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From RAW to Design in 7 Easy Steps

next, I'm gonna take you through from raw to design and seven easy steps. Right. So, uh, that's the next big thing. A lot of people don't offer albums just because they think it's hard. So I'm gonna take you through the process and seven easy steps. Um, and it's it's really not that hard. I'm gonna talk it through, and then we're actually going to go through the process. A lot of Alex and Alex. Um, step outside. We're going to design a rough album with them, But I don't want you to see any album designs until then. Then we'll bring you back in, and we'll show you a design consultation. All right, So, uh, Rod designed seven easy steps. So first of all, who times thinks their cameras All right, Who forgets the time sink their cameras sometime? Yeah. Who likes being lazy? Yes. I'll show you the lazy man's approach. The times thinking your cameras. Okay, So if you go, uh, pull up a web browser and you pull up time dot I s time dot I s It's an atomic clock with the date in the time on there...

. All right. And this could be your reference image. So before a wedding or before portrait, shoot just every camera pull up on your desktop or your laptop or your phone and just click. Take a picture. Click take a picture, click, take a picture. The great thing is that because both light room and photo mechanic in time sync even to the date. If you shoot a wedding on Sunday and you forget and it's Thursday any like a crap, I forgot Time seen by cameras. You can still do it on Thursday and you could backtrack, right, because we're doing it by date. All right, so we have that. We have the date here also, so you can Time sink is just not time. It's including the date. So as long as you don't reset your in camera clock, you could do it two or three weeks later. Yeah, awesome. You can be both lazy and forgetful and still be on point. Right? That's the best, because I am the most forgetful person ever. So take a picture of your screen right. Then when you pull into either light rumor photo mechanic, does anybody use photo mechanic for cooling? I used photo mechanic for calling. It's just a really, really fast image browser, right? That's all it does. It does. It's great with metadata and stuff, but I just use it because you can. You can go through raw files like there, nothing really fast. So if you do this in photo mechanic, uh, under the menus, you can pull up to adjust capture dates and time or in light room, and I'll show you this later. You can, uh, sort by camera. Serial number. Right? So every camera has a unique serial number, so I just want to see images taken with this. And then here is my reference image. So I just take this time and date and put it here and then hit, change all. And then everything just cascades. And then everything sync up. That's like a friggin magic. First time I saw this, I was like, Oh, my God, there's some really smart people in the world, Right? And then same thing here. So first thing, when you get back, unload your cards, time, sink everything. Because if we're shooting as a story and we're storytellers, we want to see everything in order. Right? So we just get everything in order. And even if you sink your cameras exactly full times likely already go cameras. Times drift a little bit right, so they'll slowly get out of sync. But this you can always get this. So if you own a studio studio with multiple shooters, just make it routine. Every Friday morning, you gotta pull up your screen and every camera gets a click, and there's your reference for the whole rest of the week. So if you're shooting, you know you're busy studios shooting four weddings and portrait throughout the week. You know every five Friday to create your reference photos, and then those were always available. All right, easy set to coal in, Not out. Does anybody want explain what that means? School in, Not out. Just tagged the ones you want to keep one's throat. Yes, so we don't we don't go through and look for the bad photos we go through and look for the good photos, right? The great thing is usually end up with fewer keepers, which means you have to process for your photos, right, so it's a lot less work, right? And then when we're processing raw images, we have to process them with the end goal in mind that hate this cluster of images might be on the wall as a wall art cluster or these images might be on the same spread. So as we're going through these air in color and the same color tone, these next two might be on the same spread. So those are both in black and white, and then these next. So we're processing our colors and our tones based on the scenes that we've shot. So this scene is going to be in black and white, and then this scene is going to be in color, and then this scene is gonna be in color. And then I'm also thinking about the transitions. I was like, Oh, if this scenes in black and white, this scene should probably be in black and white to because there's nothing else to really pull the transition together. So you choose as the artist. Of course, the pictures that are going to be in black and white Do you ever have at the design consultation They're like, Well, I want that one in color, which, of course, throws the everything off. Um, I think that that can happen. But the better you become at it, and the better you do it presenting it's gonna become a non issue. Because if you're shooting their story and we're tapping into their emotion, they're not as concerned with the technical aspect of what's going on. They're concerned with the emotion behind the story. It's also about how much trust you built him. Yeah, yeah, and if you are confident, you're like you say, Well, I looked at it in color, and really, it wasn't as good in color. It's much better in black and white. That's why it was black and white, like cool, right? And then the next step I go through is I choose the design selects and the alternates, and you can use any tagging you want for me. Five star for Design selects and four star for alternates is great, and where the alternates come into play is that as we're presenting the design consult, we want to keep Momenta. We want to keep it moving right and nine times out of 10. If somebody wants a change in the album, is it the bride or the groom Bright? Why exactly right, right, so if you're if we're including a close up of the bride or the bride is doing something, we also include as alternates. So here's my select. We also and choose a couple alternates that are the exact same shot. To give her a choice, just like I'm not sure about that one is like, Oh, I include a couple other that air. This the same. Let's choose which one you like best, and then we can pull those up because we don't want to, and we don't want to show them 1500 images for a wedding that would take all day, if not two days. But we designed the album, and we want to give them a couple choices here and there as they go through next week. Creator designed Project important. Just those selects and alternates weaken storyboard out the album and I'll show you this a little bit. And for those of you during the break that saw the segment on album design, you saw that you can tag certain images to be the main image for those main and supporting images. You can tag certain images to be the cover image or a panorama double page spread. And then we hit the auto design button for a rough draft and then we design and then we're done, right? So once you get used to this right, going from once you've processed all the raws and then you're going to choose, your design selects and then the final design shouldn't really be any more than minutes. You spilled a knock that out easy. Probably you in a time crunch. Get it down to 20 minutes. I have a couple of times I've I've been like you're in there and like they're here in 15 minutes. Teoh usually more for portrait's than weddings. But you like, Oh, crap. So any questions on those seven steps? Pretty easy. Seven. So, are you processing anything else besides any other photos that go in the album? Uh, that's really your choice. So that's a great step to just process everything out right? You can process everything out into a folder. Um, then for the design selects you, can you have a couple different options? One option is you can export the design, selects and alternates to a different folder, or if you put everything into the same folder, you can use Ah, photo mechanic or bridge to sort just by five and four stars. And then you could has dropped those into fundy designer directly from that window. So a couple of different work flows. Some people have different ways of doing things. Will you retouch before, um, you I think you want to do a light retouch. Um, I know you use perfectly clear is a great, like to batch process out of justice, the basic skin softening. It even does like a little a little love on the face. A little little tightening of the the face just a little bit. Uh and so usually what I do is if if you want to do any retouching on the images for the design consultation, it should be automated because we don't want to put a ton of work if they're not gonna order the album. But the key is you don't want to put a lot of work into something that some is going to get. So if they remove that image and you spent 20 minutes retouching the image that doesn't make a lot of sense And it Soufiane Andrew about black and white conversions for this stage. So I am a big fan and it's kind of similar question I'm a big fan of. If it's black and white is black and white, if its color its color and we make that decision early on and that it just stays that way, you know? And if you do that to communicate that to your clients like I'm gonna do some of your image, you're gonna be delivered in color and some in black and white. And I chose that based on the image in that part of the story. So they're only gonna be available in those color treatments. When we used to shoot film, I know there's the best days. Yeah, don't be shut on a black and white And it was like a light, you know what's the difference? So that that's really for communication and communicate with your client in setting up those expectations. Um, I'm big fan of just a black and whites black and white and color his color. Yeah, If I could, I would just shoot everything in black and white forever until I die. I love black and white. Make it exciting. Yeah. You have any questions here with awesome. Okay, so let's go ahead. Uh, we're going, Teoh. See how we design an album. So I asked Alex and Alex to step out of the room for a little bit, right? And then give me just a moment here to pull up light room. Okay? We're ready so we can switch over the computer here. And I'm just gonna take you through some of the steps here. Right? So here we have is great, right? So I'm gonna show you how to sink. How many people have time sink in light room before familiar with it? It's about half and half. So, uh, here we have the images and you can see here are two reference shots, right time dot I s just pull it up on your phone or computer. Doesn't matter. And then it's really easy up top here. We have our filters, and if you click metadata and then under here, you can choose camera serial number. So I'm gonna click on one of the camera Syrian. I'm reason you see a bunch of the image disappeared. So these air on lee the images for this client and let me click back to also notice All right, we're gonna bring these up camera, serial number, select all. And then all we need to do is go down here the time capture time, and I click it and then we make this number the same as that number. Right? So you see, I've already done this. So 0746 50 then the date and then you click change all. And then magically, it's ST And then I click on the next camera, select all and then click on Captured time here and change that time to the exact time on that and click change all and done right. It's so it's one of the things that is so simple. And then once you see, you're like, Oh, my God, why didn't I know this before? So that's easy. And then when we look at everything, everything's all sync up and we're good to go. Okay? Now, if you want to, this isn't, You know this isn't required, but as you're going through, you can see here. If I sort by keywords, see where this says cover image. Well, what I've done is I've set up my keyword set. You can customize these and you could make a custom set. So I made a custom set specifically for Funding Designer, where I have a button for cover image, panorama and main image So I can click on this and then click cover image and it's gonna tag that as cover image so that when I bring that into funding designer, it's already tagged this cover image. I don't have to do anything right, and then same with I've got some main images here on Got some panoramas also, So it's you can slightly storyboard out, and basically we put that in there so that as you're processing your images and you see an image low, that's the double page spread. You can tag it panorama, because then you're going to go to sleep in your waking up. The next day you forget which image it was, but you pre tagged. So it's good, right? So does that make sense for right time sinking and then a little precursor of of the story boarding. So now, right? What I would do is we would we would have those four and five selects, and then I would export those four stars and five stars right and then bring those in to Fundy designer. So brought this in. So let's go ahead and open up the image browser so you can see that I've tag some stuff Main images Here, Here's my four stars and five stars If I start so I'm just gonna filter toe only the five stars So those are my main ones And then I might go through and tag Panorama Main image to give myself a little precursor. You know, a little story boarding of what I want to dio And then what I can also do is if I know that I want these four images to be on the same spread. Aiken just hit the group button and these rolling hunky so you can hit the geeky too, if you want. Soapy is Panorama sees cover image, and we can just go through right, And, uh and that's it. And we just bring these in, and then they're all set up. Panorama. Let's ah, do some, you know, groups of images together, and we group them together, and then we want to hit the auto design. So I'm gonna go. First thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna filter toe only the five stars because we only want to design with those. And the four stars are our options. Select. And then I'm going to just do the filtered images and then I'll hit the design button. And so here's our rough draft, Right. I didn't pull in the same cover image, my bed. But this gives you a rough design, right? So we got a rough design, then we can go through, and then we can just tweak the design, open up our quick design picker. We can shuffle through our designs that we like. We can make changes and one of things that's fun about using drop since instead of 10 places that then you're free design. How you like to say, Oh, I want this image on the other side of those two images and so we can plop that over there, right? And I can bring in this here, You know, I can even say you know this image. I want to be a vertical. And this image be a vertical, for example. Right? So we can make this one bigger. Okay, so then we just design finalizes the design and then what? I've done that we can show Alex is you can. Actually, if we export this for Web and then bring it back into this project and then tag it, we could do a slide show of just the album spreads for the clients. So that's what we're gonna dio, right? And so I'm sorry. It only took a couple of minutes, but with with a portrait shooted. Usually it's about three or four minutes to do an album design, right? Just bring it in. Hit the auto design. It's gonna cluster based on your time stamps. And it's gonna respect any tags that if you've tagged something panorama, it's coming a panorama. And then you just adjust the design, how you like it, and then you ready, right? So and that's really key. I I freakin love albums. We make a family album every year. I'm always making albums. I love it, Um, but so I just want to make it really easy for people to design because it's a business playwright. The last time it takes to design an album, the more money you make on the album, right, because time is money. Okay, so let's go ahead and bring the keynote up again. Um, so we'll hide what we're doing here. And while the keynote is up, we're gonna have Alex and Alex come back in. All right, So, um, before we move on to the next step eso this the our last lesson for you guys to watch is basically how to run a design council. And we're gonna invite Alex Alex up here. So before we do that, though, right, think about how you can create your own workflow, right? This is my work flow on. And it's a distillation of what I've just learned over time and then a distillation What I've learned from all these amazing photographers that I'm lucky enough to be able to communicate with on a daily basis, and it's just chipping away at, um at the workflow to make it simpler and simpler. So the seven habits of highly effective people, the last one is sharpen the saw, which means, you know, once you're done, look at it again and see how weaken, you know, make it better use time, Teoh whittle away at it. So it's It's just about making an efficient workflow, right? I see workflow as ice melting off the mountain, right? When ice melts off the mountain, it turns into water and water finds the fastest way to the bottom, right? It's just magically finds fast. Way the bottom. So that's work for the fastest way we can get from Point A to point B is the best way with workflow.