Alternative Workflows
Lesson 46 from: The Professional Photographer’s Digital WorkflowMichael Clark
Alternative Workflows
Lesson 46 from: The Professional Photographer’s Digital WorkflowMichael Clark
Lessons
Class Introduction
08:17 2Shooting Workflow: Set-up The Camera
15:43 3Shooting Workflow: Histograms and Exposure
18:14 4Shooting Workflow: Sensor Cleaning
32:50 5Overview of Color Management
17:31 6Color Management: Monitor
11:49 7Color Management: Workspace
03:40 8Color Management: Monitor Calibration
25:52Color Management: Do I Need This?
03:42 10Introduction to Lightroom®
05:44 11Download & Import Images With Lightroom®
06:32 12Lightroom® Preferences
09:09 13Six Ways to Speed-up Lightroom®
14:02 14To DNG or Not to DNG?
06:47 15A Logical Editing Process in Lightroom®
08:56 16File & Folder Naming in Lightroom®
08:39 17Batch Renaming in Lightroom®
05:51 18Entering Metadata in Lightroom®
03:35 19Managing Images in Lightroom®
07:39 20Introduction to the Develop Module in Lightroom®
04:45 21Lightroom® Develop Module
24:01 22Sharpening, Chromatic Aberration & Vignetting in Lightroom®
12:34 23Graduated Filters & Spot Tool in Lightroom®
09:59 24Converting images to Black & White in Lightroom®
13:01 25Creating Panoramas in Lightroom
07:46 26Creating HDR Images in Lightroom®
09:29 27Lightroom® to Photoshop® Workflow
07:04 28Export Images to Photoshop®
08:54 29Finalizing Images in Photoshop®: Basic Adjustments
36:49 30Finalizing Images in Photoshop®: Retouching
15:16 31Finalizing Images in Photoshop®: Saving Master Files
09:45 32Make Fine Art Prints: The Cost
15:37 33Make Fine Art Prints: Ink Jet Printers
05:23 34Make Fine Art Prints: Ink Jet Papers
10:14 35Make Fine Art Prints: Understand ICC Profiles
08:44 36Make Fine Art Prints: Sharpen Image
18:26 37Printing From Photoshop®
09:11 38Printing From Lightroom®
05:07 39Compare Monitor to Physical Prints
06:33 40Printing Black & White Image
09:10 41Extended Workflow: Back Up Images
35:19 42Extended Workflow: Storage Options
18:32 43Extended Workflow: Archiving Images
15:55 44Submitting images to Clients
28:32 45Prepping Images for Social Media
08:44 46Alternative Workflows
08:49 47Final Q&A
19:56Lesson Info
Alternative Workflows
You know, I've talked about my workflow which works for me. It probably doesn't necessarily work perfectly for you. Maybe you're using different software. You might even be using Nikon or Canon software. I doubt it for most people. But I will say this. Technically, if you want the best image quality in the final image that your camera can produce, you have to use the camera company's software. But you may not be able to manipulate the image the way you want it to look in their software, or not easily. The reason I say that is because they know their files, their RAW file type. And you will end up with an image that has the least amount of noise, probably, and the best rendering of the image file. For most of us, we've found that Nikon Capture, or whatever Canon's RAW software is, while it's good at rendering the image file, it's not very easy to use and manipulate the image like we're used to in Lightroom or some other software. I will say for my Hasselblad, their software focus is qui...
te robust. Phase One is a camera company who makes really high-end medium format cameras. Capture One is an excellent piece of software, and it's one of the ones down here. And lots of people are moving to Capture One, which has, honestly, most of the functionality that Lightroom has, if not a little extra few things that Lightroom doesn't have as well. Photo Mechanic, this is not a software you can actually download, or work up RAW files in, but it is a browser software that you can preview and render your images and import and do all kinds of stuff there. Adobe Camera Raw we've talked about. Adobe Camera Raw is exactly the same thing as Lightroom. It's just between Bridge and Photoshop. It is the RAW processing translation. It's got pretty much all the exact same sliders that are in Lightroom. We showed it at one point during the class. They're just oriented a little differently in how they're laid out. And there's a whole bunch of other ones. On 1, DXO, Affinity, I mean there's a whole bunch of new ones that I don't even know the names of and have never used before. So you can try all those out and figure out what you want. It's up to you as to which one works best for your work. In the end, hopefully you're gonna get to the same place that you would've gotten, regardless of the software, because it's your intent in where you see that image going. But hold off in questions just a second, because you know, if you're a photojournalist, let's just talk about different genres of photography real quick. If you're a photojournalist, a lot of photojournalists I know use Photo Mechanic, because they're on the clock. They shot the whatever happening, you know, down at the courthouse, and they've got 10 minutes to get back to the office, download those images, and then 20 minutes later they need to have two or three images that can go into the newspaper or whatever, up on the Reuters website, or whatever it is. And speed is ultimate thing here. So they're probably shooting JPG, or JPG plus RAW. And then they're probably using Photo Mechanic, because it's the fastest download editing software out there that I've seen. I mean, it's wicked fast. It's reading straight off the cards, the previews, so it's not even building previews hardly. And that's like my buddy Brian Bielmann, I was telling you, the surf photographer. He's shooting 3,000 images a day, standing there for 12 hours at the beach, shooting, or swimming out on the water, whatever he's doing. And he gets back and they want those images up on the website in an hour, like the best 12, or whatever, best 20. So I mean, that is crazy, trying to think of that. And I told you, he's tagging on the back of his Canon camera the images that he wants to use. And he has enough experience to know like, these are the best ones, looking at the back of the camera. Then he puts it into Photoshop. He might open them up into Adobe Camera Raw for like a minute each. And he's got presets he uses. And he just whiz, bang, boom, done. And it's not gonna be perfected to the level that we've talked about here. But it's gonna look pretty good and be perfect for the web, and then he outputs them, sends them off, and bam, they're on the web. So it just depends on speed. And so Photo Mechanic might be a great option for that. If you use a certain brand of camera, like I was saying, Phase One, then maybe Capture One's better for you with that camera system. If you're, you know, they're different films, basically. Each one of these different RAW processing softwares is going to start out with different colors, as we saw in the Lightroom profiles, that they just moved to the top of the Develop panel, where you can mouse over and see all the different way that renders your RAW profile, or your Raw image. So, you know, you might find that you prefer the colors in Capture One over Lightroom. For me, I tried out Capture One, and I didn't actually like the colors as much. So I was bucking the system, since everyone seems to love Capture One's colors. It may just be that I've been working in Lightroom so long, it's what I'm used to, and I prefer to stick with that. And in terms of the other RAW processors, you know, whether you use Adobe Camera Raw, like I think Jeff, we were talking about, for your sessions, you're shooting 60 to 100 images. And you know, you're not editing thousands of images every time you go in. You're probably gonna know within 10 minutes what the best five images are. And so, using Bridge in Adobe Camera Raw is just faster and easier. And then maybe you put those images into Lightroom to keep track of stuff later, maybe you don't. It's up to you. So a wedding photographer, this is whole other ball of wax, like a wedding photographer. There's not necessarily a speed component here. So you shoot the wedding. Your client probably wants to see those images as soon as possible, because they're all antsy after the wedding. But hopefully they went on their honeymoon, so they're not chomping at the bit too much to see those images. But after they get back from the honeymoon a week later, it'd be kind of fun for them to relive the wedding, you know, that next weekend, or whatever it is. So you might have a week to work up images. Maybe you use Lightroom, maybe you use whatever you're gonna use. You edit them down, but you might have 800 to 1,200 images to work up. And this comes down to the three things I said earlier. You can have quality, you can have quantity, or you can have it cheap, pick any two. This might have a big effect on how expensive your wedding photographer is. Because if they're gonna spend a week working up 800 images, that means they might have 10 minutes per image after the editing is done to cull it down to whatever they're gonna give you. And they may or may not work it up to a high level, depending on what the time constraint is. Or they might spend three weeks doing it, and their prices are much higher because they've gotta pay for that extra time, depends. But I mean, man, wedding photography is brutal in this aspect, if you're shooting RAW, which some wedding photographers don't. They just shoot JPGs for simplicity, which, it's up to them, you know. So that's kinda brutal on the processing front. Some wedding photographers have crews of people that come in to process their images. Or not crews, but an extra image editor, to help them process images, just because it's a giant workload. So that is actually pretty intensive on the RAW processor. But on the back end, for archiving, they may not, it's not like they're ever gonna need to go back to those images for, you know, whoever the client was. They may just output them onto hard drives and put them away in a safe, and maybe every once in a while, spin those up, just to make sure everything's there. They may hand the client a DVD, and they don't have those images on their hard drive ever again, and say look, these are your images. It depends on how they're working the system. I don't know for wedding photographers how it's exactly done all the time. But they may give the images to the client and then erase them off their hard drives and say, it's you're responsibility to back up these images so you have them. Or they may hold all the images back and give your client a few images, and then offer prints to everybody. But then they're, in a lot of wedding scenarios, prints can be the final images, instead of just JPGs for a lot of clients. And how you do that off of the prints, there's all kinds of wedding print services out there for setting up websites so all the people at the wedding can order prints and stuff. There's all kinds of different ways to do that. So those are just a few options.
Class Materials
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Bonus Materials with RSVP
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Michael is a true professional and readily explains all of the nitty gritty issues of a photographer's digital workflow, including important things like Color Management, Lightroom workflows, Printing, and more. He is eager to answer your questions and has a thorough knowledge (after all, he worked with the original engineers at Adobe and wrote a book on it) and passion that he loves to share. He can get way deep into the subject, which I found fascinating. You can tell Michael has great experience in teaching and also likes to learn from his students. He is very authentic, honest, and direct. I highly recommend this class, and look forward to another one of Michael's courses in the future!
a Creativelive Student
This is an excellent course. It reinforced what I already knew and enhanced my spotty skills with new knowledge. I really like Michael's explanation of saving the document for print and web and the importance of doing these differently. Using the histogram to show this was terrific. Each session there is some valuable gem.
Elizabeth Harrigan
This class is fantastic and is just what I was looking for! The teacher knows the subject WELL and he makes it understandable and easy to follow along. In each segment, he gets right to the point explaining just enough content to make it understandable. He doesn't waste your time. I highly recommend this class. It's the best tech class I have watched on Creative Live.
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