Tethered Shooting with Canon EOS DSLRs and Adobe Lightroom
This is a short guide to explain the fundamentals of tethered [or remote] shooting, which when you’ve finished reading it should allow you to take photos and within seconds see them on your PC screen ready for editing / printing etc.
Tip - for those who are using multiple hard drives, the combination of Canon’s EOS utility and Adobe Lightroom does NOT work with multiple hard drives. I spent a good few hours learning that, so if you take that on board, you won’t have too.
Setting up
First off, you will need:
- PC
- Canon EOS DSLR camera
- USB cable
- Canon EOS Utility [found on your cameras software CD]
- Adobe Lightroom V1.4 [latest version]
For this demonstration I’ll be using a Canon 5D. My advice when using this camera is to download the EOS 5D driver which can be found using the instructions below. This basically stops the whole issue of the camera not being recognised if you pull out the USB cable too early – helpful even if you’re not remote shooting.
To download Canon EOS 5D driver from the Canon website:
- Go here: http://www.usa.canon.com/home
- Hover over ‘Downloads’ on the navigation menu, then ‘Consumer’
- On the drop down menus select:
- EOS (SLR) Camera Systems
- Digital EOS Cameras
- Your camera model
- Drivers and Downloads should the default viewing tab, if not select it
- Select your operating system on the top right
- The first section should be drivers
- If there is a driver there, download and install it. If there isn’t one, then don’t worry you won’t need one
- EOS (SLR) Camera Systems
- Digital EOS Cameras
- Your camera model
This should go direct to the 5D site
You should also find lots of other tools on your cameras page as well. At this point it might be wise to update the EOS Utility you should have installed from your cameras software CD. Canon does not list the full install, but they do have an ‘EOS Utility 2.XX Updater for Windows / Mac’ which as it’s free and benefits you, you should download and install it.
The next phase, the EOS Utility
- Turn your PC on and connect your camera to your PC
- Launch the EOS Utility
- Click on ‘Preferences’
- Change the ‘Destination Folder’ to something meaningful, i.e. monitored_folder_glamour_shoot
- Change the ‘File Names’ to something more meaningful if you fancy it
- Click OK
- Click on Camera settings / Remote shooting
Lightroom
- Launch Lightroom
- Navigate to File > Auto Import > Auto Import Settings ...
- Change the watch folder to whatever you named the ‘Destination Folder’
- Select a new destination of where you want your files to go
- Select a subfolder name while you’re there [you’ll be forced to]
- Edit the file Naming algorithm if required and adjust any meta data / keywords / previews etc
- Click ok
- Navigate to File > Auto Import and make sure ‘Enable Auto Import’ is ticked
Back to the EOS Utility
- Launch Lightroom
- Navigate to File > Auto Import > Auto Import Settings ...
- Change the watch folder to whatever you named the ‘Destination Folder’
- Select a new destination of where you want your files to go
- Select a subfolder name while you’re there [you’ll be forced to]
- Edit the file Naming algorithm if required and adjust any meta data / keywords / previews etc
- Click ok
- Navigate to File > Auto Import and make sure ‘Enable Auto Import’ is ticked
Back to the EOS Utility
You should now see the EOS Utility as per the image on the left. From here you can edit the camera settings as much as you want. Fire off a few random shots to get things going.
Tip - You can either press the shutter release button on the camera to start shooting or you can press the camera icon on the right hand side and that will also fire the camera.
Back to Lightroom
You should now see on your folders list a new folder based upon what you named the subfolder. Click on it and you should see you’re recently taken files.
I hope this guide has helped, I certainly spent a good few hours messing around trying to get it to work right, but if you follow the instructions above you should be fine.