Lessons

Lesson Info

File Managment and DNGs

So there's just like we've been showing you this entire class so far there's two ways to skin the cattle and talks to that bat we're talking about bad light we're going to show you how to do the light room approach how to do some of the similar things in photo shop and then lindsay's gonna wow you by doing the same thing in photo shopped like seven different ways so no pressure but I think we're gonna start with a light room because anything you want a dad or no that's it I we've gotten a lot of requests for how do you fix that? How do you fix this on dso we're going to talk about everything from white balance to reducing noise to sharpening your images and a lot of it you can do light right in light room so this is a cue that I want to impress upon everyone let's say that you don't use any software to manage your files if you have a picture that maybe you shot in the wrong white balance if you open up I'm talking about workflow management if you open up in photo shop and fix it and yo...

u have eight hundred other photos you need to open up and work on eight hundred photos you will never succeed as a professional photographer that way because your time is money and you have a lot of other things to worry about the reason light room is so amazing especially for shooting and bad lighting situations is you confined a file, tweak it, get the white balance right get the exposure right reduce the noise and then any other picture that you shot in the same environment that was similar you can apply those same changes and it takes seconds it takes nothing at all so far ast time saving goes if you photograph and bad lighting situations where you do need to tweak your images light room is the only way to go some people's photographs to say some people some people uh also used aperture um there's also well, the knife and the ones that existed before kind of even phased out now um one of the reasons that I advocate for light room would be the dhobi creative cloud um right now if you sign up for an adobe creative cloud uh membership if you're getting photoshopped that way you get light room that way and you get premiere that we're all for the same price so it's not like next time there's an update to say aperture you need to go buy another one you're having a membership to every adobe product and it's included one of the other reason to advocate is if you do not have a workflow management program yet there's a lot more education out there unlike room than there is aperture if you have aperture there's nothing wrong with it. You're totally fine. You can do what we're teaching here. It's not a problem, but if you're looking for some way to manage your files later would be the way to go. And creative life has plenty of classes on light room that our intensive where you could learn the insides and out in three days for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And another great thing about life, too is it's as an adobe products cross platform. So aperture is basically mac only and being in the creative field, we think that everyone islands an iphone and I mac unfortunately, there are still pc users out there. I was a pc user for a long time, and I for see myself going back that route too, on the positive builds more high and machines for video working things, so to be able to learn a program and then this subsequent upgrades and then to not be tied to a certain platform is a great option. It kind of leaves you open if you go into someone else's studio rental studio, you know the software, regardless of what machine it's running on. So we're gonna there's a couple different things why we're going to show you this workflow another one has to do with color profiles, so we've been talking about color balance all week okay, and when we get into software, the software has to manage that color profile are basically a sign what is red and what is blue and what is green there's a couple different profiles out there? There's icy sea profiles you've probably heard of programs like capture one some high end digital capture software used that on there's also dmg color profiles, and those are more prevalent because that's what adobe photoshopped light room, photo shop and then photoshopped elements support. So we're going to be showing you a dmg color workflow and that's also, what the passport color checker that we've been photographing all week uses that's another reason why we're going to focus on that. So the software's great accessibility, the cross product platform and then the color profile in that space. So there's a lot of reasons why we kind of chose this one on like lindsay said, there is no shortage of education on it, so we're going to kind of glaze over what we think you need to know to process the images and to fix the problems we've been addressing. But I mean, this should just open your eyes to the education that existed, how powerful these programs are, so you want to start by x splaining dan jiro quit? Yeah, absolutely, so I'm gonna pull up another folder here and I'm gonna pull up you guys are getting like the raw look a lot of times when I present all go ahead and have like a second window and just drag what I want you to see over there you guys are seeing my computer so I tried to hide all the embarrassing stuff anything is what you guys are using is getting well look but right here I want you to kind of look at um these guys right here these two folders so we've got a look book that I shot for the fall to two thousand thirteen and I've got a d n g folder in a raw folder I'm gonna open up the raw folder for a second here and we're going to see what these files look like I can find him there we go so these are what the raw files look like this is if you were shooting a cannon this is the candid five d mark three why do you have kanan files I shoot everything ah medium format phase hostile blood canon nikon I'm a photographer and I use light that's it you know whatever camera suits the job so this job was shot on the cannon if you look at these files these air the cr two files to these are candid raw files for you nikon shooters out there we have any f files right? So this is just starting to open up that can of worms there are a lot of different kinds of raw files out there, and every manufacturer camera manufacturer wants to keep the magic recipe or the secret recipe close to their chest so they don't share what is in how they process that data, how they capture it so every manufacturer has a different kind of raw file and that could be a pain in the butt if you take a bunch of photos memories that you want to cherish and then ten years later you open up your program, the company that made your camera I could name a couple of companies that kind of that you might worry about now and then all the they're no longer in business so they're raw file isn't supported that could be an issue yeah, I think it's kind of like, uh I have files on a zip drive what if I would never be able to get those back? And so there's actually a couple of these proprietary files names, you know, like we have then if ensued, there are tubes and things like that there's a couple that you can't open right now in photo shop because they haven't been in existence for a while and so there was no need to include them, and so you got to think long term we're thinking like archival, right? You always want to be able to access your files dante was adobe solution s o d an g basically adobe came about and they said we want a universe we'll make a universal format, you know? So by dmg basically it takes a raw file and it puts it in a dmg wrapper they found some kind of lossless compression so it does make the files a little bit smaller. It puts all the bits in there and make sure that its future proof so you can make a pentax and olympus a sony a nikon cannon raw file, all of them can be compressed into a dmg file. You still have all of the editing capabilities of that native raw file give a little smaller size and you have a universal file format just like j peg and a lot of these files that were using an art weren't universal at one time, but they are now and the same way this is going to go ahead and kind of future proof your files and that's because it's not it's nonproprietary so actually how they do their formulas is out there. It's open? Yeah, this isn't like, well, you know, if bush's baked beans goes out of business, we'll never find the big bean's recipe it's not that kind of thing it's is this, so you'll always be able to take the dmg recipe and get your files out of it um another thing to which drives me batty is a lot of people use folder structure still we're gonna talk about collections and stuff in photo album but our files have to physically live somewhere on our drive so we put them in folders we normally don't name them or date them appropriately but they're there and if you look at this raw file the cr to file here that's the raw file with all the data it has a sidecar file called an ex mp file so that has the information that includes who you are the photographer with shot at your copyright and fill your contact info when you shot it it also includes your star ratings any editing that you've done to it in a bridge or light room or aperture so that basically memorized all the work you put into the file in all of the identification of that file. So what happens if I take this guy and I move it over onto my desktop or on a drive and I email it and this folder gets trashed or lost all of this data is now an orphan and this file right now has to start over from scratch so it's a pain in the butt just filed management why is trying to keep these guys together especially if you're working a multiple computers you keep things on a backup drive so what dnd does is dmg basically takes your raw file it takes that sidecar file it takes a color profile and then it also goes ahead and takes a j peg small tiny version so on here I could just hit space bar in preview the image and wraps it all into one file made life a lot easier do they mention it a safe space to like the g eight hundred files are huge so like I immediately convert to the mg so those are all the reasons we will be discussing the dmg workflow so we talked about why you should be shooting raw and after you shoot where all we encourage you to convert to dmg and you don't have to buy light room toe work dan ji it's not a light room thing I want to show you guys here really quickly having embarrassing naps on here probably not okay, you know what that would be theirs are dmg there should be a dnc converter in here adobe dnd convert that's what I was looking for so it's up here on the top right here so this is a free application that you can download from the adobe website I think it's like labs that adobe dot com slash download or something you could just google it but the adobe dmg converter does this I can select the folder here on my drive that is my raw files select it I can save the same location or to a new location and if I wanted to do the new location perhaps like check this dmg folder here select that and then it can change document name so if I want to get a good naming convention say itjust is eric photo one three, five, seven that doesn't tell me anything I can change the names and numbers here is that in the future you know I can I can see what the fire was or when I took it and here's all the details right down here it'll make a j peg preview you could make it load faster you can compress it more don't worry about all that basically I'm just saying there's a freeway to convert to this file format that is supported by all of your editing software that's out there um also you can just go ahead and compress it down and have it delete the raw files so you can keep it in the same folder that's what ideo a shoot all my raw files dump them to a folder I have this or like room convert to dmg and delete the ross I don't want to see him again and for everyone who has a light room yeah don't worry about this you don't need this included this is just this is just kind of like the free external option and look there's even an option to extract some people like, oh my goodness I don't trust it there's no way they got it to shrink down and do all these wonderful things. I want my raw files. You could always extract the raw file back out there if you want to. So I just wanted to show that because a lot of times people think that you have to have light room and that this only work in my room. But I'm going to show you here by booting up light room for that that's, not the case, because I can go ahead and import. We'll go to my media drive, which is this external lacey rugged that I work off when I'm on location and I'm going to go to raw over here and you can see all of the raw files are coming up. Now. This is your import dialogue and light room. Okay, this is where you're gonna begin if you notice here on the top here is adding that option just basically represents those photos inside of light rooms. Little ecosystem without moving them are changing them or anything. Okay, move. We could go ahead and add those toe light room and then physically move their file. Maybe moving from a memory card to an external hard drive, okay, copy here, same kind of thing. Here's, where I want to get into it. Copy as dmg. So it's goingto imported into your life and catalogue so we can start working and it's going to convert to dmg for us, which means it's gonna give us all of the sidecar files, profiles everything as a d in gym. So you'd click on that copy. Is dmg here's our files? We're going to select all of them, and we could import.