Lessons

Lesson Info

Syncing Presets in Lightroom CC

How many of you have two computers? So between the two of you you have to would you like yours to do what his death does like the same presets on both and when you make a preset you would like her to have it no absolutely that's right that's right? So you share and share alike all of his things it's perfect. So so what we're going to do is we're going to show you how to on a mac I don't own a pc but I guarantee you there's a way to do this on the pc as well but follow what I'm doing make some notes and then figure out how to do it on the pc it just takes some research and find out how many of you aren't pc harmony on mac you're both pc both pc okay, there are I know there are programs that do this is well, there are programs that you could just buy and say I want you to synchronize this folder to this folder and then on the other computer if it's a pc you would tell another program that's does the same thing synchronized this folder to this folder so you could do a cross pc mac thing b...

ecause you can have dropbox on both and we're going to do this through drop box but you could also do it through creative cloud or any other seen service you know drop box like service but we're going to do it through dropbox dropbox khun function on both soak uncreative cloud and it's just a folder that's on locally on your computer that has all of your pre sets in it and then there's a folder from the drop box that's on your computer that's local that has all of the stuff in dropbox and then that dropbox folder gets sync to the cloud and then that's clouds sinks down to this other computers so that you have another computer that has the same thing is this drop box so there's the synchronization that's happening right there between the computers but what we have to create because you can't you can't tell light room I want my preset folder to be over there you have you have to leave it where it is so cyst so system wide it can use those pre set so it knows where they are so what that means then is that you have to find a way to synchronize um the light room preset folder over to the drop box that's on your computer and then drop box takes care of this over to the next computer but then you have to find a way to get that dropbox folder to then synchronized to the other light room folder that's the connection points you have to make those two connection points and dropbox takes care of the rest that makes sense in order to show you this because I am not on two computers I have to go back and forth between two user's on my computer so they're pretending to be different computers all right? So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to find the precept folder so I'm going to go up to light room I'm going to go to the preferences and I am goingto open the light room preset folder inside of the light room free set folder this is the folder I want to synchronize I don't want to synchronize the developed preset folder I want to synchronize the entire light room folder because of the light light rum folder includes all sorts of stuff it includes all of your color profile so if I put a profile for a printer but all of that is in here so everything that you need to deal with light room is either in this one or this one and this is the camera raw so camera is an engine that is shared between light room and photo shop and so we want to be able to connect something's inside of a photo shop is well and so your curves are here so if you ever set and save a curve it's inside of the camera raw even though it's in light room it's inside a camera because that curve will also show up in in photo shop's camera so you're actually sharing curves between camera and light room so the two folders that you want to have synchronized between all computers is the camera off holder and the light room folder those two fuller's you're going to actually do this twice I'm going to show you how to do it once, all right? This is where it would be very advantageous for youto own the course because you're going to want to rewind, play it again and then rewind and then play it again and then rewind and then play it again and then rewind and then play it again and then a pause and then rewind and played again okay, because you have to get this right otherwise they won't work, but I don't think it will destroy your computer, so you're ok just it just won't work. All right, so here's, what we need to do, we need to then copy this folder to a folder in our dropbox and then we need that folder on the other computer that's getting sink to then copy to another folder that's the essential part of it. So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna hide I'm actually going to quit this, so we're gonna quit photoshopped and hide this ok, so here is the window that shows us the light room folder I'm going to go to another folder inside of drop box that I have created you can call it whatever you want I'm just calling it a test but I actually have a sink folder so I have I have a test folder and then I have a sink folder so the one that's actually an operation is my synchronization folder and that's what's doing all of that but I'm going to show you a blank test fel this so you can see so let's see? Test there we go. Test database there we go. Test d b is what I'm calling it but you could call it sink box you could call it light room saying keep good whatever in fact let's do that let's call it light room sink uh let's call it light room in synch. Okay, only a few people got that because they're old hat. Right? Okay, that way it's in sync it's just an end, isn't it? It's not I n its end. She well, I messed up the joke. Okay, so that's I want basically for all intensive purposes I want to take this and move it here and then this one because it's on drop box it will start going up to the cloud and then it will come back down and then on the other computer want to take it and move it so physically you could do that every single day and you would so if you didn't want to do the tricky version, you could literally just you could take this right click it you could copy it and then go over here and right click it and paste the item and then it would sink over the other one that you could write click that one copy it and then paste over the top of this one and you'd be good, right? So physically you can do this now you're just going to do it so the computer does it for you every second of the day. All right, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna open what's called the terminal and this is the scary terminal. So this place if you type something in and do it wrong, you could, like, ruin your computer like you can like you'll have to go in and have it fixed so the terminal does like tricky stuff you can like re program your computer to do certain things and we're going to re program the computer to do something if you type in exactly what I say, you'll be fine if you don't if you don't follow what I say I do not warrant neither does creative live warrant what happens to your computer so you must follow my prescription exactly did I say that strong enough, okay have have legal check on that make sure for that right? Okay so here's what we need to do the first thing is we have to learn to command and the command is simply uh l in space dash that's the thing right next to the plus sign up top between zero and the plus key it's the dash it's the minus key right so my minus or dash and then s so l n think of it line ln space nash s space that's it can everybody remember that? Write it down and don't don't put a one and think you'll remember that that's an l right and l a lower case l so show yourself that that is an l and think of it as line fell in line space dash s space you have to put the space after it or I will give you an heir won't ruin your computer but we'll give you an heir alright so everybody got that this is in the terminal now what I have to do is I have to tell the terminal which folder I want to copy that's this one that light room showed us so I grab that and I drag it onto the terminal and let go and you can see that it created a user path it shows you the path to that folder so you see el n space dash s space and then I dragged the folder and it gave me the user folder and by the way I am in maverick okay? I don't know if this works previous two maverick however previous to not marry what am I in mind mavericks yosemite I'm in yosemite not scratch that I am in yosemite I don't know if it works anywhere before yosemite however, before yosemite I have another version of the sink box that shows people how to do it if you go too I think it's plug ins one oh one I have that for older versions of the o s system I think it's in plug ins one o one but anyway it's it's available but most of you are on new somebody probably if you're not on yosemite I would research it and make sure that it still works I should work terminal should work the same way in yosemite and somewhere else, but I would check it out first. Um and again, if you're on a pc I'm showing you the concept. There are programs that I could buy on a mac or a pc that we'll do this without having to program it, but this works perfectly and it doesn't cost a dime some I don't know I just gonna go with that all right? So now I know what I want to copy now I have to tell it where I want to copy it to so I simply come over here to my dropbox, and I say this is the folder that I want you to put something in, so I'm going to grab this folder and I'm going to drag it onto the terminal and boom now, see, I haven't hit by the way I haven't hit an inter key yet, so it's l in space dash s space drag the folder you want to copy the light room folder into the terminal without hitting a space, grabbed the place you wanted to go to and drag that into the terminal. I still haven't hit an in turkey at this point. It should look like this except your name instead of mine. See that? So you've got the ln dash ellen space dash s space, and you got the original library folder. That's got all of my light room in it, and then you've got the new folder where I want things to go to in the drop box. Once I have that, just click on the terminal so that you were actually actively in the terminal and hit, enter, and I want you to pay attention right up above where that light room sink is. When I hit, enter that folder just appeared, but it appeared with a very special symbol on it, a little tiny arrow, which tells you that that is a synchronized folder, it is actually not a real folder it's a kind of ah alias but it's a different kind of alias all right, so it is now synchronizing up to the drop box right now you can see my dropbox is actually working see so it's working it's synchronizing ten thousand files remaining so I don't know why it thinks there are ten thousand cause there aren't but it's synchronizing a bunch of files so I don't actually know how long that'll take, but it shouldn't take very long because the bulk of this light room folder is like at the most it's like two hundred megabytes or something like that so it should should get up there pretty quickly any questions because we kind of have to wait for this toe. How do you open terminal? Uh, you go to the applications folder and look for the program terminal, open it or on a mac, you can hit command space and it will open the spotlight and just type in tr em and terminal show up and turn that'll open up some terminal is just a just a terminal is the program that you go in and type things toe like if you go to the mac store and ask him to fix something, they'll go in and yeah, it's like doss is literally yeah it's like you're entering into the system itself, so any other questions we got some questions about presets not going even though this is going anything's game right now because we're just waiting yeah, for sure carol wants to know can you selectively a race a pre set off part of the image? Well, no is the short answer to that because in photo shop you could do it, you can do something and then you can use the history brush too erase whatever you've done in this part of the photo, you can't do that in light room, but what you can do because you're in raw is let's say I increase the exposure of an entire photograph because overall it just needs to come up, but the person's face doesn't need to because it was flashed and it was perfect so I can increase the total exposure and then if I go to the brush tool and I take that exposure down by the same amount that I took the whole photograph up and pink it I've essentially done the same thing is what she's at that this person is asking but because it's raw, it wasn't increased the pixels and then decrease the pixels after they had already been solidified its its raw so it's what you're doing is you're telling it to compute the whole thing up and then you're telling it to compute that little circle of the face back down toe where originally was and so in the end, the face had absolutely no changed done to it. When you exports the file it's exporting the original pixels with no change whatsoever to them on the face, and then the only changes happen around it. So when you work in a raw environment like that, you khun, increase the color here, and then you can paint the color back out over here, and you can increase the exposure here and you can paint color the exposure out over there, and none of it is struck tiv. And so if you don't have to worry about that up and down, like you would in a tip for a photo shop or a j peg where everything you do is destroying it's it's destructive editing, this is non destructive, so that's the advantage of wrong? Well, let this thing sink rise. The first synchronization takes awhile because it has to take the whole lightman folder and move it up to the cloud. The next synchronization doesn't take his long because every time you add just a preset and you say that it's like a kilobyte and so it just goes, it just shoots it over. But the first synchronization, like, take just a little while in order to get it up and back down, but you remember. That we first found our light room folder and we did that by clicking on the button inside of the light room preferences and we typed in our code and we'll type it again so you'll have the code again but we we typed it in and then we drug are light room folder the folder that has all of our pre sets we drug it onto the terminal and then we went into the place in our drop box where we want those pictures to go alright not pictures but the presets to go and we took the folder that we want them to be in I remember you took the folder you want to copy and put it into the terminal then you put the folder where you want it to go into the terminal and the result was this result was that you have inside of the drop box you have a folder called light room and sink and then inside of that you have a shortcut, a special shortcut to the light room folder itself. You cannot use a shortcut like the normal kind of alias thing that you make out of, uh often mac normally you have to do it this way or you can use a sinking program but the result is going to be the same you still have to follow this same structure pattern, but maybe using program to do it instead of editing in the terminal but again the terminals free so if you know how to do it you might as well do it all right so we have synchronized our drop box the drop boxes now synchronized up to the cloud this entire folder of light room and you can see that they're the same so if you zoom in here you'll see that this has all the same things so this has the same things as this and if I were to change the name of something here or if I were toe update something here it would go to here if I were an update something here it would go to here so it crossed talks back and forth back and forth okay now we're going to change our computers so I'm gonna log out and I'm walking over to my other computer walking walking oh here's my note that's not what I want I want this one uh okay I am logging into my other computer and I have given it a windows background so so that it seems like I'm on a windows you like that under all right so now that I am on a windows background um now again this could happen on a windows and a mac as long as they both have drop box so you could have it on whatever computers you want you just have to synchronize it to the folder where you want it to go. So at this point, I don't have cause I just made this yesterday. I don't actually have the adobe software on this side on this computer. So what? I'm pretending so inside of it, my desktop, I have an adobe folder and inside that adobe folder, I have a light room folder. Actually, this was my test last night, so I'm going to delete this like that and we're going to go in goa too. We're gonna go to the library and we're going to create a folder in applications support in adobe see how it's not there right now. If I had light room installed, it would be there. So I'm going toe put light room in here just so that you can see that it's there. Okay, so if light room were installed on this computer, it would be right here in the light room folder, so you need to have this open again. We're inside of our, uh so we're in the user inside of the library. Inside of applications support in adobe in light room. If you can't find this again, you could just on the other computer, open up light room, click on the button that says find the light room folder, it'll show you where the folder is, and this is what you're going to need to find okay so let's just extend this out so we can see that path a little bit better there that's what we want now we also need to open up the drop box and inside the drop box we're going to find the dropbox folder on our other computer and we're going to look in the test d b and we're going to find that light room folder so it has been synchronizing over to this computer so it uploaded it's in the cloud now it's downloading to this computer and we've got this light room full they're ready for us now what we're going to do is we're gonna go back into our terminal same thing that we were in before but now we're on a different computer and if you're not if you don't have a terminal in pc or whatever and you don't know obviously this isn't gonna work on a pc probably s o find a software that will do it or find the terminal command on a pc that will do it but what we're going to do is type in the same code so again l n space dash pass space and that's l and space dash s space once I've done that now I'm going to tell it where to go so now we we have the file in the drop box it's right here see that I have the file in the drop box so I'm going to tell the terminal this folder that's in this dropbox is what I want to copy, so I grab it and I drag it down to the terminal and drop it and that gives me the pathway to that specific folder then what I need to do is come over here and I need that light room. I need this light room thing over here to go over to this side so it needs to come from the drop box and it needs to go into the adobe application support for light room currently, if you have light room installed, you will already have a light room folder. You can't put the light room folder inside the light room folder, it will mess things up and it won't be seen remember folders within folders are not seen, so what we need to do then is we need to replace that light room folder, so I'm going to go to this folder. This is the light room folder that we open up by clicking on that little button inside the preference in light room. When I open it up, I'm gonna click on it and I'm going to delete it it's not gonna hurt anything to delete it, I'm just going to delete it just make sure that the first computer you do this too is the master that's, the one that has the good presets in it. The second computer is the one you don't care about the presets that because at first you have to take one to be the master and then push it over to the other one once they're pushed then they'll just talk to each other so now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna take this so we've already taken this light room folder here the actual folder not the folder that it's in but the the light and folder and we've dragged it onto the terminal so that you can see that we've got the actual pathway down there then we go up here to our pathway where we want it to be so we want the light room folder to be inside of the adobe folder so we're going to take the dhobi folder and drag it on top of the terminal and now that tells it I want the light room folder that's in my dropbox to be put inside of the adobe folder that's on this computer once I do that I'm gonna click on this and I'm gonna hit enter and it adds it do you see that the lightman folder is inside here now and all of this stuff is coming in and it's synchronizing so now if I were to go here and just add a whole new folder this is the easiest way for me to show you what's gonna happen if I add a whole new folder called woo hoo I just added it it just went over from here this is where this is the light room folder where light room is looking and if light room just added a preset or a folder or anything that says woo hoo on it then it will go directly over here to the light room folder and say woo hoo and then when I get back to my other computer so let's go long out here so now it's synchronized over here and we will in a minute end up with a woo hoo in this folder and it will transfer from there so anything that comes into this folder is going to end up over here inside of this folder and they will just cross talk back and forth. The important thing is that you make sure that you're choosing the correct folders and putting him in the terminal so again I'm gonna recap very quickly and that is that you go over to the folder the right folder from light room you click on that little button that says find the presets folder it'll take you to the presets folder in the terminal you type in your command which is that l in space dash s space and then you grabbed the light room folder you want to copy, you drag it onto the terminal then you go up to the folder that you want to drag that folder into which is a sink folder on your on your dropbox and you dragged that folder onto the terminal saying this is where I want to put it in once you've done that you go to your other computer you pull pull up the drop box you open up the terminal you put in the command again and then after the space you take the folder that of the light room folder that's in the drop box now not the containing folder but the light room folder itself drag it on and say I want to copy this and then you go and grab the folder the adobe folder where the light was supposed to be grab that dragon onto their and now it will synchronize and you could do that to a cz many different folders is you want anywhere on your system that you want so any time you want a folder to copy from here to here and always stay and sink you just run this system there are also programs that will do it as well but this is a pretty simple way to do it if you know what you're doing and you follow those directions it will happen yeah okay so why are you doing that rather than just putting the presets folder in your dropbox folder directly and then in light room pointing it where it says where is your light where is your precepts folder well it's here it's in my dropbox why is it not just referring directly to drop box which your other machines going to see anyway? Also your light room folder is inside of the computer you could tell your lighter and folder of its in your catalog to be somewhere, but we're not doing that we're putting it in the system so it's available to all of our lightem catalogues I see okay, yeah if you were only using one catalog and you on ly wanted to use that one catalog, you could put the light room folder or the preset fuller anywhere you want, but that means that you can't have it on all of your catalogues each catalogs goingto create a new set of presense so we want and plus, we're actually transferring more than just that we're transferring the light room settings were transferring templates were transferring everything not just the presets we're transferring everything that has to do with light room including if you go up here to the if you go into the adobe folder and you go into, uh camera raw if you do the same process to camera raw than all of your if you have any um uh profiles if you have any curves or anything like that that shared with photoshopped than those get shared a cz well and you can't move that folder so you really it makes more sense to synchronize this through drop box now, photoshopped. Sisi has the ability to share its own settings with itself, from computer to computer. Because it's, part of the creative cloud. My hope is that sometime in the near future, because light room has joined the creative cloud, that synchronization will also occur inside of light room, at which point we won't need this kind of convoluted, you know, synchronization, meth. But until that point, this is a very, very good method for getting this stuff synchronized back and forth between each other.