Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Create a Portfolio in Lightroom CC

Now let's talk about those portfolios so remember that when we were playing with our images from our baseball portrait we did a search for our one star images we highlighted those images after we had completed all of the work we've done the retouching we've done the work on the images we did everything that we wanted to do to our images including put information into the images like keywords andi I even put a little extra information into these so if you click on an image and you go down into the metadata area here which is below keywords so in the key words you can see there we go you can see I've got a lot of key words about this person including the name and then below that I've got metadata and when I click on the metadata I've already put something in he takes himself so seriously already a pro baseball player and this is the photograph right now I put that in there in a very conversational way why did I do that? Because I'm gonna blog's straight from here and I want that caption ...

to be available to me whenever I want to post this image now if it was a wedding and I wanted it to be conversational but I also wanted to have some little ceo boost from it I would say something to the effect of uh you know, this beautiful bride uh she was so beautiful at the royal poems I love the flowers you know they totally match the flowers at the hotel and you know, she said that she was wearing a dress by someone sell and lovable and keep it conversational because google can tell if I'm conversational and so I keep it conversational but I put it in there because I'm already working on the images I'm getting down too like ok, these are the you know, five or six times to put on my blogged and by the way don't put thousands on your block put five six you know something like that a manageable number something someone could scroll couple times through and they're done with it don't be putting hundreds of pictures from weddings on blog's if you want to do that, go ahead and do that but post every day for five days you know show the getting ready portion then show that you know and so the whole week there's a new block post everywhere that's much better for your asio than one big long post and we'll talk a little bit more about theo at the beginning of our next segment but you notice that I'm inputting stuff here all the time and I've got different areas that I can inputs stuff in I can input stuff in the title I can put stuff in the headline I can put stuff in the caption now a lot of you are going to those of you out there looking at this on the internet you're probably going over to your panel and looking and saying mind looks nothing like that my panel looks nothing like that and that's because my panel is customized to what I want to see so you can go into this area right here which is basically pre sets for your panels and you can choose I want to see the default information and then you'll see all this information here but a lot of that is unimportant to me when I'm captioning stuff and so I have created a my own default which is captioning work and now it just shows me the stuff I need to see which is, you know, gps information, user information, copyright information a little bit about whether fat flash fired capture time locations that kind of stuff it even has released information for the models so all of that stuff is what I want to see I don't need to see the rest of that stuff not on a regular basis and so I keep this open now how do you do that? The way you do that is with a plug in it's a plug in and if you go to file, go down to the plug in manager and click on plug in manager in the plug and manager there is a plug in called you're going to just have to write this down it's called j f metadata presets and it's made by a guy named jeffrey jeffrey friedel mrs name, I'm sure I get that wrong every time because it's a very it's like a name that has more confidence than I'm used to. So, um, anyway, geoffrey makes an amazing part. He makes a lot of good plug ins, and if you go to his jeffries blogged or jeffrey site is called hold on, wait for it it's called um no, where is it? I don't know where it is anyway just searched jeffrey friedel um I don't know how to spell that, but you can also just say jf metadata presets google that you'll find it. Um it's uh can't remember what it's called anyway uh so once you open and install this plug in, you can click on this configure, meditate ofyou presets and when you click on it, it gives you the option of changing what meta data shows and you can even rename some of it in whatever so I can then choose what kind of meta data I want to show in that and then I can save it out is a preset on once I save it out as a pre set, I can actually transfer it over to other other systems so I can make my presets and say I want this and I could take that pre set and I can put it on all of my computers so that I have that preset available in all my computers so then it becomes its own hard, fast pre set in order to activate the ability to do that to make a hard fast preset you have to pay for it but otherwise it's a free plug in um I've paid for I paid for all my plug ins even though they're even if they're free because I want those people to keep making them so anyway that's a great plugin so just look for that giant j f metadata plugin jeffrey friedel and I reg reg reggie x I think is the site r e g x or something like that okay? S o that gives you this option that allows me to do a little commenting on my photos and then notice that I did another photo and I said, well, maybe you still got a little silly side to him, right? Because he's doing that so this is going to be the blogger post that all post and actually if you go to jared platt dot com and you look at the blogged I posted it last night and you'll see but those the tags that I put in there, all of this stuff that I put in theirs part of the blogged and well blog's something later this afternoon and you'll see how that happens but it was all done from light room and I didn't even go to the blogged I didn't goto wordpress to do it it was done it I literally published in there I didn't even have to go publish it from world press it just did it so that's the best way to do it stay in light room do your thing and just trust that it's going to be there okay so we'll talk more about that the next segment but that's one of the things that we're doing as we're sending stuff out one of those things that send stuff to the block and we already sent some of these images to the block are sorry to our portfolio so we want to send stuff to the portfolio so that we can look at it later weaken turn through it we can re post it weaken post on facebook from our portfolio we can make books from report fully about all of our favorite kids shots that we've done or all of our favorite wedding shots that we've done we can re update our portfolio all those kind of things could be done because we have done all of this key wording and informational here all right? So we already sent these images off to our portfolio so right now we're going to quit this no skip don't ever skipped that I skip it because I have permissions I'm the teacher oh and by the way uh you remember we were in our our albums and I had sent the album off to be commented on so I went there and commented on it myself and so you can see right over here in the left hand side I made this comment online and it says children have have to be taught to uh that graveyards are scary otherwise their playgrounds and so that's the display so anyway I did that comment it came back to me and then if I saw that that had been done whatever that comment was I would just go to this little green check box and I would click done so I would check box that has done and then it would be done clearly we're in beta form so it's not doing it but it will do it s o that check box will then tick off the list of things that need to be done uh that is smart albums I'm gonna quit there just wanted to show you that those comments were coming through um see there there's the online version of right there so if you haven't gone to look at it you just click through and flip and that's how you look at it and then when you get here you click on an image you can see the image big so it's going to pull that image up for you that's so you gonna look at the image itself um so I'm gonna go back to the spread and I could type in the spread beautiful actually it auto corrected to beautify but whatever and then I had submit submits it back to me I want to beautify those images so anyway so that's that um all right so we're going to now build the portfolio and you're going to follow a very specific set of process to build this portfolio the first part of this process is to have a portfolio drive that dr could be a number of different types of drives it could be just a bare drive like this that you're going to open up this and stick it in here so if you're always at home and you're always using then just stick it into a hard drive here it could be a hard drive like this that's got its own casing and you just plug it in this is actually a cr ew casing but you khun sly to drive into it so it's a pretty rugged little case like it seems to be made out of like trained metal or something like that so it's very rugged so you could have it in a self contained drive like this that you can cart around with you um if you're carting something around I suggest that it be solid state so that if it gets dropped or jostle there's something like that it doesn't ruin whatever's on it moving drives is very scary and so whenever I move stuff, you'll notice that I grab a drive and when I said it I set it down really soft I don't like pound it down because I don't want those needles to break I'm very careful that they don't get jostled all right um so it could be on something like this some people if they're always at home they're always on their on their lap on their desktop and they're never going to move from that they could put their portfolio on a second drive inside of that computer or they could put it on the same drive but in a different folder called portfolio but make sure the drive is really big so that you can accommodate a portfolio eso wherever you put this portfolio, I don't care, but what I do care about is that it's its own place its own place either a physical place like a hard drive or a virtual place like a folder that's kind of separated out it's in the pictures folder and it says this is my portfolio I'm not putting anything else but portfolio in there all right? So go to that space so my space is an actual drive that says portfolio on it I'm going to open up the portfolio drive once I open up the portfolio drive, you can see that I already have folders in it and some of those folders are years see that two thousand two three, four, five, six and before two thousand two it's all scans that's because I wasn't shooting digital before two thousand too, so we're going to create a portfolio yours might be a completely blank discus this point and that's fine all you need to start your portfolio and I'm going to kind of give us a little extra space down here so you can see I'm going to start creating stuff down here and I'm gonna put a z at the beginning of everything I create so it stays at the bottom so that you can see it and you can pretend all the rest of this doesn't exist so I'm going to create a folder in here and I'm gonna name it z port folio catalog there's the portfolio catalog we're gonna put it in a folder that's separated from all the images so that we can see it now if you were the type of person that's going to have your portfolio on it on a desktop computer but you're going to travel then put your portfolio on this drive even though your portfolio photos are on this drive so that when you travel you can unplug this and take it with you and you can work on it while you're running around and when you come back you just plug it in and you're always working from this drive like I do and then it will reference the photos on that portfolio drive okay, all right, so I need one folder for the catalog itself whether it's here or whether it's on the drive where all the photos are doesn't matter second, I need to create another folder and that folder is going to be called port folio drop box now we remember I made that when I write I sent it to the portfolio drop box when we went from our job to the portfolio, but that presupposes that yours exists. We're going to assume that nobody has a portfolio catalogue, nor do they have a portfolio drive right now they've just been managing it in kind of a hodgepodge way so you're going to create a drop box called portfolio dropbox then you're going to have a folder called oops I just put a folder inside that folder it's not what I wanted to do you're also going to put a ah folder in here called z port folio um to edit now you can rename these whatever you want you need these basic ideas you need a catalog you need a dropbox and union a to do tow adit toe organize t do something all right once you've done that we're going to go to light room and we're gonna hold down the option key when we click it so that it opens up that dialogue box once the dialog boxes up, we're going to hit create a new catalogue when we create that new catalog were going to tell it to put it inside of our portfolio drive and inside of that portfolio catalog folder, and we're going to call this port folio catalog and I'm going to hit create so it is making a blank catalog, just like we made on the first day we made a blank catalog for our working catalog. If you're the type that's never going t you're not gonna really work on stuff um sharing wise until it gets to your portfolio, then this is the thing that you would want to connect to light room mobile, but if you're going to do all your work and sharing from the working catalog like I do, then the working catalogs the thing that should be shared toe light room mobile does that make sense? So wherever you're going to share from that's where you want to do the connection point toe light ra mobile so I'm going to turn this off I do not want to share from here, okay, so now I have a blank catalog, but notice all of my published services are available here they're not set up but they're available I can go through and make this portfolio even more powerful if I set these up so that then when I'm in my portfolio I can go and start dragging stuff so for instance if I want to set up my facebook I would click on set up it would pull up my facebook information and I would need to go in and authorize but I'm authorized already is jared platt so I'm good and now I'm going to say portfolio images that would be the description of the service I'm creating and I'm going to tell what kind of album I want to create uh remember we made the what the faa doesn't know um so I'm gonna make a new album actually do I have one called images from the past let's just do that images from the past so anything that I dragged in here will go into the album called images from the past and then I get to set up all the information as to what's going to be in their title is going to be the name that's it's used I don't need to rely khun rename it tio file name and headline because the headline khun sometimes have information in it american type and stuff there I can include video files um I can increase the quality to say eighty five I can do you see how it wants nine sir sixty pickles right there, that's what it wants, so just give it what it wants and then I can go down to my water marking click on watermark and I can say, I want my two thousand fifteen left logo so it's going to put a logo on the left hand side? Um, okay, so that's in a hit safe and now I've got a published service, so that published service right there is if I drag anything to it's going to put it into that port into that cattle are that, uh, album on facebook so go through and said all those things up just like that set it up to all your services that you might want to use, and then once you're done with that now it's time to import some things and set them something's up. So the first import thing that we have to set up is that drop box so when we send stuff from our from our are working catalog over to the portfolio, we want to put it in that drop box, not not drop box, I should use a different term, but anyway, we want to put it into that little dropping area, so we put it in the dropping area, we want to collect stuff from there, but we have to tell light room toe watch it so here's the deal very important. If you don't follow this, it won't work, you have to create the folder and leave it empty and then do what I'm going to do because if you put a photo in it and then try and do what I'm going to do, it won't work because light room needs an empty folder so that it knows what zero looks like. Okay, it's looking for zero is zero doesn't occur, it knows something's in there and it starts working on it, but if you don't give it zero, it can't work, so we start with an empty folder, we go to file menu and we go to the auto import so that's right there, auto import and we enable the auto imports but let's first go to the auto imports settings and once we're in the settings we can now choose. Where is this auto import folder? So let me zoom out here so I can see so this is what's the it's called a watched folder, so that means it's watching it. So I click on choose and I'm gonna go find that watch folder, which is r z portfolio dropbox, which, by the way, could literally be on drop box if you wanted it to be. Because it could watch it and then if you put something in it from another computer it would end up over here and then here it's going to see it and it's gonna grab it and suck it out just steal it anything that season here it's going to steal it's like a raccoon sees a shiny thing is gonna grab it and run away with it okay but I choose that auto import must be empty is that saying it's not empty hold on let me hide portfolio dropbox remember I accidentally put that folder in there doesn't work unless it's zero even a folder causes it to get mad at me hey trump box choose now it's good so then it wants to put it somewhere else so when it steals the shiny thing from the box it wants to go take it somewhere so you gotta then tell it where it's little tree is that it can take it to the tree and put it there and so we're going to go in here and choose the destination and the destination is going to still be on that same drive portfolio thirteen but it's going to be in this portfolio too at it or to organize or whatever it's like that's where it's going to go now we're gonna hit choose on that and there's a weird little thing about light room it has to have this sub folder I don't know why but it does if you try and leave this blank it will be mad at you and so you choose the folder you want to put it in and then here you're going to rename this to something that makes sense to you like get these organized you slouch I don't know if I spelled slouch correctly did I say good um and then I could change the file name on the way and I could change settings whatever but I don't want to do any of that because I assume that I've done everything I want to do on the way out of my master catalogue so I leave all of this stuff the same gun leave everything untouched from here down and I hit okay? Owen let's enable it hit okay, all right, so now we have all of that set up so we're prepared to use our portfolio so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hide this I'm going to go to the little dropbox that we had before so I had this one set up see, this is these are the images that we put in there from our working catalog I'm gonna just grab those and pretend that I'm light room delivering him and so I grabbed these and I drag them into our drop box right here and I let go go backto light room and watch what happens there just coming in so what this means now is every time you open up your portfolio, you'll see this happen. Anything new comes in the little raccoon runs over crabs, all the shiny things out of the box and runs over and puts him in his tree, and his tree is right over here, and it says, get these organized, you slouch. So now what I need to do is highlight them, and this is very easy if you're doing this on a daily or a weekly basis, it's not as quick as if you're doing it. If you're doing it on a yearly basis, you're gonna have a little bit more organization to do, but when you open your portfolio, your first job is to take the stuff that's, new it's always going to do this and you grab it and you move it somewhere, you get to choose the organizational structure, and it doesn't have to be really involved like too many people get all excited about organizational structure, and they make they make a whole bunch of folders they make, like girls and boys and seventeen year olds in eighteen year olds, and then they cars and then cars with weeds around them, and, you know, they've put like, don't do that your key words there for that. If you've keyword id cars and weeds and girls and boys, then you'll be able to find cars that have boys sitting in the truck and girls that have weeds around them, like you'll be able to find all of those things, so don't organise that way, organize in such a way that you were able to compartmentalize large groups of photos into small groups. The best way to do that is by year, so if you do two thousand fourteen, then you're going to limit the number of photos in your portfolio when you click on two thousand fourteen, you look maybe a thousand images instead of sixty thousand images, so the idea is light room gets really bogged down by lots of images, so if you have sixty thousand images in your portfolio, which I do, it slows light turned down, but once you click on a folder of a year that only has two thousand images, it can, it can let the rest of them go. It doesn't have to pay any attention to the rest of them. It only pays attention to the two thousand you're currently looking at, and so now it can run fast again, so don't look at all your photos that same time look at a sub section, and if you do it year by year, that subsection is totally manageable on a portfolio level. Not manageable on an entire shooting basis if I go to the working catalog and I took everything I worked on for a whole year and put in a working catalog that would be another sixty thousand images orm or it would be about one hundred fifty thousand images probably and so with that kind of a number, it would really bogged down light room, but because those air moving in and out my my working catalog states pretty lean and because then they go out to their own archives, those stay lean because each archive is its own individual archive and then the on ly images that goto the portfolio of our favorites and so then that whittles down one hundred fifty thousand images to maybe two thousand images over the course of a year. So now I can click on that year and I can work within that year without any problem. Okay, all right, so now if I am in my portfolio and I'm going to now, I'm going to get out of this portfolio because we only have one job in this portfolio, but you can see how if I'm somewhere else if I'm in my working dr all after do is export to that folder that says, you know, work on the says the drop box drop him in that drop box and then the next time I can wait for two months but two months later when I opened up this portfolio it will look at that folder, grab all those images and put him in the folder that says get these organized you slouch and then you'll go do it because the folder says you have to so now I'm gonna go grab all these I'm gonna highlight all of them and now I want to put them somewhere so the best thing to do is just right click so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click this get these organized you slouch and I'm going to tell it to show me here show me the parent folder and that's going to tell me that it's in this portfolio to edit folder but if I write click that again and I say show me that parent folder it's in the portfolio dry so now I know the whole path I'm gonna right click the top of the path and I'm going to say create a folder inside here and I'm going to say two thousand fifteen so I've I'm making a folder I mean include put them all inside of two thousand fifteen and I'm include the selected photos and hit create now organize these you slouches zero so I've done my job and now they're in two thousand fifteen and if I do that every single time I will always know where they're going to go because if I'm in two thousand fifteen I open my my portfolio except for the turn of the year I know highlight all those dragon into two thousand for fifteen in two thousand sixteen when I open up my portfolio highlight all the images that I see, I know they're shot in two thousand sixteen grabem dragon in two thousand sixteen, and everything gets organized at the very beginning. When you're doing this, when you bring in a whole bunch images, you drop a whole bunch of stuff in there, you'll just have to organize them by capture time and then go on highlight them based on this, and the easiest way to do it would go to the metadata. Click on the metadata, go over to the date and just click on two thousand fifteen highlight everything that's two thousand fifteen put it in a folder called two thousand fifteen. Then, if there's more years in there, you click on two thousand fourteen highlight everything moving in two thousand fourteen and just keep doing that until your portfolio has been divided into these years. Two thousand two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven easy enough done right, okay, so that is the simplest, easiest way to make your portfolio from scratch. If you already have a portfolio catalog and it's disorganized, you can use the same methods to organize it. So if you just take a totally messed up portfolio, go up search for two thousand fourteen highlight everything right click make a folder called two thousand fourteen, put it all in there and do the same thing until all folders are zero and then every folder that's two thousand one two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve those are all filled and then you can highlight all the folders that are empty and you can remove them from light room because they're of no value to you. All right, um then once you've done that, then you can go in an institute, your dropbox same way, make the drop box, make the organize this, you slouch, drop a folder and then those two folders go into the auto imports settings up here in the file menu like this auto import right here, set him up, tell it this is the drop box that I'm pulling from, and this is the organized you slouch folder and then everything's going to go so the drop box should always be zero soon as you open it up, it'll be zero within seconds and you want it to stay that way always keep it at zero. The beauty of the system, though, is that you don't have to be exporting on lee from light room if you find an image right here on your desk top like that should be in my portfolio, just dragon in that drop box and it's part of that collection. That's going to get pulled in, all right.