Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom Workflow

Gonna throw these into light room we're going to start making our selections I'm gonna walk you through my light room process okay so I'm gonna do this a lot slower then we just did everything else okay, so uh what I'm doing is I'm taking the card from the camera and I'm throwing it into my card reader and as soon as I do that light room here is going to detect that I have a card it will detect it there it goes it has detected it all right so here's all the shots that we just did and what it's saying is uh hear the shots from a nikon d three x I have made sure that I select this right here this object card after import that's really important because if you don't have to manually eject the card and that's a pain and so I like to just rip the card in and out really fast so that's really important then it's saying do you want to do all the photos on the carter? Just new photos I always select just new photos because sometimes I forget tio form at the card and if that's the case it's only...

an import the stuff that it wasn't imported previously appear is gonna ask me if I want to copy that as the dmg somebody asked yesterday I think or maybe the first day if I do that I don't I just copy those from the card to new location where my copying them two over here so I'm, uh putting these into my g dr mini that's the external drive that I have down here that I showed you on the first day and if we open that up I have a folder called creative live that we created on the first day and so that's where that's going to go? It's actually, um so it's going from this using this methodology going to this and then down here it's it's asking me, um, how do you want the render previews? So I want minimal previews and so that means when I zoom in on my images is that pre rendered all those full screen images full screen views and I don't want to do that because I want to keep going and I want to save some time I don't want to import suspected duplicate, so if there's stuff that I already imported, that wasn't there, I want to skip those now this this here I'm not doing this today just for time's sake, but normally I would have light room make a second copy that backup copy, I would have that go to a second dr I'm not doing that today just because we don't have the time to wait for the cards to come in um I usually do not rename my files I'm not a file rename er, but if I wanted to, I could rename these two something like creative live or carly or metal chute or something like that. Tether tools. It's asking me here's some important stuff here. It's asking me if I want to import put some develop settings on these while I do the import. I don't. But what I could do is I could have put some of these, uh, these settings that are in the developed module. I could have that automatically come in here now, later on. If we did some custom develop module stuff where we did some d saturation and we did some contrast and we maybe did a vignette, I could say that as a preset everything we shot today, I could automatically apply that while we're importing. And so I wouldn't have to do that over and over in the developed module. This meditative though this is the big thing. So the metadata I have a bunch of different, uh, presets here, and I've created one called mark c l from our creative life. Now let me show you what this is doing when I import these files. So this preset to go pierre and choose mark creative life. Um, it's asking me for some basic info like copy name label caption so I could put in here, and this is going to apply this to every single file that import with this pre set so I could have a caption that says maybe carly is photographed on set or something, but I don't want to do that. I want to have the freedom to do those later. If I must the journalist, I might have a headline that says, you know, great stuff, a creative live for all of these things, there's some things that maybe a newspaper might have me do or a news agency, I don't work for those so not going to do that. This is the stuff that's important to me to, um, this will actually add a copyright to all of your information. So this is copyright two thousand eleven mark wallace snap factory that's going up in that to every single image that import today. It's going to set the status of the copyright to copyrighted? Um also somebody asked how we keep track of the usage rights. So if I had assigned usage rights, teo tether tools or something, I would type this in here, you know, unlimited usage or something like that. So I could actually have those usage rights appended to the file itself and so if I wanted to look up and say, hey, is this used outside of our agreement? I just looked at the metadata on the file and see what those usage rights are here's the info the girl to my website so people know exactly where to go here's all the address information you'll notice I've changed my phone number so people don't call me all night so that's not there, but then there's all kinds of stuff that I can enter in here just tons and tons of stuff and usually that's determined by who you're working for, you're going to say I need to make sure I have this in my ipod tc data so instead of doing that over and over again for every single photo, I could just do it all at once and so I'm done, so I'm going to just sit down it's going to say you want to save changes, I'm going to say, don't say it because I want to keep that the way it is so meta data use mark c l now on the key words here I'm going to put in here uh, carly and that's popping up because I typed in carly earlier today, so I'm just gonna take that by hitting return and I'm going to say metal dress I usually leave mine to be a lower case keywords unless it's a proper name and creative live so that's gonna apply that to every single um every single image that they import then it's gonna ask me do you want to organize these by date? Yes I want to organize these by date and so it's going to put them into date into folders instead of just all in one folder which is great and it's going to say where it's in creative live and the hair of the folders that it's creating and so everything's done it's all that's done I will hit import now that's all a preset so I was doing all of that stuff on all the previous images that we did but instead of having to go through each of those steps I just said import use the creative life preset go all that stuff happened behind the scenes on and it's really, really quick once you have it set up so as things are coming in questions about those steps specifically anything that that's coming in online say tech asked how do you stop someone from changing the metadata after they get your photos? Is that possible? I think it is technically possible to change metadata and getting into photo shop or some other place, but um I don't know there is a way tio to keep somebody from changing your your metadata I just you know, we have contracts with companies and so if we find our stuff showing up somewhere else we just follow you know where it's come from and look there but we haven't had issues with that. They're a couple questions about what I p t c stands for but they posted it in the chatroom international press telecommunications counsel yes it's it's ah it's mostly used for photojournalists and news agencies and those kinds of organizations or sports photography it's so that when you get an image and it's in a big news agency um or getting or something like that that they contract where that was taken and how it's supposed to be used on all kinds of things like that but you can always use those fields for your own use as well think you talked about this yesterday but nick ray asked his mark create a new catalog for every new shoot I do create a new catalogue for every new shoot and then after I've played with those I take them and put him into a master catalog. If it's a depending on the client so have a master catalog for example, for shay homes all of their stuff goes in have a master catalog for all our clients from sight wire having master catalog for all the stuff from pocket was having master catalog etcetera so all of those going to those specific categories um and then I have a master catalog for personal work and so yeah it's it's like a catalog and then it goes in and the reason I do that is because I still preserve the catalogs the individual catalogs on backup drives and then master catalogs are also backed up, so I actually have backups of backups clara bar I had asked, why don't you rename your files? Why don't I rename my files? Um I don't mean in my files because they do so much key wording on the files in my catalog structure is so well organized that renaming doesn't help me out uh anyway, so I do rename when I do the final export sometimes specifically when I'm going teo the web all rename a file so that it's seo friendly so it says something like carly at creative live dot jpeg instead of dc whatever underscore five, eight, three, five more let's keep going there's a lot more that we need to talk about in light room. So the next thing that we need to do and do we have the pdf handout for the workflow? Does emily have that so I can make sure that I'm following that exactly right? So there's a pdf that shows the workflow of exactly what I'm doing and so if you want, you can download the pdf from sort of follow along on dh see how that we're doing this but this is something I do over and over and over again so kelsey's gonna bring that over to me I had went upstairs is that your commercial over no there's the whole pdf okay, so I'll find it okay um it is maybe in here I hope and it's not in here there it is it's light room were clip okay, is this pf right here? You can download this we'll see so what we've done is we created the library we've imported we didn't do the backup, but now only we did we wood we've done the key wording we've done all the I p c data and now what we're doing is we're picking the winners, so let me show you this little section here picking the winners the survey and pick tool virtual copies in the tunnel corrections so that's what we're doing next so again you can download this. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going tio go through the images that we just shot and michael and diane and aaron are going to help me with this because we need to look at this from the perspective of is this gonna work in the final output? Is the hair and makeup right? Are there any changes that we need to make so before I do this I'm going first well we'll do that according to the lateran so we're going to look in here we're going to really quickly go through these and um and see what we're like I like that so so diane's gonna come to this other side so I like that we're just gonna go through these quickly and just sort of see this is too bunched up for me we have too much of a gap underneath her arm here for me so we're looking at things this is her her head is too high so that's not good that's that's nice but we don't have the expression that we're looking for and I love doing this so um I know models love it really uh this is by the way, one of the things that we do to help break the mood if something is not working on studio we have a new model I do these little funny things with light room into the models sometimes like it sometimes they don't, so mark cut it out um that's sort of what we do, I do like that. So what I'm doing is every time I see something that I like and pushing p on the keyboard p for pick and so I'm just going right going right going right yeah, I don't like that at the back of the outfit no no good, so we had to bring that back end like say it bothers yeah we're missing arms unpick that one with the you unpick okay, now these are the verticals you see we don't have the screen and yet we're waiting for that to come in okay, so here we go now we have the screen I like way like so we're going to zoom in and see oh no that's okay? It was hard to see the get to speak up so people can hear you I'm sorry it was hard for me to see her right eye because it was zoomed out so far so just to be able to get the detail is better yeah, so we're zooming in and out that previews uh where I said minimal previews at the beginning when I zoomed in on these notice they take a while to load that's because it has to render that light that raw file and so, um e like this when we like going through that when I don't like it looks a little bit too much like high school portrait from me. Yes on we're being really critical really fast and normally we're never this vocal being this critical with a model because you know carly has been around she knows that what's good and what's not, but if this is a new model we would never see that we would just never, ever wait. Just go through and sort of lead the model we would be saying. Oh, man, this looks you look great this way. This is how we want you to pose. This is good. This is not yeah, I think we're okay. So I hit g for grid. I'm hitting all these shortcut keys really, really quickly. Um, yes, done for now. Um, so don't go too far, though, so, uh, I hit shortcut keys constantly. And so if you want to know what the shortcut keys are in light room go to help at the very bottom, it will say library module shortcuts. If you click that up, pops all the shortcuts. It's all these shortcuts that I'm saying I'm hitting p u f l whatever you can go into that help menu and see what the shortcuts are and that's true of any light room module. So if I go into the develop module and I want to know what the uh, shortcuts are same thing, what are they? There they are, there's, all the shortcuts. So that's, a really easy way to learn light room is just to look at those short cookies and I use them. A lot. So now the next thing that I want to do is I'm gonna hit f for full screen f one more time for totally full screen. I want to kick out the panels so I don't see any of the panels I want to see as much as possible. I'm going to sort these. Um, but before I do, there's one more thing I have to do. And that is the color correction. So on the, uh, on the pick winners survey pick tool, virtual copies. This total corrections thing here. I need to do total corrections. We haven't corrected for color at all, so I can do this by first loading in this gray card. This isn't the best way to do it, but I could. Then I will go into the develop module, got the panel picked the color checker or the, uh, the white balance tool and then click on this it's probably not the best thing to do because this is a very highly reflective thing. And it's probably going to give us bad color. Let me check no it's exactly the same. What do you know? It's calibrated. So we set the white balance it looks good, uh, let me show you, though, how we're going to use this. Okay what we need to do is we need to make sure that this little thing down here is in focus in all good so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go back to the library module I'm gonna go up to light room file and then I'm going to export with preset color check her passport when you get your color check her passport if you have one uh there's software that's a plug in for light room and so you go in here export with preset color check her passport I'll click that and is going to say I need a d and d profile amos needs a profile for this group of photos so I'm going to say this is carly metal dress you want to keep these names short now I should maybe put a name or a date or something on here but we're gonna keep this carly metal dress I'm going to save it hopefully I've taken this picture right I have enough it needs to really be able to see that color check her passport so it's going in its evaluating all the colors on that and it is going to create a dmg file it's going to create an I c c profile after that and then we can use it to make sure our color is absolutely accurate so that's going to take actually probably another ninety seconds yourself so let's grab a question are waiting for that though you explain that there are all kinds of different options for sorting and the question from one rodriguez is light room has several mechanisms to pick favorites, right colors and of course, the flags. Which ones do you actually use and why? Um, yeah, it does, um I used lots and lots of them, so normally I go in. The first thing I do is I used the flags because it's really fast, so I can just go in and say, uh, okay, this has been generated correctly as well believe that, but I just hit p p p for anything I'm just going to really, really quickly and that allows me and only do that before the client or the model even gets there. I'm just flying through and saying, yes, this is what I like this is what I like this is what I like and I can go into attributes and say, just show me the flag, uh, images. So when the clients come over, I'm showing him, uh, my selection for them to choose winners from I got of all the images, these air, the ones that I think are good, and so I'm sort of filtering out bad pictures, so I use that then normally what I do is the depending on if I'm doing multiple sets I'll take those and I'll create collections and then inside the collections that will do another sort using the pick chul on dh, then from those will you stars to say, these are my favorite pics in that collection that we're the winners, and then from those that we usually narrow it down to one or two and then we actually export those two photo shop for editing and it's easy to choose which ones we've selected because they're photoshopped files, not raw files. So, um but that's not consistent, we use all kinds of different things based on the situation and that's why I love light room because you can slice and dice the twenty thousand different ways. Let me get back to this cause I want to make sure that we we complete this work flow. So back here in light room, we have this message that says the color check her passport has been generated successfully this profile, but you have to restart toe activate so that's one thing that's sort of a bummer. Okay, I actually have to quit light room. So light room. Sorry, I have to quit. You it's me, not you. Somebody quit light room, audio's light room it's gonna close now you can see why we've spent the money on high end laptops, because we need to be able to do things really, really quickly and usually we have multiple things going at the same time just like I'm showing today, so I've closed it I'm relaunching light room I have light room set to open the last used library so it should open right back up where we left off and that's why I haven't set that way because I know I have to close and open it a lot okay, now that we've closed that and reopened it I'm gonna go into the develop module using carly's beautiful face here um and I'm gonna go all the way down on the develop module so again I'm in the developed module going all the way down all the way down and there is going to be a camera calibration section all the way down here the very, very bottom right normally it's going to be using whatever you shot that's, rgb, adobe standard whatever you can use dobie camera there's all kinds of things that are in there and what I want to use is the one that I just created. So look that carly metal dresses now in there so that's the one we just created so it's funny usually I do a lot of workshops and I have stuff that I forget to delete in its essence stuff like wacky color set up one s o glad that's so carly mental dresses there now what I want you to see is I don't know if this is going to work for our live audience or not but watch as I check that watch specifically these colors down here so these colors are going to shift radically or maybe not so radically but they will shift for sure so boom so look at these blue specifically and I know we can see that here you see are those shifting on the big screen? Yeah you see all those colors or shifting in the blues and see what it's saying is even though we did a proper white balance the blues were a little bit out of whack they weren't exactly calibrated now we use this profile on all of our images it will have accurate, accurate, accurate color so now I can use the beauty of light room to select all the images that we just shot so I'll do that make sure that we selected him all select them all ships select and I can say sink settings the lower right hand side and when I want to do is I just want to do all of the color so color treatment all this stuff that's what I want oh set and even white balance so I want to take the first photo that we've calibrated it's perfectly color calibrated and I want to take all of those settings and synchronize all of the images now all of my images have the benefits of that color profile so they are absolutely accurate and we calibrated the monitor earlier and we did that I think on day one or two can't remember so everything's calibrated the input from our cameras calibrated our screen is calibrated if we're doing a print that be calibrated as well so it's really nice okay, so we've done that I'm gonna go in here going to choose just the flag photos there we have it to go into this first image here and uh I like that I think these are pretty good as far as the total corrections I was planning on de saturating them I really like how they look I like how the reds air coming out of her hair I think it's monochromatic enough I don't think we really need to do anything to these photos at this point I think they're good so normally I would go in and do some things like the saturation or fixed despots but we don't have any of those issues so I don't wantto create work that we don't need um but it looks pretty good so if I needed to I would go in there and I would go to develop module and fix those if I needed to I could go and send those two photo shop and do some things um but right now they're good so the next step is for me to send these over to michael so that he can use them so michael I need to give you some files and what we have could we ask you just a quick clarification question before we move on? A bunch of people are asking when you think there's a calibration checks boxes yes was that let me do it again so when I clicked the first one I'll just click the one next to it go down here sink settings so I'm not sure which one they were looking at just calibration on in the third column under process version this calibration people are actually missed it should have been click okay, so yeah, I missed it that should have been checked so let me go back because I missed it up this is awesome si wei have a virtual team of all these people so that let me sink settings and so calibration yes, that should be there because normally on that very first image not only what I used the color calibration but I would be doing some other things as well. So yeah, a lot of times when I'm sinking settings I just say everything almost always I say do everything um I just wanted to highlight the things that you need to pull around with color and and missed the one that I needed so I still I really like these okay, so what we're gonna do is we're going to choose those winner's gonna select all of them now here's the beauty put in this thumb drive we're just going to give michael low resolution images so that he khun work on placement that's all we're doing because it's a proof of concept in the real life deal we'd be giving a high resolution photo shop files and so is your file sent for laura's images it's okay, good now we already we just exported this so I came to say export with previous so not to worry about selecting where it is not that kind of stuff um and so we're gonna be well, be good, okay? So we're gonna exit this out it's almost there. I want to give this to michael now the next thing we have to do and it's eleven forty six so we're uh we're getting there way have to now that we have this we have to figure out how we're going to place the the teller tools tell table inside of that and so we're going to do that right after lunch. We're going to answer a bunch of questions and I didn't object the dis properly, so I I don't think I'm gonna check it out if I did I'll go back and checked it so if I just said eject the disc, I didn't do it so next up we have to do is we have to figure out howto have carly out of focus in the background. With this, um, in the shot now where you don't have enough time before lunch to do that, I know that we don't, we can't do that in thirteen minutes, it won't happen. So what we're gonna have to do is we're going to backtrack a little bit, so after lunch, what we'll do is we'll have carly, uh, I don't know if you can eat lunch with your dress on. She might be able to, but if not, we'll just have to put her in the background. And the cool thing is, it's, not imperative, that she's perfectly made up and everything after lunch, because she's going to be out of focus, and so we're a little bit okay on that.