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Lightroom DNG Contest and Q&A

fourth place is wine lover to fifteen and he uh he or she I'm not sure but uh apparently is a wine lover or either a lover who drinks wine I'm not sure which but this is my hometown automotive shop and I always find this to be a fascinating building um and we spent many many many hours waiting for cars to be fixed that this place so anyway uh wine lover to fifteen wins a shuttle pro too so congratulations I just like the weirdness that I like the cross process look on this because it's so to me it's like a seventies looking place anyway so it was a good it was a good treatment to a building so okay and next third place this is kevin burdick this that this is a strange shoot we carried this grand slam piano out into the um into the this this house is in a swamp and it sunk in the swamp so there's a place in utah where an entire town was just demolished in a day there was a big mudslide and it just wiped out an entire town like oh it it wasn't a huge town but it was a little town and jus...

t wiped it out and those so there's like one or two houses left and they're all buried under the mud and this is the swamp and we drug this piano out into it for a for a photo shoot for one of his albums but uh anyway good treatment to what I like all the grittiness to it because it is a gritty idea yeah I don't know if anybody else has seen this but I haven't seen the originals we weren't participating is there some way to see the original so we see what we're I couldn't show him to you in a minute but looks yeah let's I'll show you the originals after we're finished here but uh so um anyway uh who is this this is andy day glow ray anything that's how diggory something like that so andy congratulations you just won my comprehensive preset collection so congratulations on that on a good treatment of the image so let's go to the next one second place this is also my hometown st john's this's the power plant and uh lots of beautiful plumes of smoke coming up into the air and vapor um and I I think that this needs to be seen in black and white so there are other people that did it in color and I just think that in the end this is an image for me that is a very black and white image because it's about it's about the clouds and the smoke and kind of those clouds kind of entering into this into the air the smoke entering into the clouds and so they're kind of joining together andi I think that's best done in black and white so congratulations too barton photo you just won the signature song collection and that is three hundred and ninety nine dollars worth of music so it's ten songs I've chosen them there awesome songs love um and thanks to triple scoop for for that and first place grand prize goes to kathy six one oh eight who wins the complete nick software collection and that is a crazy cool prize um and I this may be interesting to some as to why I chose this image as my favorite but I think that I chose it because there were quite a few people that did this image but they did it in such strange and funky ways and they did so much too and I think that when cathy did it she recognized that it really wass keep it keep it simple keep it about what it is because the image itself says enough without trying to go crazy with it it's a nice color image you want to see the color in it but you don't need to go crazy with it so I appreciated the fact that she kept it simple but also appreciated the fact that she cropped it so originally it's a much taller image it's a it's a two by three instead of she's got more sixteen by nine and I think it looks better to show it as a as a wide landscape than it does to show the entire image so I mostly I was appreciative of the crop I thought she did a great job making the crops so congratulations kathy you got a lot of cool software coming your way so so great thank you all for participating in that contest and congratulations to all our winners and thank you to all our sponsors that was fun all right all right let's keep rolling so let's go why don't we go to those images eso we'll go to the dmg contest images and I'll show you some of them so like that that image that we just looked at wass hang tight when we find it where is it there it is so that's the that's the image right there so she did a lot to it she brought the clouds down she she got it all into gamete and she did a good job really making it very normal so it's ah it's a great image but the amazing thing about this image is how much you can recover from the clouds so you can see there's you know the pretty bright but there there's still within gamut c how that it piles up here a tte the right because there's a lot of bright clouds and we've got this thing is brightly exposed as we can possibly get it without clipping and why do we do that we do that because the best information is in the brighter areas of the of the history ma'am so we can grab this and by the way did you know you could do this watch this you could just grab the history ram and you could drag it watch and just drag stuff down and then I'll grab this and drag it down I can grab the black areas and drag them down a little bit but bring these up so you can do all of your adjustments right here in the history ma'am just by grabbing on to whatever it is you're looking to work on and just drag it from the history ram itself and then you are finished with your adjustments on your image so instead of going up and down this way and choosing something to drag you can just go to the history ram and just drag things and say all that pile's a little bit too far this way so I'll bring it down that way that's pretty cool huh now so let's go teo here I love this image this is one of my favorite images here and the original images this see that so we're we're exposing it knowing that we want these to be nice and why and it's got a really nice dark cloud behind it but in the end we want to exaggerate the colors so that the colors become a contrast because see those kind of colors don't naturally occur but in our head we see them we're like wow that's really colorful and so were exaggerating the colors and blue against yellow and green creates a beautiful contrast so it's much much more contrast and when we do this in fact I think that if we were to go in and do a developed module and turn this on the black and white and do you know some contrast on it and bring up the highlights and though and the whites a bit and then bring the shadows down some and add a bit of clarity and then if we were to come in here to the black and white setting and bring the blues down we could create some interesting you know contrast see how we're doing that so we're bringing the yellows up on the blues down so that does that but let's compare the two of these images now and decide of the two um which one is more contrast ing the color image has more contrast in it even though we haven't done a whole bunch contrast he stuff to it because color is a contrast blue is the opposite of orange and red and so those colors will always fight each other and so when you have yellow and blue they fight each other because one's warm and one's cool and so you can always use colors a contrast but it looks pretty good in black and white to outside all right um I also wanted to talk to the interesting thing that sometimes happens is if you if you if you make d n gs and I I taught this in my last workshop that when I'm finished with all my images I take the raw images and I convert them to dmg and you do this by highlighting going to the grid you highlight all your raw images you go up to the library mode and go to convert photos to d n g once you do that it will convert them all to a dmg which basically a d n g is a raw image with all of the information pushed into it so your settings your key words everything that you did to the image inside a light room is shoved into the raw image so now you have this encapsulated dmg file that has everything in it and the advantage of that is that wherever it goes it has that information embedded into it and so if I send it to you via email and you open it up in light room or photo shop you'll see exactly what I did to that image and how I changed it so it's a very easy way to send stuff back and forth okay so that's a great way to do that but the other advantages is that if I want to find an image I khun go here and highlight just fromthe spotlight from from my system I can search for a grand canyon wedding and all of a sudden I've got photoshopped documents because they have the key words in them but I've also got dmg so I confined my raw images from anywhere I don't have to be looking in the light room catalogue or I could go to bridge and enbridge aiken do a system wide search for very very specific criteria and it will show me everything on my system with those keywords in it and the dmg makes that cross system search possible so d angie's air great file type but here's another advantage to a d n g so remember I've got this little a photo here of my son and it's in its we've changed it to black and white and we've done some infrared stuff in it well sometimes we want to take an image and we don't want to be in light room anymore we just want to take it to photo shop and we just grab it from the desktop or wherever we are and we open it in photo shop well when we do that it's going to open up in what we know is camera raw right which some people out there actually used camera raw as their editor so they opened things in camera I'll work on him and the clothes and then open them and close them and and it's a really slow way to work but they do it but sometimes I will use camera very rarely do but occasionally I haven't image that I want to work on and I bring into camera the problem is I don't have any presets in camera if I go over to kameron I look at the right there's a little slider looking thing that says presets and none of my presets air there how do you get presets from light room to camera raw or from camera raw toe light room if you have some presets that you're constantly using how do you get him there currently there's not a really easy way to do that but I'm going to show you one way to get that to happen and that is taken image that you've already created a preset four and bring it into camera raw and when you bring it into camera you've already done stuff to it so now I can just click on this little drop down menu next to the presets and save all of my settings in as a preset and now I still have to think just like I did inside of light room what needs to be added to this preset so I'm going to go in and I'm gonna check none of the settings so I well unfortunately there's not an easy way to do that I guess so we uncheck all far settings this is why cameras not as good as light room because they don't they don't think through all these important topics see okay so now that we've I got all of them off now we can say what's part of this preset well we know that the um grayscale conversion is part of that pre set right because we're increasing the greens and stuff like that we also know that the clarity was part of that pre set because we were changing the clarity things like that um let's see what else is in there uh we know that actually that's it that's all preset so then if I had saved I get to name it we'll just call that in for a red and save so now I have a pre set that I had in light room and now I have a photo shop but the dmg becomes the carrier for that or an ax mp file can become the carrier for that but you still have to do you still have to it's kind of to make the thing twice you make it once in light room and then if you think you're going to use it in photo shop you'd bring it over to there through a d m g or an ex mp file on a raw file and then recreated here so I've been asking for eh just a simple drag and drop my presets and make presets and so that they work that would be nice right so hoping for that cross your fingers yeah I tell you my chips that before but do you do leo adds its before after your voter job book um do I do my edits well which edits what do you mean by lies treats that work okay so when I am in light room I'm going to do my pre set work first minus green I don't want to put grain in before I go to photo shop so I'll do as much as I can to the image inside of light room and concluding presets and brightening it up and all the all the normal things including grady ints and burning and dodging anything that I'm going to do in light and I'll do it in light room first and then I'll go to photo shop to do the retouching then when I come back to light room I can either add the grain there afterwards to the photo shop document or I can add the grain inside of photo shop while I'm there with you know like nick silver effects or something like that so but you always have to think about that if you have grain on it don't go retouching it take the grain off then retouch it then put the grain back on because otherwise you're trying to copy grain and it really doesn't go well it starts to create word patterns any questions and I don't know how much you want to get into d angie's but there's quite a few questions about them okay maya had asked does doesn't dmg use more space and then photographic ce miami had said dmg files are smaller than raw files straight out of the camera is there a loss of information from the original raw file okay so dmg takes all the information from the raw file and puts it in a different format and that the only thing that changes is that it's a different house it's a different housing for its the same information it's just now has a different house that allows for the ex mp to be added to it so all of the settings and the keywords and the descriptions and stuff like that can be added to the dmg a supposed to in a in a in a c r to or in any f file those files can't contain all that extra ex mp so they make a sidecar file the hold it and so instead we make a d n g so that all that could be contained together now sometimes a file will be slightly smaller is the dmg than it is is a raw but that's not always the case pretty much the same size um it just depends on the image um you khun you used to be able to make a smaller dmg like a compressed the angie and I don't know maybe you can still I'm not sure let's find out so if I if I goto export this image as a d n g so I'm going to go down here and create a d e n g yeah so they have allowed a los e compression so you can actually take a d n g and cut it in half but but you're using a compression that loses information and so I would never use that there's there's no point in storage spaces cheap enough that you don't need to try and limit the amount of information that you're putting in your d n g so the dmg is just simply a way of encapsulating at all now if you were to embed the original raw file and be twice as big as it because it would have a dmg plus an original raw inside of it so you'd have like this double sized file it would still be the same size when you printed it I'm just saying that the mega byte size is bigger because as two files and one so my preference is to just use the latest camera raw a medium preview j peg and the embedded fast load data if you embed the fast load data in light room for it just operates a little faster so that when you go to that image your sliders appear faster cause it it has that information ready to read so it just speeds up the operational faster yes when you create in jeez I okay tio eighteen with no love violet vermeule cameron then yes so when you um when you create a dmg so if I highlight all my images to make d angie's goto the photo menu and I go to delete I'm sorry go to the library and go to convert photos to dmg when I do it asks me first on ly convert raw images to a dingy you definitely only want the raw images to be converted to a dingy because if you convert a photoshopped filed to a dnd that doesn't make any sense because it's not a raw file anyway so on ly convert the raw files and then delete the originals after a successful conversion and that keeps me from having two versions of the same file and I'm fine with that but remember I'm only converting these two d and g after I have exported my client's files is j pegs and started them up loading toe pick taj so I have a pristine jpeg over here that I've already made I've adjusted all the images have exported my j pegs and sent them off to the client and now I'm going to convert as an archiving process to dmg so if something were to go wrong with the conversion I'm not too worried about it because I still have my j pegs and their pristine and they're on their way and they look great but I've never had a d n g conversion go awry and I've converted everything that I've shot to dmg since dian g was created so I've never had it happen and that's a lot of images not not have one issue so you convert everything you saw every well everything that I capped all the things that I've thrown away I obviously don't convert to do angie because they're in the trash bin but everything else goes to dmg one more yes though and you important when you em but them I don't do this I am bored as kenji as the election good questions so why wouldn't I just import the d n gs our import the ross and convert them to dmg on the way in the reason is I'm importing five thousand images and I'm only keeping five hundred the process of converting images to dmg takes time and so there's no point in converting five thousand images when I could convert five hundred on the back end it's so it's just all it is an efficiency thing go figure right like that jared would choose to do something more efficient so yeah that's the sole reason otherwise it would be fine if I had no problem waiting for it to convert them all then that's fine but I'd prefer to just have the computer only spend its wheels on five hundred rather than five thousand images so just faster other questions out there yes ah one from a photograph what a graphics miami uh you mentioned yesterday that you export to photo shop front from light room and psd format what are your thoughts on exporting an un compressed tiff instead to continue working in photo shop and does the un compressed tiff file have less data than a psd you know that question I think is one that it's one of those ones that doesn't matter um I would never compress a tiff I would just leave it uncomplaining but the question between tiff and ptsd doesn't really there's there's not enough of a change between the two to matter which way you go I always use psd is just because I figure it's photoshopped document and I'm using photo shop I might want to use a photo shop document on dh that's that's the that's my entire reasoning behind it I do like the photoshopped document more because of the way it presents the information there's certain things that it contains information aly that I could do differently than on a tiff but but the advantage of a tiff is that it's universal and so I can send a pc version of a tiff anywhere to anybody and they will be able to read it and so a tip is a little bit more universal than a psd is like other programs khun use a tiff whereas a some other program might not be able to read a psd and so but but I'm only using adobe products anyway and so I really don't care you know but I but when I'm sending if I have a client a designer client or something like that and I have to send that client a ah high resolution image for something on a in a in a spread in a magazine or something I'm going to send him a tiff not a psd because I know that whatever they're using the tip will work so the tiff is kind of just a universal thing ok one final demand a question okay this is from mbi from colorado springs colorado if you make all your files into d angie's then do not need to keep the light room catalogues once I'm done editing a session I like to move the final files to a separate location but I don't know howto have removed the catalogue for just that session so I just export the final images would deign jeez allow me to do this and edit from that final location yes but I'm going to show you how to do it even better right now how does that sound okay all right so if I have a job so let's say that this uh this portrait shoot here is my is the job that I want to archive and I have all the images I want I highlight them all first I create all right go up and I convert them to dmg once they've been converted to dmg he's correct in that I could abandon the whole catalog and I could see all the information in the dmg the dmg could be imported into a new catalog and I would see the images as they're supposed to be seen I could look at him and photo shop and I would see him the way they were supposed to be seen but the disadvantage of abandoning the catalog becomes that what happens when the client comes back and wants to see those images like let's say they call and say I want you to make me a book well it's much easier for me to just go backto a catalogue and open it up in seconds than it is to go and say well now I've got to re import all these dmg so that I can see them the way that they were what the way that they were so so in my estimation you're going to save more time in the long run if you take your images and you save them to dmg just in case is kind of like a back up but then you also keep the catalog so that when you have the catalog you can open it up spur of the moment and look at him so that we're going to do that right now so we've already adjusted all of our images we've converted him to dmg once we've converted them to d and g weaken right click that folder and we can go and exported as a catalog when we exported his catalog we go to the actual job dr where the the information is contained where those photos are there's the portrait right there and I'm going to create a catalog see that catalog that already exists there so I'm going to create a catalogue for this and I'm just going to create a new one called catalogue too so I'm creating a catalogue I don't need to export the negative files because they're right here I'm parking the catalog next to the negative files so I'm an export them but I'm going to include the available previews which allows me to open up the catalogue and immediately see the images the way they were when I last left them and that's important so I'm going to export this catalog it's going to send out all of the previews and the information that's included in the catalog that we're looking at once it's done which it will be done fairly shortly then we will weaken we can just quit this catalog and we'll quit photo shop and we will go to um the traveling drive and we will open up that portrait catalog catalog too and when I double click this I'm going to now get that job all by itself so if this is what you park on your archive dr here now if someone comes to you and says hey you know you shot my senior portrait you know during the summer and you printed a couple prints for us but now we want to do a whole series of like photo montages or something like that then all you have to do is go to that drive to the archive dr go into that folder open up that catalogue and now you have everything just the way you left it as though you hadn't gotten rid of it if you only did the d a n g s then you have to re import that information back in to light room so so it's faster on in the long run to just have a catalog the catalog's not very expensive space wise so just make the catalogue and then that is what goes so this this job folder right here the mayfield senior portrait that whole thing gets drug off onto some archive drive and it stays there until it's needed and if it's never needed then fine it's never needed but if it is you have instant access to everything that you had including all your collections all your key words everything that has to do with that so that's a better way to go so jared yes I don't mean to steer you in a different direction you can steer me wherever you what I have a question here from hank henge in and he asked I'm going to say first of all yesterday when we you started talking about your big the big picture I was so inspired by all the things you said kind of like to steer I want to hear more of that from you right now if you don't mind so the question is could jared talk about how he got his passion for photography okay that's an interesting story um I'll tell you I'll tell you where I got my passion for photography and actually I have an image um to show you so let me let me go to that image so I'm gonna go back to my catalog here and I think we'll end on that um so I had never touched a camera until I was a senior in high school and while I was a senior in high school I was in a humanities class and in that humanity's class which was incidentally topped by one of the world's greatest teachers um I'm all choked up there like she was my favorite teacher oh I had a couple that were my favorite teachers but mrs udall and just a phenomenal teacher and she just inspired the most um you're just always intrigued by everything you saw and so we were studying artists and I at the time wanted to be like a stockbroker I was going to be a lawyer or something I would I would come to school with suits on I gotta wear suits to school you know and I have a briefcase instead of a backpack you know I was like trying to be alex p keaton friend heist family ties yeah I slowly that way I can picture this and everybody is like you're the weirdest dude because you like I'm wearing suits and ties but I also found that my dad would buy me any clothes I wanted if it was a suit in the time so I could have had like fifteen suits in my closet you know and all my other brothers like dad please buy me a shirt hold too expensive but he'd buy me one hundred fifty dollars two hundred dollar suit or whatever that's fine so anyway um the way we work our parents but um so so I had never really shot anything but we were studying all these artists and I was looking at jackson pollock that was one of the artists and so we my friend and I thought we could totally do that just spill paint on a canvas and so we went and spilled paint on a canvas and took it into our teacher and said look we can do this this is this is crap right and then and then she showed us like louise nevelson and so we went and built like random blocks and put them together and came in said stay we could do that these artists ridiculous and so then and then we'd studied poetry and we studied like e e cummings so then we went in and wrote poetry that made no sense and made little shapes out of words and stuff and brought it in c c we can do that there's nothing special about that and then we study dancel adams and I thought I could do that to all you have to do is take a camera and go somewhere beautiful and take a picture of the beautiful thing and voila you have a beautiful photograph right and so I took I went to my mom and I said can I borrow your camera and she had a little minolta you know thirty five millimeter camera had a fifty millimeter lens on it or something and and she let me borrow the camera and I took my dad's truck and drove out grew up on a ranch and so I drove out on the ranch and I spent an entire day driving around the rent from sunup to sundown just taking pictures just taking pictures and when I came back I went to the drugstore where you had to process your film and it took two weeks to process film so I gave him the film and they had to send it off to phoenix or wherever they sent it to get it processed and then it came back and I had my little four by six is and they were amazing they were really beautiful and so then I chose a couple good ones and I gave it back to him and said print thes is eight by tens and so they took two weeks later I got my eight by tens back and I took him into my teacher I said see I can do that too and she was like the's air really good and a couple of teachers were like wow you that's really good stuff these air beautiful and so I thought so then I dismissed it and I went to school and I was going toe I don't know what I was going to do it by then I wanted to be an actor and then I got I went to acting class and I thought all the actors were weird so I decided I would be a director because then I could tell them what to do so you and your suit and your briefcase in my sewing my briefcase I can be a director right and and so so I my freshman year I had no idea what I wanted to do but I thought I would be a director an actor or something and and once I once I got to the halfway through I saw this photography class and I thought I'm really good at that so I decided to take a photography class and when I went to the photography class I was horrible I couldn't reproduce what I did on that one first day to save my life and it took me six months of working and working and trying to figure it out trying to get the exposure's right and all that kind of stuff and I realized okay I do have a gift I can see and that's something that can't be taught so I can see it I know I conduce a it but it's so hard to get it right and so the fact that it was it was something that was in me and I had initial success but that it was so hard to do is what kept me intrigued and so I kept playing and doing it and trying it and I spent two years on a mission for my church and I went out and I just took pictures wherever I was and I loved it when I got back into school I was sold because it was such a challenging art but I knew I had a gift and so that's the only reason I stuck to it was because it was challenging because if it was easy I would have never done it I dismissed it as soon as I'd done it right the first time but as soon as I realized I couldn't do it right all the time that's when I was intrigued enough to do it and so I studied it and I got my first photo job as a photographs for frat and sorority parties and and I've never had a drink of alcohol in my life and so here's this little kid you know coming in from cow town yusa and I'm in these drunken brawl fraternity and sorority parties but I had to learn because I got paid by how many pictures were usable where they and focus where they exposed correctly were they composed correctly so that someone would buy him so the only way I made money in college was if I if I got all the technical right and so I learned trial by fire to do that right and so it was a great education and I finally got my technical to match my gift and that was a long long struggle on dh and we were talking about this last night at dinner um you have to do a lot of things for free and you have to do a lot of things just take the opportunities and doing and if you take those opportunities that come your way whether you do him for free or cheap or whether you charge or not you you have to you have to put yourself in a position to do something that you're not good at doing and grow from it and so every time I went out on a job I was scared and I was difficult and then I did my first wedding and totally botched it and screwed it up but fortunately was free you know so they couldn't really get all that mad at me and they were my friends and they've still remain my friends and and so you just make a lot of errors and you and you but because it's so challenging is what keeps us going if it was easy we would never do it it's because it's hard and because it's so challenging that were driven to try and master it and try and overcome it it's why people climb mount everest because it's hard and it's something that doesn't come easy even though we have a natural gift at it and we can see that we're affecting people's lives and we're changing things and we're and we're saying things that are important if it wasn't challenging we'd never do it and so that's what it wasit was the fact that I could do something that was challenging but I knew there was an underlying gift and and you know the thing is is I look at my kids and I think you know what is it that they're gonna want to do in their life and how can I give him the opportunity to see that they have a gift we've gotta find that they have a gift first and then make it challenging and pushed them to succeed beyond you know they're natural capabilities and that's the only time that we ever really amount to anything in our life if we if we if we know we have a gift but it requires effort without those two parts I don't think I don't think any of us ever go anywhere so anyway that that's my story I guess jared you have touched so many people's lives the internet right now just absolutely loves you and I are just saying exactly what you said you know it's that drive and within us that keeps us going so I speak for them I speak for everyone here at creative live and just want to say thank you so much for sharing your gift and your knowledge with all of us here because we're all growing and you're challenging us to rise to the occasion so thank you so much