Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom Workflow and Q&A

So let's go into light room here these are some of the images so we're all within the light room catalog and what you're looking at right now are the edited images so you're seeing here to pick up one or two I like this is a fully edited image her skin's been retouched it's been contrast color corrected all that stuff so we use image gnomic they're portraiture tool for skin softening I love love love that tools probably one of the best skin softening tools on the market that is my personal favorite and you can control how much it applies so the skin doesn't start looking like plastic that is again preference what you like but let's go to the actual images that we took yesterday and so we filter these hoops with five stars on yelp and so let's go to a few that we like write so here's our base image a tte this point so I like this particular image this has had nothing applied to it yet we're right within the light room catalog and I've created my own presets so if I want to develop this ...

image okay, I've got my presets right so south and connor are lightning for presets notice how there in number order on the left hand side on it's in the order that we added in so you can do everything we're doing you can absolutely do here on the right but I what I find is that as you go left to right left right left right time is money and it takes too much time I'm all about simplicity so the first thing I want to hit here is get started so once I get started that applies in auto white balance and I apologize for those you looking on different monitors uh I think the coloring is going to be a little bit different but bear with me so why pounds auto? I don't particularly like what happened here went all the way up to seventy, five hundred so let's try a little cloudy okay and let's pull out some of this tent and I'm gonna edit guys to what I'm seeing on my particular monitor here okay? So I'm gonna get that image to look the way I want still looks a little too warm ok and go free go from there so when you pull out a little bit more saturation okay, so that's a great starting point so I've got my white balance exposure we don't need anything else here do I want to bump up? Contrast no. Do I need any highlight recovery? Easiest way to tells you jakey short cut there's no highlights being lost so that if you look at your history graham up here you can see nothing's been lost up here so as we come here no highlight recovery I've got fill light if I want to bump up some fill light vignette I like vignettes so I've got a preset for vignette on I can go as heavy as I like on that vignette notice I'm just growing down the left hand side I do not spend a lot of time on these images I get them to the point I like well now I want to go into what I call is the creative zone so now I've got this image to look the way I want basically but now I want to have a creative de saturated edit so I've got something here called in each tr ed it s so let's do creative hdr black and white and that within three clicks hey, I'm talking through this but within three to four klicks I was able to get this image from point a to point b to look the way I want it that is very important that's all from my presets that I have here on the left hand side so I can go creative hdr warm cool ok, I happen to like the straight black and black and white on this so these are the kind of things that are very important to your time in the tool so most of my editing ninety eight percent is happening within the light room environment then I'm going to go to photo shop for two three four images and go over the top on those and apply these types of edits so when we look when we go back into light room and I'll take some questions here in a second we go back into light room and we look at the edits that we finished these are the ones I'm talking about that we would spend a little bit more time on in post production this you're gonna have to go to photo shopped for this is not gonna happen within like we're swapping out skies backdrops creating that mohr moody look you know things like this to me are going to be shots that we can sell so let's take some questions before we go to break the skin softening can you do any of that in light room you cannot do that within light room I believe the image gnomic plug in they have a plug inversion for light room I don't like doing it that way if you're going to start doing that I like handling it in batch so what we do is we apply that skin softening its on a batch export so we create a droplet out of a photo shop so I don't know if you know how to do that so if you go in the photo shop you can actually create an action to apply the skin softening okay and then you go here file to make sure we're doing this automate create droplets and what a droplet is in essence is that's going to sit on your desktop or if you put that droplet but it's basically a and execute herbal if you will so you can apply a whole bunch of action script skin softening created droplet and then take two hundred images out of light room put him right in that droplet and in batch they will apply skin softening so I don't do it on an image by image basis I do it all in batch that's why I'd rather have it done that way does it put him back into the light room with those same follows edited or is that going to create a separate file that'll create a separate file for you. However, if you're working the way I work here you can actually come into light room all right? And then I say, hey, this is one image I wanna work on if I go here and say uh, export or edit in um you know photo shop what ends up happening is that's going to go out to photo shop? I can apply on my layers on my textures everything when I hit saving photoshopping will automatically round trip right back in the light room I mean they could not have made it easier toe work between the two products, so that part is really, really easy yeah, quite a few people are asking, including actually donuts for photography do you sell any presets of your own? We do self presets. I should have been better prepared on being a horrible sales person might not here's what I promised everybody one you're gonna love our presets we just finished them for light room for so what I will do by the end of the show is I will create a discount code for the creative live audience on ly for our presets and I'll get you a special link so I'm assuming you have katie, she'll put post those online, but we also have a special for my tour, so we created a very aggressive discount for the creative live audience, so if you haven't quite enough of south way are on tour and we're gonna be on our wedding tour, so we're gonna give these guys later on a discount code teo, get them to see us live on tour talking about weddings. So speaking of weddings, I was wondering if you have a different editing style for the seniors, maybe they're a little bit more edgy than you would for weddings or engagements. So would you have liked more conservative presets and then more kind of like what you're doing the beautiful part about our pre sets? Are they our state? You know, like room is really bad on building it doesn't have this concept of layers, so what we've done here on the left is we have isolated literally everything you khun due to an image. So what do you want to do to your image? Will you want a white balance? It first, then exposure than contrast and highlight? So we've created single edit and bump so you can see you need, you know, exposure by point five maybe you're a quarter stop off seventy five point seventy five or a full stop off, so what I'm trying to do here is just enhance my work flow and make it just ridiculously simple to process your images when it comes to advanced edits. No, actually our style is very similar, so my I find I'm finding that my clients even wedding klein's engagement clients love our gritty style of editing on dso it sells both in the senior market and in the wedding engagement markets. What our brand you remember day one, we're talking about branding and the way you edit and how important that's tied to your brand. It is really you're seeing it in real life for us. Cool, right? Thank you very much and maybe one more question since we're time to go to break chris w are there any copyright issues when it comes to outsourcing and that's from campbell river? Bc never seen that question yeah that's an interesting question there's no copyright issues when you're outsourcing now the copyright issue would be if the outsourcing companies started trying to use your image to promote their company, then yes, you're going to run into a copyright image, but uh, any post production company I know they would ask for that release before they used it. Now if they're not, you've got a whole set of other issues, but let's, talk about copyright for a second as part of your work flow er or our workflow, I should say every senior who comes through our studio signs a copyright release because you got to remember I'm doing shows like this I'm doing, I've got books that we've published, I've gotta have those copyright releases, but I understand maybe not everybody's writing books and doing that kind of stuff, but you want it posted on your website you want to post it on facebook, you want to put it on direct mail pieces? So is part of your normal work flow you have got to get copyright. Releasing those forms are pretty easy to come by, so go down one pain attorney a couple hundred bucks to get one, but it will be the best money ever spent you have to be able to use those images, you right? So if somebody says, listen I'm not interested in using my images for anything don't care so that you're selling your rock star yeah, I want to be private yeah we honor you still shoot so it's an option either opt in to the copyright or not you explain it hey listen I love to use images can I say we don't care where they say no yeah and just to give you perspective in the four and a half years, five years now we've been in business we've only had one client up to not have their images used and that was more of a personal security issue, right? I mean, from their perspective they, um the husband had a stalker and he had this very unique last name and they would go his stalker would find him everywhere just by googling that name. So if I put images out and said, hey, this is from the soul and so wedding she would find them so when they when the client has that discussion with us, we're like, of course we won't post these even though we had the most amazing images from their day, we just honored their their requests so most people you'll find feel honored that you want to use their images of their kids to promote your studio so yeah, but always honor did you uh did you get a copyright from the president yeah, so you know us and follow us. We've had the honor of photographing for the white house multiple times now, and it turns out we are in a very short list of photographers for, you know, photographing president obama when he's away from the white house. And so we, uh, while we own the copyright to our images, we've not released those the white house has requested continuously that we do not publish me. So if you go to our website, you won't see any of these images, and it sucks for me because I'm so proud of these images to be able to do that, regardless of whether you're republican or democrat. Dude, it's, president, united states. So from that perspective, I have to honor what the white house has requested. In theory, I could be like, a screw you. These are my images, I'm using them, but then I'll never photographed for them again, not woodstock, so, yeah.