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Lightroom CC Workflow Recap

So I want teo go over a couple things and then I want to recognize a couple people that are very integral to this process um of making the entire process work so let's first talk about our basic workflow that we started with a workflow remember this slide show right here um we started with this at the beginning of this workshop and we started with cf card of the sd card that's all we had and we took it and we put it into a working drive that working dr is right here so working dr is a raid system if you're a traveler than it could be this kind of a raid system but either way it should be a raid system and then we swapped that drive out and remember we showed you that process here so you khun you can use a standard system that sits on your desk or you can use a traveling system like the tough tech duel but either way you need to have something that's automatically duplicating your files and then you swap out that third drive to give you extra security to make sure that it's off site cop...

ying data from one one drive to another on ly insurers against dr failure it doesn't insure against theft or fire or water damage or stuff like that so that's why that third copy is valuable the other reason the third copy is valuable is because if you remove this you have a little bit of ah lag time between the time you figure out something went wrong and copy down to here and the time that you swap it and copy the problem again so it gives you a little bit of an extra time and if you want even more time introduce a fourth drive that on lee comes in once every month and then you totally are insured again it's data problems because that one on ly get copied a long time ago and then you've no oh there's a problem so and then at that point you could take the fourth one instead of reintroducing it here you could put it in your j bod system or simply plug it into you know a chord um and then and then you could grab that information and pull it down and save whatever information had died here you could override it or whatever okay, so but we talked about going through this process and so you watched the all of these processes occur even though a couple of them were a little bit out of order so I want to go through that process with you so you can see it so we went we put everything in the working dr we put it in an organized fashion we know where it went because we watched it go there we didn't let light room do it we did it then after we did that, we told light room where it was by importing it and that brought references to those photos into the working catalogue. The working catalog has a whole bunch of jobs in it that way we can work on multiple jobs once and it went through this whole process of doing things, building one for ones and selecting images and key wording images and adjusting them and reorganizing them and renaming him once they're renamed, we could go to photo shop and do some editing if we wanted to, then we could export those images and we can do that through cloud services through published services, we can print them out, we were able to go and print some amazing prince, which I'm going to go to now. So some of these prints this is one of our prince that I just printed um, this is a little portrait shoot that we did in in salt lake city area at the bonneville salt flats super cute little portrait um get an overhead of that. So um, but while we're working on images, we can export them and we can print them and we can post them on facebook and we can, you know we can, we can share them as we're working on them, we don't have to wait until the job is completely done to start sharing what we're working on we can share it within the flow because we have things dialed in remember our printer is dialed in we went to the print module and we set up print templates that work specifically and are calibrated specifically for our cancer paper for this size and for this type of paper we've even got, you know, print bright ning and contrast set up so that when it gets there it's going to look right, we don't have to print it twice we just print it once and, uh by the way again thank you again to cannon for the amazing printer and thank you for cancer paper because they provided all this paper for us for this and so fantastic we appreciate all of them, they've created great and by the way, I'll show a slide for cancer later so you know where to go to get their paper, but so we're we're eager to share these images with people we want to share the images and so we do that as we're working on remember we threw away all the ones we don't want to work on got rid of him the room away put him in the rejects drive and that rejects drive is just a little drive that we put off to the side and if we need it we could go back to it later but chances are we'll never use it once we're done with all that would clean it all up, we turnem all to deon! Geez, so that all that metadata is saved into the dmg, and then we send those d ngs out to our portfolio. We also make a catalogue, and we send that catalog out to the archives, and then we send our remaining images, all of our j pegs we upload them through a published service up to smugmug or some other service so that our clients have access to him and comprende temas well, once we've done all of that, all we have to do now is confirm that the copy that we made from are working drive over to the archive is correct, and we did that through using delta walker, and once we've done that, then we can delete the stuff of our working dr remove it out of our catalog, and now we're clean, and we've got lots of more space for to put other things in there, and we've got an archive copy, and we've got our favorite images in the cattle are portfolio catalogue, so we can use him, and we showed you how to update that so that its constant thing it's constantly dropping into that dropbox and it's constantly than pulling those in automated wise so we can look at him and use him. And that's where you would party and play and grab, you know, drink and look through your photos and look through kid photos or whatever it is you want to do, whether it's personal jobs um, and that's our workflow so it's not complicated, it looks complicated, it seems complicated, but once you boil it down and you just follow it through it's, a very, very rational, simple process that you follow the key is to start doing it start now, don't start next week, don't start a week from now, like start now, get yourself organized even if you're in shambles now organize the next thing that you do, and then start bringing the other things into compliance with it. The faster you get organized, the faster you'll save time, the more you'll be happy with what you're doing, you won't be spending as much time behind the computer, and so you'll get happy about it, and then you'll say this is the way, and then you'll have faith in what I'm saying and you just keep moving forward, because every time you get a positive result out of this, you're going, you're gonna push forward even further, and they're going to push forward and further, and after a while you'll be just as paranoid about your files and you'll be just as organized as I am. Because you'll love it, you'll love being able to find stuff you love being ableto know that when you walk away from the office, you're not worried every night that you're office it's going to burn down or someone's going to break in because that's just no way to live your life through fear, right? Okay, so that is the workflow um and if I promise you if you follow it you will find extra time in your life and you'll just find joy and working on your photos again because now you're not going to be laboring on your photos, you'll you'll enjoy them you'll get it done and you'll move on to the next thing. So let me quickly mention a couple partners that make all of this possible um first is cancelled paper cancel paper uh cancel infinity uh they've been making paper for hundreds and hundreds of years um and now they're making paper that goes in that printer because that's where artists are printing now and so we are super grateful for them go there look at their papers their profiles are excellent, especially on this cannon pro one and so the next person that we should think in that line is of course cannon for delivering us a great printer that there's no way I could have carried on the plane some appreciate that on dh then the next person that I should mention uh, is I should mention all of these people here's all the people that make my job impossible so it does take a lot of support to do what I do um and so even if you're just a even if you're just doing, you know, fun photography and you're not doing it professionally takes a lot of people to support your habit. And so these are all the people that support my habit, and one of the most important is c r u so if if you are looking for some kind of a hard drive, their fantastic, they're not expensive, but they're really good quality, so check him out if you go toe all of this stuff is on creative lie ford slash creative live at my website, so just go there now you'll be able to link to it, I'll leave it up so that you can find those things on dh find the deals that people are offering there, so but again, all of these people make possible in order to do what I do, and so I can't thank all of those people enough any questions that we need an answer before we leave? Because we are decent round up questions from around the whole three days, so why copy the catalog going back to catalogs if you have dmg files that contain all the info it's a good question because you are replicating it right? So the dmg is like a little piney catalog for that one image, but the catalog contains all of the information about those images and it contains the slide show that I made and it can claims any of the prints that I made and it contains any of the published service collections that I made all of that stuff is contained in the catalogue and so if I would open the catalog again, I would have the ability to go down. Say, what prince did I make for this person? Oh, these what's sideshow did I make oh, this so it's very easy for me to just simply pull in for instance, the senior portrait it's slideshow that I just showed you I didn't have to make that last night. I made that when I shot the job and then I archived the job and then when I decided I was coming here to teach you, I knew that I had a model reason release for that senior and so I went to her catalog and I brought it and put it on my disk that I brought here, and I imported it into my current working catalog and I went to the slide show on hit play and that's it, so it was very easy to draw that out and I didn't have to go find the video either it's the completely raw version of that slide show so that's why we save the catalog? Awesome. Aaron has a question, so if I have my image image is important and exp ported to and from light room via external hard drives is it okay to remove the light room catalogues? I'm not sure where that say that again. So if I have my image is imported and exported to and from light room via external hard drives so they're coming in and out v external hard drives is okay to remove the light room catalogues. Okay, so I'm going to try and piece that one together. Okay. Um, this may or may not answer the question, but maybe lands of someone else's questions. It sounds to me like they're wondering if they can get rid of catalogs after they have exported something from that catalog. Um here's the deal in my method, which I think is a very, very good method. Um, there are other methods out there, but I think this one is for especially for someone who turns through a lot of photos. This is, I think, the best method when you're working with a working catalog images come into that catalog without a catalog they're not a catalog. They come in separately, they leave together as a catalogue so it's, like people come in to a building and then you collect them and make them and say you guys are now family and then they leave together that's how it kind of works well so so once you send the catalog of images out you're not going to delete the working catalogue and you want to keep the catalog you just sent out so I don't see any point at which you want to delete catalogues unless they're asking if I had a catalog and I exported a catalog to go run around and use on a laptop and then I brought the catalogue back and I brought the changes back into the working catalog then you could delete that traveling catalog you could certainly delete that because all you were using it for was a briefcase toe hold some information when you came back you could get rid of it so those are the two circumstances I can see that that question might have been asking so about j picks do you save a file of j pegs for let's say printing or do you print usually right from the dmg and just in general what are you keeping these days in terms of j pegs that you put in the catalog since you're publishing so much stuff directly what you keep I keep psd tiffs and deon geez that's it no j picks unless they come from a cell phone or something that doesn't allow for a a d e n g or whatever. If it's not a raw image in the first place, then it's going to be a j peg. But in most cases, I don't keep any j pegs because the j pegs that I'm keeping our online there on smug meant they got put up there, and so they're just sitting up there in the cloud. Now, if I didn't have smugmug, if I just had say, ah, hard drive that then was being, you know, backed up by carbonite or backs blaze or something like that, then I would I would send j pegs out to that and let that constantly be sync up. That would be a good method if I didn't have something like smugmug s o that's, perfectly valid thing to export j pegs here and just let him keep sinking up to the cloud if you're using some kind of non photo type of synchronization method. S o that's fine, uh, but when I'm printing, if I'm printing in house, I'm printing toe a printer, and so if I'm printing to a printer, I wantto print from the raw image sixteen bit to that printer on that can, and pro one allows us to go sixteen bit so we would never want to print from a j pegs the j pegs on ly a bit so I want to print from the raw image if a can and if I can't want the psd of the tiff which is also sixteen bit so I want the best information if I'm going to white house then I'm sending him a j peg but I'm going to send it directly from here out to the white house I'm going I'm gonna make a j peg, put it in their road system and then delete the j pegs that I have no interest in him okay? And speaking of by the way we just talked about back plays and I got a email from a buddy of mine um and he said that he says I thought you might be interested in this bit of information so we're talking about hard drives and I was talking about, you know, c gate hard drives and western digital and turns out that back blaze did a study, so I'm going to show you the study that back plays did and I figure if back blaze did a study about hard drives, you probably believe it because they got a lot of hard drives. So this is the study and it's not very big we don't have a very big version of it, but you can see that hitachi is actually the best failure rate so it fails less than it's like two percent or something like that at the time and western digital fails mohr but not as much as c gate so that should be your answer to that question then so here's the study see gate probably fails mohr western digital a little bit a lot less but hitachi is the least so that's only that's a study that only someone like back blaze or carbonite dot com could really really do yeah study and it is quite interesting one thing to note is that is not like western digital blacks or western digital reds these air great one they're they're not enterprise drives or anything like that there whatever they get cheap his face is very cheap drive because they're buying so many of them they know they're all going to fail so they buy the cheaper one but multiple copies, right? Yeah about it but it did there's still a lot of valid information there so so that's that's valid I guess on all the cheap drives so then I'd be a question of you know, whether the and here's the thing I've never actually had a drive completely fail. I've had drives yeah knock on wood but I've had drives kind of get wonky on me and like I could here something going on in there and as soon as I plug one in and I hear that you did it like that I immediately go buy another drive and plug it in and then I throw that one, actually don't throw it away, I give it to my son and he, like, breaks them apart, gets the disks out of them because they're fun to play with. And plus it ruins the drive so that, you know, no one can access the data. So anyone s o I thought I'd pass that along good information to note. So if you're really looking for a dr, that fails the least it looks like hitachi's lower in dr fails the least I don't know about the higher and drives would be interesting to see a study on that, too. So but I I've I've had great luck with my sea gates, so I'm I'm okay with him some any final fast shared. This is the end of the three days of life. Yeah, it was kind of kind of weird. It isthe made it all the way through. Wait, um, you know, in the end, my final thoughts of these photography is supposed to be, you know, originally was a science. It it was a science until kind of mid to late the early nineteen hundreds, it was still a science, and it wasn't really an art form until about nineteen, fifty or sixty did the university's ever even put it in the art college? It was a science and so, you know, in the past photographers were very scientific and so it was all about the science on dh it's only recently in our history of photography that we've become artists on dh so we become less technical and I think that that's a sad thing that we've lost that technical edge um as photographers are really, really, really think that we need to do both we need to be artists we need tohave that that beauty within us but we also really, really need to get back to the roots of the science behind it so that we can remain keep that technical edge because of all you're doing is making happy accidents and you don't understand how you're doing it um then you're not really a good artist either, so good artists are also good scientists they know how good painters or good scientists cause they know how to mix their colors it's not an accident when they get, you know, burn number and you know charcoal and put them together and know what they're going to get its its not an accent and it shouldn't be an accident to you when you're exposing your images, knowing what you're going to get and it shouldn't be an accident when you're putting a light up knowing what you're going to get shouldn't be an accident knowing I still have my files on my hard drive should that shouldn't be. An accident should be purposeful. And the things that I've given you are purposeful ways to ensure that you can repeat giving your client's good files and on time and actually intact. And so, you know, don't don't shy away from the science and the technical aspect of your art, because I think that that is a big, big portion of who you really are and what you need to be. And so, I think, that's. My final thoughts, study the science and enjoy the art.