Lessons

Lesson Info

Post Workflow - Lightroom Editing

So what's gonna happen here is I have already created a catalog for some of seasons images that we're gonna work with today. So it's already an open catalog. It's empty. Okay, So what I'm going to do first is the usual. I'm going to import some images, so let's see, Import select a source. I happen to know just where they are, since I put them there and you can see here. If you want to know how I structure my files, I'm just gonna show you real quick Before I pick anything. You've got the overall one with the date and the name and then underscore W for wedding. This is our naming conventions. Susan uses something different. I don't care what you used. Just be consistent so that you don't confuse yourself and you can always find things we like the underscore w so that we know it's a wedding shoe. Then underneath, you see all of the beginnings of everything is identical. It's the date, and it's the name of the client. But then afterwards you've got something else written. So the 1st 1 wh...

ich is blank after Gonta wits, is the catalogue. That's where the catalog is I've already got that open. Then I've got the Facebook version. The Master DMG Master Dandy is the large Dan genes that we talked about. There's largest the Rafah off their original, all the data, No compression. Then we've got Master Jay Peg. That's for later. We've got master Raw. Those of the original files. Those were the raw files that were not yet converted to D and GS. So I've got those two because you've got to start with those or you've got nothing. I've got Master X and P. That's in case Later I want to extract accidentally data for my clients. Some of my clients I deliver it does that for me. And when I about everything ons in folio forming, she also hops back over the transporter and gives me the X and peas in case for any reason whatsoever, we have to revisit a wrong gallery, which we've had to do for a variety of weird reasons, right? Just in case, just in case. It's a good backup for you, and it's it's just smart to keep in there, says Small. Why not? Then I've got a preview gallery. This is mostly just in case they're blogged images, etcetera, that need to be handled. Then we've got proxy DMG proxy. DMG Now is the small day Angie's like we talked about. That's the switcheroo happening thing. And then you've got rejects, which is just photos that were in pecked and reports we have a way of running and report on how many raw files we are. I won't bore you with out, but it's just something for on a kind of keeping track. So you're pulling in the proxy D and G. So I'm gonna select Proxy D and G's. It's gonna show me. Here they are. You can see over here in developed settings, we have presets. I'm using our standard import preset because that's going to set a lot of kind of things ready for me, and I don't have to worry about them. And I'm just gonna say import and I choose 1 to previews because I don't want to have to wait. And with these small file sizes, rendering these oneto ones is not gonna take very long at all. So I'm gonna import, um whoa. Yep. They're all gonna come in pretty fast since they're pulling the previews. Look at you and all your two stars go back. So I'm gonna come in here, and obviously I've got a really small catalog because we don't have a ton of time to spend on the actual editing of this, and really, you don't need to see her slogs through entire gallery. But if I had a longer gallery, I might do something, like take a collection of images that are similar color, put them into a collection, edit them, and then resume to the full gallery and kicked them out just to save myself time. But because I don't have that here, I'm gonna start just with the first photo. I'm not gonna worry about it, and I'm going to go into the develop module. And as you can see, when I hit Mikey, it automatically brings me up this little pointers. I can set my white balance, which we've already done, so I can click a couple of places and decide what I like. I know season might like something a little warmer, so I kind of click around a little, and I kind of go with something a little bit warm. But in the beginning, you're looking for a good neutral. Exactly what exactly you're looking for something that kind of looks the way that you want it to look. So once I do that and you can see if I bring up my history here, you can see what I'm doing. So now I'm gonna look at the image, and I'm going to start thinking about what Does this image need to be a Susan strip lingering shot in this case? Because she's the client. So the first thing I know is that I feel like it does need to be a little bit brighter. There certainly are whites. I don't want to blow out detail, but it's a little bit little bit dark right now. But then when I raise it a little bit, I feel like it loses a little bit of contrast so that I want to use my keyboard. I'm gonna lower down the shadows and kind of make it pop, so it looks a little bit more contrasting. Then I've actually got a preset that's called details. And when I hit it, you can see it kind of brings everything into kind of a little bit of a sharper focus And then I've even got a details brush that I can hit which will go ahead in and we can actually hit the actual stone. And we can really bring out the sharpness and that's down. So now you've got a ring that looks really, really punching on. And if you want to look at it well, you go from that original all the way to this. So I like this much more now if I feel like it's not warm enough, I can just hit at a little bit of temperature. I kind of play the line with this because you don't want a a diamond look yellow. I mean, no one wants to look at their diamond and think it looks yellow, but at the same time, I think Oh, no, unintentionally yellow OK, yellow diamond is supposed to be Oh, but you can add a little bit of warm. You can add a little bit of tent to balance the warmth, and I think you end up with something that looks great now if you want, If you want to really go all out, you can grab the dark and brush. I blow it up. I always like to use a larger brush stroke because I think it's more subtle and using pressure sensitivity. I really had it hard up here and then I kind of ease up as I get closer running and dodging its angrier when she's tired, it does, and I also don't want to create a halo here. And if I feel like I did too much, you know, I could back it off. If I felt like I wanted to do more, I could do that. That would look terrible. As a client, I do not approve, right. So once I feel like I'm happy with that, I'm just gonna move onto the next one, gonna look at this, and I'm probably immediately because it's Susan and I have, you know, a level of confidence with her. I'm probably going to be thinking to myself that this might go to black and White eventually, but I'm going to start out trying to call her balance it And I don't really want to do round trip black and whites today because I just think it will take too long. We go over that pretty extensively in our course, so I want to raise it up. I want to make sure that her face is really kind of emphasized. I can't go to dark with shadows here because you really start to lose her. This is another situation that I would never do a vignette here. No, because she's right on the edge, and all you're gonna do is dark and down your subject, which is not what you're looking for. Um, if I if I noticed that this is a little bright over here compared to her, and everybody's looking at the dress first and not so much her face. Then I might grab the dark and brush. I might bring this down a little. I'm not getting rid of the dress. I'm just saying, Hey, emphasis Number one is girls Face emphasis number two, then is the dress. And thanks to Susan's good shooting, the make up artist is like no emphasis at all, because she's hidden probably behind a water bottle or yeah, thanks for asking. You're welcome. I'm gonna go into something like this. This is a close up again. I'm gonna hit and try to find a white balance that's gonna look decent, and I will kind of go over a couple of work. This is happening in there. There are, I can tell We've got window light on tungsten Gonna raise the exposure a little bit, But again, I don't want to even things out I want to bring. I want to maintain that kind of dramatic look that season's going and that was one of the things that we had to really work on when we were Like I said, we were talking in between the days a little bit about how many days and how many weddings that took us to really find a groove with each other. And it's between two and three. I would say of Is this the right? Is this what you mean by warm? Is this what you mean by cool? Like I was talking about with Web design that when you're saying I want a site that looks elegant, sometimes you need to explain exactly what elegant means to you. What warm means to me might not be. When I say warm, I mean orange. When someone else has warm, they might mean yellow or just not blue, right? So I go through, I just do a little bit of darkening and move on. Now I've got this kind of neat photo again. I want to find a good white balance for her. And again, if I was in a full gallery, I wouldn't have to pick the white balance for all of these images because I would pick it for one. And then there would be a series. And that series would be in the same white balance, more or less in the same lighting. So you would just be copying and pasting. The only reason I'm not liberally copying and pasting here is because I'm working on a small number of images, all of which are very different, which would also be applicability. You were doing like your own preview galleries for yourself, right? Because there's not a lot in a row going to be in the same condition, right? Absolutely So here. I can kind of see that this bride is sitting in a chair and she's got a lot of sunlight on her, so I might actually grab the highlight down brush here. And I might just hit the dress because I'm not a person who believes in blowing out neither All the white details I want to just recover a little bit of that. So that later if you look at the bodice and you're looking at it, close up, which we're not doing here because we have proxy files, you can actually see that there's some reaching there. And it doesn't just look like a plain white Arctic blast. Yeah, exactly. So here we are again. This is a formal. We're looking for a pretty neutral white balance and an image like this. I remember this wedding. This was a difficult set out formals. I'm just trying to find something that balances because this is this was tough. You were in, like, a room with a lot of green, and you had a lot of color bounce. So if I want Teoh Aiken, try something, you know, like one of our precept, we have some, like, sort of skin fixing presets that we can try to use to see if they will help us on. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. It just kind of depends on where you are. Um, and how much red or pink or yellow is in the skin. So I would probably go with something like this. I might warm it up a tiny bit just because they do look a little bit pink. But also, part of the problem we're warming up is she's tan and her bridesmaids or pail. She's very tan. So you always have to kind of walk the line between somebody looking orange on and at the same time, you don't want the other people to look washed out. So you kind of have to find a balance. Their kind of important have a calibrated monitor. Yes, it does help a lot. And like I said, the feed may be different than what I'm working on here. Um, looks pretty good to me. This one? No. Yes. You have a question in this step right now and you're doing you're looking for a white balance. What are you looking for in that power that's showing up next year? Cursor While you're supposed to be looking for a perfectly neutral gray, Okay. But I'm just hovering like my clients paint their rooms. Do you see how When I move over it over here in the little preview on my screen, you can see what happens? Way don't want that. We want that we don't like that. We just look and I just kind of look until I see something that I feel like I can work with like that. And now I've got something that looks a little bit warm, but not crazy orange. But it's not blue or green, and it feels like a good starting point to me. And then because I know I'm at the reception because it's the cake. I'm probably even going to go up a little and warmth on my own. But I might add a little bit of 10 just to keep it from getting orange, because I feel like that balances it out a little bit. And then because this is a detail and there is no skin tones to worry about, there's no people. I'm gonna hit a punchy preset because I just want to make it pop a little bit. I mean, I could even go so far as to use our details preset, which is very, very severe, something you would never use it again. You never want to put it on skin. Definitely not again here because we're still in the same room. I can give it. I could give a copy paste a shot. I don't know if it's gonna work. I mean, that's not too bad. Actually, you know, my shadows might be a little low for this, and this bouquet is a little bit more exposed than the last one. But this gives you a pretty good idea. You know of what you can use in this room. And if I was doing dancing, it would be the same all the time. You know, I just kind of work through it. Unless she significantly changed her flash placement or what she was doing. Obviously, if she has one dancing photo that has a rim light, that's gonna be different than just a full frontal flash dance photo of which you don't do that many anyway, so as we kind of moved through. So I'm gonna look at a photo like this. That's outside. And I'm thinking to myself, Well, this is definitely going to be really warm. We find something that's gonna work. Oh, I can't. It all looks kind of bad. It looks like I'm gonna have to say sorry, Charlie, and do it myself. So I just kind of go through tent, go through with the warmth trying to find something that feels right to me. And I know that it's gonna be a pretty dramatic portrait. Um, and I know that this could even go to black and white, so I just kind of go with something. In this case, that's warm. I could go with a very neutral if I knew it was gonna go to black and white. But then I'm gonna come in again with the dark and brush. And when you're just hitting the keys, these things come up so quickly it saves you so much time. Um, second here a 2nd 2nd here. A second there. It all adds up, and I'm gonna hit that and be done and move on. Would, you know, introduced that one because it s so so I do it all of the you know that. Yeah. So this obviously suddenly were in a totally different world. This was a day after I believe right of these people, because these were the rain people right up. Yeah, so that was kind of a bummer. So, essentially, what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna look over and I don't crop for all my clients because every client is kind of different, but I'm gonna look over here and see, you know, there's, like, a light. Nip it. I don't I don't like that. How often do you call for me? Um, probably about 20% of your images, I would say. And it's usually saving very small. Okay, very small. You also have to retell my family formals. Yes, yes, I'm actually also very tilted with family formals, and sometimes I'll do a little bit of a straightening, So this is obviously a very different image. I don't really need toe white balance this because I kind of know what she wants. I mean, I can tell by looking at the image that she's looking for a very warm, very sort of representative kind of image. She's she's not trying to expose everything evenly. The goal here really is to make it look like a beautiful sunny day, which is what it waas Andi. I know that because I worked with her a lot, so I know that because I'm not, they're not facing me. And because their skin tones air really that important, I could go pretty warm with us without really running into any trouble on Dykan. Pump up my blacks a little bit if I want to. I could go really far and I could make it really contrasting. I don't think you should do, but I don't think that season would want that. So I kind of find a middle ground when it comes to the contrast. And then I know they're in a park, and I know that. You know, there's this person over here. I'm just going to do a tiny bit of darkening over here just to darken that down a little bit. Just said that that person doesn't kind of distract you from what's going on in the foreground, which is this couple kind of making this beautiful walk. But I'm not trying to get rid of the sun flare because I know that Susan knows how to shave her lens. And she didn't want a sunflower. She wouldn't put it in the image, so I'm not trying to destroy it. I'm just trying Teoh. You embrace it, but make it look a little bit more of a pop. So if you go from the start to the end, it's just a little bit more of a dramatic image, and I feel like it really points you in at the couple, which is something that you know that I really like. And then here you can see she didn't use a sun flare in this situation, said She's obviously not going for that, obviously, like I'm not going to be like, Oh, let me try to straighten this all out Now it's all even for you, Susan. How do you like it? I the history. I mean, it's hilarious. If you look at the history Graham on this picture, that's a horrible hissed a gram. It ISS, Which is why you know, the history am does not tell the whole tale. No, it is not so I can go in here. I can warm things up. I can raise the shadows a little bit because, you know you don't want to block things up. But the whole goal here is to make the image look the way that she wanted it to look. And in this case, I probably wouldn't even really do a burn because I feel like this building is need and there's a reason that she wanted it there. So we just kind of leave it. If I wanted to do something in the trees, I could. But really, this image is already set A really good example. If you could go crazy with it, you could you could go pick. You could move. You could you could dark it that down. But this is really, really nice. Why would you obsess any further over it? Right? And like I said, if I was gonna show black and white conversion, I might choose this for black and white just because it is so dramatic and I feel like black and white would really be nice, But I'm just not gonna have time to do that today. So So let's say I'm done. That was a quick one. I bet you wish all your wedding's went that fast. Follow how weddings went, let fast you wouldn't be here because it would be all sourcing. That's a good point. So the first thing I'm gonna do it on home, I'm gonna select all and this is where I'm going. Teoh, actually do enjoy production. Oh, I thought we were switching. Not yet. We're gonna do much of that hand gesture we did in our instructions. So the noise reduction is actually something that was created not by us, but by a guy named Jeffrey Friedl. You can get it. It's a plug in for light room. It's on his Web site. We have the website. Is it? Jeffrey friedl dot com. Let me pull it up for you. Journalists felt a little funny. And I want to tell you guys, cause this he just deserves so much credit for this. I just feel like he is an amazing, amazing I So Jeffrey Friedl is j f f r e y f r e d l Yes, Jeffrey Friedl, please make a contribution to him. If you take this plug in, it is just amazing. And he accepts all levels of contribution. But, you know, be generous is gonna change your life so, you know, help them out. We like to use it. And the thing that makes it so unique is, rather than a flat noise reduction that gets applied to all of your files evenly. This actually has a scale. So a 200 I eso photo, yeah, gets a different noise reduction than a 1600 which gets a different direction than a $10 don't even know that you held this one back from me. Sorry. Thanks. I gotta have my secrets. So we want to go and we want to select them all. And then we're gonna say file plug in extras. And there's some instructions on how to install this on his site. And we go down and we find it. Oh, look, jf bulk develop, apply both develop settings. It's gonna open up now The first time that you use it. It will not have these values in it. You'll have to kind determine your own values. I'm sure that somewhere we'll have to see if we have on our website we might have some starting values, but essentially you are setting this up. So you see, it says lower bound at I s a 100. Do this and I s 0 10,000 Do something else on, then create an access in the middle of that. It sort of works. Oh, my gosh. For each stop of exposure added in light room in creep. Wow, that's cool. All the credit goes to Jeffrey Friedl on this one. And then what we have as a little safeguard is all images inspected. You add a little keyword that says NR set and then all images updated. You add a keyword called on our set. And the idea here is to make sure that you don't miss noise reduction before you do the switch on the export. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and apply it. Gonna say OK, by the way, it also has different settings for different cameras. Just so you know. Of course it does. So it does canon differently than icon. It doesn t 800 differently. Event of the three. So it says Okay, we updated, developed settings updated the keywords, I say Jeffrey Friedl love you so much. Um, and gonna select all I've already got him selected for the last thing. And now I'm going to say metadata, save metadata to files. This is absolutely crucial. You have to do this. If you don't do this, you will be very sad and you will cry. Then what we want to do is we want to find our source. So we see right here. We've got the source of where we have our pictures from right, and we actually want Teoh update the source and this is actually a little bit different than mines. I've got to figure out how to do it here. The same Jeffrey that makes plug ins for in Folio and SmugMug. Right? So once you've got all of the metadata saved, and like I said, that is very important. You want to go over here where you've got your proxy DMG file? You want to right click, which I'm gonna do actually on the pen and you're gonna choose update folder location. So if you didn't save the metadata, if you updated the folder location, would you lose everything you've done? Uh, you possibly Let's not try this at home. Let's not experiment are that kind of stuff. If you want to try that with one photo, I don't recommend it. I like to play it safe, So we're gonna cheese update folder location. Once we say it, all that matter Data, it's gonna open it up and it's going to say, Well, where's the folder then? I thought I knew where the folder waas and you're gonna go in and you're going to look and you're going to choose Master DMG. And that should be again the same exact contents as the proxy DMG folder. These were just the full size files. Me stop you just really quick. The reason that we're doing this and we're not doing an export of the proxy DMG follows is because you would end up with very small files and you don't want small files. You want large falls. I'm not going to pretend that it late at night. I never made the mistake of exporting small files because I've done it. But if you have a workflow and you have your steps you remember okay? I did noise reduction. I save metadata. And now I've got to make the little switcheroo before export these falls. So you update folder location. It's a right click on the mouse. Took me a minute to figure it out on the pen, and you go ahead and you select the Master Jianjie folder. You choose that and what happens? Well, it looks like nothing happened, right? You're like, Yeah, those were the same pictures that you already did, but they're not, but they're not. So it's not these air the full size files in here now, and they're even showing your changes. They're even showing what you already did that recipe, Those directives that you put down. But in order to make sure that that information really gets written in you select all. You go to metadata again and you say metadata to falls and you do this right away. Please don't mess around here. Please don't like Oh, Legal. Look at something. Let me come back later. Oh, no, no, I forgot. And now there's no information. You really want to do it right away so that all of that stuff is safe now, I don't need to know. I don't need to do the noise reduction because already did it. I don't need to make adjustments because I already did them. If I was gonna round trip something here that I had designated for black and white through 1/3 party app, this would be the time that I would do it because now I have the full size files. If I did it on the proxies and it wasn't a light room preset, if it was 1/3 party, then it would actually be a small J peg. And what you really want is the large size files. So once I'm done, I select them all. And then I export. We have an export preset, which I don't have installed on this creativelive computer. But you basically set up your preset. You make sure that you've got everything correct. You know where you're sending it, or you can select it later, and then you go ahead and you just export them, and that's it. You're gonna export. We export tiffs, and then we change them over to J pegs because there is a weird thing with light room when it experts J pegs that exports unnecessarily large shape eggs. So we actually expert tips. And then we convert them to J pegs to save space, because the quality on those larger light room J pegs is no different. Really, they're just big for the sake of being big. Yeah, there was some acknowledgement by Adobe I think that it was unnecessary, but I don't think it's been fixed quite yet. So that's how proxy D and G's work, and that's how speeding up your editing works, you could see how fast those previews jump compared to when you're using the full size files. And if you multiply that out to 100 or 300 or photos. You save more and more time, and then the way we close all of that out, you deliver to all of your clients in a different manner. However, if they want it back on their transporters, if they want it sent to them for me, kind of jumping it back over to me. She puts all of my high resolution J pegs ons in Folio I go to that is in Folio Gallery. I add in anything that I've logged already, and then I just prep the gallery for showing it to the client. I type in their names. I give it a password whenever she gives me the gallery, she puts it in a special archives folder, so it's not viewable to the general public. But that's also how I get my files from her. I download my high resolution versions right out of Zin Folio and that I have them and I back them up on my end, right, and she still has her raw files on the transporter and I pull some X and P data out, and I put that on the transfer order as well as a backup and then on top of all of that, generally at the end of every single wedding. If she's noticed something that all of a sudden I'm doing, that's weird. You know, she's my check and balance with my work. Not only do I look at my work all the time at the end of during my work flow to try to make sure that I'm staying consistent with myself and I'm trying to improve. And I'm not starting to make sloppy, shoddy mistakes, especially as the year goes on. She's also there as any employees you would for you if she could be working in my studio. My studio manager, she would be telling me that I'm sucking at something. We have a feedback loop back and forth of, you know. Hey, I was I was in this situation in this wedding, and I was having a really hard time, and I had to really push my I S o. Do you think there's anything I could have done next time to make it a little bit better and she'll give me feedback, you know? Yes. I had to push your files really hard. It really hurt things. So on so forth, I'm having to save all of your files in this certain situation because you keep making the same stupid mistake. We're not about fixing things, and post we're not about saving you in post were actually about making posts as fast as possible because the images coming out of your camera are as close to done as they possibly can be. That above and beyond. Anything else will make your work for faster. Absolutely. And we're figuring out problems Sometimes that can't be averted, like the fact that everybody is switching from incandescent bulbs right now in tow bulbs and every church that she goes into in every time. So I go into even in Washington, when I'm shooting, it's like they're in the middle of the process. She got like three incandescents to L. Edie's halogen and daylight coming in the window. Well, that's just like a horrible situation. I mean, I'm not a miracle worker, you know. I can't make a white balance and the circumstances look perfect. We can improve it. We could do something like using flash for a processional if we're permitted in order to kind of make the subject look good and not worry so much about the background. But sometimes you just discovered that there are things that you can't house that you all you can do it. It's just a challenge. So let's pray that all the churches make this transition very quickly s so that we could have some kind of an even white balance. Any questions we can answer for you guys about workflow before we it is available? Or do you have suggestions on where to pick up some of those brushes? We did, actually. John made that brush, and we do sell the presets on our website, And that does include the brushes and some of the other shortcuts that you can use independently of the keyboard. If you're not interested in the keyboard or you can map it to the keyboard, I have a lot of them, and I use them not with a keyboard. Yeah, you could absolutely go in and select them one by one. If that's your preference, especially something like detail that you're not gonna use constantly other questions. At what point do you key word? Your images? I don't. I keyword my images on ingestion when I bring them into photo mechanic, but I keyword them extremely generically. Um, I don't anticipate a career in stock photo sales personally, so I will usually put in just the location names. So if I'm shooting a wedding at the Mayflower in Washington, I'll put Mayflower Hotel or Renaissance Mayflower. And then if it's a church, I'll even put the church down. Even though it's applying to all of the images, it just lets me know the locations of the wedding. You know, if a wedding is a particular like a Persian wedding, I might Persian in the key words, just in case I'm looking for that wedding later. Typically speaking, I should 30 to 35 weddings a year. I can usually find what I'm looking for if I need to, because I'm categorizing mine. When I'm done editing the whole thing, I'm pulling what I'm gonna need for different things, right? Do you wear them at all? Whichever one last question before we cut out. If you had one thing, one piece of advice that you would say, Do this or by this, or get this to help improve your post production workflow. What would that be? Wow, that's tough to narrow it down to one. I mean, I can answer one on my end. She thinks of mine would be improve your work like nothing's gonna make you faster and post them not having to do as much imposed. I think a shortcut keyboard would be my number one even more so than the tablet, which would be my second in the actual just technical aspects of it. I think that short shortcut keyboard really is kind of unsurpassed and speeding you up because you saw how fast I was heading this tease rather than searching for things on the menu. I just really feel like that makes a huge difference.