Lessons

Lesson Info

Presets, Presets, Presets! with Jared Platt

My love is light room um I talk about light room I teach about it I do a lot of online workshops I do a lot of presentations albeit w p p I speaking a couple times there but the reason I like light room so much is that it's it's based on work flow the point of light room is that adobe recognized that photo shop was eating people's time and so those of us who shoot a lot of imagery whether we're documentary photographers portrait photographers wedding photographer sports photog whatever you happen to be shooting a lot of images photo shop is not geared to move those images through the pipeline and so a zoo result of that they created light room in order to allow people to get have the same power and control of adjustment but in a quick fashion on dh there's a lot of programs out there that want to do the same thing that light room does but they all do it a little poorly so so light room is the tool of choice for me that being said I have there's a lot of creative live material from me a...

lready someone have any of you seen my previous workshops on creative life ok so one of them was the ultimate light room workflow on dh that was in that class we talked about everything surrounding light room so we talked about file organization and the workflow aspects of it this course today, especially this first, of course, the presets course is where we're going to talk about very specific things inside of light from that are very cool and very important to understand. So we're going to take the entire first segment here of the day and talking about three cents and then, well, the next segment, we'll talk about it, amazing adjustment techniques and synchronization methods will talk about in the third section will talk about portfolio management, which is really key to the success of your business, and then the fourth is going to be a pretty fun little class about sharing images through your through published publishing collections inside of light room. So so we're gonna have a good day today, but it's all very specific little minute things inside of light room and each one, I think, is very critical to the success of business on the success of your time, but there will be really nitty gritty so first segment presets, presets, presets, light room is on ly as effective as you allow it to be, and its goal is to make things quick. Its goal is to get you through your images, but that presupposes that you are using the preset capability inside of light room, and there are presets everywhere in light room everywhere you look, for instance, if we go to the import dialog box, the very first place that you would ever go is here inside the import dialog box and I'm just going to go to a job here hold on, let me just let me just go find a job that we can import here um okay, so these are just some little snapshots that I was taking around creative live yesterday and well actually use these a little bit later so we're not actually going to import them by the the first place you'll see presets is when you come into light room and you're starting to import things and you'll notice that you've got developed pretty sets here so you can add any presets. So if I want to take it down to, say, one of my presets and I decide that I want a black and white preset and I want every single image that comes in to be a scion, a type I can click on that pre set and now every image will go through that sigh in a type preset. Now most people are not gonna want it like change everything to black and white, although I have done an entire wedding in black and white and it was really fun, so I all I had was a like a camera and I just went around and shot knowing that everything would be in black and white and when I got home, I didn't want to be tempted to keep the color, so I literally turned on the auto import, and I said, ok, everyday settings, I went to my rich, black and white setting, and then I just everything that came in was black and white, so I never I actually saw anything in color, which was very liberating because then I wasn't tempted. Oh, should I keep this in color? Shit is just all black knight, and it was super fun, like even the flower details and all that kind of stuff is black, and it was just it was fun. I loved it so that's, the first place you're going to see presets is, as you're importing your images, you'll also see that you've got presets inside of your metadata so you can choose on the import toe. Add your copyright information, you can add location information, you can add keywords, unimportant there's, a lot of things that you can do, so if I were to start andi, I had never imported any presets. When it comes tio importing images, I can go to and create a new precept for my metadata and look at all the stuff I can put in, so this is stuff that you would normally be tagging in later, but most of the stuff is the same every single time you import so there's no reason to keep putting into the image for instance right down here is your what is your copyright there it is so we've got copyright information right here and so I would put in my copyright information I would tell it that it's copyrighted so have you ever seen like when you open and photo shop you see an image and there's a little copyright symbol on the on the window that's where this comes from if you click on that it will say copyrighted and so then programs will be ableto alert people that this is a copyrighted photograph and technically all photographs or copyrighted but it's the signal that's alerting them that you're claiming that you know um the proper copyright the way to write a copyright would be two thousand thirteen and then comma and then your name or your company depending on how you want to copyright your information are your photos but typically I would just put jared platt because I am the copyright holder not my company I am ok all right and then of course you can put in usage terms and you can put in the copyright u r l information so that if someone wants to get a hold of you, how do they find you? If they find your j peg on the internet, they can open it inside of photoshopped or any kind of photo program go to the information and they're going to find that copyright information and be able to find you on your web and you can also look at this creator jared platte city my state suppose I could put everything I want about this don't put your home address by the way you know, use repeal box or your business entrance or something for that but email, website, job title all that stuff should be in every photo so then if I create that pre set, which is this pre set here, I don't have to write that stuff it down then on the way and I can type in keywords now key words on the way in need to be something that's they're not they're not unique keywords like for instance, in this place it's this is a man, right? So I would put mail, you know, but there's also a coffee mug up here, so that doesn't need the same key word. So the on ly keywords that would make sense for this whole set is something like creative live things like that so things they're common to all the images ok, so that's the first place you're going to see presets and by the way, you also have pre sets for the presets so you can say I want because sometimes you import one thing and other times you import something completely different and so like uh when you go shoot a wedding it's you important one way but when you shoot like family photos you're importing it to a different spot or different location or whatever you can actually create a preset down here and you'll notice that I've got a iphone five import setting and we'll talk about that in segment for today we're going to we're going to solve the iphone conundrum and I'll tell you about that in section for but anyway so in session for today we'll talk about that but there's a reason that we have an iphone five import setting because I do things very differently when it's coming from my iphone than I do when it's coming from a camera okay so presets are everywhere so let's cancel out of this and let's talk about everywhere else there are presets so our goal here in the first portion of the segment is to show you everywhere you have a preset and everywhere there's a preset you should use them because there's a reason that they're there because they save you time and I know they'll only save you ten minutes or three seconds or ten seconds here and there but you start adding up all those ten seconds that you're typing in things and you're doing the same thing over and over again and it will it will be hours upon hours upon days upon weeks of time every year came so presets presets presets all right so there's also presets inside of your quick developed so you can you can use your presets from here so all your presense that you have inside of your develop module are also available here and if you're selecting all a bunch of images so if I select this entire set of images of my daughter here and I wanted to do something to them I don't necessarily have to go to the developed module to do it. I can click on a pre set here and choose something like, say, a muted warmth of contrast and now all of those get some kind of a change to them okay, which I don't want to do all right? So the presets air there s so you can use those as well. Um so presets are available here they're also available inside your develop. Wait for it. There we go. All right, so here's your presets inside of your develop module and these air just your developed presets, okay, there's, a lot of other presets as well, but these guys show up in a lot of places. You also have presets if you go into your brushes, so like your radiance and your brushes there's presets there as well, so for instance, if I wanted to darken the surrounding area around her I would then take my radiant tool and I would want to then set the grady in't tool you know and move this exposure that exposure and and I could spend some time doing that, but instead, if I'm I have never found that I really have to change those settings beyond like two or three different options and so all of my presets are here so that preset areas right below the actual tools selections says effects it's right about the temperature knob and it says custom, you click on it and there's a lot of presets now what you'll find with photo shop is these that segment right there that top segment? The bottom segment is what I've put in so every time you have something that you've done, you can simply click on this drop down menu, go to the very bottom and save it as a new preset when you save it is a new preset you name it and it will show up inside of that pre set area. So I'm going to choose burn by one stop and you'll notice that all these have changed and now we've got the exposure down one stop so I can simply just grab grab, grab, grab you see that so I'm creating a very customized vignette for her and I could just take it I can do this all day long that doesn't mean you should clearly we have over killed this but you see what I'm saying and now I could go in and say, oh I will I want this one to make the sky a little bluer so then I can come over here and I can change all of the sliders after the fact so you start with a pre set get you most of the way there and then you realize oh, I need blue sky so you click on the one thing that would make the sky bluer come over here and just now we're adjusting on lee this one pen and I take the temperature down I mean yeah, the temperature down and now I've got a blue sky coming in so presets could be very, very valuable to you even inside of these tools because now we don't have to keep sliding the sliders around to get ourselves into certain positions so I have a lot of presets for instance let's create a new one if I go down here there's what I call smart dodge and a smart dodges a very important tool but you'll notice what it does is it brings the exposure up it adds a little contrast takes the highlights up but it brings the shadows down no why do you suppose I would do that? Well, the reason I do that is that when I'm brushing in brightness on say, her face I want the bright areas to start to get brighter and the mid tones to get brighter, but I don't want the black areas to get brighter. I don't want I want them to stay rich and so that little shadow going down holds the black areas down while the rest of the areas khun increase. And so now if I want to brighten her up, you see how her hat has not changed like that. The details in her hat, the shadows, they're still there, but yeah, I was able to brighten her up, and so instead of getting like a thin, you know, coloring in this, I still got nice, thick colors because the shadow areas were still pushed back down, okay, but I didn't think about the time that I would have been wasting putting all that into its place. You don't have to do that because of pre set, okay, so presets in the brush areas are very important. Then also, you'll find the the less important but still important little cousin to the pre set, which is the template. Okay, so the cousin of the pre set is the template, and that is in the yu conduce that in this the print module, so if I wanted to print this then I would go in my print module and I could choose all sorts of things for instance I use blurb to make proof books and so if I want to make cover for my blue my blurb book and this is going to be the cover I can just simply choose one of my coverage you could see all this stuff here and I'm going to say I want a vertical cover and both there and now I have to do is double click the book name and say indy and hit ok and then I can resize that and aiken put it right here and if I want to on this one aiken because it's a short name I could then turn it and say no rotation and now I have my book cover and then I just throw that into the blurb software to make the book if I wanted to be a one out page there it is and that's got the photo information if I wanted to be on a four a page there it is you see how much time you saved by creating these templates, which are basically presets so you definitely want to get involved in using all of this so you'll notice that I've got things for even costco I'm gonna print something at costco or if I'm in print something on the ups and printer okay notice my logo is down at the bottom now putting a logo inside of a template is simply a cz easiest going to the identity plate so you come down to the mid midsection and you've got an identity plate and you can create presets oh my word there's presets for identity plates so if I want that the identity plate to be platt photography that's one thing but if I want to I can change completely and do something else for the identity plate in fact, I could use a graphical identity plate so let's do that so if I want to create a preset for my identity plates, I would come in and use a graphic. What I want is to locate a png file serino to png is the difference between a p and g and t j peg is that the png can show transparency but it's still kind of the size of a j peg and so I'm in I'm actually going to go to this is I'm you you are learning the pathway this is like the pathway to the inner sanctum of library are of presets so basically it's inside of your home folder or you're the user of your computer. This is on mac by the way, not on p c I can't tell you where it is on pc I'll show you how to get there, but I can't tell you where it is because pcs or so convoluted that you can't get to the inner sanctum like it's it's like their guards holding you back so you go to the library area ok, now the library folder doesn't actually show up on the new macintosh operating systems you actually have to go up to and this is a little tip that I'm going to I'm going to tell you about and you're just gonna have to go and google it and find the code that you put in because I always have to go google it, find the code and paste it in but if you go to in the spotlight, you go to terminal and you open the terminal right there that terminal is where you paste the code and if you just search show library folder in mac os there's like twenty people showing you that code and that code is like show library folder or something like that's kind of a complicated little version of that, but you type it in there and hit return and then as soon as you quit the library show folders shows up from here on out and we'll just be there so you go to your home folder tow library, two applications support to adobe and then you go down to light room and there's all of your presense so everything that light room uses is right here inside of this folder so you can see that there's developed presets there's color profiles there's email address books so if you if you have, if you're making emails from light room in the fields in the file menu, if you do that as you make email addresses, they'll be right here, which is great because then if you were using a different computer, you don't have to re typed those in you could just take him from here and drag him over to the other computer and now you're good and we'll talk about synchronizing those in a bit there's your export actions there's your for export presets where developed presets, there's all the stuff that we've been using already if we want to go to the tools so those tool presets that we're using those are local adjustment presets so you can see that there's a bunch of those okay, so there's a lot of different presets in here, but one of them is panel end marks. You know, these little things let's see, uh, well, I mean, you grab this little guy here, okay? So, um, I'll show you the path I can't show you until I finish this. So the panel in march for the little funny little squarely things at the bottom of each panel like sometimes it's like a florida lee or whatever you know, down at the bottom you can make your own that that folder is for you to put panel in marks in and so you can make your I'm just using a panel in mark and so it's a little money symbol and uh and and I'm going to create a going to save this so soon as you've created your custom logo and I just went and found a png which happened to be in my panel and mark folder and I'm going to go down to custom save house and I'm going to say money right ok so now you can see that I've gotta money option here so now I could have a little logo down here on the bottom of the picture that's money all right that's a money image right that's money that picture is money okay now but see this little decorative thing right down here I can go panel and mark so I'm just I just write clicked so I right click down here on that panel in mark and I go to panel end mark right and I'm going to choose money there it is because it's in the presets so I could like I could have different you could put your logo down there so in the end instead of having white room for showing up here and a little squirrely low florida lee down here I could go up to light room preferences identity plate set up and I can choose again uh platt logo actually let's make a custom one because I don't want it to be a logo I wanted to say platt photography helps didn't turn on so now when people come over and look at photos with me now it's I made the software it's my software adobe didn't make it I made it right there's no adobe logo anywhere on here it's all about me, it's all about my company and my brand so you really can I mean presets or not just for working on photos there also for the look and feel of and because they're in presets you could change the look and feel depending on what you're doing if you're really into that so you could have different logo or different logos for different clients or so print templates or print presets templates are good, you've got them in the web area here is well, so down here you can create your own web templates, so if I'm working on images, I would go and say I want I have some platt web templates that I've created specifically for me and so I'll go in and do a clean white one and I've created all of the stuff that I want to be done to this template over here and that's not what this session is about we're not talking about how to do things we're talking about how to make the presets so we go and we work on all of this stuff and say, ok, I want the male to go here and I want the studio name, and then I come over here to the top of my temple area, hit plus and create a preset, and I can tell it what folder to put it in. So notice that I've got several folders, a light room templates folder, the platte web templates folder is here, and I can hit create once I've named it, and it will show up down here in this platte web templates. And no matter where you are in light room, making a preset is azizi is simply clicking on the little plus logo above the area that you're looking at or looking at a drop down menu. It's always at the bottom of the drop down menu and it's save precept from your current settings, and you can update the settings as well. Kinds there's a lot of stuff, and we're going to actually go through the process of making presets here in the second. I just want to show you where they are all are are all our, um I know that the identity plate is catalog specific is anything or any of the other presets catalog specific that's a great question light room has catalog presets and system presense. You can if you go to the preferences inside of light room and in the preset panel you can tell it to make all of your presets catalog specific and so they will travel with the catalog if you take the catalog and send it someone behind your presets but the problem is is that they no longer are system wide and so you're next catalog won't have them and you have to re import them into that catalog because they travel with the catalog so I don't like to check that I like to leave it off all the other presets are going to be specific to the to the system the system wide and then the way you find them and this is a good place to show you this if you want to find your presets in a very simple way instead of having to go through the craziness that I went through and drill down into the inner sanctum if you go to the light room preferences that's it right there so inside of your preferences in the precept panel right in the middle of that panel is the show light room presets folder that's where they are you click on that and they're right there so you don't have to find your way into their it will find it for you now why do you want to know how to get here you can actually go in let's go to the developed module you could actually go in here to the developed presets and you khun add a preset by making a preset right you can work on all the so you can change all your sliders here and then come in and create a preset or you can right click a folder here an import a preset so if you know a specific someone friend of yours says hey this is a cool rock and preset I'm going to send it to you you can import and go find that preset wherever it is on your desk top or whatever and imported you could only import one at a time so if you have if he sends you twenty presets take you a while to import those if he sends you a thousand don't take you a really long time right? So the reason you want to know where this folder exists is that now if I send you presets or if you win my presets today you go to the developed presets and you simply grab my presets and drag him into the developed resets and they're there the next time you restart like room they just show up and the beauty of this system is that now this light room folder is your purse or for the man in our room the men in our room it's your carry all it's your man man bag man bag bag so this is the purse or the man bag right and what needs to happen is that needs to be copied to a place where you always have it for me that's a drop boxes everybody know dropbox okay dropbox is awesome I love dropbox and so I literally when I came in here to set up this computer this morning the first thing I did is install my drop box on this computer because if I go to my dropbox open up my dropbox folder you will see that I've got presets in here these are all the presets and stuff that I sell and all that it's all right here so if I am on a computer like this one that doesn't have my presets what do I do I just simply go grab my light room folder that's up here in the drop box and I replaced the one that's here so whatever presets were on this computer before I arrived are no longer here mine are which are better anyway of course so all of it literally was able to in ten seconds I was able to make this light room mine all right so doesn't matter what computer I'm on the light room can be mine because all I have to do is replace this folder and now it's me and when I leave if I delete this it would just make it again so if I were to delete this light room folder so that I didn't want other people to have my proprietary whatever then when I delete it, the next time light room starts it goes all the lightman folders missing it will rebuild it with all the standard presets that air there ok, so you can't screw it up just that's you just need this light and folder so copy this put it on a thumb drive put it on your drop box put it somewhere that you have access to it no matter where you are in the world so that if you come to a computer and you need to work on it and you're missing your presense you go to that thumb drive to that drop box and replace that folder and you're good to go got it? But what what happens? How many of you have two computers, a laptop, a desktop, right? So when you're doing that what you want to do is you want to institute the master so the master is the one that that's where you do all your pre set creation, your preset organization, right? And then the other one receives all of the information from there so it looks to this one so about once a month you simply take this light room folder and copy it back up to your drop box and then when you open up your other one, you copy that one down and so you synchronize those two folders by just overriding the lap there that it's always the laptop that's the that's the that's receiving them so I create him on my desktop that's where I'm doing most of my work and so that's where generally I make new presets so then I take those and I overwrite the laptop just over right that folder about once a month so that my laptop is the same as my desktop so the two light room's air always synchronized together so it makes sense okay, so it's important you understand where that is and you say I'm going to do it again just so that we don't have to rewind go light room preferences inside of the preset channel show light room precept folder you click on it and now I've got it one final note and this is an important note because people get so confused I always get e mails all the time hey, I'm trying to install these presets and they put him into the light and preset folder and they're just not showing up in light room number one you have to restart light room for it to happen, but number two, if you go to the developed presets notice that I have folders in there if you go in and put those folders into another full day like the user presets, it won't see him notice there are no folders in the second because light room can only see one folder deep so if your presets have another folder between them and the precept folder area oh the develop resets it won't see him it has to be folder folder presense at a hard fast rule you cannot see more than one folder deep inside of any precept fold it doesn't matter what kind of if you're in the email address but it doesn't matter so notice that I've got in the fire and the let's see let's go to the print print templates here print templates it can see them directly under that folder or it can see them in a folder below that but it can't see another folder here you can add another folder and then keep adding you can't like totally folder tree the thing out right one folder deep that's all you get for organization so follow that rule then it'll work but if you don't follow that rule then you'll be like I can't see my presets that's because you didn't follow my advice yeah how long does it take a key to settle this up because I'm sitting here feeling faintly depressed because I use light room a lot I have thousands and thousands of images in it and I'm not using any of this stuff and I'm going to sit down and and and dio myself and this is yours and now you don't have to you are so so that that's every precept that you're seeing here okay you're going to take that folder and put it there but you're not going to call me and say I can't can't get the presets to show up because you know what's the rule one folder deep and so and there's a whole video on that show you and I'm going to give that to all of you so you won't get it but the important thing is that those presets start you on the path they are not to be the on ly presets you use they start you on the path of organizing your presets and getting it right beyond that you start creating your own and you start messing with mine that's what you do so it's it's a starting path for you and then from there on out you're going to start working more and more and more on your presets and you'll just him and get him just right and you tweak him and then they'll be yours and then mine will be insignificant okay but at this moment I think I love you I think he is welcome and you can say that as much as you like because your accent is so pretty I like it so I'm like okay so all right so that's the preset folder and you need to know where that is because you want to be have access to that all the time okay jerry weave this might be a good time for a couple of questions on the now that's great okay michelle asks when light rooms updating our self made presets migrating automatically or do we have to keep a backup and import them again into the new version oh yeah so if you update from three to four four to four point two or whatever it's it's in it's in the system folder and light rooms not changing that so it just stays there and and by the way most light room presets even in three are fine and four if they're designed correctly if they're designed poorly like most of the ones out there are than there will be a weirdness because light from three light before have different sliders but like all of my presets except for like two or three of them do just fine like before or enlightened three and those that on lee working like before I actually tagged them l r for so that you know if I touch this and all our three it's going to do something weird you know and so if they're designed correctly it doesn't even matter whether you're in three or four because it'll work in both urine to you just shouldn't be there anymore alright so if there's anyone out there in light room too you gotta get a grip on update I mean we are way beyond my duty to you can't even imagine uh main computers and mac and windows laptop is that light room folder transferrable between the two operating systems? Yes, great yeah there's no difference in that folder between the two operating systems there is a difference between that folder and the french version or the german or the russian or whatever because the names are different and so if you're getting presets from someone like me in america and you're in france and you're using a french version of the program, those names going be different so you're going to have to do the translation because I no speak any other languages you know, like I just sorry I'm adult american and I just tell you, you know, I speak like a little swedish and a little spanish, you know that's it e going like find a bathroom so that's all I got is there's no there's, no bathroom folder inside of the present so it's I can also say in swedish for all the swedish people out there, I can say you ought to make your food, which I thought meant that I was I was full, I was, you know, I didn't need any more food I'm done thank you, but it really means I'm drunk because apparently when you're full over there you're full of beer so way and I was the only one that wasn't drinking and so everybody laughed pretty hard in that you know no, I'm totally drunk I don't need anything s so you don't want me translating anything to get them in today so you have to do your own transitions but I'm assuming if they're someone's listening to me they can understand english so they could do the translation okay any other questions were quick one from t brown six one one seven and can light room presets be imported into adobe camera ross since the engines are apparently the same no thie emphatic no that's in the vatican know they should it makes no sense that you couldn't just drag a light on preset into the the into the priest that area inside of camera but interestingly enough, the two the two groups that make them are separated and so they don't really deal with each other all that much and so like one does it and then another one does this and then they just don't really work together but I have actually just finished translating mine over to a cr and so if I were to say take this image and I was to edit in photo shop cs six oh wait hold on I don't want to do it that way sorry um it's going to actually make a photoshopped version of it so this isn't what I really wanted to do hold them but we'll just cancel out of that don't say that, but if you're someone who generally works inside of a cr and inside of light room like you interchange the two it's really useful to convert them over but it's very difficult to do so there's a guy that I know that's creating a plug in to do it but it's not ready and so something at one point it will be available by the people who are doing this but it's not really ready yet so at the point that it is ill tweeted out, so follow me at jared platt is the best way to follow me when that comes out, I'll tweet it so that you can do this on your own, but I actually have converted them over. And so now if I were to let's let's show this in the finder, if I would take this file and I were to drag it on photo shop as a raw file, it will open inside of adobe cam wrong and it's really important to have presets in adobe camera if you're using him and so I go to my preset area and you can see that I've got presets in there now. Unfortunately, adobe camera rock can't put folders into this and so there's no good organizational method for here, which is another reason that a c r is a bad area work on mass files it's good for one picture but it's not great for multiple pictures but I can I can come in here and say ok, well I want to do you know some kind of ah uh kodachrome look to this and so I'm just with one touch I've been able to make kodachrome look to this photograph which I think looks really cool but that's the same kodachrome that you'll find in the pre set that's inside of light room that's also on that disc the stars are on your disc by the way because they're just brand new but anyway these air pretty exciting to me because now people who do use it can throw him in here is well and use them so the answer's no, but you can get them over there but it's just super complicated, okay? And and at one voluntary on twitter, follow me on twitter and at one point there will be a way to convert it, okay? And it won't cost you very much to do it. So and another quick question I noticed that on and sort of wolfie that you have numbers for your presets is that the way you catalog them or u s o? So I'm glad that we're talking about that because that is our next portion so what we want to do when we're making a preset and let's tie let's say we want to make kind of a cross process kind of like this code of chrome look or whatever, if I want to work on this file that this is indeed indiana is her name she's my daughter and she's super cute on def she's watching hi nd I love you. I don't know if she's watching, but I hope she is anyway, so this is india and we just found this is like, this happens like once a year, maybe where it snows in phoenix, so it snowed in phoenix. It was really cold on I was like, I live here for a reason it's warm? Why is it cold? But what we're going to do is we're going to create our presets and creating presets is a very, very important aspect of how you get your workflow done. The using the presets is someone important, but actually creating them is where you save your time, okay, which means you have to spend time making them came. So what we're going to do is we're first going to adjust the image so that it's exposed correctly, so we normalize an image before we ever make a preset for it. So if you're going to make a pre set, the first thing you do is normalize your image so that you like the way that it looks on the screen. So in this case, there's a little brighter than I probably would want it to be, but that's because I've already added a preset to it, so I'm going to reset this image back to it normal, and you can see that it's a bit under exposed, but the beauty of the under exposure is that now I've got all of the sky and that cloud intact, and so I can do whatever I want with this image, so I'm gonna bring up the exposure I'm gonna bring up the shadows just a bit and now, let's see, I've got the full sky detail and I've got her got everything in that file, I'm not losing anything at all, I'm going to bring the blacks down a little bit and he didn't bring that up just a little bit more. I like to hit the jakey to turn on the shadow on highlight warning so that I can see oh, now I'm starting to lose the sky so I can I can go up quite a bit with that without losing the sky and then if I want to bring that sky back and just grabbed the whites and bring him down, bring the highlights down a little bit and you can start to see ok now got that cloud coming back in. Okay, so once I've got this thing normalized the way I would want to see that image at this point now we create the effect that we want to work with, okay, never start making an effect until you have a normalized image. Once you have a normalized image, then we're going to go for the effect. So for this effect, I want it to be fairly kind of old school looking. I like that kodachrome look like that cross processing look that I'm going to do. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add some extra shadow to it on dh, then I'm also going to bring the highlights up a bit so that it really gets kind of poppy, right? I wanted to really pop out, so now I've got a lot more pop to this image. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to bring up the vibrance a little bit so they get a little bit more pop out of the warmer colors on doubt of the out of the colors that air more vibrant, but I'm also going to take the saturation down and I want to take the saturation down because I'm going to create a color effect that's going to wash over the top of it, and when you do that you want you still want the underlying color to be there but you want to have their suddenly enough that you're you can overpower with your other color effects going to create so we take your the saturation down a bit so that we've got that overall information in there for the color but we're going to be able to then go down to split toning and create different colors toe over to fill in the shadows and fill in the highlights a lot of people try and create cross processing with the huge saturation in lieu eminence and they also try and create it with the camera calibration which I don't think is really great way to do it you can do it that way but when you do it you start to create weird edges and things like that s o the best ways to do it is split toning so I'm going to take the saturation on this up two, one hundred percent so that I can see what I'm creating and I'm just going to create kind of ah warm undertones all of the darks they're going to be very warm right and but notice the sky is still the same color it's still white because it's only dealing with shadows and then I'm going to take the saturation back down and added in until I think I've got what I want out of that so it's the right amount of that color and I'm going to re adjust this just a little bit there okay, so now I'm going to go to the highlights and I'm going to choose a different color so many choose kind of ah, a bluish purple ish type of color, right? And then I'm going to bring it down and I'm going to just add it back in see how see what's happening to this image I'm creating a very stylized effect, but it's it looks like it's some kind of an old faded film that I have found in the garage or something, right? And so it's got that strange look to it and it's just a matter of adding one color and the shadow and another color in the highlight, and they're over there kind of filling in for the lack of color that has been brought in the saturation shin and I can go into the saturation now tweak and see how much color do I really want from an image? So I'm going to keep about that much color to it. All right? So now I've got my look I want since it's supposed to be a film effect, I'm going to go into the effects I'm an ad a little bit of grain to it, so let's zoom in and see this grain and it groups, and when you do this, turn off the j so that you can actually see what the grain is gonna look like so now I can see what the grain is going to look like if I turn off this grain sits pretty smooth so I'm going to fill it in with a little grain and I love grain anyway so I'm gonna add grain I like rough grain but I don't necessarily want big grain see how big grain softens it up trying to keep the grain size small make the grain rough and then I can choose how much grain I want there to be that looks perfect and so now I'm ready to make my pre set so the preset is done I just need to create it but the problem is that now you're only halfway done with process you have to click check none now we're going to name it so the person on twitter out there was her name we'll be wealthy wealthy so wolf he asked why do I have these numbers numbers are toe organize because the list is alphen americal and so if I were to put it in like black and white see pia black and white would be here cpi would be here but I use them together and so I want them sitting next to each other because usually I'll hit black and white than see pia so we named them oh one black and white o two c p a that means they come together and then down at the bottom I can have something that starts with a because it's one hundred fifty and then it starts with a you know, auto whatever so you can you can organize your priest that's based on a code which would be the number at the beginning and so you'll see that I've got a code that that that specifically puts all of migraines here together one hundred, two hundred three hundred four hundred thirty two hundred but notice right below that is o seven removed grain because that would otherwise be in a different spot from great green would be here removed would be down here and they would be separated and then out to start scrolling and what happens? You waste your time so scrolling is a huge waste of time so organization is is important as the way you create a preset so first we have to organize it so in this case I don't know what number it's going to be so in this case I'm just going to say zero zero zero so I know it comes up to the top and then I'll find where it's going to be in the folder and then all name I can rename it later so I'm gonna name it zero zero zero two spaces and then I'm going to call it cross process uh warm and blue something like that now I know that all cross processes that I do have some kind of film grain to them that's just the way I do that because anything that's supposed to be film is going to get a little grain added to it to kind of make it feel more like film which means that almost everything I do gets filling grain add to even like the perfect smooth pristine one hundred I s o shot I add grain toe because I just think that digital imagery is too perfect and by the way you do seniors right? You don't like to retouch dea I mean it's not fun okay but you get but you get a client and she's got a couple little blemish just a couple of little ones not the acne ridden one but the one that's got a little couple blemishes right? And you like I gotta retouch thirty images before she looks at her because she's going to hate him just add grain soon as you had grain all the little blemishes disappear because the grain is actually over the top of them and breaking up the lines and so the eye is looking at skin and doesn't see the blemish because there's grain breaking up the lines and so adding grain to a senior portrait the whole shoot just a little bit just a nice soft grain like I was doing will make everybody look gorgeous and then later on when you go to retouch one for like the big portrait then re touch that one you say that now I've just saved you ours just that one tip saved you hours add grain no more re touching on senior portraits so and of course there was ah whole week worth of retouching so you know you can go back and watch the other ones about photoshopped retouching so the on the one image that you do need to retouch go back to photo shop go watch the other courses on retouching and do the one but only touched twelve shown to him first on ly retouched the ones that you're getting paid to retouch period that should be the hard fast rule for every photographer you on ly going to photo shop when you're paid to do it because it takes time this is a speedy process one do things they're free for quickly we do him quickly only when we get paid do we go to photo shop okay, so there's this this is the name of the priest set now we have to make the preset making the preset requires us to think bang it ok, so we think the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to choose the little sections that we worked on so what did we work on? So you guys have to answer what did we work on split toning that's right? So we're gonna add split turning what else did we work on grain that's right? So we worked on grain what else do we work on tone curve? Because I wanted to pop a little bit right now sometimes you might want to have tone curve separate from this effect but in this effect because it's part of the overall effect we add it ok, so we're gonna add tone curve what else that we work on? Okay saturation was key to the effect wasn't it because without the saturation going down we would end up with a weird looking image so the saturation down and we also increase the vibrance a little bit to pop a couple of the more saturated colors. So what else do we work on that's it right? Yeah, now I worked on some of the basic tones in the color and the white balance didn't, but we don't include those into a preset in fact, I will bet you that you could fix all how many of you have a pre set that you got online or you downloaded repurchased and when you click it ruins your image, right? Yeah. So the reason it ruins your images because whoever made it touched these because these the basic tone in the white balance or unique to every single image, each image has its own white balance and its own basic tones so you don't mess with those not in a preset presets or everything tone curve down here and of course, saturation vibrance ok, you could add clarity to a pre set that fine. All right, so I'm going to create this I'm gonna put it in my user presets so we can find it really quickly. So hit create there's the there it is, see how it's a the top so now I can find it and I can drag it in and you can take a preset and drag it into any folder you want. So if you want this to now be inside of let's, take this and put it inside of our color effects. Now let's, put it in our film pack, so we're gonna put it in the film packed seats right at the beginning of the film film pack and now I can go down and say, ok, what do I have? Oh, a warm cross is what it is, so it looks like a warm cross so I could make it warm cross eleven and notice that I have one fifty eight and then I don't have a one fifty nine I leave spaces in the naming so that I can add stuff in later, so don't ever think well, you know, I don't have all the presets this one ends at one forty five so that I can add other contrast curves later so every time I'm kind of hitting a new concept I start at like one sixty and then won seventy one eighty so that I have space to add new stuff in all right so now I can rename this to cross warm ten but it's number one fifty nine so I go up here right click it rename it and I'm going to say one five nine cross warm and did I say it was eleven eleven? I think so now if I hit ok it's going to be down here in my cross warm eleven and of course it's not quite right and I am a little of cd that way so I'm gonna rename it at an extra space and make sure this is all capitalized very now it looks just like these, okay? And I've created a new pre set by doing that so now I could or I could choose a different on there I could do that one, right? Okay, so that's how we create a preset and that's how we organize them also notice that they're in folders so I can collapse these folders see that so now I've got all my folders collapsed and these are all the ones that come with light room and I don't understand why I can't get rid of him but anyway they're not very well designed I don't understand they made the program but anyway so now I have him all collapsed and it's just a matter of I just usually I collapse the navigator and I open up my everyday favorites because that's what I want to use most of the time because the last thing you want to do a scroll up and down a thousand preset because that's always to your time so what you really wanted to do is organize them into folders and then take the ones you use the most often and move them into another folder so that they're all in one fold of the ones you always user in one folder and then if you need something else it's only once in a while so they like all I need something else so then you can collapse this folder and go to your film pack find the one thing you want click on it and then go back to your everyday favorites okay, so folders air really important and how do you get their light room preferences preset she'll light room folder there they are and guess what if I want to I can go the developed presets and I can go to my film pack, scroll down and find that one that I was that I just made that I really, really like so my cross warm eleven aiken copy it so right click right click uh copy then I can go to my everyday favorites I can right click that and paste and now I have two version two of the same preset won in one folder one in the other unfortunately there's not a copy paste option like a duplicate here so you have to go to that precept folder copy it out of the one pasted in the other and now if I restart light room it will show up in my everyday favorites right? I just love this process because it makes you think about efficiency and really system enticing and think and really categorize in your process as a photographer and as an artist I think it's a brilliant with him well and also notice that inside the everyday favorites is the best place to see the process in action notice that there's a divider see that black and white divider that black and white divider is a preset that does nothing I made the preset and unchecked all the boxes so it does nothing so you click it does nothing right the point is to divide it so I can see all the color stuff starts here oh the grain starts here right? It just becomes a divider it's a it's a completely useless preset but it divides the right so that's the first thing the second thing is that you'll notice that I don't organize the presets by what they are or even what they do I organize and by how I use them ok? They're organized by use so my black and white and my cp and my santa type are all together because generally when I make a split tone I'm also in black and white so black and white and then so in this case if I said okay, I'm gonna go to black and white on this and I'm going to go and make a scientist type oh, you know what? I really don't want to make it a scientist type I want to make it a sepia o c and that would be snc quite a ways away but the guy code were able to put them together oh, but you know what? I really wanted to be in color see how there's a restore it to color is inside the area where the black and whites are and the cps are and if I went in and added more grain so now it's much more grainy so I've got a lot more grain in there and then I go I really don't want any grain click remove grain and now you can see that the brain has been removed see that so it's by usage not by what they are so you kind of have to take if you if you click on a pre set and then start scrolling and then click on another one you have them organized incorrectly what you should be able to do and let's just go grab uh another image that's kind of let's grab that one. This is jackson, right? Yeah he's he's awesome. So let's let's go teo jackson and we're going to reset his image so that he's again it's a little dark because it's actually this is on auto exposure so it saw that sky and was totally fooled so I'm going to normalize the image on all afternoon normalizes that once I've got the image normalized what you should be able to do as you should be able to go and say, well I want this to look like color film so it mutes it a little bit I wanted to have age color plus and I wanted to have I don't want to have that much grain still have two hundred grain and I wanted to have a medium tone curve and I wanted to have a strong post crop in yet but do you notice I didn't scroll up down up, down, up down looking for something I went boom boom boom boom done it's all downhill everything you should go downhill same thing over here in the developed module you should just start up here and finished down here but you notice that while I'm working on all this stuff how many times have I come over here? I did a little bit right here and I did everything else over here because once you get below from tone curve down you never have to go here because these things air effects that are all the same on every image they affect every image the same as long as it's a normalized image so all you need to do is normalize your image start applying presets that are touching things below the basically below the presence area so from presence down that's where all your presets are your presets control everything down for from that but they don't control anything appears and normalize your image and hit preset that's it okay? And if they're organized you'll be able to just go boom boom boom done you'll also notice that the other rule that I follow in making a preset is that it's targeted so that the choices I was making click here do this one do that one that thought process of making the pre set in the preset dialog box is critical because if you separate him out so that your for instance my black and white on ly adds black and white notice that it doesn't remove the c p a it just adds black and white because the only thing I did is click on the black and white check box inside of the creation the creating dialogue box and if I say remove split tone it removes the split tone but doesn't remove the black and white or I can add a scion a type over the top of it and then I can remove the color from the of the black and white out from under it so now I have color back in there but it didn't remove the split tone everything's targeted so it only works on this that that it works on one slider or two sliders at a time the problem with most people's is they do this so if I were to me let me show you what this looks like if you use a what I like to call a fat and gorged preset so if I were to take this image and I were to adjust it this is ah I found this online and so I like to use it so high we're to adjust this image so I like it perfectly I think it looks great and then I come down to my fat engorged precept that I found and I liked guy I renamed it so that you don't know who made it but it wasn't kevin kevin did not make this effect I just want I want to be clear about that kevin next door did not make this effect so I click on this and watch what happens to my file I'm in turn on the shadow on highlight warning so you can see now was that helpful? Okay so here's what happened and then boom it ruin my image and the reason is right here it's, plain and simple look at the all the sliders over here and watches I turn go back and forth and you'll see what they're changing changing the temperature there changing the tent they're changing the exposure recovery phil like blacks brightness contrast everything that should not be touched is being touched bad preset pad preset eso I show you that on lee so that you can see what a bad preset will do because they're touching these things up here if you keep to the rule that presets on lee should have things from the presence down, you'll be right you'll be dead on accurate with your presets and you won't ruin images they will literally save you time okay? All right so I just want to mention a couple other presets that I didn't get to and I want to you know that they're there and they're important presets so if we go the library module and go into the grid if I wanted to sort for things I can go let's say I want to sort for attributes and I want to do anything that's three star arm or right and I want to make sure that they are uh let's see the text they need to be snow they're okay so now what you're seeing is images that have snow in them that air now this has taken a while ago but notice that it comes up because now I'm searching in these collections for snow images that were taking they were taken that were three starter above now if that's something you're constantly looking for for me it's always oh I need to find the photoshopped documents that are in this collection right or that air in this job so if you're filtering up here presets and so I can create a preset called three star snow images and no matter where I am inside of light room I mean in the grid module but no matter what collection on man or if I'm in of a folder over here and I go up to the library filter I can simply go to here and choose psd files and it will show me there's the psd files inside of this specific uh collection all right so I mean you could get really involved inside these library filters and so I just want you to see that it's very very easy to go through and work on a set of images and choose specific images by simply clicking on a preset here as opposed to coming to keep doing this attributes folder like every time you do this attribute thing you're wasting time because you could just be doing it here ok and you can even sort for things like I have I know it's flagged you can even do stuff like it's landscaper or portrait vertical or horizontal so there's a lot of tools that you can use here in orderto speed you're filtering that you're doing all the time right is everybody felt during it you know for this or that or whatever you can all you can you can automate that right here ok now one last place where there are presets that air super super critical and that is in the export dialog box so when I export there are presets here and if you are touching this stuff every time you export you are insane I never touch this stuff the only thing I touch here is naming the sub folder that it's going in or choosing the location that it's going to go to. So if you look at my four print I have I use picked ours to do all my post printing so they print and send it to the people that order it. And so I just simply click picked taj develop and everything set so the naming convention the size that everything is set and all I have to do is choose where it's going to go and then change the name of folder that it's going to go into that's it that's all I have to do if I'm going to go to my blogged so four screen blawg now everything set for my blawg I don't have to change this figure out what you need for an image make all of this stuff accurate to it and then create a preset because you need that happening here and at the very popham is a post processing action I can tell it to do things afterwards and make presets so I can actually save a preset of, say, an action that I want to do. So for instance, if I want um to do eh warm grain in nick software I'll have to do is click on warm grain nick software and when I had export it will save it as a psd, open it and photoshopped add the grain from nick software and close it and put it back in light room for me to look at later and I could be sleeping well it's doing that? Ok, now how do I do that? I simply go to the bottom, go to the export actions folder, right? So I'm actually in the post processing go to the export action folder and you'll see that this is what I've got and this see that warm grain nick, that is what you call a droplet. Does everybody know what a droplet is? A droplet is an action, so if you're inside of photo shop and you want to create a droplet from one of your actions, all you have to do is go to the file menu automate uh, create droplet when you do that it will ask you where you want to save the droplet where do you want to save it in that export actions folder that light room will find for you it's easiest just to save it on the desktop and then dragging into it once lightman finds it for you and then choose from all of your actions what you want to do once you create it like I could do a skin softening right and so it will open up my skin softening action, run it through it and then finish it and then I'll be sleeping right and it could do it to one hundred files right? And then you can you have to choose a couple things like the suppression of opening dialogue boxes and stuff and and that kind of stuff but that's how you make a droplet and it's just a repeat of an action ok. And by the way, if there are any other things like say male or I photo or picked taj this is a ftp if there's if you have a program that you can take a a folder of images or an image and dragon onto the icon of the full off of the of the program if you make an alias or a or a what do they call it a pc land a shortcut, a shortcut if you make an alias or shortcut of the program itself and stick it in here then when you're inside of light room and you go to that, you can actually say okay, I photo I wanted to open it and I photo, so when you export it it'll export the whole folder of photos and then I'll take that folder and drag it on toe I photo and then import whatever it does when you drag it on there it'll do it so if you have a slide show program that makes slide shows by dragging photos on to it, it would just make the slide show for you or whatever. So if you have a program that has that kind of capability than you could just drive stuff onto okay, so there's another place where these air really critical time saving opportunities for you is in the export actions folder and also over here on the left in the presense ok, so that's presets I know there's a pre cents or everywhere find your presets use your presets but that's how to make intelligent good presets um and I promise you, you use the presets wisely and light room and you cut your post production down severely so time for questions. All right? Yeah let's definitely do a few questions I'm going to turn into our student audience and we'll start there and then we'll see if we can squeeze in a few from the internet any questions yeah explode ok let's go let's go to the internet we have some really good ones one from you like this from ansel adams his question is I love it, ansel I totally thought he was dead, but I purchase some precepts of require custom camera profiles of out of them to my camera. Ralph older but light room is not seeing them can use to just how to correct this so I can use presets on my raw files custom camera profile. Okay, so what he's talking about is their cat custom camera profiles down at the bottom of the developed area in the camera calibration here's where those camera profiles would be s o if you're looking down below the process area there's a profile there and those of the profiles you can create profiles four cameras through plug ins. I'm not sure what profile specifically he's using and I don't know exactly whether they were created in light room or whatever, so I don't I don't have enough information, but but that's where they would need to be they would have to be recreated here generally by whatever plug and made them or if there's something he downloaded, he just needs to install them into the the system, so if he has those, he just needs to install them into the profiles here and I believe that that folder is there's color profiles, but those aren't I don't think that's where they get the I think he has tio utilize whatever plug in or whoever is selling that custom profile would have a way to install it. It's just a matter of installing it into lighter but it's not something that's easy to do, it's just a matter of whoever's providing that would have a way to install it in and it's probably some, uh, plugging methods. So plug ins air generally dealt with here in the plug in manager so that's generally where plug ins take stuff. So if you open the plug and manager you, khun a lot of the stuff here is what dictates how it gets into light room so he would just have to check with whoever is creating those for him and get them in otherwise he he can create himself to like, for instance, the eye one profiler from x right creates custom profiles for cameras so you can use that to create a custom profile it's a plug in, and then it will show up in here so you can just you just shoot their target, and then it runs and makes a profile for that specific camera in that specific white and then it's just dead on accurate for that situation.