Lessons

Lesson Info

Designing Albums Fast Part 1

First thing we have to do is highlight room and go to smart albums and here's the welcome screen, welcome to smart albums. All I need to do is create another project. I'm going to choose a company, and these are all the companies that we have available to us, and yet the think of smart albums, not just a program that is helping you design you're also thinking of it as people who are busily finding out what the crazy requirements of your album and your book producers are and figuring them out, figure out the crops and the bleeds, and this and that and the gutters and everything they're figuring all that out, and they're taking it out of your hands and making it possible for you to just design, and it just works so they're they're constantly in contact with these people, taking care of what is the trim and what is the bleed, and when you do, a ten inch album is really ten inches or is nine point seven eight, you know? And they're figuring all that out, so all we have to do is choose the ...

specific vendor we want to use and what size a book we want to use and whether we wanted to be a vertical horizontal or a square, so I'm going to do a twelve by twelve album. Here and we're going to use white house custom color and I'm going to go down the album type and I get two different types of paper with them if I chose a different so like let's say I went there's a couple book vendors I use kiss books is one of those they do a fantastic job, but if you look at the cover type that's it they're very simple and so they do one thing on dh they do it very well if I was going to go to couture book couture book is a very interesting documentary very beautiful coffee table books they feel very much like a fired on type book there you can't match their quality when you're trying to create something that looks it's like an ansel adams coffee table book on dh those that you just have the one choice and then the sizes there, but when you come down to someone like white house custom color, they're giving you a couple different choices so they give me a premium lester or they give you a premium luster paper or all paper types except premium luster so you choose between them so we'll choose a premium luster paper will choose twelve by twelve we're going to leave all the cover types available and the room we're going to hit next when we do that it's going to ask us what you know what kind of design style we want to deal with and these it's it's a it's based on templates so they have I forget what they said but and I don't want to like this isn't gospel truth but I swear it was like one hundred thousand templates or some astronomically huge number of templates are in there and then all of them are coded so that it knows if you give me three images two verticals and a horizontal it will then look through those and find them and it will look at your order of yours and they'll say ok, got that in the time line has got two horizontal and vertical, so I want a template that has two horizontal and vertical in that same timeline look and but it's doing some really intelligent work in order to try and match your images that you're asking it to design to the template so it's it's a very template based system but you can tell it to use all templates orjust templates without square frames so that it's never cropping anything or you can do on ly templates with a three by two frame ratio like you you khun change all of those for you I just like to do all templates because then it gives me all the options available to me I can choose borders, so if I want a little key line border around, everything will leave it a quarter of an inch on dh then you can choose how big a gap you want between images of images of together do you want twelve points the part you want twenty four points how much do you want them apart from each other and then you can also change the background color and decide you know what? What kind of color to want the background to be so there's a lot of different options here but we're just going to go kind of with their basic and hit start and then it asks me where I'm going to put it so where should I put it? I'm gonna put it in the album production folder right next to the altman wedding book and so I'm going to change the name here and the name is going to be altman wedding book design okay, so there's my wedding book design and I'm going to hit save it has saved a little project folder right next to the photos that is going to use for those so it's loading those right now and now there it is it's got all of the information about my album design are my album printer and it's got a nem p canvas for me and what I need to do now is tell it what folder I'm going to be working from so I'm going to go to my pictures boulder to my album productions and I'm gonna grab that folder and I'm gonna drag it into here not onto the canvas but right into here into this little great timelines so I grab those folder that folder and this is what now this is smart albums way of making a connection point, so I'm making the connection point and it is now importing those photos into smart albums and now light room has a connection point to that folder and smart albums has a connection point to that folder, so now they're talking so we just have to wait for those to come in and as soon as they come in, I'm going to start designing my album and we're going to time me and see if I can design this album in a total of five and a half minutes now you guys are welcome to comment and ask questions all you like, we're going to try and make this as fast as we can. Those of you on the internet watch have fun watching ask questions if you want to ask questions, we can try and relate them forward, but I could promise you five and a half images for there are five and a half minutes for designing an album is quite a process to do so I may not actually answer you all that much, okay, we want you focused we've got a lot of focus a little bit all right, okay, all right now I'm going to know there's something I'm gonna notice right away here and that is that I forgot to rename these images in such a way that they would come out to be in order of where I wanted him to be. So when you when you export your images, make sure that you're exporting in a named order so that then when they're when that's done by name it will it will show them you know, from start to finish but right now I'm seeing them in the time so if I do it by file name then it's you know, this is image number seven when I was in new york and this is image thirteen on the grand canyon and so they're kind of going back and forth together but if I do it by time taken then see how it changes the organization there so now all of those are the new york ones are at the end and that's how I want them to be, so if you do it by file name, it doesn't work and so with this I need to highlight all of these so I'm gonna have to scan through and highlight these and remove them from this I'm just gonna okay I took him out of the timeline because I had to reorganize my name's here so that they were in the right order before I start the process highlight all of these and then dragged them into that timeline so now they're available in timeline, they're not here. So this is your total collection. This is your time line and this is your canvas. And by the way, let me act. Women make you to this before we start, you'll notice that this is going to be where all of the the album is started, starts to be produced. You'll see all of this spreads happening here. This is a time line for you to look at your images in the order they were created or whatever order you named them down. Here is obviously every image, but if you were to import a siri's of folders, so if you have, if you encounter or the folder with many folders in it, it would actually automatically make this into, uh, that button right there. That is the folder that I imported. It gets the name from that. But if I had sub folders in there, it would show me a whole bunch of those folders so that I could have, you know, getting ready could be one folder and details could be another folder so I could separate them out. And then I could just say all I want a portrait and the on ly deal with the portrait session images, so I can I can further make those different and give them different categories of I want but for me designing an album is about telling a story start to finish and so I want to see all the images together I don't I'm not goingto separate him out by what they are all right you ready? Well, the question is are you ready? I don't know if I'm ready but I'm gonna I'm gonna work on you right? I'm going to set your timer and we're setting for five minutes and thirty seconds but hopefully you will beat that I hope I will and I am going to say go all right so I'm gonna look for moments that are the same so I'm looking for sections and I'm cutting ideas so these air ideas here that I want to have and then I hears him getting ready and now her is getting her dress on and now this is kind of the waiting right here this is heading out to the canyon and this is her talking to the people on the canyon and this is them working so this is him waiting for her and now she's coming and so we want to show that much of that and then this is kind of the moment they see each other so that's a really good moment there and then I want to come down here and look for that's them getting ready for the wedding and then this one I kind of like the whole thing on its own so you can see everything this is that good like this there listening to her so let's just do those two together this is that all right good they're looking here um oh now see this I want this to be included with this I'm gonna grab it and drag it across that timeline and now it's in that spread and then I want this one on its own just a piece of art it'sjust auto populating that's right it's looking for the best possible design from it and it's making it's doing everything it can to make a spread from it with an appropriate template see now this one I don't want it to be full on gonna drag it right there now this is the groom's page you're a very nice bases in the gutter keeping faces out of the gun out right now what we're doing is we're deciding what the scenes are so we're on lee looking for scenes here so there's the scene scene setters that's what we're looking for um another piece of art there's a portrait stuff couple more portrait's how we doing on time let me check three minutes left oh man keep moving let's see who will not distract this guy has got to go over here because he's part of that whole scene this one's good than these three could go together and then these two right here can actually I could grab this one and drag it over to that one see how it pulls me back to that scene because I want all of this to be kind of together go on let's, grab here's some details I can take this one over here and then we're gonna take details here there's fun happening on then that's kind of there everybody signed that and now we're into their shoot in new york and I want this to be the first image so that shows kind of a section break and then we'll do a couple of these and then these two here and then these two right there and then we'll do all the subway shots and then we'll do this one and then those two let's grab this spread here so take that spread. We're gonna go over here with it and so now that spread over party oh, I gotta cut it. Okay? So now that's not okay, so that's the total design almost done and then it's just a matter of scanning through them and looking to see if there's a different type of design. So I'm just going to kind of amusing the arrow keys I'm in a cycle through these and if I want something different, I'm just going to go through and change them and then I want to move this on over a little bit because I like them both square and then I'm going to start moving through the designs I like that one ninety seconds ninety seconds if I want to change through the designs I'm gonna go looking for new designs like this one but I need to move that right like that for this one over here uh scan through that's good that's good like those they're like in the white space they're liking the white space all right let's go with the white space more white space so but you notice how I'm just kind of cycling through and then if I if I see one that I don't like that well I think that one's fine there's there's one over here that I don't like like this one didn't necessarily like the design of it and so I want to just cycle through and look for other designs that might do I like that better so now I just need to reframe this one up a little bit so that we can see what's going on there thirty seconds on dh so in here there was one back here where they were looking the wrong direction um so I just want to find that one keep going like that that's good I think that's all pretty good now let's change this one up there like that better um done. What do we get? Ten seconds to spare with seconds to spare so five minutes and twenty zach, please tour a pretty dang good album design and it's all based on templates now a lot of people wiggles are too are too comes up so a lot of people look at that and think, well, wait a second salt templates I have like, one hundred thousand templates or something like that like some insane amount of templates and they're all done by a really pretty good designer like someone who's that's they hired a designer to design all of the different possible templates, and then they have this computer is looking for the possible matches for it. And then if you you specifically want to look at all of your options, you come up when you float over the the the spread you can look up here and that little dot dot the little squares. If you click on that, all of your design options come up and you could just cycle through, see that so that's, how you find so these air non exact matches and these air exact matches that exactly match the specific crop for my photos, so they exactly matched my crop. I like that one a lot, so I click on it and now that has changed so I could beam or specific about it and less random by simply going here click on here and then we move through the images like this or if you just use the arrows if you come back to here if you just use the arrows the arrows cycle up and down through the different designs that match it but when you go here you can also look at all the non exact matches to see if something you know maybe like that one it's not an exact match but when I click on it it's pretty good and so I can see that you know this one might need to you know change because it it changed the order of them but in this case it doesn't matter having the order changed is no and then if I decide well this one should be in this spot I congratulate her and put it here and they swap and then I could just scan through so that's the process of designing album so what you've just done is in five and a half minutes you have created a storyline for the album and most of the work has been done. Then you can go in and tweak a little bit and work on it but here's where it really gets interesting so let's go to say this image again our favorite little front image now let's not do that one let's do this one here I want that black and white so let's say I want that black and white I'm going to go backto light room now this is where a second monitor comes in really handy because you have two monitors then you have your album on this side and you have light room on this side and so you're looking at the pictures you simply scan over here inside of your published service I all I have to do is click into my published service and look had all those images and this is the image that I want in black and white so I turn it to black and white it tells me this needs to rear published, but the problem with this is that it's, it's green and white so I've got to do a little bit extra work to it, so I need to come up here and I need to I need to go into the develop module with it and I need to work on this because I don't want it to be a green and white image, so I'm going to go in tio my everyday favorites and I'm going to remove a split tone so there's no split tone on it but also seen notice it's still green and white that means that I've got a tone curve issue in the point curve see that I've been messing with the point curve and so I need to reset this point curve or turn it off and now it's fine so I just turned it off that way I'm in the keep in mind that when you're working inside of light room and you have something that you worked really hard on but for a specific use you want to get rid of that thing like say grain or whatever turn it off don't reset it turn it off and it will now function as though it doesn't have it that way when later on you want it back you can just turn it back on okay so I'm gonna turn this off now it's a pure black and white I need to do a little adjustment cause once you have black and white you lose the color so you need to do a little bit extra works on there brighten up the shadows and I'm going to take the blacks down a little bit once I've done that I'm going to go back to my publisher is so let's go back into the grid see how it's modified and he's republished I just hit publish and it's what it's doing is it's going into that folder and replacing it but when I look over on the right hand screen where my album is it's already black and white and so now I'm interacting between the two because smart albums is constantly referring to that folder to see what's there and it's constantly looking at those j pegs so this is something that wasn't in the software in january and now is in the software now that's how quickly they made that adjustment and so we were able to take this from a really amazing program to something that's amazing and it talks the light room and so now you can work on them both together at the same time amazing and so now you just simply scroll through the album and look at your photos and you're looking for connections and say ok all those black and white that's good like all that all that see if there's anything that needs to be changed about photos or retouched about photos and do that work on the photos so for instance these that one's darker than these two so now I would go back in the light room no and I would scan down and look for those photos so there they are so remember that it's this one and it's this one so it's this one and this one and I just need to highlight both of them I'm in the grid here so I can go over to my quick developed and all I need to do is bring the exposure down just a little bit and now they are right here and if you don't want to have it keep popping up there just go up to your collection that has those same images innit so go to our album and you just you could just work on him there and it it'll just stay stable and then as soon as you're done working on images, you can then just go and republish him so you just keep your keep your published services right here and then every time you feel like you want to see what it's done, you just right click that altman wedding book and re publish it and you don't have to go to the publishers to do it. You just right, click it, publish it and now it'll go soon as we go back to that monitor. So it's just finished that. And when we go back to that monitor those air now darker so they maps that better and if you have them onto screens, then you can just constantly compare the two together and that's designing the album. Now any questions about that? I know that it was a very quick design and you had to watch fast, but I had to work faster. Yeah, ten questions. So images by sarah would like to know could this album now be exported out toe photoshopped toe add design elements, borders, backgrounds and textures, etcetera? Absolutely. So all you have to do is go to the file and export, and when you export the album spreads, you can act on it right now, it's telling me that I designed to big of ah of an album for for white house custom color to build. So I would have to go in and delete a few spreads. But I'm in a nor the limitations, and it asks me to on export for print or for proofing by export. For print, I can choose j pegs. Pdf or psd. And if I, if I export a psd, exports everything in layers so that every single picture is a different layer on a spread. That's the right size, so that then you can do borders, backgrounds. And, more importantly, you khun type. Text things like that.