 Today I want to talk about the reference view inside a Lightroom. What's up nerds? Welcome back to another photo nerds tutorial. My name is Adam. I hope you're having a fantastic day today. Today I want to talk to you about the reference view inside a Lightroom. This is a feature that's been added to Lightroom. It's been here for probably about a year. I've never talked about it and it's probably something that you've never touched before. Maybe you've seen it but you just don't know why it's there or how you could find this useful inside of your workflow. Today I'm going to show you why I think that this is a really cool feature that's overlooked by many. But before I jump into this feature I want to start with a quick story. This story revolves around this image right here. This is a photograph or this is a drawing that I did some years back. You've probably seen it hiding out in the background of the YouTube videos here. This is something that I drew a long time ago. And truth be told when I was growing up as a kid the thing that I wanted most in life was to draw for Disney. But I never really thought that I was any good enough. But growing up as a kid and drawing I wasn't very good at getting things out of my mind. But what I was really good at was looking at other people's works or cartoons. My favorite cartoons are looking at comic books and things like that and then recreating them. Basically copying what I saw. And this became a great way for me to practice drawing and getting better at drawing. And this feature inside of Lightroom is a great way to do the exact same thing but in a photography sense. Another quick story when I started doing photography is I would constantly look at other photographers work admiring what they were doing and maybe how they were going about it. But I never really felt that my work lived up to their expectations. Eventually over time I realized that I was looking at this the wrong way. What I should have been doing was looking at other photographers work and trying to recreate it or copy it in the same way that I did with my drawings as a kid. In doing so you'll find that you'll learn quite a bit by trying to copy somebody else's work and recreate it. It's because of this that I feel like this feature inside of Lightroom is so valuable because it allows you to have one image up something that you may be trying to recreate or a style that you're looking for while having your image up and editing it in real time while having a reference on the screen. Let me jump into Lightroom and show you exactly what it is I'm talking about. The first thing you should consider doing is going over to Google and searching for whatever it is you're looking for whether it's an artist, whether it's a type of photography, something along that lines. In this case I'm going to look for black and white ego photography and I'm just going to scroll through some of the images that I have here looking for something that stands out to me, something that inspires me, something that I might want to recreate and so right away I spot something that I think looks pretty cool and what I'm going to do is take this into my Lightroom catalog. No for all you photograph snobs I'm not stealing somebody else's work I'm simply using this as a reference I feel like there's perfectly fine. Once you've imported the reference file into Lightroom the first thing you want to do is head on over to that reference file right click on it and set as reference photo. This is going to ensure that when you head on into this feature later on that it knows what photo you want to reference to. The next thing you're going to do is go through your library and look for a photograph that you want to edit I've got one right here and then what you're going to do is head on into the develop module once you get into the develop module you'll find this feature down here near your film strip it's right next to the loop view and it's got a little R.A. on it this right here is the reference view as soon as you click the reference view because we've already set what image as our reference it'll immediately plug that into the reference view field so on one side I have my photo on the other side I have the reference the thing that inspires me the thing that I might want to use to copy as I practice techniques that mimic the style that it is that I liked once you have this in place just go ahead and start editing once you're all done making changes to the file and you feel like you've nailed the reference view you're pretty much done this is a really really good way to continue practicing look for other photographers work that that that inspire you and find ways to recreate those looks and feels in your own photography there's nothing wrong with this I highly recommend it and luckily for you the reference tool will make this really really easy for you to do so go ahead and give it a try hopefully you enjoyed this video if you give it a thumbs up as always if you haven't already subscribed to our channel and thank you so much for watching that's all I've got have a great day everybody