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Lesson Info

Setup for Tethered Shooting

one of the most powerful things that we have inside of light. From classic. It's not available inside of light room desktop, which is the newer version of Light Room. Is the ability to tethered shooting toe have tethered shooting. Tethered shooting is the concept of shooting at the camera and immediately delivering it into light rooms. So that especially when you're doing commercial work, you want to make sure that everything is perfect when you're doing table top shots. That kind of stuff. You want to make sure that everything is absolutely tax sharp, that you have the right exposure everywhere and sometimes shooting on a camera and looking at the screen on the back of the camera. Looking at that hissed a gram. It's fine, but it's not always is accurate, is it? Could be. Whereas if you could shoot directly into light room and see the image and zoom in in it and play with it, look at the raw image on your screen. You make a lot of great decisions, Um, because of that, so when you're se...

eing it on your screen, or if your client is in the studio with you and they're seeing it on the screen really large. Instead of on that little can camera screen, you could make a lot of better decisions. You can see wardrobe issues. You can see hair issues, you can see framing issues. All of that is much more prevalent here. More, uh, obvious on the screen. So a lot of people want to shoot tethered for that very reason. So we want to talk about the concept of tethering today, and we want to show you how to do it best inside of light room. So one of the things that you should note is that there are specific things you should be doing when you're tethering, and those things will help you to be more successful, especially in light room. And there there are issues with light room people have had in, innit, disconnecting and stuff in. And they say, Oh, well, it doesn't work very well. So they go out and get a different shooter program, the either they work with capture Juan or they go get smart shooter or they because they're afraid that light rooms not gonna work for them because they've had it fail on him in the past, on and A lot of that has to do with just the way that you're connecting to the camera and to the computer. And so we're going to talk a little bit about set up. First set up is pretty essential in the way that you tether. So the first thing that you want to dio at your camera is make sure that you have turned off any kind of sleep mode on your camera. So if your camera, all cameras, do have some kind of a sleep mode, so after three minutes it goes into a sleep mode. Do not allow your camera to ever sleep, so you've got to turn off the sleep mode on your camera and make sure that is completely off. The second thing that you need to do at the camera level is you need to make sure that you have a really good connection here at the camera itself. If you have a cable that's sticking straight out, and this is why I have what's called a right angle cable and this is a it's a cannon us are. So it's got a USB C connection on. It s So this is a USB C. right angle cable. And the reason that we use a right angle cable is that when you have ah, cords sticking directly out of the camera, you're gonna end up with it moving like this and that moving will not only destroy the port, but it also starts toe wiggle and you lose connection. And as soon as you lose connection, then the camera is not sending a signal to light room and light room. Can't see it. So light room stops the tether. So a right angle cable is a must. Now tether tools. Who makes this cable makes a really cool little pigtail. So all it is is this right angle cable, and it goes to about here. That way I could disconnect the camera and move things around and then reconnect the camera So these little pigtails air awesome and what we're using below the camera is a tether block. So there's a little channel inside of this block and this block it goes like this so that this cable, no matter what happens here, this cable never moves. So the combination of a tether block and a right angle cable make this a really secure connection. so there's not gonna be any kind of movement on it. So we're gonna put that onto our tripod, and then we're gonna plug it into what's called a tether boost. So this is a little signal amplifier, and it's important to use a signal ample fire when you are tethering so that you don't ever lose that connection. So it's just boosting the signal, especially if you're doing a long distance. So fear using a long cable in order to tether, make sure that you're using a tether boost to boost that signal and make sure that you get the signal all the way to the computer. Okay, so then I've got myself another USB C cable here because that's the port that's on my computer, and I'm gonna plug that in here. Okay, so that is the cable situation, and you want to make sure that you're firmly secured. Make sure that you have a tether boost so that the signal is strong and make sure that this is never gonna move, which is why we have the right angle cable and the tether block here. So all of that stuff is important in order to no matter What system using it doesn't matter if you're using light room or if you're using any other kind of tethering software. Make sure that that is all secure. Don't just use a little tiny cable, ah, USB cable or whatever. Now, the other thing to mention is that if you're using a camera that has USB two, that is really, really, really slow. So a USB C or USB three is almost essential. The other option that you have if you If you want to be free from wires running around your studio, especially if you're doing fashion shooting and you're moving around a lot, you might want to look into something like this. Like the air direct. The air Direct is a wireless tethering service, so it simply sits up on your camera or maybe off to the side of your camera. You plug that into the U. S. B cable on Bennett. Just it's all it is, is a little tiny pigtail at your camera, and then that transmits it over to your computer through the WiFi network. And it's really quite fast, very capable and easy to use. So this is a great option for those of you are tethering, but you want to be able to move around while you're tethering rather than a tabletop. So today I thought that we would show you how to tether and some of the tethering tools and how to start a tether session inside of light room. And so I'm just going to use a watch, just going to use my watch and set it up. So the first thing that I need to do is and we're not gonna you know, this isn't a tabletop shooting class, so we're just going to get a shot of this watch, which is like, 20 years old. It's actually my wedding gift from my wife. And so I've had it for a very long time, and it's still ticks. So I'm gonna turn on my camera, and I'm gonna just use the back of the screen to get my first shot and all right, so I've got what I think is going to be the shot in the camera on, and what I'm going to do is set up the tethering circumstance. So what I need to do is inside of light room. I'm going to go into the file menu and in the file menu, you will see that there is a tether capture option and we can start our tethered capture. And once we started, it's going to give us our dialogue box. And this is really important to start setting up all of the places that we're gonna put things. So I'm gonna go first to choose a destination for the photos that are gonna come from my camera. So I'm looking for a place that makes sense. So I'm gonna go to my jobs here, and I'm gonna create a new folder. And that folder is going to be called, uh, 2000 0 To 1 underscore, uh, cl for creative live and tethered shooting. Okay, so I'm creating a place, and then I'm gonna create another folder inside that called Raw. That's where I want my photos to go, and I'm gonna choose that spot. So now I know exactly where the photos any photo that shot here is gonna be left on the card. So on on most cameras, it will allow you to keep the camp the photo on the card and send the photo to the computer. If you have a camera with two cards on it. You can have one of the cards have a large file and one of the cards have a smaller raw file and then just choose to have it. Send the ones from the smaller raw file and send it over, and they'll move even faster over to the computer. If you want to see them quicker, not necessarily storing you're not gonna end up using the small raw as final file. You use the big raw image that's in the camera, but if you need to move those faster, you can use a smaller raw file. But on Lee do that. If you have a camera that has two cards in it, one can be the full raw file on one could be the small. But in this case, we have one card in the camera, and it's going to send the full raw file into this place, this destination, the raw file here. And so we are going to now choose a session name. We're going to just call this watch, and this allows us to segment by photos. So any time we moved to a new shot weaken, simply click a button that will let us add a new shot name. So I'm gonna leave it clicked so that I can show you what that looks like because it's very useful. Especially when you're doing some kind of a fashion shoot. You've changed wardrobes or something like that. Um, Then there's the naming option. I just leave it at the file name. Don't change the file name on the way in. Unless for some reason, the client's gonna grab those files and take off with him. Um, then once I've done that, I want to add it to a collection and this is really awesome. So do this. Add it to a collection. What's gonna happen is when I do that, it's going to say I'm gonna move the file from the camera to the computer. Once I have it in the computer, I'm also going to add that file to a collection inside of light room. And as we know, light room collections can be shared with the cloud and so automatically, those images are gonna end up inside the cloud. So what you do is you come here and you can either choose a collection that already is tied to the cloud or you can create a collection. And if you create a collection when you create the collection and put it in whatever folder you wanted to be in or just have it out and without a folder, But you can use this option, which is to sink toe light room. So if you sink it toe light room, it will sink it to the cloud. Now, I've already done that in this tether option here. So this tether collection is already sync to the cloud. So anything that goes to it is automatically gonna be uploaded to the cloud, and you're going to see the value of that in a little bit. Then the last thing you can do is you're gonna add keywords. And so I'm going to say watch Ah, table top and still life. Okay, so these are the three things that would describe what that thing is. Oh, and I could also say, Ah, it's a yeah, it's a fossil. Uh, false fossil. Okay, e I miss spelled that. Okay, so now I have some keywords so that they're automatically applied on the way in. I can also apply my copyright on the way in which is metadata. And then I'm ready to go. Now. This button here, disabling auto advance means that when it comes in, it's going to stay on the image you're looking at. And it will keep putting MAWR images in the problem with auto advances that if your client is looking at a shot that came into the computer and you keep shooting, they don't get to see the shot for very long. The next shots come in, if you allow auto advance, then you get to see every shot that's coming in, which is great if the client wants to see it that way. But a lot of times the client wants to just click around and see the different shots, that air coming in and kind of look at him for a while. So I like to disable auto advance so that I'm in control of what's showing on the screen next. Okay, so I am going to hit, okay? And now you see how it asked for an initial shot name and we're just gonna call this watch one and hit, OK? All right, there we go. It's detected the camera. You can see right down here that there is a camera bar and it tells you the actual camera that you're looking at. And then it shows you the folder, which is Watch one. If you click on that, watch one name, it allows you to change the shop name, and it will make a new folder inside of that, that main folder. So the the folders watch, and then inside that you can see this happening right here. There is a folder called Watch One. And if I create a new one, so let's just make this now watch, too. Now there is a watch to folder and watch. One folder is now finished. So if we were shooting a series of watches every single time I switch to watch, I'm going to make a new folder just by simply pushing the name of the shot. And it will give me an option to make a new shot name. Okay, then, here we have the ability to change our shutter speed. Our aperture r I s O and our white balance. Okay, so that's we're gonna take our initial shot and see that come in. So I'm just simply going to click it. It's taken the shot. We'll see how well we did. Yeah, it's set up pretty well. I like it. The great thing is is that I can see my hissed a gram over here and if I hit the J key. So, um, if I hit the Jakey, I will see the highlight and shadow warnings. So I'm just gonna hit J Oh, sorry. I gotta be in the develop module to do that. Hit the J key, and I can see the highlight and shadow warnings. So inside of the develop module, I'm looking at the actual image, the hissed a gram, and I can see where they're highlight issues. So I need to I need to change the exposure just a little bit. So I'm just gonna take the I s o down to 2 and I'm gonna fire that again. But notice that the new image that comes in is is not showing up because I don't have the auto advanced feature on I have it off some clicking on their boom. Much better now. I don't have any real highlight issues, but I can go in here now and I can play with those. So I like the way it looks now I'm going to go in and play with the adjustments, so I just take the highlights down a little bit. And Aiken, I can definitely recover those. I can bring the shadows up a little bit, play around with my white balance to some degree, and as soon as I like what I've done, what, regardless of what I've done to it? The great thing is is that when I'm tethering the developed settings here, can I can either choose a preset toe, add to every image that comes in? Or I could just say Samos previous So Samos previous and this even works for, like, cropping. So if I wanted the client to see exactly what the crop is gonna be say, we're doing kind of a banner on the top of a website there, and I want the client to see exactly what it's gonna look like. I've got it cropped, and now I'm gonna fire the next shot, and it's going to not only bring it in, but it's also going to apply the crop, see that it's applying the crop and the adjustments that I made prior, which is fantastic especially when, even for people who are doing like a let's say you're doing a photo booth kind of thing where you're just having fun shots at a party and people coming in and you're taking pictures and then you're showing it to him on a monitor to the side, you can take the pictures and it will automatically apply everything. Every, all the cropping, all the adjustments, all the styles, the camera profile, anything that you want applied to it. It's gonna apply to it on the way in so that the client never sees anything but the finished shot. So that's a fantastic thing to use. Make sure that you play around with using that same as previous, so that when you're done, you've done all of your adjustments. Air done. You might have to do some retouching toe one individual shot, but you're pretty much finished. Okay, so now, um, let me show you a couple other things that are really important to tethered shooting. Um, number one is you might have say you're doing a cover shot or you're doing a photo that's going to have some kind of graphic over the top of it. If you can get that graphic first. Then you can come up here to the, um, adjustment in the tools. There's an adjustment overlay mask, so we have to go to the library to find our overlay. So we're going to come back into the library, go down to the view menu and then look in the loop overlay. And there's an option here to choose an image. Now, when you make this image, if you make just a J peg, it's just gonna be a big, square image that floats over the top of your of your photo. But if you make a P N G file, which is like a J peg that has transparency and you leave it as a transparent file, so now we're just looking at the logo. You can do that. So I've got a logo, my logo, that I'm gonna flow over the top of this image. And so I'm using a PNG file, so simply just click, choose layout image and then go find your logo, whatever or text or whatever is going to go on it, and as long as it's a a transparent background with something over the top of it, that stuff will float. So let me show you how that works. So I've already chosen that anyway, So I'm gonna go to view loop overlay. I'm gonna choose a recent photo and boom, I've got myself a logo that floats over the top of the image. Now, I can also click on the option. Let's see the command key. So in the command key, I simply grab that logo and move it around, and I can change the size of the logo. This is always holding down the command key. So I'm holding down the command key and I'm changing the size of the logo. I'm changing the position of the logo. And then once I've got that set, I can also, by the way, if this will help you in making sure that you have levels. So this is just like your little level or you can move around like that. You can also change your grid size up here at the top, so just grab onto the size of the grid and you can increase or decrease the size of a grid. You can change the opacity of your grid so all of this stuff can be good. It could be helpful in you setting up your shot. But your client, if they're looking at a secondary screen, won't see any of this information here. They actually won't even see the logo, which is? They should allow you to see the logo. But if you come down to the bottom left hand corner of light room, you'll see a one and a two. The two is a secondary monitor, so if you have a secondary monitor attached, simply click on that secondary monitor, and this is what they would see on the secondary monitor here. So your client could be sitting across the room looking at his own monitor and looking at the shots as they come in, or as you toggle them. So when you click on an image shows him the next image so you could shoot 12 images. Look through and say, Hey, how about this one? And then he looks that one. But if he's looking right over your shoulder, he's going to see all of this information here. But this is really fantastic for you being ableto organize the shot and make sure that you've left enough space for whatever text needs to be in that photograph or whatever logo is going to go over the top of. Or if there's, you know, the title of the magazine at the top of of the image. This helps you to design your shop better. Okay, so that's the That's how you use the mask overlay. Just simply, it's in the view. And then you come down to loop overlay in either show or not show, and you can see that it has a command key, which is, uh, uh, on a Mac. It's command option. Oh, so we're going to get rid of it now and there's our shot. So using light room as your tethering tool is a fantastic thing to do because now everything is already here. You've got your developed image already finished. You can go in and tweak it. Do a little bit of retouching. Obviously, this is a very old watch. It's 20 years of constant use, so it's not a pretty watch. It's definitely nice and used and scarred, but it keeps on ticking, so