Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

Hello. I'm care Applet in it. And welcome to today's class where we're going to talk about downloading, organizing and sharing your photos. So we're gonna get started today by talking about our goal. A lot of times with our images today, people have a mess going on in their computer. So if you do get around actually downloading your photos, it's very common that you have a hard time finding them later. I know that a lot of people dio I myself, if I'm not very vigilant, I can have a meth on my computer as well. So today's goal is to create a plan, basically like a workflow for effectively managing and maintaining what is an ever growing collection of images. So here's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about downloading. I'm gonna walk you through the download process. Then we're going to talk about organizing our photos. So once we get them on our computer, how do we keep track of them, for they're easy to find. Later, I'll show you how you can use light room to share ...

them on Facebook really quickly and easily. We'll talk about making a photo book also pretty painless and how to prepare our files for printing. I think that's key with our digital photos, we want to make sure we give them a way to live on beyond the life of the hard drive. So the tool that we're gonna be using today is Adobe Photoshopped Light Room. If you don't already have this piece of thought where you can download a free trial of it from adobe dot com, Flash Creative Cloud And this is really the industry standard for dealing with with photos. There's a lot of different tools that you could use something like photo mechanic you can use. You know, I photo are, I think now it's just called photo. There's a lot of different tools available, but nothing really compares. If we're gonna be honest about this, I don't think anything really compares toe light room. So that is what we're going to be working with today if you don't have it. Like I said, you have that pretrial and then to purchase it is different than what you might be used to. It's not a piece of software anymore that you just buy it something that you only pay as you use it. So it comes with photo shop. I think it's about 10 months. $10 a month. Are is the current price anyway, so it's pretty user friendly. Budget wise and photos are important to you. Then you probably want to find a way to make room for that so that we'll be using. Today we are going to talk first about getting our images onto our computer, so we need to get them off of the memory card so we could take the card itself and plug it into the computer. If you're computer has a way to do that depends on the memory card that you're using. This one in The graphic here is the SD card. Today I'm going to be downloading images from a compact flash card. So actually already have it plugged in here, so I don't want to just yank it out right yet, But it's a little bit bigger, and I don't have a lot for that on my computer. So in that case, I'm going to be using a card reader to pull the images off. So you want to make sure if you're using a card reader that it will fit whatever kind of card you have. Last but not least, you can always plug your your camera directly into your computer using whatever cable came with it, so that is also an option. So whatever your method of choice will be using light room to actually do the file transfer. And I just want to take a minute to actually explain what light room is and how it works, because it's probably different. If you've never used anything like like room before, it can kind of be a little bit mind or P. So Light room is a piece of software that allows us to organize and work with our images, but it does not actually store are images, so the images are not saved in light room. They're going to be saved just on the hard drive like normal like like they always are. Light room is just a way that we actually are viewing it. So in this graphic we see the image on the laptop itself and light room. I like to explain it as basically a window so lightly with the window we can look through to see the images on the hard drive. So another way to think of it. He is like this. So it's a window to our hard drive. We're just viewing the images that are there wherever we choose to put them. Probably in our Pictures folder. We're just accessing them through light room. But if you were to uninstall light room and remove it from your system, it's not going to take your photos with it. Your photos are separate there on the hard drive. We're just looking at them in light room, so sometimes that gets a little bit tricky for people to think about. And the nice thing is that light room. The advantage of this is that lie true. Makes it possible for us to view all the photos in one place that being light room, no matter where they are on the hard drive. So you may have photos scattered across hundreds of different folders all over your hard drive. But when it comes to trying to actually see them, you can see and find them all in one place, and that's just part of what makes light room so great. So here is the workflow that we're gonna be talking through when a download our images and we're gonna be doing this in. There's a lot of different ways you can do it. What I have found and what other experts recommend is putting your images into a folder labeled with the download date. I didn't always do it this way. I usedto download all my photos and name, you know, name the folder whatever kind of photos they were. So if I was on a trip to Seattle, for example, and I took pictures, I would go home and download those and put them in a folder called Seattle. But then I would run into problems looking for them later because maybe I didn't call them Seattle. Maybe I called it creativelive. Or maybe I called it Washington. Who knows? So it can get a little bit tricky that way. So what I found to be more helpful is to actually just name the holder with the download date, so I'll show you how that works. We also want to be backing up our images as well, and we can use light room to make another copy on a different hard drive at the same time, and I'll show you how we do that. But of course, with best practices, you also want to be backing up your whole hard drive and using maybe a cloud service to like carbonite or mosey or back, please, or something like that. So look into that if you're not already doing it, and then once we are done downloading our images, it's really a best practice to actually delete them in your camera. So we'll download them from the card here. But then we're just gonna leave them on the card until we're done. Then we would stick it back in the camera, and I would actually wipe the card by formatting it in the camera. Just I think it keeps the memory card a little bit healthier and creates less potential for error data errors. Next, I'm gonna walk you through organizing images, so that means we're going to be downloading them into the one folder. But we're going to separate the images into what are called collections. They're just virtual collections, so we're not actually duplicating anything on our hard drive. We're not moving anything around. The files will be right where we left them, but it's just a tool that light room uses to help us find what we're looking for. So we'll do that. Then I'm going to show you how to go through and Cole your images, which is kind of like panning for gold. So we'll go through the chute, sift through and get rid of all the shots that are out of focus or just really bad expressions or blink shots or something that we just really maybe it's a duplicate, really, We just don't need that. We'll get rid of all of that stuff, and then we will take out the trash so we can maximize our hard drive space and usage. So that's gonna be organizing. We'll walk through sharing on Facebook and publishing our favorites. That's gonna be our workflow here, and then it's always good to have some sort of output. Um, that doesn't mean you have to print every image you take. Of course. I mean, I don't do that either. Let's be real, but because we live in such a digital era, it's so easy to not print anything, and I think we run a big risk of losing a lot down the road in the future. So I like to think that my future self will thank me for printing things now, and I think your future self might do the same. So I'll give you some techniques for how you can make that part of your workflow. So it's just a routine and not something you have to put a lot of extra effort into. So that said, Let's jump on over into the footwear So we'll come on over here into a light room and what we're looking at is the work space itself. So just to walk through give you a little tour. Light room exists in different modules. So right now we're looking at the library module, and this shows us our catalogue of images. So what we want to know about light room is that again, these images are not stored in light room. They're stored on the hard drive, but I can see all of them here in my library. So the library in light room is called a catalogue, so this whole catalog right now has a total of 175 images. That's because I created new catalogue to start fresh to show you guys what it looks like with just an easy small catalog. But the reality is at home. On my computer, I have thousands of images in one catalog. So that's how light room works. You're working within a catalogue. In that catalogue, you have everything, so you generally only need one catalogue. You don't need to make a new catalogue for every shoot. It's just one catalogue, and that's where everything lives. So this is my catalogue. And in library module you can scroll through and see the thumbnail. So I have some vacation photos here, some pictures of my son, more pictures of my son, family pictures, some plant stuff. That's all just right here in my catalogue. Okay, We also have this film strip that appears down at the bottom of the screen, which is just another way we can move through our images. We can sort the way they appear in our timeline with this option here. So by default they're going to be sorted by captured time. But you can sort them by all kinds of other options as well. Over here on the left, we see the catalogue itself so I can see how many photos I have and down below we see the folder structure of the hard drive. So these images that we see in the catalogue as I mentioned, they're stored on the hard drive and this shows me where they are. So if I click on these different folders you see that light room jumped to those images in my catalogue. So this is one way I can jump around my catalogue and find what I'm looking for. If I click on these date folders and then light room will reference those remember there on the hard drive so light rooms just pointing to their location. And we're seeing this nice little thumbnail here. We will look at collections here as we get to organizing them. So we'll come back to this in a little bit. We have the develop module. I click on this. There we go. So this is where I can make adjustments to my image. So maybe I have, like, this image here. Maybe I decide that I want Teoh. What E. I don't know. Maybe I just want to make it black and white. Then I can go through and adjust that, um or maybe I leave it in color. But you can just make all kinds of adjustments here in the develop module. We're not gonna get to go into a light room and too much depth today. But there are other, much more in depth courses in the Creative Life catalog from other great instructors who can take you through every nuance of light room. But we will get to the develop module just a little bit. We'll also look at the book module, and, um, that's probably what will get to today. But there's also a map. Ah, slideshow, module, print and web. Most of the time, though, will either be in library or develop.