Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom Post Production

I also wanted to share a little fact with you did you know that on average the normal person only speaks ten minutes a day I have destroyed that record today I am raising raising the curve on that but I thought that was an interesting little fact that's how much people actually todd got average and I was like good lord I'm going to need tea and honey after this non can't be talking about women I think that applies to women so we are going to go through our we're setting up portraiture is a hot key for you and I set up all of my adobe stuff on a new account which is why I had to re enter that license numbers it took me a minute we're good but if you guys remember we went in two keyboard shortcuts we went to filter and we found portraiture and we assigned it this keyboard shortcut so now what's cool about portraiture and for those of you that don't know what portraiture is it's a really it's a great plug in that you guys should all it's a great one to use what it does is it doesn't gener...

al smoothing of the skin okay it's going to go in and smooth stuff out but it only effects skin tones so what you're going to do is you're going to pick this is my my skin tone and it's going to go in and just smooth that and it's not going to affect the eyes it's not going to give you fuzzy teeth fuzzy teeth never sell eso is gonna let you go in and adjust your it's going to let you go in and smooth skin out on all of your subjects quickly without monkeying up a lot of your other images ok, so but now originally what we would have to do every time is you have to go up to filter down to this and click this window okay it's just a lot of like moving my mouse around now all I need to do now is just hit command shift tea and it pulls up that window for me so again it's just another quake way to navigate myself through the work so now that we've set up I'll show you guys one more trick real quick this one my favorite keyboard shortcuts and this is one that people generally overlook so we go in and I'm gonna do this I'm gonna overdo this so one thing with portraiture is by default you have to pick where you're selecting right but it's kind of hard to see like what the skin tone is doing you can't really see where you're affecting so I was like to turn this show mask to black black is where where portraiture is not affecting your image okay? We're going to go and pick this kid's face run it okay, now with guys you want to be aware of not so moving this get out too much because it'll make him look feminine and I've never had a high school senior guy that's coming and requested he looked feminine for his senior portrait it's so you want to be aware of like, backing it off sometimes on the guys on the girls we will run it fold full blast maybe even full and a half with guys we rarely running at full capacity. Now if I go back, I just undid that by hitting command z if I go back to this window there's a ton of options I haven't hear and I can go in here to just my capacity to be, you know, eighty percent you can go in and in fact all this stuff in the window, but because I'm so focused on speed, I haven't easier way of doing it, so what I'm gonna do is go in, pick this kid's skin come hit enter okay, now in photo shop you could always hit command shift f and the last thing that you did photoshopped will let you fade. So you guys understand what layers are right so you can have a layer with with with an item on your layer and you can have that layer at fifty percent you're going to be able to see halfway through whatever that thing is right, you have full and it's going to be all there, you can have a zero and it won't even be there you wanted to see it essentially you khun treat your last step that way you can adjust it quickly by hitting this fade so now if I zoom in on his face and I hit that, you'll see that right now we're one hundred percent zero and anywhere in between so you won't see that in real time what I would do with this kid session is and once you pick a skin tone that's always the one that portraiture is going to go to so your skin tones shouldn't be varying much so once you set it that one time you should be good, so I do is hit control shifty enter control shift f hitting the number eight zero enter fade it eighty percent now if I were to go in, though, and this is an important thing to know that only works on the last thing that you did, so if I run portraiture and then I'm like, I'm going to get rid of this little thing right here on him. Well, now, if I had control shift half what I'm fading is that last little thing right there I can't go back to steps it's on ly goingto work on the last thing that you do so it's important that when you're doing your workflow ifyou're going to use this because I don't like to work on extra layers it's just it's just not necessary I gotta work for that's scream and vast without doing that so you just need to be aware of like as soon as you hit the portraiture window control ship death basia rapacity because if you start clicking around you do anything else than you have to go back back redo portraiture then fade it so it's one of those things that you just kind of have to be aware of as you use it okay, so let's go in and I'm just gonna kind of show you guys what we would do with it a sample session okay, so again I just pretended that this wass thea get rid of these I just pretended that this was the file folder so imagine that this is a memory card okay want to go in and we're going to change this to studio plus assigned all of my clients a five digit unique number for their session. Okay, so we're just gonna call this one two nine eight three, six okay all right that's what we're gonna give her for a session number sorry we're going to take this and we're going to change this to say ross because he's the ross from this session now what we need to dio is create a job folder for this right? What we have a perfect light room catalog already set up so I'm just going to go onto my lighter and catalogue and hit command see I would click off of it and hit command v copy's lightman catalog now it's got this new job too and we're going to enter a number two nine eight three six because that's our session number right now we're gonna take our ross we're going to get him in there okay? Now you'll see that I go into this and it's gonna tell me I have this new job here and it gives me all of this information what's going on here is remember we set up light room catalog one time named new job we don't want to call it new job we want to call it this client's number so it always makes sense so I need to go in here and change it to two nine eight three six okay, done now all I gotta do is double click this relaunch and light room is opening up and you could tell us in the right catalog because we're right up here it says two nine eight three six so we've renamed are perfect light room catalog that we've set up for our specific computer toe work for this job and all of our smart collections are in their all of our everything we've done it's all good so what we need to do now is import our files okay? Just click the import but there's a couple of ways to do it and this is something that light room really did an amazing job with like I really love this interface because it's so incredibly easy to understand if you think about what you're telling might room to dio so we go in here we click this and we go to our ross okay, now you have three options here. Four options you can copy is the dmg does everyone know what d angie's are it's a digital negative files so if you have candid cameras a dot cr two if you have a nikon camera was any f okay so it's in any f that's proprietary software that's a proprietary file cannon owns dots here too that's theirs so when adobe wants to put it into their software they have to pay a licensing fee. Which is why I always think it's funny one like people get mad that like light room too won't support my five game mark seventeen of course not they don't want to pay to support files from software that you bought years ago they're gonna pay the license that so to get away from that proprietary software adobe has offered you that our proprietary is after which the adobe negative I don't use the dmg files unless it's for a wedding we will use it for weddings because it allows you to compress the file but by shooting and raw we shoot medium raw in our sessions we don't shoot full raw and we'll talk about that tomorrow a lot but we don't need to compress our files are already compressed in the camera we don't need toe add that extra step there's no riel massive benefit for me shooting dandies and it does take time so don't do that copy awful idea because you're going to end up with multiple copies of your ross and you're probably not gonna have any idea where your stuff is not what you think you know why is my new computer like filled about like a fourteen terabyte hard drive it's because you have five copies of your raws everywhere that's why so move? I don't really move photos like that I don't like to it can be a little bit confusing to make sure you know where your stuff is so I think you should just add it from where this you know where it is we're just gonna add these files now later on I'm gonna show you guys were going to create a precept but when we create our presets I do have an import preset and this is where you would set that up but we are going to get that right now we're just going to import the way they are okay so as we import these files photo shops going to bring us into the grid view okay grid view is in the library mode grid it's literally gives you this grid of photos okay, this view is good for you to kind of get an overview of what's going on in light room it's good view but if we wantto see our image is bigger and make our selections it's kind of hard because you can't exactly see everything that big so some people decide that when they're going to do their selections that didn't go to the developed module bad idea when you're working in the developed module you're accessing the raw files it's going to slow your system down because it's getting too much information for you it's more information than you need to just do your selections so I told you I set this up like brand new so I got to turn off all the tips now so we go back to this grid view we're in the library mode we're in grid view if I hit keyboard shortcut e tosses me in the loop view luke gives me one big image now this still isn't big enough for me I want a big image so I hit shift tab it's gonna toss an even bigger so now remember how I told you guys that we don't overshoot like we don't do that at all so there still might be one or two images though that don't make the cut so on this one we're just gonna go through and we're gonna pick our files we're gonna pick him or reject them they're good enough or they aren't it's yes or no it's black or white I don't do five colors I don't do nine stars and it's it's they're going to see it or they are so we need to pick our files right well if you hit keyboard hookup p that picks it but by default if you hit p c it's just it's play it's not doing anything like now I have to hit the air okey and now it's kind of similar to the other one we're gonna reject that one that's annoying because that to go through and click it every time if you turn on your caps lock it will allow you auto advance so every time you pick one your onto the next one so I just turned off my caps lock there on great love it awesome uh huh yep all right. No way good. Okay. Yep oh, matthew, let it get a little soft on that one. Not good enough reject good. So now if I go back to my grid view it's going to show me and I hit tab again it's going to be my side panels it's going to show me the images that we've picked now all these ones with the little flag and the greater box that's a rejected vile and all these ones that are white with a little white stroke round of the white flag that's a pict file they go right down here you turn on your filters and we want to see our flag files all right? We're at twelve gs so many images that show my client from the session twelve it's perfect so now here is one of the biggest things that you need to do with your senior files absolutely positively if you take anything away from this this will make your life so easy for keeping your stuff organized a lot of people go through and work their images and light room and they export their files and rename them toe billy joe number one billy joe number two billy joe number three and so they renamed fromthe raw file to the j peg that becomes a new name because it becomes more friendly to your client I get that and I love that what I hate about that concept is that you have a disconnect between what you're raws are named and what you're j pegs air named so if there's ever a reason you need to go back to a raw file you are straight eyeballing it you're like I think that's the same one yeah that's good have you overshoot? Good luck the nineteen of the same pose good luck with that right? So you gotta make sure that it's the same one so what I do is that rename all of my raw files case I'm going to hit command a it's going to select all my files and I'm gonna hit too eyes to me keep our shortcut not working in here and hold on one second oh, I know why because it wasn't on the folder so now we're gonna hit me go in and select these files we can go in the library so now what we need to do though is rename our files so let's go in and edit this to a system that makes sense. Okay, this needs to get deleted. We're just going back space and we're going to put this as because a sequence with two numbers and we want it to be a custom text custom name sequence. Ok, now we have to go in and get it and you want to make sure that you're doing something with two numbers used to do it with one what can happen? It's like it's gonna put image number it'll go like one eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen fifteen to twenty one plantation in future for so you got to make sure that you haven't least two digits in there so it just sorts better in your computer all right, click done. And now you're gonna see it gives you an example of what your raw files are going to be named. Now, we want to rename these raw files to be the same as the session number, so it makes sense. Everything in our system works on this session. So to nine, eight, three, six ok, now, the other thing I like to dio is take these files and I'd liketo adam to a sub folder. These air, my picked raws, and we want to include the selected photos and click create. Now, this is huge guys. And this is something that you need to understand. What we have actually done right now is have adobe gone into this software gone in through the software, and it has created a new folder called pick ross, and it has physically moved our raws into this new folder, and it has renamed them to be the new extension. So from this point on, we're never going to rename these files in this way. All you always know which session number it isthe in which image number there they're looking at cool. All right, all right. So let's, go to now. We go to roz, gives me that sub folder now we only have the twelve that we need to work on. I know when I start my developed process of photos, I kind of like to have all of my images start with the same look I like to have my vibrance bumped up to twenty for those of you that don't know what vibrance is vibrance is different than saturation saturation is just saying we're gonna take all the colors and making brighter or softer vibrance can have a similar effect, but it stays away from oranges, tans, skin colors so it's better when you're working with people, if you're going to make general adjustments to color, you want to use vibrant, not saturation okay? And then I bump my clarity up to ten no clarity can make your image look really creepy crazy a really soft and gross, and sometimes we go to ten and sometimes ten might even be a little bit much, but remember we're going to soften all of these photos again it's kind of this weird process where we make him really sharp, but then we soften him because I like that look so I want about my clarity up to ten I want about my vibrance up too twenty and I want to go to my tone curve and I want to turn this to medium contrast it's just kind of a general starting place for me that's generally where I like my images to go now I have this dunn and I have a couple of options right now to apply this all these images I can click sink right here and I can pick the things that we just think everything right now and that's going to go ahead and do it gets another all going to change if I had gone in and turned down auto sync by holding my command key now whatever I d'oh toe one you'll see on the bottom it's goingto as it races across um you'll see that it's applied to everything so auto sync is an option but that's something that you you would do that and groups you could go in and create a preset for what we've done he'll do that by clicking this little plus button we could name this like our default will you just call it our starting point if you start creating presets you should make a preset for anything you do more than once in light room presets are what make light room crazy so what's important now is we want to make sure that we only checked the boxes that we want to be affecting so don't just go in there and click like yes all of them because if you've done adjustments like to your white balance now you would overwrite your white balance with the current setting that's not what we want to do so we wanted to go in and we adjusted our tone curve we adjusted our clarity we adjusted our vibrance it's going to make you keep this on okay? And we're going to create the starting point side note if you want your pre set to go to the top of the list at a couple stars it always bumped it up to the top okay, we're gonna put this in our user preset catalog create so now what I can do is then go on these images which are at their default starting point and I can click there straight at the camera nothing's been I click this preset right? Well that's cool but remember now from this point on this preset lives in that import dialog box so now when we go to import our images here cancel import it allows me to put this preset on all the images so I don't even have to do that I have to click the images and click do this just as a starting point I have to do that and I have for like if I do an in studio stuff my lights air so dialed and I have it come out with perfect exposure and perfect color before I touch it that's the power of pre sets in and that's the power of love is like an eighties montage no it's important is important stuff to no I mean you guys like this is this is big to free up your time don't waste time clicking around this software knock it out get it done so we're going to go through and edit a couple of images I want to make sure that I show you guys kind of well I'll walk you kind of through how we would do this my exposures are generally pretty good this is a little under explosive gonna have to brighten it up now I know you all know that you can go in and click your exposure and drag it up and you can do all that jazz if you ever get too hot you could just double click it take it backto home you go in and just a shadow isn't it I'm not gonna lie to you I have a hard time remembering which sliders doing what I really d'oh and so how I like to affect my brightness is I should just go right up here to this history graham hissed a gram is a visual representation of your exposure okay? So if you're history graham is falling off the right hand side that means that you have blowing out all of your details and there's no information there if you're history miss falling off the left hand side it's black nothing left there's no details, no information they're so a good history graham doesn't peak in this or shooting high key and mr xi lu cookies that you wanted to go out you don't want your history, graham teo, be outside of these walls. Okay? So when you go in here I can see now you'll see as I'm dragging my mouth around here if you look down at the shadows tab right now that's the part of the image I'm affected you see that? I pulled it up here. Now I met exposure so that as I move my history as I move this around the history ram it's going to tell me what I'm affecting but for me for the way my mind works this is a really easy way for me to just my exposure it just makes more sense so I just go in click drag okay, now, of course some of them were going to go in and find him a little bit. This one, I think she needs a little bit drop my black point a little bit more, give it a little bit more richness now we need to set our white balance. Okay, now you can set it a lot of these presets are actually pretty close. Never ever use auto. Auto stinks, but you go into daylight that's too warm going to shade that's way too warm. Go into flash that's actually pretty good, but you can also just hit w and that's gonna pull up your turkey picker baster thing big tip that I learned in this tool that I never knew was I used to hate it because I go in and I'm like okay let's try this what that's not right and I have to go on hit w again then we'll try uh closer it's not good did w again so annoying to me all you got to do is while you have this tool selected go right down here and turn off auto dismiss now you click around wherever you want you turn it off you tell us when it's good okay all right sometimes I look out at you guys and I love all of you but sometimes I look at you and this is something that look and I hope it's that scary I hope this is just your process on how you're absorbing this information because this is the stuff that it's these little things it's these little things that you're doing in your digital work flow in your regular workflow that are eating up your life it's the little things that are that are taking away your free time so knock it out get it right move on all right so go in all right that's good brighten it up a little bit okay? That's cool yeah that's good brighten it up a little bit all right can't a little bit warm with back it off okay that's cool next one o that was way off all right, there we go. It's good move on that's good. You'll see that I try to do a variation between smiling and serious you don't want to go too much of one or the other and that one's like way too cool so we're in a warm that uh okay, we're going right now uh all right now this one's got a little funky right back that off. Okay, cool. You can go in and hit the eye if you want. Okay? Hoops so this image right here was just an existing light shot where I was trying to check if that was what we wanted, but I actually like the way it looks so this image is obviously way into it wasn't because I was going to use a flat for that, so we're just gonna pull that out another little tip in trick if you hit our that's the keyboard shortcut for the crop tool. Why? Because it it's ridiculously confusing to remember that our is your shortcut for crop and that's gonna pull up your crop toolbox now, there's a lot of stuff going on in this is a lot of things that you can do while you're in the crop toolbox you can hit oh, well, well cycle through a variety of overlays that may help your creativity or help you with your cropping. I like the rule of thirds this is one that used to drive me nuts okay, so how many people have shot an image and then you imported you're like uh I want it like horizontal and I hate this because it's vertical so I want to go in and you're like I want to crop it like like that like well that's not really like um maybe you'll like turning it but you can't quite get it right drives me batty to flip it to the other orientation keyboard shortcut up the day while you're in the crop tool hit x it is alright flipped your orientation so also in this image like let's just say it's like a little bit crooked now you can go in and just grab a corner and twist and try to get those lines to line up in the wall but what I actually dio is just going and hold the command key is gonna pull up this little ruler click and drag on your straight line now it's cool all right this one he said that was a little bit over exposed that way let's straighten that one out go here cool and I'm going to go over here and this image love that rim light I realized my last time I was on creative live though I showed all these images from high school seniors and I realized that like of the six kids that I showed five of them were redheads and apparently that's always shoot they don't come here if you don't suffer from ginger vitus is liz back that down? We're good. We're gonna adjust our white balance just a little that make it all right. Cool. So are images are done now, right? So now we're at the point where we need to start exporting our images. Ok, well, matthew, that sounds easy. No, you're probably doing it wrong and I'm going to free you from mohr time that you're wasting exporting your images, you are absolutely there's a system to this stuff so hit keyboard, shortcut eat takes me back to the to the loot view and goto export I want these images to go to the same folder is the original, but I want to put him in a sub folder. I'm going to call it my picks folder my pick j pegs right? I do not want to rename my files. I don't care about video, I want these to be j pegs I want them to export at one hundred percent quality. I want them to be an adobe rgb ninety eight personal preference. I do not want to resize them, but I do like my resolution at three hundred just where I'm at and we don't worry about output sharpening we don't worry about metadata, we don't worry about it our water marking but we do want it to show me the pictures when we're done as one of now show me so I clicked that all right? So we click export right? Wrong. This is our standard export. This is how we're going to export all of our senior sessions, right? So why in the world would I want to go through and click all those things again? That was like five seconds of my life that I can't get back. So what I'm gonna do is go over right here ad we're going to make a preset all right? We're in called us our standard export ok, create cancel so now going back for wine with me, we're just done we got our images where we want, right? Well, now I don't even need to go to this export box. I don't even need to click that all I need to do is go file export with preset and the one we just set up is right there. It's done it's going? I don't even need to see that box again. So talk about freeing up some time simple tricks. This is not stuff that's above anyone's head here I mean, sure that this is all this's common sense stuff, but we just haven't explored the software to the point that we know it all so all right, is that's exporting? I got a second. Hear us if there's any questions about what we've gone over so far, we can definitely looking to have it otherwise. Yes, I do have a question. You back to export those in the photos, right? No, those are exporting into a folder that we created in the sub folder of the ross. Okay, I'll show you. Okay, we teach you now, but the question I have extra came from their photo shop. He was doing the layers early when you set up your personal however he did. Are you able to save that? So? Because, like I do a lot of my editing ex school, which they have, you know, fifty million computers in ten times that, and then somebody will go in and change it again for your export. Our career work space is like they're workspace. Are you able to, like save that own and in a particular state bite where I can go from different computer to defer computers? You know, I'm not sure, but let me check for you, okay? I don't know. I've never had to do that, so I don't know if that's. Something that's a se va ble file but I'll find out I'll let everyone know tomorrow because I'm sure that now there's like a bunch of people out there they're like yeah, that would work for me too, so I'll make sure I'll let you know when I'll let everyone else know tomorrow morning. Thanks cool so one quick one from someone online from keith who wonders whether you do any custom cropping of your images to any non standard sizes or whether you allow customers to request that in any way absolutely I'll sell you anything you want to buy I not above telling you that I will not sell you anything but uh everything I work on I try to shoot and get my cropping right on camera and the reason why your image is our two to three ratio does everyone understand that it's because you have full frame thirty five millimeter full frame camera thirty five millimeter camera is two to three ratio think about it like a tv like an old school tv like the one my dad used to make me get up and turn the knob on because he was too lazy to get off the couch he's coming downstairs that was like um or square format right now everything's hd it's it's a stretched format so back in the day when you used to shoot medium format it was a four it's a four by five ratio that's why so many crops that's why so many print sizes exist that's why four by five prints exist because four by five print was your edge to edge image that's why eight by tens are popular it wouldn't be an eight by ten with a four by six ratio it actually be in a by twelve so some of these prince sizes haven't kept up with the times they're just kind of rooted in tradition I shoot everything on as a two to three ratio I show everything as a two to three ratio but I will crop and do whatever is needed for the for the product that they want another quick question from a cm eighty three you've talked about putting textures on some images are going to show us that or that's coming up yeah eso going back to this this folder that we started I'm gonna go in we're gonna look at our rahs going to go into our picked folder picked ross there's all of our picked ross and here's our picks these r j pegs right now remember I told you guys I like to have three copies of all of my images those are my jump off images I'm never going to touch those again god willing the clients never going to see them and that's just going to be something I have just so I never have an issue wanting it later so now I'm gonna do is just control see control the pace that whole folder going to go in and change the name of this folder to retouched okay, so now as I open up this file it's gonna give me all of these images now I don't I simply don't have the time tow, walk through and do all of these images for you guys today but I want to show you a couple of them and I want to show you editing on guys and I want to show you the full process, okay? So let's, take this image and let's take this image and let's get crazy will add one more I like this one. This one isn't in the notes though the other two are so now we're gonna go and open these and photoshopped ok, now I use like I told you everything at our studios built around speed like it's like fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast so anything, any tools that I can use to speed up my work flow are like I'll spend a lot of money to get it faster because it needs toe work quick, so buying portraiture and I think part is like twenty bucks, so I was like twenty bucks I'm gonna buy like ten right now has more judges like two hundred bucks but it saves me so much time. And it gives my clients the images that they want. And it's. Just a click of a button.