Lessons

Lesson Info

Web Proofing Workflow

Today we are discussing ah lot of the little, uh, plug in work flows that we need to deal with, like, for instance, building an album we need to make slide shows work with video things like that other things that we do inside of our workflow that don't necessarily have to be done but their additional things that can be done and we want to find the fastest way and the best way the most logical way to do things and so we're gonna plug those in to our workflow now remember, on day one way went through the entire process from start to finish so we brought it air images in we worked on it, we selected him, we've adjusted him, and then we archived them after we would deliver them to the client on dh delivering the client could be in a lot of different ways. So this morning we want to talk about delivering to the client. How do we do that and how do we do it best? So first I want to discuss the idea of delivering proofing to the client. How do I get things out to the client? Now I know that b...

ob you you deliver online to your clients you bring in people, take portrait ce than when they leave you deliver online and then they get to look through their proofs online and then they tell you how you know what images they want and that's when you do they ever come back into the studio, though as well? Or is it mostly okay? Mostly online? No, mostly online. So I I assume on ginny, you you deliver via web pages as well. Don't you like you online portfolio clank online gallery for that. Right? Okay. Um, what about you online? Online? Okay, so most it seems like most people deliver online today. It's that's just common it's I think it's what the client expects and I think it's what's easiest for the photographer, especially since most photographers are not in a studio that's just the nature of tyre for most photographers are shooting on location there's no need for studio and so they are in an office at home or they're in an office somewhere else but there's no studio involved there's no sense in the client coming in. A lot of my clients are from different places in the world or in the in the country, and so they don't come into my studio because they don't live near me on dh. So I deliver online and that's where my online portfolio or my online services come in. Now I have a portfolio, but then I also have a delivery service so my portfolio is on live books and that's where people you know, discover me and find my images, but when I'm delivering images to the client I'm delivering them on smugmug smugmug has the absolute best conduit toe light room and incidentally I mean they have a beautiful web site as well don't get me wrong that the website is beautiful on dh everything about it is really nice and it's intuitive and the client can use it really well and it connects to my printing house, which is white house custom color so if someone orders a print it goes to my favorite printer and my favorite printer sends it directly to them so it all works very well, but the most beautiful thing about smugmug is that it is the best connection, the light room and you think that's an odd reason to choose a web client delivery service is for its connection to light room you'd think that people who like well, I wanted to look interesting or I wanted to have these functionalities for the client or whatever no, I would even if smugmug hadn't been as beautiful to look at or hadn't been as functional for the client, I still would have chosen smugmug because of its connection to the light room and that's because it creates complete seamless delivery from light room to the client and and for me that efficiency is absolutely essential so I'm gonna I'm gonna deliver this a portrait shoot that I did with my clients in new york city, so you'll you'll notice some of the pictures behind us here, like the one of the grand canyon here and the two over here, one of them's, the grand canyon, and then this is the new york print, and these prints were made by white house custom color as well. But we have the wedding at the grand canyon, but they live in new york, and so I went to new york to do there their portrait selecting and get it it's, not an engagement portrait, but of wedding portrait in new york. I've done engagement portrait's in new york, but I thought I'd be interesting to do wedding portrait's in new york, and so we did their wedding portrait's inside in new york walked around the brooklyn bridge and stuff like that? Well, I'm going to post these images right now so that you can see the process of posting I remember when we built our catalogue when we first built our catalog yesterday and we made our template catalog. We connected all of our services before we instituted the catalogue, so we never used the catalogue until we put all of our services into it, and if you haven't done this, you need to do this. You need to you need to stop your work and connect all your services to your main catalog if you're a working catalogue kind of person like I am where you have lots of different jobs coming in and out just just connect that working catalog, but if you are a one catalog per job type of person you need to stop you need to make a template catalogue and then you're going to start working from that template catalogue every time you build a new catalogue, but you need to connect the services because you don't want to have to keep connecting every time so down bolos inside of light room you have the folder area here, which is what showing all of the stuff on your disk those air actual physical locations inside of your hard drive. The collections area is where you grab stuff that you want to work on and put them there it's not for organizing images at the base root level that's what you do in the folders so when you when you finish working on a job like we talked about on monday when you finish working on a job, you're going to organize them into individual folders so put your selected images into the select folder so that they're all congregated together physically that way someday in the future, if you're not using light room, you still know where your select sar andi you rejects khun go in there folder if you want to use folders to denote getting ready versus you know ceremony shots or if you wanted to know family photos versus children's photos or whatever you khun divide those up physically inside of your computer by the folders area the collections is more for this is a little set of photos that I want to work on temporarily right now and so you'll notice that I collected thirty two photos here inside of a collection called n y the original shoot has eighty two images that were finally selected, but I'm just going to deliver thirty two photos up to the website for viewing so I have all of my two star and above images here inside of this collection so I'm collecting stuff for a purpose once I've collected those things for a purpose and I can highlight all of them and you notice that there are some additional shots here there's sixty to sixty five and sixty five again hear this this whole set right here I'm gonna look at those three so this is a kiss shot and this is just them looking at each other I like them looking at each other better then I like them kissing but I'm going to leave both because maybe they like to see kiss rather than just looking at each other I prefer to just see that almost kiss in fact, most of the time when I'm when I'm doing portrait of ah, bride and groom, I will ask them to get close and I'll say, don't kiss, just make him think you're gonna kiss him and that's that's the magic moment right there is that anticipation that's the part that's love and the excitement and that creates beautiful smiles and stuff like that because she starts toying with him and then something magical happens there the kiss can sometimes be a little bit awkward looking, especially if they go really into that kiss, then it's like, I don't want to see that, so so you know it's or they or if they're if they're if they're pucker kissers lately go like that, then they face looks weird because it's like lines and puckers, and so the almost kiss is far better than the kiss s o that I prefer that the the almost kiss here but there's two almost kisses here one is a regular sized image, and the other one is an enlarged image for a big canvas that's on their wall zeal to enlarge it before you print it that's why they're two in there, so in that regard, I'm going to go to the the tiff image, which is the enlarged image and that one I don't need to put up online because it's it's a big enlargement so I'm gonna hit delete it's not going to delete it from the folder it's deleting it from this collection so that it's not going up online the same true here I don't like it I like the black and white version of this so I'm going to get rid of that one so I'm just going through and making sure I'm not doing any duplicate type work. So there's a copy for some reason that one oh, I know why that one's a copy if you look at the two of these I did one for an instagram and one for regular s o I prefer the square version of it and so I'm going to delete this version of it so I just kind of scan through and is this what I want to deliver? Yes it's what I want to deliver so now I'm going to highlight all these images and I need to make a published service for them. So my smugmug published services where I deliver everything to the client and so I'm going to connect into it via the published service so I don't have to go because otherwise I would have to export thes is j pegs then I would have to go to the web and I would have to open up my web portal I go sign into my website and then I'd have to go on upload images and then I would organize my images and put them into the you know, categories that I want them to be and tell it how I wanted to show and then and then hit published or or maybe it doesn't automatically at that point, but whatever that that's, an annoying process. Instead, what I'm going to do is go into this client area here and right click and create a new gallery, but I want to create two different galleries. I want to create a folder and then to galleries within that folder so that I can have, like, my absolute favorites and then everything else, so I'm going to create, and you asked me on ginny about thie do I use the folders now for because I used to say favorites and then everything else, so I had two folders in the folder area that would to know these are my favorites, and this is everything else that I'm delivering, and I told you, I don't do that anymore, because now I can do it here inside the published service, so I don't actually have to congregate the images into different folders at the root level. I just do it here in the published service, and it divides them out, and I can copy them into both if I like, so I'm going to create a folder. So I'm gonna zoom in on that so you can see I'm a creative folder and when I create that folder it's goingto ask me what do I want to do because the plug in is connected online to all of the options I have for my smugmug count and so now I'm going to say altman new york shoot and I think I already have that I do that name's already in use so I'm gonna say altman new york shoot seal and if you after I published this if you want to go look at it on smugmug just goto platt photography dot biz and then click on the client area and I'll leave this unprotected so that people can go in and look at it and it's going to be two folders of images that you can see the way it looks on smuggling as well so notice that it creates a customer earl so literally it will be the customer you're ill will be plata ta graffiti up this forward slash altman dash n y dash shoot our seal andi I could put a description on there and I could even put keywords on there so that it's much more searchable although I'm not all that interested in making this super searchable because most of the time all of the stuff that you see on that site is going to password protected anyway so people are going to see it I can tell it to be public unless that air private I could put a password on there, but I won't because we want teo show this to people out there on the web and I can tell it to be searchable on the web and I can tell it to be searchable in smugmug and then I'm going and then of course you khun change some appearance like when how doe I want it sorted I want it sorted by name so image one will be first and down and then I'm gonna hit create what that just did is that created inside of my smugmug count a folder called altman new york shoot c l now inside of that folder and that's created like a main event page or and now if I right click it and I created gallery inside of there now I get all sorts of options in there and so I'm gonna name this one ab solute favourites okay, so these are my absolute favorite images from the day on dh I'm going too I can choose all of the different so again I've got the public option passwords, etcetera but I can also tell it how big an image I want people to be able to see I can tell it whether or not it's right click protected so I'm going to hit on which means that people can't download it or I could tell it to be downloadable and if I tell it to be downloadable, if I turn this off and I don't turn this on original than anybody could go in if they have access to the site and they can download the original image, so if I want to be able to deliver full high resolution j pegs to my client, I just turned on the ability for them to download and give him the original access to the original, but we're just going to give them three times large, so that's pretty big, and we're not going to allow them to download. We're not going to allow anybody download aiken water market if I like on dh, I can, you know, tell it to I can hide the owner there's plus, this is one of my favorites. I can create a gallery and if I click here and I type in a code, once I put a code in here, then it allows everybody else toe upload to my site so I can put stuff on my site. And then I could say, you know, upload would be the key word, and then people from the wedding could like, hey, I've got a cool photo and upload, and they could just be filling my client's website with all sorts of stuff that they could use and print they can actually order a print from white house custom color from their friend's photo that they had uploaded from the wedding, and you get an idea that you get the profit from that that would be interesting. Yeah, I could get that that's a good idea. S so everybody can upload photos and then, but all they need is the upload key, and when they get there, all that was grabbed the image and drag it into, like, a little like a little square dragging in, and it goes up to the site so it's a pretty good option. I've used that for parties and stuff like that. Upload your photos to this party and it's it's fun! We've actually used it on creative life here we used it, I can't remember which one it was, but we I think it was maybe light or one one or plug ins one on one, I think it was what it was, and we're running a contest and people were using that to upload their photos for the contest. So it's a pretty good and then, of course, aiken, choose the shopping options. I'm going to turn the shopping cart off on this one so people can't order prints from it on dh I'm going teo khun change the social thing if people want to share, they can allow likes allow I'll turn on the comments, people comment, I can change the appearance all of that type of stuff can be done, and this whole, everything that I've been doing is also available here in the quick settings. If I go onto smugmug and set up a siri's of quick settings of all of these settings, it shows up here, so then I can choose gallery version or wedding with download so that I know so it just instantly changes all of it, so I don't have to do it more than once remember we talked about presets every time you have to do something more than once you need a preset to avoid ever having to do it again and that's what that is it's a pre set so that you don't have to set these settings anymore and you can have as many of those as you like. So we set this already and I'm gonna hit create so now I have a folder called absolute favorites under here. It's a gallery folder if I right click it and I edit the gallery, I can see the settings again here and it says absolute favorites and I need to actually put absolute favorites here here so that I know that's the favorites folder for me this is what the girl says, this is what the gallery name is and, uh okay, now it's his favorites and I'm gonna make one more gallery in here and this one is going to follow the same, so I want the right click protection on and we wanted that shopping cart off those the only really big things that we changed and this one we're going to call it all images and that's all we need create and now we have all images and favorites, so now I can go back to my collection of the new york images and I can highlight all of my image is going to scan down here and grab all of them and put him in all images so now it's inside of a basically your public services are collections their collections that are also connected to some kind of a service somewhere and so I'm going to grab those and drag them to all images and then I'm going to go through and on lee find the ones that I really like that I think that are my absolute favor images um I love this one and that one and I love almost kissed their I love this one and I love that one. Jared are these raw images you are dragging right and everything's wrong images except for there's a tiff here that I did some retouching on on dh that's it you don't have to save these two j pigs before you know no, I didn't I'm not saving j pegs, I'm not exporting j pegs on that there's no interim step and that's what I'm telling you is that using a public service and you know, I don't care if you smug mug or not, but you better find someone who allows you to do this. I don't know of anybody else. Well, I do know that photo shelter does. This is well, so smug mug and photo shelter are really good at their plug ins and that's the important thing the website is incidental. What really matters is your workflow if you're spending a lot of time on uploading stuff and you know that just takes a lot of time and all of that time is costing you money it's costing you association with your kid's, costing you the opportunity to meet with clients it's costing all sorts of time that you don't have. And so I really think that any service out there that doesn't invest in making a plugin doesn't care about your time that's all there is to it. So I'm going to judge every company that has a service for photographers and if they're not investing currently in making plug ins, teo get the images to them from light room, even from aperture. Whoever but obviously light room has the bulk of the people on it you know, like they have the market share so so they ought to be investing in the places that you are so that you can utilize them and if they don't they should be kicked out of the club they really should any service that's not doing this kind of plug in should be kicked out of the club because they're not they don't care that that tells you that they only care about the way their stuff looks they only care about you using them they don't care about your time they don't care about making things easy for you so and I hope they're all listening out there they're probably getting some people that I know like and I even use their services and have been telling them to make plug ins need to listen to that because that tells you how much they care about you as a photographer whether or not they're making it easy for you to get to them. Hey sorry you may have already covered this, but when you upload a photo too smug and then you re edit that photo, I will show you this I haven't covered that yet, but we're going to show it awesome great then I'll let you roll yeah, thank you so I know what you're gonna ask before you acted it was good okay, so now I'm taking these favorite images and I'm dragging those into the favorites folder and so there are now twenty nine images all images are in the so we have a duplicate of system we have in all images we have everything and in the favorites we have eight full photos that are also in everything you can separate him out so you only have you know the favorites and won and non favorites in the other or you can have everything in all images and then favorites you can repeat him any way you like. So once I have that set up all I have to do now is write click this main job folder and I say published now and it is now taking all of these raw images and tiffs and whatever happens to be there and it's posting those to my sight right now and by the way, if I happen to have video in there it will post the video as well so they can watch the video so the video will be inside of their site as well so they'll see it with photos and they'll see a video there and they can hit play and it will open it up and they can play there slide shows well so that is simple connection and so these air being published currently right now it's updating the published collection so it's because I just made the publish collection here smug ma didn't know about it soon as I hit published it goes it goes up it's updating its telling on and then it needs to build all of the j pegs and then it needs to upload all the j pegs and so it's going to do that for a little while so we're not gonna play on these images for a little bit we're gonna let him just kind of upload and then once they're done once they've been uploaded then we'll come back and we can kind of play around with them and you'll see that once I'm when I change this it will then tell me, oh this needs to be re published because you've changed it all I do is hit published and it goes and it takes the old one down puts the new one up so but let me let me show you what the public service looks like so if I go down here two favorites and see that it says new photos to publish so these are the photos that need to be published and if you look over all images here's the new photos that need to be published here so we're just kind of waiting for I wonder if we're having a connection issue are or what but we'll wait for those to publish I'm not sure how long it will take, but we will come back to them whenever they're done out there. They see it. They're starting to move now, so it was probably building them and now sending them or something like that.