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Lesson Info

Storytelling and Slideshows in Lightroom CC

Let's go to another avenue of sharing, which is slide shows slide shows are and opportunity to put a story with a song which is also a story, and the value of songs and photos together is really, really high when you can take music and marry it to a set of images, the emotion in those images and the emotion in the song become tied together and, quite frankly, the as the saying goes, all our aspires to the condition of music music is like the top of the food chain of all art because it has a direct conduit to the soul there's no filters necessary. When you hear music and it's angry music, you feel the anger doesn't have to have words, you can feel it, and when it's sorrowful music, you can feel it on what's happy music, you can feel it just it just is doesn't matter what the words are, it just is and so that music is what all art wants to be, and photography is no different. We want that direct conduit and the beauty of q piggybacking on music is that you can then steal from the music t...

he music is doing the direct conduit and it's connecting directly into someone soul, and if you can pay back on it so that they're getting connected for through this musical experience and you've just shown them a photograph now they're married to the photograph, the photograph and the music are now together, and so then they feel what they're feeling with the music and they think it's coming from the photograph now it may be coming from the photograph because the photograph is enhancing the experience, so if you have a wedding slide show and you have, you know that that wedding slide show is generating this, the music is generating a lovey dovey feel and you know, tears and whatever the music may be generating some of that emotion in your photograph so then reminding them of the beauty of the wedding or the time they dance with their dad or whatever, and so both of them are providing some kind of emotion, but the two together it is it's far greater than the total of its parts, and so utilized music is an opportunity to marry people to your photographs. And so but again, you have to find a way to do it in a in an inexpensive way, inexpensive for your time, and so I'm going to go through the slide show module inside of light room there's also other options. Another mohr robust way to make slide shows is through a company called an emoto and there's an entire workshop on making slide shows through an emoto that is on creative life, so if you want to learn more about that you can just simply go there it's free all the time it's kind of one of those evergreen free creative life presentations so go there but for the slide show module I want to go through and really uh look into the slideshow module and get get into that with you so that you can see how you can make a slide show very quickly but with a lot of power and so I'm going to go in to the slide show module but first I have to go and find a set of images that I want to show a slide show two and so I'm going to kind of scan through a set of images let's go to um let's go to this salty picnic s o this a siri's of hilarious little shots that I did with a group of kids in the salt flat it's in salt around the great salt lake so in utah and a super great little fund set of images with these kids in the family andi I believe I actually have uh them right? I might have this whole thing set up let's see um I have a set of images no, I don't so let's just make it so I want to again in the same way I want to go through and highlight all of my images and find the very best images so the very best images are going to obviously be one two or three stars so I can go in and choose let's just say I'm going to go for the one star images first and I'm going to look down here and I see that I've got one hundred five photos teo actually I've got a hundred five photos I've got seventy selected let's go into the two star arena and now that we're in to stars we've got seventy images total that's close enough to a slide show that we might be able to get enough out of it so I'm going to say that would be a pretty good slideshow to start with but we can also pare it down by going we only want to look at the original so there's no because we've got a couple of those pesky little virtual copies in there so let's give her the virtual copies so now we've got see I'm looking for the number looking for a number of images fifty nine so as you star images remember those star ratings they're going to help you to kind of whittle down so utilize don't some people use star ratings for like one star is for I'm going to send to a flower vendor to stars I'm going to put him on ah blawg three stars I'm going to put him in an album and four stars I'm going to you know uh send him to a different vendor to the the deejay or whatever so they're using them is like tags problem is that make that makes no sense because four stars is better than two stars and three stars is so on lee used that stars for rating your image is based on their value how good they are and if you do that then when you start sorting like this you will find that as you go up you'll limit the number and it will always be the best number so we're going to go for the highest star rating we can get that will still give us a good number of images which I think is about fifty nine if I got three stars it's going to be way too well no three stars good three three stars gives me thirty one that's a good number so we're going with it see how I'm choosing my slideshow based on my stars so then what I'll do is again go the collection's gonna create a new collection and that collection is going to be called salty picnic slide show and I'm going to put it inside of our creative live ah folder here and I'm not going to make any virtual copies because on a slide show I'm going to be tweaking stuff just for the slide show s o the slide show is just going to have all the images as is and I'm also going to set it is the target collection and I'll tell you why as I create this so now I have a slide show here, but I also want to go back into the original images so I'm going to go back to our total session here and I'm going to look for other images that maybe I'm missing so I'm just gonna scan through and see if there's anything in the two star range that I want to keep I'm going to keep looking and looking and looking and just kind of scan through and make sure there's see how these air selected so that's perfect for me because I can see which ones did and didn't get selected and so I'm moving through everything looks great. Oh, ok, so this is the one that I want keep right here, so I'm going to click this this is a video and I'm going to click onto the that little circle right there and by doing that it adds it to the collection. So now when I go back to that collection and I look at my we're okay here it is so I click on the salty picnic slide show and as you as you see all of our images air here and as I scroll down, you can see that there's kind of kind of just being smattering of fun little images for the kids and then at the very bottom there is a video now, once I get into the slide show, I can see that there's occasionally a repeat or maybe you know this one this is actually a funny comparison. So this is the picture I want to keep because this is the other picture and you can see it looks like this little guy he's got like, a explosive like he just two did or something that's like he's a rocket ship so that's that's when flare goes awry but anyway, so I'm gonna delete that one out of the collection it's funny but probably shouldn't be in the collection on dh then I'm gonna scan through and see if there's anything else and there is one photo here that it looks like I have done some, uh teaching on and I don't want to I want to go back so I go to the history and I can come back there that's what I want and I'm going to bring up the shadows a little bit so that we can see it better ok, now I can go back into the grid all of these look pretty good everything's good, good, good, good. All right, so now I have everything I want and I'm going to highlight all of these and I'm gonna go to the slide show and inside of the slide show module I have a lot of controls but all of those controls can then be put into a preset or template so you want to make sure that you go into the temple area and you want to create a template for this once you finish putting all the details into how you want the slide show toe look make sure that you make it a template so that from here on out it's always going to do that so you don't have to build it again so the first thing I want to do is go up to the top and I want to make sure that I can either zoom to fit the frame like that but that means all the vertical ones when I get to a vertical when it's also going to fill the frame that wouldn't work out so most the time I'm filling the frame instead of fitting I mean I'm fitting the frame instead of filling on dh then I but all this stuff I rarely use the layout itself I wanted to go all the way to the edges but if you wanted to kind of give it some space you can use these you can use these buffers here so your margins would come in but here's what you really want to know about he's down here you can add an identity play a watermark you can also if you're goingto if you're giving a slide show to a client that for purposes of helping them understand which ones you like best if you click on star rating it will show the stars that are associated with the gym it's so it'll be like two star comes three star comes up four star so they know which you know rating see that there's a little star area there and so it'll just keep moving back and forth depending on how much you like it um and then you can do text overlays as well but here's, what you really want is oh, and by the way, you can also do backdrops so you could choose an image like, uh, let's go grab this image right? No, not this this image so there's no kids in it so you could take this image and drag it into this box and now it's an overlay. So then from here on out, no matter what picture is showing that's always behind them, then you could go up here and do you know something like this? And you'd have a slide show of images showing behind this and you could take this down tio in a passive he like something like that and the background color you could make it white so that instead of a black sails getting dark if you make that white capacity, then as you go like that, it looks a little bit nicer so then I could have that floating over the top. You could even put a drop shadow on this image then so you could get a little tricky if you want, plus you you actually could. We're really tricking this thing out, but you could go to the these your margins, and if you shifted it like this, you could put your whole slideshow right over here, and then you could put some kind of an identity plate right here where you say, you know, your photography logo or whatever, and then this could be just playing so you couldn't really trick it out, but if I want to go back to square one so that I've got a normal slide show, I'm going to go back to my standards slide show, I'm here and boom see how all the settings go back, so now I'm going to go down and show you one really important set right here, and this is the titles titles are critical because you want to start the slide show and in the slide show with something that identifies, so I'm going to click on intro screen and I'm going to click here and say, edit and now I'm just going to say a salty picnic, and then I will choose what kind of fund that's going to be? I'm going to make it avenue next, and I'm gonna hit ok there's a salty picnic and I can change the size of it, so there that'll work and then I could do it ending screen as well, and I'm going to click on that and that's going to be my logo. Simon edit that logo! Use a graph pic logo I'm going to locate the file and then this is where I'm going to go into my drop box. I'm going to find my logo, so I'm just going to go into a file called logo's go to my logo's and I'm going to look for a logo file click choose it's saying me it's really a big logo, but that's because I made it a full screen use anyway and ok, so then shows the logo and I can make it, but like that big there we go, so that will show at the end. So the first introduces the topic and the end shows that my logo and then down here I'm going to choose music turn the music on and I'm going to grab some kind of music right now. It's got some music from a previous slide show don't want that simon, who used this negative button to remove it, and now I'm going to go and grab a new one and click on this and I'm going to go again I used my drop box so that all of my computers have access to it and I'm going to go to the music that I have rights too so I'm going to go to my rights managed music folder these air all the things that I've purchased from triple scoop music so that I can have rights to use the music and I'm going to type in see lips I might not have put it in this folder yet so I can also go to my music folder go into my itunes folder because I have some of it in there as well that I haven't put into my rights manage music and if I go into here I can still type it in crais ola where are you well I don't see it so let's choose a different piece of music because I'm not finding that s so let's d'oh um writes manage music again we're going to right click on here how about this one and listen to it for a second so turn up that audio work so here we go we're going to choose that now we've got this piece of music in there on this minute music is by sparrow from triple scoop music and now I'm going tio come down to the slide show area down here in the playback I can choose manual which means I'm the one pushing it forward or I can choose automatic in automatic I could tell it to sink to the slides if I click on that it reads the slides the music itself in the slides sometimes that doesn't work too well because it it it reads too fast and it goes dun tenant and like it's just going to be too fast but we can try it out and see so we're just going to zoom back out and we're going toe highlight all of our images started the beginning and just see what happens so we'll see how this music sinking to the music goes but it sometimes it works sometimes it's a little off s o it's fun fun to see if it can get it because if we can get it it's cool because it actually hits the beets but sometimes that it misreads the beets and they're a little bit too fast or a little bit too slow and we're going to wait for this to prepare and we're nowhere for this to prepare so low cut time something you have questions are you able to manually control the directions of the pans and zooms if you use that option no you're not but that's not something that you do so you can see how fast this is going a little too fast so let's let's go back out so instead let's turn off the the sink and let's go in and control our slide length down toe like I think about two three seconds is pretty good on dh then we'll do the cross fades instead of cross fade like fast cross fades let's do some pretty fast instead of slow cross fades let's do some fast ones, so like you know point five seconds, because because it's kind of a hard song so it's not it's, not like a a theory a ll song so we'll choose a little faster cross fades, we're going toe, we could fit it to the music so I hit fit to the music it says ok for three point two sly if you go three point two seconds per slide, it will fill up the whole song, which means that I actually would rather go a little bit less than that just because I don't tend to want to run the song out haven't clipped the slide so so three point oh is pretty good and then I can have the video have some so if I go all the way to music it's on lee going to play the music, but if I have video that has some audio that's a value, then I want to bring that audio back in, so if I go backto video, then assume is it here's some video soon some video comes in in the audio will duck down and the video will take over and so I can do either all music, all video during those times or I can take the video down most of the way so that's what we're going to do because I have that little video clip of the very end and we're going to use it to tell the story, so remember, we're telling stories, so I want to tell that story, and so I'm going to allow that video audio to come through on dh then of course I can use pan and zoom pan and zoom again uh, is so you were asking about controlling the pan and zoom and bringing you don't get to control where the pan and zoom happened, it just does it so you just it's just kind of an auto thing, so it's not like something like if you wanted to control your own panic, zoom, then I would go to premiere and then you could control every little aspect of the pan zoom. So anyway there's the panic zoom I always keep it at the lowest level if you go anything higher than low it's going to be really nerve wracking, its just the laws, it'll make you sick so they need to change that of it, andi, I'm not going to repeat the slide show I just wanted to run once andi, I wanted to be a the highest quality and that's your setting you could do a draft you can do standard or high we're going to set it at the highest quality and that's our slideshow when we're ready to go but you will notice on the last past we had some of the photos look good and then one of the photo came in as kind of pixelated and the reason for that is that we hadn't built the previews yet and so that one photo hadn't rebuilt itself yet and so we need to make sure that we rebuild all of our previews first before we do that too I want to end this slide show with a different photograph, so I have a syriza photographs right um here or we're doing some races with these that's the same photo we missed that one, so let's delete that one okay, I've gotta siri's of these little photos that we're using this this little car and so are this little scooter, so I want to find those photos with the scooter and I want to bring them towards the end of the slide show, so I'm just going to grab him and I'm gonna drag him this way so they go all the way to the end of the slide show here so that they match up more with this video that's going to happen and so I'm I want this one to be first and then I want this little guy to pack his bags and then I want this guy to get actually open and then this guy is going to be driving and then we'll hit that all right so it's just kind of tells that little last story all right so I'm gonna highlight all of these images and then we're going to go back to the library for a second we're going to go upto library menu previews and we're going to build one for one previews that's the best way to make sure that your slide show is going to run perfectly is to make sure that you have built those one for one previews and then we'll go back to the slide show while we're waiting for that to happen and we'll be ready for it to go a soon as it comes in now I'm gonna check on our print because our print hasn't run through and I think it has to do with the fact that the paper didn't actually get pulled in so we're just going to push this button here and here you go now it's got a warm up again I spent so much time talking to you people that I forgot I have been disregarding my printer here come on there we go so now that could be printing while we're working on our slide job and it looks like we're almost done with our building are one for one previews and so we will, um, soon as it's done, we're gonna hit play. You're ready? Let's. Go let's, this is a pretty fun little slideshow you missed that. Wait that way so let's keep it no way that way. You okay? So that's the story and I think that's it's a fun little way. So what we do is we any time we're doing a video arm in a photo shoot, we always take a camera that can shoot video and of course all of our you know, all of our slrs, khun shoot video, but we'll actually take just a little hip camera my cannon g fifteen with me, and then we can just set it somewhere and hit record and let it recording video or my assistant can kind of do a little pan or something like that. So well, we'll keep a little video with us no matter what we're doing, so that in the end we can always throw in little clips of video about a photo shoot, and then it kind of adds to the feeling of the photo shoot. We can do silly things like that at the end, especially when you're dealing with little kids when you're doing with seniors. Sometimes we'll actually have my video guy matt come, and he'll he'll do an entire video of it. He'll do a bunch of clips, but all of that video can be run directly from light room. We can adjust the video it's very easy to adjust. In fact, if we were to go into the library module with this video here, double click it. You can clip the video so you can open up this thistle, uh, gear here when you click on it opens up a place where you can then trim the video, so just grabbing onto these little spots will allow you to trim the video, but also you can come in and adjust the video with your quick develops and so in this one, you know, if we want to bring the exposure down, we can take the exposure down, you know, just a little bit here, but then see how we're losing some of them so that's a little too much, but weaken increase and decrease in little increments by holding the shift key down, and so that allows us to really finesse that, but if we want to finesse it even more, if we really want to adjust the video inside of light room a little bit better than we're doing here, all we need to do is go to this little button here and click capture frame and we capture the frame than right next to the image will be so we've got video and then we've also are going to have a j peg and I don't see where did I put that j peg it's goingto be right next to it in the actual right, click it and show it in the library and the folder see this j peg that was created from there, so I've got the video itself, and then I've got a j peg here. This j peg can actually go into the develop module, the video can't with the j peg can and in the j peg, I can go in and work on the tone curve for the video itself so I can take you know the highlights down, but keep the shadows up so that we don't lose a cz much on them, and then I could kind of finesse that a little bit more and I can go in and work on even like the reds, greens and blues so I could take the blues and I could say, I want these blues to be a little bit more saturated or less saturated so I can work on this and really tweak this file s o then, once I'm done with it come, all I have to do is go back to the library module, but I just take this j peg and I highlight and shift click to here and then I'm gonna sink the settings all the way across and this shows you what you can synchronize you khun do white balance you can do basic exposures except for highlights and shadows even tone do tone curves, color treatments you knew all of the colors, settings and that's really important if you want to take the blue skies down or something like that because you can go in to the developed macho well here and you can go and grab that hs sells you goto luminous and say I want the blues to be darker and so by bringing those blues down, you've completely changed the video then you come back to the library shift clicked across those two, so there we go synchronized settings synchronized and now all of those settings are now on the videos. The videos now has a darker blue sky and it's still going to play see that so very, very simple editing easy to do, but you don't have to leave light room and if you're just dealing with little clips, this is the way to do it. If you're going to do something serious, then you go into premiere, but when you're just dealing with little things, you can do it here if you don't have premiere but you do have light room cc photographer addition, which is the which is light room and photo shop, you can actually edit video and photo shop as well, so you could work there a swell. So if you want to make a really serious video, go to premier or go to photo shop. But here you can make cute little slide shows or even mitt movies if you're doing hard cuts, even just cut between scenes and you could do a whole movie inside of light room just cut between the scenes. All right, so that's, that's, the slideshow module and it's, a very simple module you can play with it really get to know it. But the important thing is that there are ways to share stuff from within light room that our ways to tell stories that include other mediums, like video and an audio. So those are really important. Plus, by the way, in the slideshow module, if you wanted to include more than one song or more than one track, you can simply do that by going over to the music area and adding another music's track just by think plus and it will add another track below this track and just keep going through the tracks, so just keep adding here tracks, um and if you wanted to have a little bit of silence at the end or something like that, just cut yourself some silent video. Are silent audio so that you have a track of, you know, two minutes or one minute or thirty seconds, or ten seconds of silent audio, and make that a piece of music at the end, so that then you could have, you know, silence of the beginning or silence in the end. Or both. So that's. Another option. So there's. A lot of ways to work within light room.