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Class Introduction and Basic Workflow Management

and I'm really excited about being able to talk about light room today and kind of work flows in some ways to think about an approach light room. And even if you've been in my room for a long time, I think there's some really exciting things that have been added delight room that maybe you missed. You haven't really explored. I want to talk about those today. We're gonna talk about importing, organizing kind of thinking about some of those bigger things, were editing photographs or talk about printing and sharing photographs, because in my world, until you actually print it, we haven't quite finished the loop yet. We'll talk about that. So really, I really exciting day for me and I'll everything I'm really passionate about excited talking about before we get started. I do want to address one of the big elephant in the room for everybody. And why don't we has kind of two variations of light room have light room CC, which is kind of a mobile. First, it used to be light room mobile, but i...

t's now got all the same kind of development tools you would have in light room Classic CC today we're gonna be in light room. Classic. See the CC all day. If you're using light room Classic CC, it would behoove you to take a look at light room CC. Have a class here on the introduction of light from C. C. So you have been into it. You can check out that class, but either way, it's a great way to actually kind of experience the experience, the entire ecosystem of the light room program. It's definitely worth taking a look at. But today we're gonna focus specifically on the light room classic CC, which is for any photographer who's been around for a while. That's what they think of his light room, so we'll be in that program today. I just want to address that up front so nobody gets confused. Um, so basic workflow management. So one of the keys to working well on Light room is that it was it at its foundation is a workflow program. It's an organization tool allows us to store track and find our photographs, allows us to develop our photographs, build slide, shows, print, but all that's workflow related. It's about making sure we can be efficient and what we do and the challenge I always hear from people. No matter who I'm working with, it doesn't matter what they call me about. It could be about trying to do something in the film. Dark Room. It could be printing, but at some point it all comes back to a workflow question. And in light room, it comes back to the basic of the same things. I'm trying to stay organized. I need to try a system. I've been on the Internet, and I looked at other people's systems and I've tried their systems and they don't work. So we're gonna talk a little bit about why that happens and really, what you need to think about him. Building your own workflow and my approach to workflow is pretty customized. So it's figuring out what kind of weaken naturally do because if you're naturally messy, but you can find things we can kind of work with that if you're entertaining, you work with that kind of work with what you kind of can already intuitively do. So what? The core workflow is about three things. It's about consistency, reliability and repeatability. When I work with people in my room, it is actually for me. It's entertaining because when I go in there, I can see everything they've ever tried. They've got 50,000 photographs, 100,000 photographs where they stress out because they're worried. Light room's gonna break because they've imported 1000 photographs. And that's a lot. So no matter where you are, if you have 1000 photographs or you're at 500,000 photographs or 1,000,000 photographs when you get into people's workflow, what you notice is that they've stopped and started 15 different things. They've keyword ID 5000 photographs. They put photographs in a collections. They've done folder restructuring with 50 different names. They have changed cameras 10 times. They have changed file naming times, and so when they get in there, you're like, Well, where is this photograph? And they're like, Oh, I took that in 2012. I think so. That would have been key worded. Maybe it was 2013. It's in a collection, and so they default to the default way of being organized in light room, which is going to the library module hit. The G key started the top impotently scroll in hopes of finding something, and eventually people get frustrated with that and they realize, well, that's not working for me. I've got too many photographs to scroll through. Now that's the break point. I can no longer scroll through my photographs efficiently. And so what they do is they start to look out for a workflow. So they go look at other people's work flows and they say, Oh, that person has keywords and their super organized. And I think if I add on my keywords and I put him in a hierarchical structure, I can find anything. If you're a stock photographer, that is your world. You Onley still work if it's properly keyword it. That's how people search for photographs. If I want a photograph of kids playing part dog, you have to have those keywords on that photograph. But if you're not a keyword er and you're gonna get frustrated by that and you're not gonna complete that process, that's not gonna work. So then you might go find somebody else's work floor. They're like, Oh, I just late label the photo name with whatever it is, So if I'm in Italy, I just call it Italy 2016. And then that's my Italy 2016 trip and you're like, OK, great. Can I see all your photographs that have boats in them? Where was this? There's one in this Italy thing, So you go to Italy folder and they find one, and then they look at the the trip to Paris folder. I think there was a boat in Paris and and then they they work all those different things, and it's because they've done these these different pieces, which goes back to this of all the things you'll ever do, Whatever you do, always do it. So it's consistent and it's repeatable. If those two things happen, it becomes reliable. Now may not be reliable to anybody else but you. I mean, somebody sits down on my computer, they'll be like, I can't find this. But if I tell them this is how I organize, they would at least know what tools to go through search for. So part of your job is to sit down and get real with yourself about what is your organization? How do you actually work? And don't just think about your photographs. Think about your life and how you organize your life If you're a person who has a to do list and everything goes on the to do list and you check off the to do list and you reward yourself and you check off the to do list. That structure is informative of what might work for your photography and how you could use light room. If you're a person who's like, I hate doing the same thing over and over again, that's me at my core. I don't like to repeat the same thing over and over again. So in my world, in my main catalog that I work in a lot of presets air. They're not for the development module, but for importing and for applying metadata and for exporting and for searching. I use presets for those things because I don't want to have to go. Remember what I searched for last time. I build a preset for them, so we're gonna walk through some of those techniques today. So after Korla, you gotta figure out kind of who you are a little soul searching little experience on who are you as an individual and start with that and the other piece that I recommended. You start on paper right down the workflow, write it down and look at it and noted outline at whatever it is. Because if you can't write it down and explain it to yourself, you're never gonna get light room to do it. Because in light room what happens, And that's that. I see this over and over again. And in the hundreds of people, thousands of people I've taught and worked within light room. As soon as they sit down in front of the room, they start clicking and moving stuff around. What are you doing there like? Well, I've got all these tools and light room I'm going to use. Well, if you don't have a plan, you don't know where you're gonna end up. And if your goal is to just adventure and journey land, that's great. I mean, sometimes I go on a road trip, drives my wife crazy, but I was like, where we're going, we don't know. We're gonna drive until we get back home. We're gonna we're just gonna go. She's like, how long we gonna be gone for my long enough that we should take the dog, but not so long. that we worry about the cats so so that you do that sometimes. But in this organization to get to the workflow, we need we write it down, you're going to see big gaps than when you implement to you write it down and start implementing Be like Oh my gosh, I didn't realize I made an assumption that gets me from a to B on a piece of paper that I don't yet have resolved and you can fix that. The other reason to do that is you don't have to back anything out in that workflow when it's on paper. You haven't committed to the process yet, so it's just a way to kind of create a check and balance in my classes. When I sit down, one on one with people are we have smaller groups and we actually get to interact that way. That's the first thing we do that's right out. Our work flows. It's gonna want paper. Let sharing. Let's look at him was collaborate on those to come forward so consistent, reliable and write it down before you start a couple other two, particularly with light room, a couple of things we need to think about it. Are you working locally on Lee? Are you working remotely with files and bringing them back? Or do you have a mobile using light room CC and you're doing some kind of mobile hybrid peas. You need to take that account into your workflow as well, because if you're only working locally, you shoot, you come back, you don't ever radius out. You don't travel a lot. You have one computer at home, one catalogue at home plugging your files and the important that's one workflow. But when you're traveling, if you've got a catalogue that has half a 1,000,000 originals, do you want a hall, your entire network with you, your entire external hard drives with you all your backups with you? Do you need those? If you're traveling or if you're traveling, can you work in a travel catalogue and bring just that catalog back and organized that we're gonna talk about catalogs and collections and all that later but thinking ahead of time about how do you actually work in? What do you actually need? And again, you've got to be honest with yourself. I used to travel with my entire catalog until it got too big that I can't get it on a hard drive without a raid array because I was convinced I needed all of those photographs. No, What I needed was the photographs I was taking on the trip I was on. I wasn't like, Oh, wow. Sitting in the hotel room, I'm in Paris and I'm like, Oh, man, I really wish I could look at those bad photographs I took six years ago. We were in my lab room catalogue when I was interested in was kind of got a look at these photos from Paris and see what I get where I'm going tomorrow and nothing about the old catalog. So my world, by accepting the fact that I was not doing something, allowed me the freedom to change my work flow in a way that work more efficiently for me. And it was around this local remote kind of question. So I think that's another big thing to consider and think about, Okay, before we actually get into the other world, I wanted to address the hard drive backup question. This is probably one of the biggest questions I think photographers have. And if you're not a tech person, and you step into this space. It gets convoluted and difficult pretty quickly. So I wanted to make this a simple is possible. And I don't want to spend a huge amount of time on specific drives and raid arrays and back up procedures. But I do want to get a foundational thing for you to think about as well in your workflow. You take pictures with your camera. You have one copy of that photograph. You drop that camera into the river, you drop it onto the concrete camera explodes, the memory card gets damaged, photos are gone. You have 11 copy. Basically, when we get it back to the computer and we copy off the memory card and we put it on the hard drive for the first time, we have two copies. We're now in at least a safety position of having a backup. I never considered myself having a photograph until I have the backup. And the reason for that is if something goes wrong, we'll have it now. I'm paranoid enough. Actually, I'm paranoid enough sometimes that I'll switch memory cards during the day. Like if I get something Where I'm out shooting. I'm like, Holy cow! That's amazing. Um, I might pull the memory card and put a different memory card in and shoot it again on a different memory card. Just so I have some redundancy there. Sometimes I have not. All my cameras and my cameras have dual card slots, and I'll double right the data to both cards if I'm paranoid. Other times it's like maybe sad to lose that landscaper sunset, but I could live with it until I get back to a hotel. When I was shooting film and when I am shooting film, that's my scariest time is when I've got the film. There's a large format photographer. I took six sheets of film out for a 12 hour shooting day. If anything goes wrong, I drop it pops open, it's gone and I only have six. So it's like it's really commit a precious commodity. So I'm in that same stay until I get it developed and get a print made. I mean that staying paranoid state. So I want to get to this back and know what's really, really cool is companies in the Western Digital C Gate who are making hard drives want us to spend more money, which is great, because now we can actually get little hard drives that actually have memory card slots in, um, and we just in the field back up right there and feeling if you're traveling, it's a great way to get back up. So we're seeing some opportunities come up the solve this problem before we get in the light room. But at a minimum, we've got to get that second copy. Now, I consider ourselves backed up when I've got three copies. So when people ask Mary get backed up. What that means is I have three copies of the file. So in this scenario, I haven't reformatted my memory card on the camera yet. So I have one copy there. I've copied it toe one hard drive, my second copy. And then that goes under my backup hard drive, which is my third copy when it comes to buying hard drives. What I like to do is look at how much information I have today. And then I look at how fast in my growing my date us my data. So if you're a photographer who shoots every day, all of the time and you come back and every day you're adding, you know, a gigabyte of photographs so you can go through, figure out Why had 30 gigs a month? How much is that? A year and terabytes. How big mitts data my gonna need, How much storage am I gonna need? And I always like to have my hard drives with double the anticipated data for the next year or two if I can get two years out of it, I like to do that. The reason for that is that means I don't have to switch hard drives as much. I can grow into my storage space in the difference between by in a two terabyte hard drive and a four terabyte hard drive is about $ $25 still $25. I'm a working artist. When I was in I T director, $25 is like has artist I'm like, That's cheap tuna face or good tuna fish. So I want I want a better hard the most I can get for my money so I'll go buy that bigger, hard drive. Four terabytes means I've got double the gross. If I'm on one terabyte, and by the end of the year, I think I'm gonna be a to I want to buy for my backup drive would then be the same size. So would be a four terabytes. It's backing up. The same amount of data is that's how I calculate the size I need. When my data got bigger than one hard drive would hold, I moved to a raid array, which is combining multiple drives into one, and it provides some redundancy. There. Rate stands for, ah, redundant array of independent disk, and what that allows you to do is go by 54 terabyte hard drives and turn him into a 16 terabyte drive or a 12 terabyte drive on your configuration. 10 depend on your configuration, but you get compress those into one. So is your drive needs grow as you shoot more. The same thing applies, though that second hard drive now is just a raid array, and the next piece might have to be another raid array for the backup. So that's the piece. I'm just consistently growing, and it's a part of the process of photography, of your creating a lot of photographs I mean, And if you have it, I had the pleasure of working or going into a house or in a state sale of somebody who was a photographer in the film days. You go in and open a cabinet like the size of this table, and it will be full of photo albums. Name that. That's this model. In the old days, it was just photo out mantra photo album after photo album, and they just bought more photo albums. Hard drives. Ultimately, I like to get into this state hard drive, working drive for my photos actually live that I work off. The backup happens, they might back up. Back up. Happened was truly the backup. Now that bad, that 3rd 1 might be the cloud, so I might back up. Then I might go. I've got enough data. I stored it Dropbox or Microsoft er, Amazon or Google or back Blaze or whoever else stores A lot of data, but I get it off site and that's mine. That's really my insurance policy. And that 3rd 1 whether it's cloud or an actual hard drive, that one. I don't want to live in the house, so the first to get to live in the house. The next one doesn't live in the house, and this is the other mistake I see people make is they just leave it everything at the house. That 3rd 1 is your insurance policy. So it is the catastrophe planning. If the house brings down, somebody breaks in and steals all your computer equipment. Lightning strike. It's the house and shorts that all the computer equipment everything's plugged in. Ah ah, Flood happens. Tornado happens. Earthquake happens. If it's in the same building, they're all gonna be gone. So even if you just had a neighbor, you trusted your like, Hey, can I bring her driven or you take it toe work or just get it somewhere else physically, somewhere else and that the cloud might work for that. Now, if you've got a lot of photographs I have in my light room catalogue, if I'm honest with myself, I've got 100 150 photographs that would just destroy me to lose outside my family photographs. That's my core, like, truly, the ones that I love. They're not even necessarily my most business valuable ones, the ones that sell most but These are the ones that I emotionally connect with. So even if you had a lot and you're like, I don't want to pay for a lot of cloud storage, find the ones that matter the most. We're gonna talk about building collections later. Build yourself a little collection that has your most important photographs and just back back collection up. So at least you have the things that really matter. So that's the little piece on the harder. Like I said, we could spend a lot of time figuring out moving, backing up lots of programs for that. But at a minimum, when you figure out your workflow consistent, reliable, repeatable, make sure you get the backup peace to that.