Lessons

Lesson Info

Smart File Management

And and here's a really interesting tip for you if I open up these files I have multiple ways to manage my files the first the first thing that I can use is the actual folder area inside of light room so if you look at this folder area right here there you go those were the things that I have to do because they're there so whatever's present inside of light room needs to be done it's a to do list and once I'm done then I'm going to remove them from this to do list and they will go to the archive drive and so this basically if you have a long list that you have to scroll through then you were taking too long to do your job it should look like this it should be a very small list of things that need to be done get him done get him to the archive they don't wait here for the client so for instance if your wedding photographer and you have to wait for a client to select images for an album or something like that you don't wait for the client to select images and have them clutter up your to...

do list you finish the job and deliver everything to the client that can be delivered then it waits in the archive it waits in the archive and when the client finally comes back and says I want to order an album that's when you open up the archived version of the job and work on those files and get them out of the client get you know the album done or whatever it waits on the archive it doesn't wait inside of your realm okay? This is your desk and you don't want clutter up your desk with stuff that you're waiting for six months for someone to come back to you okay? So we definitely want to keep this small but the other thing that I've done and I think this is really useful is I've used color codes you see all these color codes here those color codes are really important to my work flow because I can open up a drive immediately and I wish that light room would allow us to color code the files but they want to keep it so pristine and clean but they won't let you do it but I want them to just allow like little color tags on the folders but see these color tags they mean something they're not just random color tags so I'm gonna zoom in here and show you this this right here is the color tag option if you view right click the on a mac if you right click up here you can customize that tool bar and you can tell it to have the color tabs there but if I drop this down see that red means urgent oranges in progress yellow is to deliver greenest for review for me like that means like review for like portfolio work and stuff like that clean up to archive and to delete so anything that's grey means I could delete it at any time because I've already backed it up and I know it's safe, but I'm choosing to keep it here for some purpose in our case because I want to show it to you, but I can delete it. The orange ones are things I'm currently actually working on, so these air in progress, the green one is for me to review so I can and you can actually change the the names of those files in your think it's in your finder preferences where it is, yeah see labels and you could just name those labels I don't know if pc has an ability like this or not, but if it doesn't, it should so those color labels means something for me and the beauty of it is I can come into this into my organization here and I can tell it to organize them by label and now I have a label system that tells me, oh, these are the things you can delete this is what you need to do for internal review, these things, they're in progress you need clean this one up and these have no labels on them so I haven't um all I have to do is open up my folder and I can see what do I need to do to oh that one is red it's urgent get it done so I have the ability to quickly see what I need to do that's really important to have two how many studios have you gone into? Where there's a whiteboard and then that whiteboard has like this needs to get done this is you know, write the whiteboard this is my white board but instead of duplicating it here and you know like everyone has like a white board here and then they have a checklist here and then they have a checklist on their phone and like none of those air ever synchronized and so like you have to check it off here and then check it off there and check it out there I just have it here so when I open up my file tells me what needs to be done when I open up light room light room tells me what needs to be done right? So it's it's just an intuitive to do list once it's done it will be removed from their put on the archives so it no longer needs to be done okay, so that is the way I assess what I need to accomplish is through what's inside of my light room folder area and also what what those color labels are inside of the finder now the mavericks the new mavericks allows you also over here in the left hand column toe put those labels and it will show you those labels as well on dh so you can see it from over here rather than just in this fashion here but the thing I don't like about mavericks which is funny because mavericks allows you to put different color labels like you can put green and red on a folder I hate that I don't want that I want one thing because they can't have it in progress and to delete at the same time so I had to like check one and check the other off it's annoying to me so I don't know there's a way to like go back so I noticed that my laptop was just where I mostly work die having put mavericks on it I have mavericks on my home computer my office computer but I don't have it here because I really actually don't like mavericks all that much I wish I did because I love dancing I haven't upgraded yet I'm still staked the hang on just hang a lot okay good thank you all the other thing by the way if you are thinking about advancing the mavericks is it slows adobe products down it literally does my my laptop is faster than my I haven't a brand new twenty seven inch fastest solid state drive the best I'm act that they make and it's five times ten times slower than my laptop because on mavericks, mavericks just hills and I don't know what it is we've gone around and around I've been with adobe have been with I've taken it to the mac store and it literally like you'll just to go from one photo to another photo which takes no effort was whoever just to cycle from like to go like this to go from this to that one like see how instant that goes on mavericks it will take a second maybe a second and a half to do the same thing I don't know what it is but mavericks is not a great place right now, so I'm just saying don't go to patrick's yet um I would wait till the next one until they bulls or whatever it is that they don't know what they're going to go cow that they didn't need it mac os cow okay sloth they're your cousin that's that's the new name for it. Okay um so let's import a job because that's the beginning of your workflow is importing thatjob um and by the way we're goingto let me show you one more schematic really quickly before we even go there on dh that is the actual pipeline so this is a a visual description of things that have to be done to a file say a wedding or a portrait it's a lot of stuff but it's important that you write it down and if you don't want to write it down I already have and so just download this and print it out and look through it and then you could kind of adjust it to yourself and change it for your own needs but for me everything comes from that cf card up here in the top left corner and and the and the pipeline is going to come through the cf card into the working drive into that job's folder in tow untitled folders and the reason I haven't untitled folder for every card so if I have ten cards from a wedding I put ten folders into the raw holder so I make her off older and then make ten folders inside of that it's very easy to make those by the way a lot of people go what ten folders so if I'm going to make my dry are my my job I'm gonna hit command our shift command end and that creates a folder and then I'm going to call it two thousand fourteen oh four what is the date? The twenty fourth underscore platt underscore c l test that's the job then I'm going to create shift command and another folder inside of that folder so click on that folder I think we're having a connection issue let me do this I'm gonna do it on here so that I don't waste any time. So if we were creating this job inside of the jobs folder on our computer instead we're gonna hit new two thousand fourteen oh four twenty four underscore platt underscore c l test and then we're going to create a new folder call that raw and then inside of the raw folder we're going to create a brand new set of folders, those untitled folders if you were to just right click and hit new folder, it would create an untitled folder and then you have to click on it again and then do the same thing that's annoying. So I go into the list view and then once you're on the list for you, you can just hit command, shift and and just keep pushing that button over and over. And so, however many cards you haven't a stack that's, how many folders you put in, then you take your card on you, put it into your card reader and that card's going to come up and then at that point you just simply choose folder one grab this one so this is the card we want to import these photos if you hold the altar, the option key down, when you drag it, it will see that plus button is showing up that little plus button tells you it's going to copy the entire contents of the card into the folder if you just drag it without holding the option key down, it gives you an arrow. An arrow is not copying an arrow is referencing. So it's going to it's not actually copying anything hold the option key down the plus button appears let go and it's going to copy and there's only two photos on the cards copied him really fast, but I'm going to now inject that card. We no longer need it and now we have that job ready to import into light room. And the job is the test as a raw folder and it has twenty nine of cards. Just it was a really big event, really big test, so twenty nine folders for twenty nine cards and you would just simply plug in as many cards as you can at one time, I can actually get five cards plugged in at one time because I have two of those lexar double card readers and then I have one internal so I can if I have that many cards, I can plug in five at a time and just and they did not to wait for him, so a lot of people let light room import their their photos don't do that. Because light room is slow about moving the files so it's much faster just to plug him in like we did and do it here just grab the folder option click and drag it and just do that all of your cards and then let them in let them actually copy onto your computer once they've been copied onto your computer then in light room we will go we'll go to light room and we will go to the import dialog box and we will look for and we're going this is on our inside of our users terry plan c so it's in the jobs folder and there it is right there it's just two photos and at this point we're importing but notice up here at the top we're adding them we're not moving them we're not copying them we're not copying him is the dmg were simply adding them into our light room catalogue so it's looking at where they are and it's going to then reference those but it's not moving him anywhere then we're going to come over here to the left hand side and this is the file handling area where we need to decide what's going to happen in order for us to do things quickly in our workflow we need to build our one for one previews one for one previews allows to zoom in and zoom out without that little spinning thing that says we're waiting to build a preview very important because if you're spending a lot of time waiting for your computer to spend, then you're doing everything wrong, okay? Computers don't wait for you don't wait for your computers computers should wait on you, right? They're they're supposed to make things faster for you and so you build the one for one previews and then also we build the smart previews and we'll talk about why we're doing that tomorrow but build the smart previews it's in your best interest in most cases, some cases, maybe not, so we'll talk about that tomorrow, but build the smart previews and then you can also apply any develop settings, so we're going to talk about that later on today. In the third section, we'll talk about why you might add a preset as you're importing and then metadata, we'll go to metadata and choose our for two thousand fourteen copyright again everything inside of light room there are a lot of preset options everywhere you can make presense because they'll save you a ton of time, so this is all it's doing is just adding my copyright information for the year two thousand fourteen to the files on dh you can edit that just down here and choose what kind of meta data you want to put on the photos so it's going to tag all those photos and then we also want to add keywords because later on we're going to have to add keywords anyway so in this area we're going to add the key words there there that are common to all the photos that were working on so if it's wedding we would add wedding arizona phoenix royal palm's uh and that's about it just you know basic stuff you don't put in bride because the bride's not in every shot in this case have to photos I know exactly what's on them so I could just say color checker pass port I really don't need to keep where these photos but since we're talking about the wedding photos I'm yours and I'm going to say test so those are two things I know are on every photo it's a test shooting a color check her passport and so I'm gonna hit tab our enter and that enters so now the keywords are going too and this is a key phrase, by the way. So if as spaces those air keep phrases which is different than a keyword keyword is one specific word and then it could be added to any other word in a key phrase google sees as a much more home specific things, so for instance, if I said grand space canyon space wedding, google would see that very differently than grand comma canyon comma wedding because it might come up as grand cayman weddings and I might end up on that list right. But if I have a key phrase than google really knows what I'm trying to say, this image is because now it's it's not going to be searching for just grand orjust canyon, or just wetting it, saying that's, a phrase that needs to be searched for. So then I'm gonna hit import, and now, it's, just simply adding a reference to those photos. And if I go to it now, um, so inside my pictures folder in the jobs folder, there is a test right there. So now they're inside of light room, ready for us to work on them. Obviously, we won't be doing a lot of work on these photos, but later on today, we're going to talk about calibration. So might as well have them available to us and ready to go so that we can do a calibration later on today.