Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Create Your Portfolio in Lightroom

Now let's talk about the how all right, so you will notice in my portfolio slash working catalog, and I used to do this differently. I used to have one catalogue for all my working stuff, and then I had one catalogue for all my portfolio, and so I would when I was done with it here in the working catalogue, I would share it with the portfolio. And then whenever I wanted to look for something, I would just go over to the portfolio, open it up and do some searching. I no longer do it that way, and the reason is this. Number one light room has gotten faster, and so it can handle mawr images than it used to be able to. So that's the first reason. But the real reason is that light room is connected to Light Ra Mobile. And because light room is connected to Light Ra Mobile, there are a lot of things that can be done that I don't wanna have to set up in two catalogues, and I can't synchronize two catalogues with lighter mobile. At least at this time. I can't do that. I can Onley synchronize o...

ne catalogue with light Ra Mobile. And I want to be able to use my working catalog, the things I'm currently working on and my portfolio so that I can open up on my phone or my tablet at any time and see all the photos that I meet. So if that person calls me and says, Hey, can you make a website for me? Of all your photos from Sweden? Aiken go here and I don't even have to be at my computer. I could be on a train somewhere, and I could give them access to something from an IPad or an IPhone or some kind of mobile device. So I want to be accessible to all that. So now I do everything in one catalog. Once I'm done with the job, the job is going to be archived and sent away into an archive drive that's detached. I'm just gonna I'm gonna archive the whole thing. And if you want more information about how to do that, I have days upon days of workflow, organizational structural things. Plus, if you want to know more about light or a mobile, I have a whole workshop here on creative live there about that as well. So this is not the time to discuss that in depth. But I need you to understand that I am using one catalogue for a very specific reason. And that's so that it can connect a light ra mobile. And so that everything I trained like room to do can be done to my portfolio and to regular images all the same time. Rather than having open up this catalogue. Do something. Shut that one down. Open this one. Do something. Shut that one down. I could do it all at once. All right, Let me show you then what my catalog looks like. And I've had to alter it just a little bit to be here, because obviously, I'm not connected to my, uh, computers and my my raid systems at home. But you'll get the drift. So I have on my catalogue to essential folders. The first folder is the Jobs folder. That Jobs folder is where all jobs go. So each job if you if you look into this Jobs folder, you'll see a job, a date, another job, a day, another job, a date, right. And I don't have too many jobs in there. And the reason I don't have too many jobs in there is because I get them done. You got to get your job's done. So get him done. Get him off. Send them out. I just made some jobs here, pulled some old jobs in so that we had jobs to look at because, quite frankly, as soon as I left to go to Prague last week, I didn't have any jobs like I was done. So I finished my jobs. I went to Prague, came back. These other jobs, these air just jobs from 19 2015 and back. So s so I've got all of these, plus my Prague right here. So these are the jobs that I'm working on. So they're gonna be there once they're done. Right? Click Export. This is catalog. It's gonna go somewhere else. I mean, it's so it's making a copy of all the stuff here and sending it off somewhere else. But they're going to be images like here that I love. So I like this image here. And I see that I have already key worded all the stuff that I need, I've got Cliff Bride groom Shoni point wedding, wedding photography. All that right. So I've got everything that I needed, and I like it as an image. So I want this image to go to my portfolio. In order to do that, all I need to do is grab it. Now, remember, I've already archived, so I archive the job. So there's a copy that on Lee that the client can look at as their job. I have delivered it. The client. Long time ago, I finished it. I exported as a catalogue and put it on an external drive. That's for 2015. Jobs sent it over there. Now I just want this image, which has already finished. I want this image in my portfolio, so I simply grab this jaw. Are this full file and I grab it and I drag it into the portfolio, notice that the portfolio is divided into years. And then there's one folder down here that says new additions to the portfolio. I grab it. I drag it into the new additions to the portfolio. What light room just did is it took it out of its current job and put it into the portfolio folder. Remember, I already sent the job away, so there's copy of it. So now anything I do, that job is my prerogative. I can delete things. I could move them. I can shift them around. I can whatever I want because the client already has their job park down on archive job drive so I can go through now and sort by all my four stars. And I could say, OK, I want all of these in the port if I don't really want all of them. But I want some of them. And so I could just grab all of these and grabbed them and dragged them in there. And now see how it's moving all these files. So now I have Okay, One of them already existed. So I have 59 images inside of the new additions to the portfolio. Now, this job, every once in a while, you kind of go through and look at all your images and then say OK, where When were these shots? Well, I confined that down here in the metadata, so they were shot in 2013. So I'm gonna grab this and move it into 2013 and now it's just moving those images into the proper time. So now I can look at everything I shot in 2013 just by clicking on 2013 and I can see all of those, right? So it's very easy for me toe add stuff to my portfolio. Then once I'm done with that, I just simply go up to the job itself, and I right click the job and I remove it. I'm not gonna remove right now, just in case. But I removed the job and it just disappears from light room like one forgets about it. But where are the favorite fold photos that I want to look at later? They're in my portfolio folder inside of this current A collection or catalogue. So if you want to start the system having a portfolio, all you got to do is take your one working catalogue that you currently have all of your stuff in and add a folder simply by right clicking the top folder, the most parent folder, right clicking it and create a new folder inside of it called Portfolio and then inside of that, create a folder called New Additions to the Portfolio and then any time you pull stuff into it, when you want to organize it, you can come to it. And you could just say sort by metadata. By the way this is Let me introduce you to the library. Filter this. The library filter the backslash key right above the enter key, hides it and shows it. So if you go to the the library filter and click on metadata, you can see the dates that things were shot. So you would just highlight 2006 and then highlight everything from 2006 and drag it into a folder or creative folder. So if I wanted to create a folder, I would just go to here and say, Right click and I would say, Creative folder inside of there called 2003. There's one that already exists there, but that's what I would do and hit create, and it would move all those into the 2003. Now this right here we have one photo with two, um, virtual copies of that photo, that air inside of the 2003. There's much more at home, but I didn't travel with my entire collection with me. Okay? At least not that I'm showing him. Um, OK, so that is all of my portfolio. So I could scan through this portfolio or if I want to find something, I can simply highlight the Portfolio folder instead of the whole thing. Just highlight the portfolio and click on text, and then I can. So Senior Portrait's while there's bunch of senior portrait's and then I could say, Senior portrait. It's to do with music. Well, there we go. Say she's got a record in her hand. She's got headphones on, so that has to do with music. A good day. I could do senior portrait sounding to do with golf. None. I happen to know that I have some, but not necessarily here. Um, I think let's see what happens if I type in sparks. There we go. See the sparks come up so you can tell that I'm doing my job because Aiken search for things and find them pretty quickly. Um, and if for some reason I didn't quite keyword, I'm right like, for instance, whole gah. There she is. That's there's a whole girl right there. So if I didn't somehow do my job I can always search around a different route and find it. But generally I find that I do a pretty good job. Key wording. Okay, so we now have all of our images key worded. We've tagged them on maps. And by the way, if you want to, if you want to tag something on a map, but you don't actually have it tagged on a map, Um, I can go here and search for Chandler Arizona, and it'll find Chandler right there. And as I go drill down, my studio is right over here. Um, that's this way, and it's right here. And so this photograph was taken in my studio, as were these two photographs. And so I just grabbed them and dragged them right to their and boom. So now those air tagged in my studio if I didn't know where they were shot. So it's very easy. Even if you don't have GPS to just look at a map and figure out Oh, I was over at such and such a church and Aiken search that cause this has access to Google. So it's you can search anything Google concert and find where it is and then just tag him on there. If you were shooting at the opera house, just search for the opera house and tag him with the point being that now you've got really good data on all of these and you're able to find them because once you are able to find them, you have the ability to share them. And that is where the power of the portfolio comes in is in the sharing and the distributing of your photos. So back to the cooling process and getting rid of and archiving. I typically deliver a high rez J peg, not a raw file. When you archive a job, are you archiving just the J pic? No, I'm archiving the entire raw I'm archiving when you right, Click something and say exports, this is catalogue. You're exporting the raw photos, you're exporting the catalogue itself and you are going to save all of the J pegs to that same folder. Then you're just going to go in and grab that entire folder and copy it over to that archive drive. So anything that I've delivered to the client slide shows, movies, uh, anything there there signed documents, all of that including their model release, is in that folder and then that folders copied over to the archive drive so that I can find it later. Are the rejects there, too? They could be, but not necessarily. Yeah, I like the delete. Um, after I just moved to a reading rejects drive with the client's name on him and then later on, if they want him, they get. But I don't want to tie out the whole, you know, the whole drive to that stuff. So I just throw him out to the Rejects drive and then later on, I'll just delete to make room for the next set of rejects. They're coming in, gives me about a six monthly way. A zlotys have six months leeway. Nobody, you know, if they haven't if they haven't complained in six months that I would like to stand on. So what method are you using to track which images are model release? Because it's, I think, an important consideration as to whether they go in your portfolio. That is really important consideration. So in order to discuss that, um, I have one right here. Um, so this one is has a full model release on it from both models and from the location. And so if I go to the bottom of right here inside of the metadata, you can click on the I T. P. C. Information, and you can scan down to the bottom. Oh, sorry. It's the extended, um, in scan down to the bottom and you will find a property release and a model release so you can see that I've got an unlimited in unlimited property release. I also have an unlimited. Uh, so this is the property right here. And then the model releases here. So I've got unlimited property Lee released and model release on it so I can do whatever I want with the image, because I've gotten both signatures from both models and from the property. I'm good to go. So that's just in there. And I can then search for show me everything that has a model release, right? So, yeah, you definitely want to add that in. But that's something that you don't have to do per image. You just do it for the whole shoot when you're done with the shoot. If you have moderate leaves, highlight the entire thing, say I've got a model release for this. Where is the model release? Well, model release ideas right here. So I have to do a search for that model release. So if I say look for this name right there, I'll find it. Now, I use a model release. Um, on my I pad and phone, it's called Easy release. So if I open up my my ipad and I go to all of my photo applications, it's right there. It's called Easy Release. When I open it up, there's all the releases that I have from all sorts of people, and then I could just search for whichever job we just did. And I can either export one at a time or I can export the whole job at once with this little arrow and it'll email me all of their receipt. Are there releases at once in J Peg and PDF form, and then I could just add them to the job folder so that they're there. And if I am going to keep them in my portfolio, I'm gonna also keep a copy of that inside of the portfolio or inside of my catalogue drive. So I just have a folder that's called model releases. All modern releases go in there. I confined sort by. Um, it's fairly easy to find him the other. The other thing you can do is you could actually keep the J peg version of the model release in with all your raw files. So it'll actually show up in light room. Right? Next. OK, so find a way that works for you. I don't care what it is, but get the model release somewhere where you can use it. If you just keep it on your IPad, you've got to go find it. It causes mawr difficulty to get to it. The more difficult it is to get to something, the less likely you are to use it. So get those model releases and put them in with files that they're actually referring to, so that then you can utilize those. Okay, All right. So that that's photo releases and those air gonna come into play when we start trying to use the images for something other than posting on our website or sharing with friends or putting on Facebook or something like that? If we want to start selling those images, then we need to have those model releases