IMPORT - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 38

Importing photos into Lightroom
To work with images and video i les in Lightroom you must i rst import them.
h is creates records within a Lightroom catalog. During an import, Lightroom
reads the image i les and makes records for each of them in the currently open
Lightroom catalog i le. File names, folder locations and metadata are all stored in
the catalog.

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It's important to understand that in all cases the i les themselves are not actually
contained inside the catalog. When you do an import, Lightroom just reads the
i les, makes data entries in the catalog for each i le and links the Lightroom data
to the i le on disk.

Later, when you're working on photos, Lightroom references the original i les on
disk and keeps track of your edits within the catalog. Lightroom also generates
numerous previews of the photos, which are constantly updated as you work.

Lightroom 3 provides a redesigned Import process that is faster and easier than
previous versions. h e new Import screen helps you see how Lightroom will
handle the i les being imported, quickly navigate through hard drives and folders
to see their contents before importing, and speeds the import process with the
use of presets.

In this chapter, I'll cover the three most common methods you'll use for getting
i les into your Lightroom catalog: importing from a hard drive, importing from a
camera's memory card, and shooting with your camera connected directly to the
computer (“tethered”).

When you're done importing some photos, you can move on to Chapter 3, where
you'll begin working with your photos in Lightroom's Library module.

Supported image i le formats
Unlike Photoshop, which can open and save a dizzying array of image, graphic
and video i le formats, Lightroom is designed to work only with the most
common formats generated by digital cameras and scanners. Lightroom can
import, process and export the following types of i les:

• Native camera raw i les (from nearly all modern digital cameras)

• dng (A dobe Digital Negative: open-format raw i les)

• jp g

• tif (tiff)