Lessons

Lesson Info

Making and Using Templates

We're making these artist suggestions and we're making one procession it was taken forty five or fifty minutes and I was like, I don't understand okay, here this this is just in eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper okay? And it's just folded right in the middle way made a template for it to speed up the process because we're doing it over and over and over again again it was redundant so we decided well, let's make a template that will speed up the process it did and knocked it down from any forty five to fifty minutes down tio I don't know thirty minutes but now I was like, we're still populating this with all these images all the time there's twelve images in this thing that we're doing it all the time let's do it with and action so we created an action that allows us to open the template I call these action template combos now this action and template requires twelve images so I can open this up. Oh, all right. And I'm gonna open up twelve different images to go with my templat...

e and then I'm just gonna hit play and the action is going to populate the template with those images open this up to you this is a big one you watch it run on the right side there it's taking every image and re sizing inappropriately and then it's dropping over every one of those images into the template and then it's gonna place every image exactly where it goes ahead stop give me some instructions there telling me reminding me to change the last name of the client because photoshopped will not do that for you it can only do so much so you have to remember to change the last name of the client with the text tool just go and selected everything's editable I don't have that fun but everything's editable in the template okay, but you can see now I have four different groups in my layers palate I have a cover group and inside that all the layers in that cover group that I can still manipulate and customize I haven't artistic ideas which is on the back and typically well maybe run a vintage action or brown to an action or put aboard or something to that image even beforehand so that the client sees it and knows that you know we could do you know that that's not a typical image that's just kind of a fun image and we would do something quirky too that maybe some sort of treatment and then in the same layer and same layers palin the same file I have two other layer groupings this is the inside so you just print one side flipping your printer open up these um two groupings in here and now you have inside left in the inside right inside left that's what we recommend as a wall portrait you know forty by sixty for sure that's exactly what you want at least a forty by sixty of that and then they could go down from there um and then these are these are just different products suggestions maybe folios maybe gift prince you know all the different things that you offer these air the other images that I really like because invariably everybody comes in and says what is vicky like when is vicky thing here what do you think what do you like that's why they're coming to us you know his professional photographers understand the power that you have this is just makes it really easy for us to communicate with our clients like the questions already answered what vicki like here you go and then they have something to look at and look through and foot brown and talk to grandma about our show the kids or show their husband you know that's really important um got to sell to the dad's got to make those dads cry then they buy that's the saying right but the point is again a redundant process that we were doing over and over and over again creating an action template combo to do the work for me so now instead of fifty minutes instead of thirty minutes it takes two minutes to do that same amount of work times three hundred sessions I'm saving forty five minutes times three hundred or I'm paying an employee last time you know, forty five minutes less per session to make that for me and they really don't even need to do a photo shopped here just open this open this hit a button that's done print one side print the other side you know then it's ready? I mean another another example. Okay, so here's one more example for a product that we sell a lot of our nine opening and this is you know, this isn't anything new openings people sell nine openings and for years it's a great product this is based uh, inaction template combo to make for speck like if I want to see a client comes in and they're like, oh, I really like you hear him talking about the nine openings are they you know that they're interested in the consultation or some sort of priest or even in the session, you know that they're interested in this type of a look? Well, it really really helps to have something built for them and there's ways to do this manually and there's different haps that do this um like even selling maps that you can help show people what they want, but I like to have somewhat of a finished product ready for them and I can make that with an action template, combo and photo shop so that when they come in they actually see it and they're really, really more likely to buy if they can see it with themselves so I have two different options I have a nine opening that contains a vignette on every image and nine opening that doesn't contain a vignette on any of the images you open up the template it's designed for a thirty by thirty three hundred that's plenty of resolution to go to a forty by forty probably even a fifty fifty and still look really, really good it's going to be a big file but I'll play it play it, you open up the template you open up the nine images then photo shot goes in this is where I'm going to get my sandwich typically photoshopped goes in and re size is everything and create really what's going to look very similar to a finished product for your client it's not something that you're just building in some map there's there's gonna be a stroke around every image is gonna be a drop shadow around every image um the back image is diffused and you can still control that, so that gives the image some depth but the point is it's all being done automatically for me and I can build something like this on spec in couple men it's you know, the only thing they have to keep in line for something like this is that the images have to be square so you have to use square me just because you know again, you can automate that part too, but you still have to go in and manually crop where you'd want it too. So I just I just went last night I took the images from this session I went through okay, so then here's my images and I can put every one of them where they go and I have guys set in there that it all locks too. All right, so I'm not really having a worry too much about where I put thes because the guides are going to snap to all right and I can still moving around let's say, well, I kind of went this one down here and this one looks better up here, all right, all right. And it's done and it took me a couple of minutes. Now my guys are on there that's kind of unsightly let's just hide our guides clearing off there and there you go. I mean, I have a product that the client's going to see that and it took me a minute and a half or less to build that they're gonna be a lot more likely to purchase that showman brownstone version sectional black and white version you know and that's what the diffusion in the back you can keep and here's the other thing save this as a psd so you can still manipulate, you know, in layered format so you can still move your layers afterwards you can show in a small jape eh as a proof, but save it as a psb so that so that you could manipulate things afterwards because in the sales and we even you're gonna wanna oh, I can shift this around right? Put this image here you make note of that so that you can do it afterwards when you're creating the finished product, but again a redundant process that we solved with an action template combo okay, clipping mass now we're gonna get you the creative part a little bit and we're going to talk about including masks and how to automate your processes or make things fast. We're using clipping masks and I'll just do this pretty quick because I think most people know about this, but when you're designing something like let's say I designed this card this is a gift certificate card that we made for the studio so let's say I made this I make this with a clip, which is just this black background I can clip that image it, but if I want teo I can clip another imaging and really fast to customize it is by bringing in my image okay and clipping it I don't need this image and hiding that image okay and then using ah free transform and blowing it up now is bound by the parameters of that black box of that clip you can see in the layers palette that that arrow is pointing down to that clip now I did that really fast but the manual way to do that is to goto layer this is going to release the clipping mask you see the whole image but goto layer create clipping mask and you'll see that as long as your image is right above the clip laywer create clipping mask it clips down into that box and it's defined by the parameters of that clip really really easy way quick way to design things using templates and all the templates that we use and everything that we sell it at her studio everything that we sell through white house through focused is using clipping mass it's using this idea and then of course everything is editable like all the taxes edible you could move everything you can change the color you can do whatever you want I'd probably change this color maybe t to be like the dog's eyes and bring the duck eyes on a lot better but the point is everything is editable reusing clipping masks and if you're designing something for yourself design. And you know what? The layers all in text and use the image as a clipping mask or just a black box as a clipping mass so that you can swap things out really, really easy and customize it for yourself later. That's a huge time saver from a workflow standpoint. Overlays. Um, I showed this all the time because overlays a really easy way to apply a treatment to an image. Um, there's there's an image of bailey the dog we have people come in all the time and ask us to be photographed on our marble wall and we don't have a marble awe, but we have a picture of marble ish wall so I just drug that overlay over on top of my image and I'm gonna change that from normal toe overlay mode. I'm gonna get that look all right. Starts off it's a little strong it's over type or the whole image here's a layer mask there's my reveal all leather mask it's white I'm gonna use a black brush at a hundred percent it's very soft and I could bring back the dog and bring back the subject. And I'm all I'm doing is hiding the overlay this is a pretty basic technique. A lot of people know about this, but I have a few people that still asking about this on a regular basis, how to do it, how to do it effectively. It's still strong back there. Okay, so there's a few different things. Aiken, adjust my opacity and hock it down like that. You know, I can't even I can't even blur it. So I'll goshen blur, let's. Go, teo filter goshen blur, filter blur, guarding blur. I could knock it down a little bit like that. So it's a little defused it's a little less obtrusive. I don't want something that's gonna knock somebody's socks off. I want something that's going to improve the image. I wanted treatment that's going to improve the image and still retain a classic, timeless quality. We want our images to look good ten years from now, fifteen years from now, twenty years from now. And not everything that we've done in the last ten years is conducive to that. Yeah, we learn. And we learned that the hard way. Like we look back to some of the stuff that we did seven very, uh, well, you know, that was just playing around, but I even like the treatments and stuff that we're when we were first getting in a digital in early two thousand's two thousand to do I can make me I could make it look like I'm falling off a cliff and I can make it look like I'm hanging out and the lighting is all jacked up and you're just like, uh, you know, or I can put my face inside of a letter, you know, two thousand for seniors and like she's inside the letters that's so cool, you know, like that's been, you know, under the bed in our client's house now since the year after you did it, you know, but something like this, you know, like, you don't look at that and think, oh, that's like weird treatment, you look at that and you think you know, that there's a cool background or a quote drop our cool wall that she's standing next to and that's really what I want that's really what I wanted to attain when I'm doing, you know, treatment on images, timeless, classic something that's still going to be on that wall ten or fifteen years round, maybe in the basement so that we can replace it with a new image you don't wantto maybe you don't want to do something that's too good because you want your clients to keep coming back, I don't know