Lessons

Lesson Info

Working When Creativity Strikes

Let us go back to our schematic because I want to refresh you and kind of bring it all back in a nutshell as to why we want what Adobe's done, why we like it. So I know that people have panicked about it and they've worried about it and they've disliked it and they've said, you know, people have been like, oh, they're taking stuff away from Adobe. It's not taking stuff away. It's that they've created a new product and it's in its infancy and it's going to continue to get better and better and better. But right now, it's still awesome because it extends your reach. You have a current workflow and a classic Lightroom catalog that does all of your work. And it's a workhorse and it's great but Lightroom CC extends your reach into that. So no matter where you are, you can have it on multiple computers, you can see into your catalogs that are in Lightroom Classic by virtue of some other computer. That was not possible before Wednesday of last week. So now you have the ability to, on another ...

computer, look and work on files that are in that computer. That's amazing. So you have the ability to do it on your iPad, on your phone, and on your computer. Plus, you have the ability to backup stuff into the cloud fully. Wherever you happen to be, if you put it into your iPad or onto your computer, it will be in the cloud and it will be back in Lightroom Classic, just where you love to work. But it's backed up in the cloud, you're safe. And any work you did while you were outside of that sphere, outside of your studio, you have not wasted that time because it's also with the files themselves. I mean, that's incredible. Plus, because everything is cloud, you can share it, you can work with it, you can find it really quickly. And Sensei has the ability to work with you and that's only gonna get better. There's more and more learning that's gonna happen. If you go to the web and play with the auto-exposure, it's better in the web than it is on any of the other applications because the web, it's using Sensei to do it. And so it's an intelligent adjustment to your images. So the auto-exposure in the web works better than any of the auto-exposures in CC, on your mobile devices, or inside of your computer that's running Lightroom Classic. So that's a pretty cool deal too and I bet you that it won't be long before that auto-exposure gets into Lightroom CC itself. Hopefully, sometime it'll go also into Lightroom Classic as well. I mean, all of this stuff is gonna help you out. One last thing that is really cool that's available to you now as a result of this whole update is that Photoshop can also reach into the cloud. So I'm gonna show that to you right now just because it's such an amazing thing. So if I go to Photoshop and just open Photoshop and let's just say I want to start working. And I'm working on Photoshop but I don't have Lightroom open, don't want to go to Lightroom, I already know what I want, I already know what it is. Notice that there's a new option here that says LR Photos. I just simply click on it and then it's looking in the cloud and it's gonna see all of my photos here. So now, that photo that we just worked on in those portraits I can click on that and now I can work on those portraits. So I go to the Swedish portrait and I can look for the one that I was working on and I can click on it and download it. Now, notice that there's that little, you know what that is, do you see that? What is that? (audience mumbles) Smart Preview. So if you've uploaded the full resolution in the cloud, you have access to the full resolution. If it is a Smart Preview that came from Lightroom, it's going up into the cloud as a Smart Preview, that's what you'd be pulling down. Photoshop is assuming that if you have the full resolution file here on your computer, you would open it from your computer. This is so if I am away from my studio and I can't get, I can then pull it down out of Photoshop from anywhere. As long as I'm logged into my account, I can pull it down. I could be on Drew's computer, open up Photoshop, log into my account, and pull anything down, do a little retouch. And then, once I've done that, so let's just say that instead of opening something up from here, I actually opened it up from a file here. So I just said, I want to open up, I've already worked on this TIF document. I'm gonna right-click it and I'm gonna open it up in Photoshop. Let's say this has never been in any of my clouds or anything and I'm just working on it, notice that it opens it up in camera raw. I'm gonna open that image. Once I've got the image ready to go and I've done my retouching, if I want to share it, I just go over to the right-hand side and there's a little share icon just like in all of your other applications. Click on it and you can share that to Facebook or Twitter or whatever just directly. That's pretty cool. But also, look, I can share the original to Lightroom. Now, it's grayed out right now because I haven't saved it. But once I save this, so if I hit Save, so let's just save this as something. So I'm gonna put it on my desktop and we're just gonna save it as a TIF. So we did some work on this and we saved it as a TIF document. Once it's saved, and I think it is already saved, then see how that's available? So I can send a small one or the original one and I can add it to Lightroom photos. When I do that, it's uploading it to the cloud as a full resolution document and putting it inside of my Lightroom photos and then it will be shared with all my devices. So as long as you're logged into your account, you now have access to the cloud even inside of Photoshop. So the real lesson for today is that you now have an incredible tool called a cloud and it's really a cloud and everything is accessing that cloud. And it's only gonna get better but right now it's pretty dang good. Photoshop is looking at the cloud, Lightroom is looking at the cloud, Mobile is looking at the cloud, Web is looking at the cloud, CC is looking at the cloud and all of them have pretty great capabilities. So anywhere you are, anytime, any kind of, you have any excitement to create, you can do it. When inspiration strikes, you have the tool to be creative. So don't look at it as, oh my gosh, Lightroom's different, I don't know if I like this, I don't want to work with CC. Someone said, I have no interest in the cloud. That's the wrong response. The right response is, how can this cloud and how can CC and how can mobile extend my ability to reach out to the world anytime I feel like it? Because that's what you do as a photographer is you reach out and you touch people with your work. You inspire people, you make people think. You make people cry with joy over photographs that they, or you make people fear things that they should fear. Photographers do that, we help people think, we help people feel, we help people enjoy their life. And the only way we do that is if we share. And the only way we can share is we have the ability to work on our images, get them done, and then have access to them whenever we feel creative. The worst thing that happens to a photographer is you have an idea, you feel creative, and you have no tools. Because I'm not, I don't sketch. I don't have the ability to paint, I don't have, I can't just grab a pencil and sketch something beautiful, it's just not gonna happen. So I have to have certain technologies with me in order to create the art that I create. And Adobe has just opened that world to us and said, hey, you have the tools. If you have this phone, if you have inspiration strike, you can create. Because now you have access to everything that you're interested in. So go ahead, take Lightroom Classic, keep using it, upload stuff in Smart Previews to the cloud. When you're out and about, put your stuff into Lightroom CC and into mobile and put it on the cloud and start utilizing that cloud to make sure that you can work all the time. So we are going to open it up to questions so from here until the end, we're gonna answer questions. And please ask us any questions and we'll do our best to answer them. Yeah. This is kind of off-topic from Adobe but earlier you were talking about your big backup for all of your big raw files is to Drive. But then you were referring to your RAID system. Are you manually uploading session by session to Drive or did you find a way to get Drive auto-sync on a different hard drive from the one built into your computer? Correct. Cause I haven't figured that out and it's driving me crazy. When you are in your drive, when you're in Google Drive, this is what Google Drive looks like. And if you click here and you go to Preferences and then you go, and Google takes a long time. If I hit Preferences we're gonna be waiting forever to wait for it to look at everything and it re-associates and whatever so it takes a long time. But there's a Preference in there that says what folder do you want to use as your synchronized folder. You just simply point at the hard drive and then everything on that hard drive becomes the synchronized folder. It says it's a folder but really a hard drive is just a folder with the name a hard drive on it. And so just point to the hard drive and make that your synchronized folder and then everything on that drive will be synchronized. So my working hard drive at the studio is the folder that is being synchronized to Google to save it all. And now, again, Google is not the easiest thing to deal with as you know. Google Drive is a kind of a clunky system but it is very inexpensive to upload everything to it because it's unlimited if you have Google Apps for work, which I do because I use their email service and once you have their email service you have Google Apps for work. And so, you can just upload everything that you feel like to that drive. And I have 10 terabytes in the drive and it just keeps going. So I've got plenty of space but it's hard to access it. Like, I can go on the web and find it but I have to find it one at a time and download them one at a time and all that kind of stuff. But synchronizing to a disk is pretty easy and so everything I'm working on is just up there protected. And that's the whole purpose of it is just to protect anything and everything that happens to be on this drive is up there as well. That's all it's for. So I'm not using it to try and find things and use things and share things because it's really clunky when it comes to sharing stuff. So this is where the Creative Cloud comes in. Creative Cloud makes it simple. I mean, you saw how simple it was to share stuff, right? That is not Google Drive. Google Drive is not easy to do, but this is easy. Lightroom CC is simple to get something in the cloud and it just automatically transfers to all of your other stuff and then adjustments go across. It's super super easy and that's why you want to use, I mean, and those of you who are creative and you're already using Lightroom and Photoshop and Lightroom Mobile and stuff like that, it's just time to start using this tool that they've given you. And those who are thinking about it and you're not sure if you want to use it, give it a try. It's an amazing system and it's super simple. But I still am backing up everything to Google Drive because that, remember, if you're a Lightroom Classic user, the only backups you have on Adobe right now is the Smart Preview, which is fine, it's okay, but it's not the full file. And I don't know if they have any plans to change that and allow you to choose whether you want the full file to go up or whether you want a Smart Preview. If you are the type of person that's gonna be using the Classic workflow, you might want to send them a note and say, hey, let us put the full file in the cloud from there, too. I don't see why they wouldn't want to do that because it just means you have to buy more space on their cloud so they ought to. But right now, all your Smart Preview, you can send up 60,000 Smart Previews to the cloud and it won't cost you a dime because those don't count against your space. It's the full files that count against your space. So, you know, go ahead and share your whole catalog and you'll have access to all your photos and you'll be able to share them and work on them. Facebook doesn't send anything over 2000 pixel file anyway. So that's what size your Smart Preview is. So why do you need the full file in the cloud for that? Full file is useful for other things like sending it to a designer or downloading it in Photoshop from somewhere else or something like that and that's why it does make sense to take your portfolio and import it into Lightroom CC and allow it to put it on the cloud. That's a possibility, that's something. Your best work you could put it in the cloud so that you have that always saved, always available. Yeah. Sorry. That's alright. And then again on that note, because I just use Drive as a backup backup of my big files for printing purposes, and I also have 10 terabytes on it, so when you fill up that disc and then you swap a new one out, how does that affect your sync? Well, that's something we can talk about a lot more some other time because it's a complicated process. But basically, you just simply take the stuff that's from the drive and you can create a folder that's not synced and move it over and it archives it. So it's just an archive process but that's a lesson for a whole other class. Any other questions out there on the web or here in the audience? What do you got, Drew? We have another one from S. Adams, asked a question earlier, thanks so much. Any risk to updating only Photoshop at this time and doing updates to Classic and Lightroom CC a little later? I'm on the CC Photography plan. No risk whatsoever and that's the great thing is you can update one or the other. Photoshop, you want to upgrade now because it's got some great features in it. It's a lot better in a lot of things. And to learn more about what's new, just go up to the Adobe app that installs stuff and just click on the What's New and you'll see a list. It's a pretty extensive list of cool stuff inside of Photoshop that's available but, I'm telling you, that Lightroom Classic, even if you're not gonna update to Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic is a world better. It's faster and it's got that new system for masking. So you can fix the masks a little bit better so that's a really great thing. It's faster, it's got some more search capability. So that kind of stuff, there's no downside to upgrading to Lightroom Classic as well. Lightroom CC is something that everybody has to question. They have to decide, is this something I'm going to use? Now, before you go and upgrade to Lightroom CC and try and migrate, you really really have to think, am I the type of photographer that needs speed of workflow and I just churn through a lot of images? If that's the kind of photographer you are, you are still a Lightroom Classic photographer. If you only shoot a couple images and you just look through one or two and you adjust those and then you share those and you're not churning through a lot of photos, then Lightroom CC is a really great option for you and you won't even have to use Lightroom Classic at all. And it won't be very long before all the tools that you're missing in Lightroom CC come from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC. So Lightroom CC is a great tool for those of you that are kind of just hanging out and having fun and taking pictures. Lightroom CC is built for you. Lightroom Classic is built for those of us who have to churn through a lot of files, so wedding photographers, sports photographers, press photographers, those kind, commercial photographers. Lightroom Classic is built for us. And then we'll have to wait til Lightroom CC becomes something a lot better than it is. But Lightroom CC is amazing for what it is even for all of us that are using Classic. CC helps us to see our photos and stuff like that so it's still a very good tool that I use constantly as of Wednesday. (laughs) So it is amazing, I love it. So don't discount it just because you're not gonna use it all the time. It is a very good tool. The same way that you don't use a neutral density filter all the time but it's an amazing tool that helps you when you need it, right? You can't do without it. So you really can't do without CC either. You just won't use it all the time but you will use it. Yeah. Are there any consequences to your original Lightroom Classic catalog when migrating aside from telling Lightroom CC what to look at? If you're migrating to CC, you're just pointing it back to your Classic catalog? No, you're not. If you migrate, you are adopting Lightroom CC. Don't migrate unless you want to be a Lightroom CC user. So in your instance, because you want to control where your photos are and you're moving through a lot of photos and you don't want to use Lightroom CC as your main platform, you do not want to migrate. You don't migrate. You just simply turn Lightroom CC on and tell it your email address and your password and it will then become your away thing. So you put it on your Lightroom. So do you have two computers? Okay, you have a desktop and a laptop? So you put your desktop to work in Lightroom Classic and then you just take Lightroom CC, put it on your laptop, tell it to store zero percent of the photos on it, and that's the sum total of what you have to do. And everything that you toggle on inside of your collection, every collection that you toggle on to go to the cloud, will show up on your laptop and you can work on them anywhere you like, play with them, flag them, adjust them, put them in little collection or albums. And then all of that stuff will show back up inside of Lightroom so it's just this back and forth that's going on between those two things. So those of you who are gonna stay in Classic, don't migrate.