Storing And Organising Your Stock Collection
Lesson 3 from: FAST CLASS: Creative Composites Using Your Own Photo StockKaren Alsop
Storing And Organising Your Stock Collection
Lesson 3 from: FAST CLASS: Creative Composites Using Your Own Photo StockKaren Alsop
Lesson Info
3. Storing And Organising Your Stock Collection
Lessons
Creative Ways To Photograph Elements
08:48 2Capture Usable Stock Anywhere You Go
04:14 3Storing And Organising Your Stock Collection
12:01 4Focus Stacking Small Elements To Make Them Look Large
04:25 5Focus Stacking In Adobe Photoshop
10:34 6Photograph Atmosphere
07:49 7Create Photoshop Libraries, Brushes And Overlays From Your Photographs
11:58 8Create Continuous Photoshop Patterns And Pattern Brushes
19:51Lesson Info
Storing And Organising Your Stock Collection
here. You can see my Lightroom CC catalog. Now. I actually have in here. 35,000 images that I have imported. And many of those are just a really big assortment of stock that I have collected. So every time I go out and photograph something, I then bring it in to Lightroom CC. Now, what I used to do is order my stock by having lots of different folders, uh animals, for example characters, maybe nature. And I put them into folders. And I would then carry around a external hard drive to try and add to that. And I was finding that it was just chaotic. So, I am going to go into all photos on Lightroom CC. And I am going to type a word now. Imagine that I've photographed many animals over the years. And I have I've photographed many kangaroos actually. So, I am going to type kangaroo into my search. And what's going to come up is anything that it thinks is a kangaroo. For the most part, it gets it pretty right because it is based on a I search. So I can now go through and it doesn't matter w...
hen I photographed it, I can find all of my kangaroos in here. Sometimes other animals do pop up. But that's okay. So when I find a photo from a series that I want to go back to, I don't need to try and find the folder. Here's what you do. So, for example, the photo shoot that I did of the homeless Joey. I can then just click on one of the results from that series. So I know that this was one of those. And then I close my search and it takes me straight to that part of my catalog or that timing of my catalog. So then I can go through and find all of the photos from that series. So it just makes it so easy to find things. Now, maybe you want to create a fold up so that you come back to it so you can do that as well. For example, what if I wanted to collect all of the skies that I've photographed over the years? What you would do is type in sky? Let it find all of the skies and in my case there are going to be quite a lot. So I can scroll through and I can see so many skies in there. So it's found things that aren't just skies. So the next thing you might want to do is choose out another keyword like clouds. So now it's going to search for clouds within that sky search. So then you can narrow down your search, you can go sky clouds and then we're going to add blue and then we're going to create a folder of blue cloudy skies. Let's take blue and added to shh So once it's narrowed down to blue cloudy skies will create a folder and we will share that with someone else or with the public so that they can then use that folder they can reference to it and if you want to give them access that they can download to give you an example. I'm going to double click this and I'm going to go into my settings. And this is just like any raw editing software, like capture one Dobie classic, even camera raw in adobe Photoshop. So I'm just going to make some quite obvious changes so that you can see it reflected on the web. So once I've made those changes it will reflect here and On the one I share right here. So any edits are going to happen straightaway for anyone that you were sharing your work with. So as I said before I download my stock collection, the photos that I take straight away to Lightroom and then that's reflected on my other devices so other computers because it's all on the web. So once it's uploaded I can access those photos from anywhere. You can even log into the web based version of Lightroom and access your photos on any device. Even if you're not running Lightroom Creative Cloud. Now, you can import your photos either direct from your hard drive if you've already copied them or from your card or your card reader. So I'll first show you how I would import from my card reader on Light room. So we just go up to add photos and down to Nikon Z seven and you can see the photos I took when we were photographing the costumes there so I will import them. They are also roars so they are N E f. I really highly recommend always shoot in raw because then you have all the image data there to work with. So shooting with jpeg flattens out your data and you can't push and pull it and when you're compositing you want all of that image information there. So we're going to add the image is now the way that I do it, as I said before unless I really need to put them all in one folder. I tend not to bother even putting them in a folder or key wording them because I can very easily find them later when I do a search. So if I go now to all photos and right up to the top, I have these images here Now I can double click on them, I can edit them right here before I take them anywhere. And I would then Take them into Photoshop once I work out which one I want. So if I go ad and then browse, you just need to find where your images are. These are the photos that we took out on location that we're going to use to create brushes from and textures and all sorts of things throughout this class. So I am going to add those in now and when they're finished importing I'm going to create a folder of all of these elements so that I can easily come back to them as we go through the class. So I have a Wi P projects collections which is work in progress and I'm just gonna pop it under here for now. So I'm going to create a new folder and we'll call this one Creative Live and under here I'm going to create an album textures and elements. The easy way to bring all these in is to just go in to all photos, select the ones that you want and you can just drag that down to your album. So first of all we'll go into one of these textures and as I said, you can edit all of the image information already in Lightroom. But because we are going to keep this raw data intact, it doesn't really matter because we can do this editing in camera raw. Now there are a few selections. When you right click you can export the photo, you can export it as a Jpeg and there is this other one edit in Photoshop at this present time that will flatten your image and will not keep it as a raw file. Now that may change in the future but for now I will go to export one photo original and settings what that does is it keeps the raw data intact where I want it on the hard drive. That's up to me and that's up to you as well. But what I'm going to do is create a new folder in this location and then I know that as I'm exporting out my image files, my Raw files are going to the same place click create and then I'm going to export this original raw photo out. Now any edits that I did on here will be reflected when I bring it into Photoshop because it is keeping the settings so that's what original plus settings. That's the settings that you changed. They will stay together. Okay. The next thing that I like to do is actually use bridge. I can then have that as a link between my Lightroom catalog and Photoshop. Now I know this seems like it's a two step process but as I said before at this current time, there is no way to open this as a smart object directly from Lightroom Creative Cloud. That may change now I go into here. This is where my folder is and I can simply double click it and it should open in the software that it's linked to which for me is the latest version of Photoshop. But you want to double check that open in Photoshop 2021 default. Yes. Okay, now the next thing that is going to happen is it is going to open in camera raw or so before it opens in Photoshop it's going to go into camera Raw and it's going to give you some settings that you want to make sure you have changed to what I'm about to show you if you don't, you might find that it still opens as a flat file or as an eight bit file when you want. 16 bit. So let's take a look at these settings once you've done this once it will hold as long as you're using the same computer but you need to do this on every computer that you run. So import right here down the bottom of the screen, you can see it says import, click on that. Once you click on that, you will see a couple of sections that you want to change. Now by default. This section here says open in Photoshop as a smart object is not ticked, you need to make sure that you take that. And the other bit that you want to change is right here by default it's eight bits, change it to 16 bits. Now the reason that you do that is again, it's got to do with image data and having the most that you can work with the most detail. So I always work in 16 bits. I do work in adobe Rgb so I do work in that across all of my settings from camera through the print and then open in Photoshop as smart objects. So now you can see that this image is a smart object because it has that little icon down the bottom there, that icon means that you can open up and make the adjustments that you want, You can even do this after you've must and you can go back and those adjustments will be reflected. So let me show you what I mean by masking it and then being able to do it. So I'm just gonna use the lasso tool and create a selection and create a mask. Now I can still go into my raw file and make my adjustment press OK and it's changed but it still retains the mask so it gives you so much control over your photo no matter what part of your compositing stage you are in. So I hope that gives you a clear picture of the power of light room and how you can store your images and always come back and find what you're after no matter what. And use those images within Photoshop to create nondestructive composite.
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