Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop CS5
Tethered shooting with Lightroom offers several advantages:

• As a photographer, you can quickly evaluate a photo on your computer screen much better than you can on the small screen on the back of the camera.
• You can check lighting, exposure, and the sharpness of the photo much more easily on the computer than on the small LCD.
• Clients and art directors can watch photos as they’re being taken; the images appear directly on the computer screen.

Lightroom has an innate ability to shoot tethered; by changing a few settings, you can be up and running in a snap.

What You’ll Need
Make sure that you have the following items before you get started:

• Camera. Matt Kloskowski uses Nikon and Canon for examples in this article.
• USB cable connecting your camera to your computer. You should have received one in the box when you bought your camera. Chances are that it’s still in the box.
• Some type of tethered shooting software. Your camera needs to be connected to the computer, and your computer needs some software on it to pull off the photos from the camera. (Lightroom doesn’t do this part.) Matt covers the options in step 1.
• Computer with Lightroom installed and an unused USB port. The computer should be booted and ready to go.

Step 1

The very first thing to do is acquire and install another piece of software in addition to Lightroom. This software will enable remote capture of your photos from your camera to a computer. If you’re shooting with Nikon, purchase Nikon’s Camera Control Pro. For Canon, EOS Viewer (or maybe Capture) should have come with your camera.

Step 2

With the remote capture software installed, fire up Lightroom and choose File > Auto Import > Auto Import Settings. For this process to work, you tell Lightroom to set up a watched folder. When images appear in that watched folder (we’ll get to that in a minute), Lightroom automatically imports them into its library. For the Watched Folder setting, specify which folder on your computer Lightroom should watch. Then change the Destination setting to a folder where you want to store your newly imported photos.

Step 3

Next, select options as desired to rename the images automatically as they’re being transferred, or to apply any default development settings, metadata, or keywords.

Step 4

After you’ve entered all of your choices in the Auto Import Settings dialog box, click OK. There’s one more thing to do in Lightroom, though. You still need to tell Lightroom to turn on Auto Import. Select File > Auto Import > Enable Auto Import.

Step 5

Nikon shooters: If you’re a Canon shooter, skip to the next paragraph. If you’re a Nikon shooter, connect your camera and computer with the USB cable that came with your camera. Then start Camera Control Pro and choose Tools > Download Options. The folder listed in the top setting in the Download Options dialog box is where Camera Control Pro will put the photos that come from the camera. Specify the same folder that you specified as the Watched Folder in Lightroom in step 2. Click OK when you’re done. You’re almost ready to shoot.

Canon shooters: Connect your camera to your computer, using the USB cable that came with the camera. Then start EOS Capture and click the Preferences button. For the destination, click Browse and select the folder that you specified for the Watched Folder setting in Lightroom in step 2. Click OK when you’re done, and you’re just about ready to shoot.

Step 6

Actually, I lied in step 5—you could shoot right now, but there’s one more step you should try. Take a test shot. After you do, you’ll see the dialog box transferring your photo to the computer.

Step 7

When your test shot is done, look in the Library module. Click Previous Import under the Library panel so you see the latest photos. The test photo appears there, but the thumbnail is probably very small—which defeats the purpose of shooting tethered, because that thumbnail size isn’t much larger than what you’d see on your camera’s screen.

You need to set up Lightroom to display your imported photos as large as possible. Otherwise, after each shot, you’d have to go to the library and zoom in on each photo, which would get annoying pretty quickly.

In the Library module, click Fit next to the Navigator panel at the upper left of the screen. Then press F F L L. Pressing F twice takes Lightroom into full-screen mode. Pressing L twice goes into Lights Out mode and hides all of the panels around your photo. Now, when you take a shot, the photo is large onscreen. You can even click the photo to zoom in and see the detail, if you need a better view.

In a nutshell, that’s tethered shooting with Lightroom. But keep in mind a couple of things:

• Shooting tethered won’t work in every environment. This practice typically works best in a studio, or on location if you’re not doing a lot of moving around.
• If anything goes wrong, double-check your tethered software in step 5 to make sure that the folder setting is exactly the one you used in Lightroom in step 2.