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Post Processing Q & A

I'm just going to jump into some questions chris is actually yeah let's let's get through some of these guys all right um what's your edit to shoot ratio how long does it take to edit your photos for your look and um versus like shooting uh that's a that's a tricky one because I think it really just depends on you know what the what the goal is you know if you have a job that you're uh that you have to come back and you know processes images in a couple of days then you're gonna be spending a lot of time editing you know so you khun get through everything it depends on how much you had to shoot on that job depends on you know if you were shooting like time lapses of your shooting this I mean everything can kind of take a different amount of time you know a lot of times when shooting night exposures I'll shoot a bunch of different frame to the same scene just hoping to get the right one eh so it's usually pretty easy to pick that one I think for me since post processing isn't something ...

that I put a ton of tana emphasis on in terms of like you can see that you know how much time I spent car cracked in those files you know maybe that's a long time to you but to me it doesn't seem like a super long time so I find myself as as times gotten gone on and I've got a little bit older and wiser in this field it's been easier for you to make select which has been easier for me to get through my edits I need to do so typically trying toe you know really just spend as much time as I can shooting in the field that's where that's like kind of a goal you know it is creating the work and not being you know come down by just processing is that you can make it take forever you know that's for sure could be a huge bummer do you ever use the healing brush for dust yeah yeah occasionally talk I mean dust is a problem you know we all have dust issues in our sensors I didn't bring it here but what I use is I have one of those little handlers I've got a really powerful one as well as the arctic butterfly it's called and it's basically just like a magnetic brush that u turn on and then it can wipe away the censor and then I also have a physical little spot sensor cleaner and those all just like her in a small little kit that I'll bring with me on my trips um almost always especially if I'm going somewhere where there's a lot of sand there's a lot of wind places like iceland or somewhere like that I'll bring a couple cans of compressed air is too clean off the outside of the camera never the sensor um and that's just you know to kind of keep things going but yeah I mean the last case scenario is to have toe pull out the dust and photo shop that's a painful process that nobody wants to have to do do you calibrate you mentioned you work with in your studio with uh external monitors to calibrate those and if so what do youse we do I couldn't even tell you because my office manager is the one who does all that stuff and sadly there's a lot of procedures of our business and stuff that I try to stay his hands off with as I can because there's one thing I've learned it's that you don't want to get good at something you don't like to do yeah so I like to shoot photos I'd like to travel I don't like you know dealing with payroll and uh you know negotiating fees and contracts so I have people in place that can do that stuff but for our screens and stuff I know that they just have a you know basic software that has helped for all of our screens to be calibrated now it doesn't so much matter the screens of people who are not really doing that stuff it's really just my photo editor and the people who are are gathering images doing any color correcting but we typically tend to try and always use that we use like these del sort of flat matte screens and those work really well for forgetting a realistic interpretation of the image do you handle personally still all of the editing we're not what you do or you have people to do it and you just check off on it not yeah I mean I I usually I'm the one making the final selects I'm usually the one signing off on it but the beauty is people that in my office or trained and people that I work with to color character you are trained to kind of edit in my style interpretation that I am doing and there's no pre sets or any I think so it's really just every image has to be treated specifically so anything I'm posting on instagram or something bad is usually myself color correcting it and I I'm pretty hands on with the editing process but for big big trips and stuff I mean I've got someone who's dedicated on the site editing every day and who's there to kind of go through the images and I'm just working with him to make sure we provide a treatment for that shoot or for that specific job yeah question relation done meta data so when you organized all these photos how do you organize a meta data so that we can find it later times and you know those folders and I was putting things into yeah so those folders have meta data added to them afterwards so if I have my basic metadata from the shoot which is like you know creative live san francisco yada yada yada outdoor photography those just like basic keywords that every image would and then inside each folder I would have you know waterfalls and then different one arctic surfing and then whatever and then if I wanted to organize it further I might go in and admitted that to the names of the people in the shots or the names the location and the shots it depends it's a time consuming process and I don't tend to use metadata that much ever it's more of something I ad for my stock agencies of people who are selling my images and having to search through them you know but that's that's pretty much it that's all I do yeah do you edit while you're on the road um sometimes yeah I mean well you know like I said if I'm doing commercial project you know I have we have a detective person who's in charge of this system there their whole entire job while they're there is to process images and to make sure that things were getting edited and worked on and so that when we get back to the office our turnaround time is really quick and a lot of times you guys to you know clients air there on set and they're like we need to review in a day or we need to review that night so as soon as we're done shooting us who's that card filled up for giving it off to my assistant he's uploading them prepping stuff for review color correcting stuff I mean that's khun b's very stressed well I could be pretty intense shoots when you have to do that stuff and it's all happening really quickly I personally like to be able to come to the office you know organize an edit photos and under ideal conditions and then you know provide them the best I can but when it's myself when it's me personally I'm really never editing on the road typically unless I'm unless I'm posting something if it's me traveling just doing like a social media project traveling too you know maybe alberta or something like that I don't have any need to be processing and trying to send it send out images except for if I'm uploading photographs to my phone or uploading them so that I can prop so I can post them online right awesome you guys have any more questions you guys sure everything is clear from that last section knows a lot of information on there as well um did all like the download archive kind of makes sense and why why we're separating those things why we're using t ngs and kind of coming back to that stuff making sense yeah no more questions are there in the world do we have a couple more uh do you have a system on extended shoots or expedition shoots where you don't have your did you get with youto offload stuff too how do you do that well if I'm if I'm going somewhere where I'm out backpacking for multiple days whatever you know then I really I'm not bringing a laptop I'm just shooting on cards and I'm just taking the cards and holding them off I know there's some solutions now there's a couple people making kind of seem like non laptop hard drive where you just put a card in there copies that um in the past I've used some of them they've been a little junkie so if I if I am going somewhere where I have the ability like our camper just out whoever all bring my laptop and I'll bring two small drives in a car better that's it just something to transfer between the between the cards and the drives if I'm going to be really remote and don't have the ability to bring that I'll just bring a bunch of one hundred twenty eight megabyte cards and I will just you know fill those up put him on there you know keep him very very lock down so lf nothing happens but I mean sometimes it's like the more you add you know it's like the more weight you're bringing out there in the field even it's a hard drive or whatever it's just adding a ton more so do you ever I think you cover this earlier but really ray do you ever shoot h e r never shoot hd are no um I mean I just I'm not really a fan of it so much um and probably because I think I'm just trying to as much as I can in camera and and with filters and whatnot and trying to achieve maybe sometimes the same effects on my own and I know that it can look amazing and I think in some ways maybe it's gotten a bad rap because some people tended take it a lot really overkill but I've seen it done really beautifully where it can look really good and you can have amazing results by blending you know those images but yeah it's not really something that I'm typically ever ever messing with so awesome how do you save your photos after you've edited them tio upload to the web so like social media yeah so if I if I was gonna eat my process for basically like if I was going to make a selection I was going to post all these air I'm gonna do this and that I would basically just take them back in the light room from dmg taking the light room I would uh I would basically it's got my export tab because they're already all dialed in ready two ready to go and make them into j pegs saving that fifty hundred pixels wide and I would export them it like eighty percent quality right because I don't want them to be massive multiple megabytes right I'm just gonna posting them online are sending them to somebody are posting them on facebook or some like that you know there's I want them to be really you know people able to view them and enjoy them and stuff but I don't really want them to be massive quality people could print and always seventy two d p I for the web you know you don't want to do anything you don't want to save anything larger than that because it could be printed it could be utilised like that so yeah uh the program for the mechanic it doesn't you can't export pictures photographs inch back you need to put them in light that's not what it's for I mean I think you can but I would never do that the program is really an organization and selection tool for you to make quick easy I mean there's no way in light room at all toe work as fast as you can and put a mechanic right there's just it's just not it doesn't function that way people have used the program for to do a bunch of different things when really it was just designed to do one thing really well which is processing and editing photo mechanic has really optimized to do one thing really well which is organism organizing and selecting your images right and moving them between folders um and that's something you can't do in life you can't move between folders and light and that's kind of basically photo mechanic is just a very very awesome finder window right that's all it really is you know it's like finder on steroids so you cover this a little bit before and you always start with all those control sliders like at zero but since you're doing a lot of the same adjustments we got a lot of questions about why you don't use presets I'm just not a fan of pre sets have a preset means that you're going to be lazy yeah and I find that for me you know if I'm and just mean for me I know that that's what'll happen to us to me all all into being lazy with it you know just kind of you know the highest preset make a few tweaks if if I'm doing a shoot where I have hundreds of images from the same location the same light everything I'll just copy and paste I'll make one awesome at it it's the same thing as a pre set I'm just copying and pasting so I'll make that at it and that's the thing is like if I want to go back here and I want to you know grab some photos from my archive that aren't color corrected I'm I might go to a d a n g in my download folder save the edit grab those other files just pace it on there you know it's easy enough to do that so I feel like with presets rather than digging through all the presets finding the one that really works I find it's just easier for me to go through I mean what I was doing for you guys I was slowing that process down but I feel like I have a really good interpretation of exactly what I would do to each image and each file really quickly like I could have dove through that really fast ply would have been stoked on it just would have been like a blur of whatever of sliders you know but I feel like I've I've kind of develop that a bit and I know what I'm looking for you know um but yeah I know presets committee that's super helpful I just find that I'm usually shooting in a lot of various conditions you know quite a bit so cool before me before we keep gun wantto share some internet love with you russell smith says and may have to step out with one of the thank chris for the whole presentation but got most out of the post processing which has been great because he talks in a manner that anyone should be able to understand thanks so much cool people are digging it man that's huge I tryto keep the techie jargon out of this because I feel like that's always one of the biggest like flaws in the photography realm is like this idea that you need or have tto have all the proper gear and the proper thing you know all this all this stuff light room photo mechanic doesn't matter you don't really need it you know to produce great imagery like this stuff is secondary to the actual process of creating images I think for me I'm just trying to show you guys really the the cleanest easiest way to kind of preserve this work that you're creating and make it last and make sure nothing happens because I'll be the first one to tell you I've had hard drives fail I've lost images I've lost memory cards things happened that suck and uh it's always been something easy to fix you know