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Lesson Info

The Value of the Physical, Printed Image

One of the reasons that I think that this class is so needed is that album production and album design is such a difficult thing bookmaking. All of that stuff is so difficult and has been in past avoided by photographers, especially wedding photographers, because just it's so complicated the process that it just drives people nuts to do it, and so they've avoided it. But I think to the detriment of everybody involved, I think it's to the detriment of the photographer, because the only way people are seeing other people's work is through their phones or through the internet or the web or anything like that, which is pretty ubiquitous. I mean, we all have images on her phone and that's how we in just images, but we really need to also see images in a passive way so that all those things they're active viewing situations, so active ewing situations would be going to a tv and turning it on and putting in a dvd and watching a movie or active would be turning on your phone and flipping throu...

gh images are sending him or going to facebook and looking at images those air active, active, participating places where you look at images and ingest them. But there are passive ways to view images as well, and those passive ways are things like coffee tables on a coffee table, books on a on a coffee table, something where you're just sitting down and you can thumb through it while you're having a conversation with someone and you just see it laying there on the and it's a piece of art on the table, and even if I don't open this up, if this is sitting on my table that's a pretty, you know, that's just sitting on my table and that's a really nice, you know, viewing circumcise like people look at that and they see a piece of art sitting on a table, I think that's beautiful, and it adds to the table and it adds to the room, and even if you don't look at it, it's a passive viewing experience and even if I pick it up and I say, oh, I want to look at this book, then you know, I just open up the book and I just kind of thumb through it and I'm I'm doing, you know, this kind of thing and that's just it's, just fun like I'm talking to you guys and I glance and it's very passive it's, very easy to do doesn't require a lot of effort from the viewer same thing with prince on a wall principle on the wall are super passive. But it's an opportunity for it to enrich your life and, you know, increase the value of the experience that you're having in your home or in your office on dh that's why people want prints on their walls but if you was a photographer aren't providing prints for people and all you're doing is posting them on the web and all you're doing is putting on facebook well, you're not giving your client the value that they need that they really want and and it doesn't give them the opportunity to sell you, you know they can they can show their stuff on facebook and say, hey, look at this cool photo on facebook or whatever, but but the people who really matter to them also come into their home and when they're home doesn't have any prints on the wall, then there's no conversational piece there's no opportunity for them to enjoy the plus if you have a print on somebody's wall, they have a daily reminder that they should update that family photo where they have a daily reminder of that. You know, this was such a beautiful experience at our wedding when they I have a baby oh, we should call, you know jared toe have them shoot a baby because, you know, he did such a good job with these images that our wedding he should photograph our baby so so those kind of passive viewing experiences air really valuable for use of photographer and also super valuable for your client? Your client really needs those things in their life they're not going to think they do because they think that all they do is look at him on the phone but they really do look at him in other ways they just don't think about it and so I wanted to talk to you about the need for prince as well and I use white house custom color is my lab and that's ah united states companies so if you're elsewhere you obviously need to find a lab that's in your country but you having a good lab that you can connect with I use smugmug that's my, uh online viewing for my clients so when the clients need to look online and when uncles and aunts want toe order prints, they order him there and it goes directly to the white house white house, princeton and sends him out so it's easy for me to provide prince to my clients without ever being involved in the process and I charge a low enough fee for the prints that they're not uninspired to print them I want them to print them and so I'm not charging, you know, some insane fee for the amount of prints I'm not charging one hundred twenty dollars for an eight by ten um I just I don't see that is valuable to the client now if I need to retouch something then I charge for my time to retouch it but my prince themselves were not all that expensive and so I want people to have the opportunity to have those prints in their lives and if I'm using an automated system like that, then the money that I get from it is worthwhile because I'm not involved in it it's just extra funds coming in the door when people want a really nice print that's when they come to me when they want to read touch something I only sell small prints online so then when they want to come for something that's a sixteen by twenty or bigger or canvas or something like that that are a mad are a matador a frame print that's when they would come back to me I will do some retouching work on it really puts him artistry and and then we print it so that involves me those are much more expensive prints that way my clients have the ability to print I'm not tryingto to keep them from printing I think that when you charge too much for your prints especially like the little loose prints you're you're doing your clients of this service and you're also doing yourself a disservice because you're not giving them the opportunity to love you the way that they could so I with every wedding, I provide a proof book, so I have a physical thing that my clients get to show to people. This right here is one of the best marketing tools I have because it's physical people can take it to work. People aren't going to be looking on their computer at work at their images and have someone randomly come and grab it. No one's going to come up and randomly take over your computer work, but someone will randomly walk up to your desk it work, see this on the desk and pick it up and start thumbing through these images and say, wow, these are really, really beautiful, and you're not going to take your album toe work, so you need physical things for people to play with and to touch. I get a lot of client referrals from these, and I've gotten a lot of them on planes, so mother bride will have approved book on an airplane and she will be thumbing through it, and the person next to her happens to have a daughter getting married, peeking over who did the wedding. I get a call and the call says, hey, I saw a proof book of yours on an airplane that's a common occurrence, because this thing travels, people aren't going to if I have my phone out, and I'm doing this people aren't going to look over my shoulder and look at my phone they will look over my shoulder and look at a proof book funny thing the proof book is open for like you can look over but this that's not open for that and I think it's probably because people are afraid that there's incriminating photos on these someone might be looking through and be like oh don't look at my you know whatever so anyway proof book is very valuable but it's because it's physical something you touch and I think we've lost the value of that physical nature of things and so I want to show you how to print things quickly is important when you are inside of the process of working on the photos that you have a very easy outlet for printing images so that you can give gift prints to your clients or so that you can sell prints to your client or maybe print thank you cards to your client or something physical that they can use that has their image on it so that it reminds them of who you are and the artistry that could create I mean even even if you were just to take a piece of art from a wedding let's say you're for instance this wedding right here that we're looking at right now this is this is the wedding that I did in england it's the wedding that I was running around at the south of england there with them and we started looking at those flowers you remember those flowers so they know those flowers exist here they are so they know fly these flowers exist they've seen them in their wedding pictures. So what if I while I'm working on my images simply said, oh, you know what? They really like these images I should make them a print a gift print of this not of them but of the flowers because now if I just simply go to my print module and inside my print module, if I have taken the time to set up a template for the type of paper I like to use on dh for the printer I want to use then aiken, grab this simply go to the type of paper I want to use click on it and I let's do that one and I'm going to simply go down here and it's all set up because I've set up the template let me show you this really quickly when you come into light room inside of the print module anything that you set up, the first thing you're gonna have to do is go to the page, set up and choose the printer and the size we're using cannon pro one siri's printer and we're going to use the a three sized paper so this is going to be a big print on ben we also go to the print settings and when you purchase printer paper you're going to have a set of you're gonna want to get a set of color profiles for each piece of paper that you get and so we're using canceling paper s o the cans and paper very toothy beautiful papers very art paper same paper company that men a used when he did his art and so just it's it's been around for a very long time and so they make amazing paper also for printers now and so we want to use their paper and when we download their profile we also get the settings from them they'll say if you're using a canon printer, then use these settings for this particular paper and so when we go in and set up our settings quality and media we see other fine art paper one which is what they've told us to use on dh so we're going to save those things and as we save them then we come over here we choose our paper margins how big we want the print to be this is going to be an eleven inch print all right eleven inches which means that they could put it in a nice sixteen by sixteen or twenty by twenty frame and it would look really beautiful with a map but the beauty is I don't have to do that for them I can just send them a beautiful print signed and say, here, take this to your matter and matted up, and it won't cost me much and yet they will find that to be an amazing gift, and so I'm going to do this, I'm going to print this for them and then I'm gonna send it to him, so when I get home, I'll send this to him and they'll be super thrilled, and so I'm going to adjust it the way I want it. As I worked with the printer, I'm gonna learn what its particular idioms or what its particular the nuances are, and so when I look at it, I print the first one and it's a little darker than at the very bottom I conduce, um, print adjustments, so I can say, oh, this one needs to be, you know, a little bit brighter, so it needs to be twelve or thirteen, you can just kind of, you know, play with it, and as soon as you get that paper dialed in, then you're going to come over here to the right hand side and you're going to right click or you're either going to right click a, a printer template you already have if you right, click it, you can say update with the current settings and it will update it or if you're making a new one, you can go up and hit plus on the templates, and you can then name that that paper type so that from then on out, whenever you want to print a piece of a piece of our on a piece of paper, you go put the piece of paper into the printer over there. Once you've got the paper in the printer, you're going to go to the two year print module and you're going to come over to the left of your click on the template that you want to use it sets up the paper size, sets up all the color settings it sets up the amount of brightness and contrast you want to increase or decrease on that print itself. It also sets up the actual profile of the printer and by the way, those profiles air contained if you go into your if you go into your light room menu to the preferences and inside the preferences, you go to the preset area inside the preset area. Hit on show light room precept folder when you click on that it's going to show you where all of your light room presets are and in there is a color profile area and in that color, prideful profile areas where all of the profiles for the paper that you just download it are going to go so once you download profiles, you throw him into this folder and that's where you're going to, uh put all your profiles that way when you come here, they're available for you to choose click on that profile and that profile allows for whatever you're seeing on the screen to show up on that print over there. So now I'm going to show you how easy this is so we were in the library we're looking at a print on image and we think, uh just finished that I'm working on this album for these people are working on this, you know, a job for the people I think this would make a really beautiful gift print and I just finished adjusting it I like the way it looks in fact, I'm going to go in and do one little thing to happen and brightened up those highlights on those flowers just a little bit and then I love the way it looks and so I'm going to go into the print module and I'm gonna say, okay, I'm gonna print this exactly the way it is I love it so now I'm gonna hit print it's all have two duis come in here quick on the paper type and hit print now I'm going to go over here I don't know if this is on no, it's not on turn it on first, make sure you turn on your printer first and then once you've turned on your printer, then you can hit print on dh, then make sure that the right kind of paper is in here on dh it's kind of churning up. It may take a little bit of a little bit to turn, but the idea is that you can then quickly print something it doesn't take you much time to do and think of the advantages that client gets from the gift print and think of the advantages that you get from your client being super thrilled by what you've just done, but it doesn't take very long to do it. I should have turned this on before we, uh, did this, right? So we'll let that run, and then we'll get our print out of it in a little bit, but we can continue to go on our merry way doing the things that we need to do. There are other things that we should be doing with our time, so we'll work on those things and then later on we'll look over there, the print will be made all right, so the value of prince is very, very high, so find ways to make those prints easy for yourself to make.