travel catalog into the main Lightroom catalog back home when the trip is over. I also address the all-important practice of moving files within Lightroom so the program always knows where they’re at.

Seán Duggan is the co-author of Photoshop Masking & Composting, Real World Digital Photography, and The Creative Digital Darkroom. He is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York City and leads workshops all around the world. See all of Duggan’s Lightroom tips below:

• Lightroom Keywording Tips
• Adding Value to Your Image Archive with Keywords
• Adobe Lightroom Tips for Beginners: Merging a Travel Catalog with your Main Catalog
• Adobe Lightroom Tips for Beginners: The Island of Lost Files
• The Lightroom-Photoshop Connection: Sending JPEG Files Back and Forth
• The Lightroom-Photoshop Connection: Sending RAW Files Back and Forth

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Alex Huff

Alex Huff's photography and lighting tutorials can be found on 500px and her blog. See her lighting tutorials here. She is a Marketing Associate Manager at BorrowLenses.com. She learned about lighting and teaching while modeling for photographers such as Joe McNally and has since gone on to teach lighting workshops of her own in San Francisco. Before focusing on studio portraiture, she shot motorsports for X-Games, World Rally Cross, and Formula Drift. See her chiaroscuro-style painterly portraits on her website.

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