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Post Production: Engagement Shoot

let's get on to a little bit of post production I got about twenty minutes here and what I want to do is just kind of walk you through our editing process and show you it's really not that complicated the last thing you can do is be married two photo shop or light room I think that's absolutely horrible for you to do with your time so what you ultimately want to do is I outsource right so complete transparency outsource we send ninety eight percent of our work to evolve at its dot com check them out I've been using them for four years and the reason I started outsourcing is because as my business was growing and ladies we talked about this last night right sarah you're like I work a full time job with my extra time is this what I should be doing with it is editing and the answer is no right if I'm your business coach I'm going to tell you this is dumb this is not where you should be spending your time it's it's like the ceo of fedex going down into you know shipping and putting labels ...

on boxes you would never he would never do that your time is best spent all of you by the way two things shooting right photographing that's where you're making money that's your expertise and business marketing so if you've got an extra two hours and your editing pictures in light room I think that's madness instead without two hours I want to see you focus on your marketing strategy focus on your business plan what's your strategy to get five more weddings this year if you're just stuck in editing till two o'clock in the morning you can't do it well rewind back to two thousand eight two thousand nine okay I think about two thousand eight I had ten wedding's in a month all our clients see their images in two weeks two weeks well that's great if you've got five weddings a year what happens when you have one hundred fifty seniors what happens when you uh when you have you know all these additional weddings how do you scale your business and I think I don't know if you remember we talked about this on day one on day one scalability plan is to find partners people you can trust and that is absolutely key so we've all that it is one of those companies for me so what we did we photographed last night okay I handed my memory card the cool thing is is my developers are in the united states right my my uh editors or in the united states we're not shipping overseas right we can have tp to him but I was fortunate because they're in portland they're here so I got to just hand him a memory card and said go figure this out s o that's great toe have that team that scale ability so here the pictures from the alley ah that we took and what we're doing here is I'm gonna filter these so I took four hundred twenty two images they narrow these down to about one hundred ninety four and so they tried to pick the best of the best they color corrected them for me and ah what we have here on the left hand side this for a second okay is we have a siri's of edit one is called a signature at it let's see these or what we call premium edits are gonna bring these up thes air from the alley and so what they did for me you look a little darker on the screen than they are here but what they did for me is they put some texture there uh and just really kind of gave it that gritty look which is what we're known for okay then there's those middle shots remember let yes I was talking about tightening a wide so what we're thinking about here whether I'm editing or they're editing what I'm thinking about is the sales process for taylor if I don't give taylor the images she needs to sell larger prince she is going to be up my butt right because she's going to like you're hurting our sales process and so I've got to be listening to the feedback coming from the sales room as photographers we're all guilty of this right we just want to we want to get involved in the art of it and hey there's nothing wrong with that I say eighty percent of your chute should be consistent repetitive you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you go out there as a photographer that's where I think we missed the boat yes I get it we're artists because what if you go to mcdonald's and I'm not equating our art to mcdonald's by any stretch of the imagination but if you go to mcdonald's in florida you have the same experiences if you go to mcdonald's in seattle right and that's how it should be so my business philosophy is is if you come into my studio whether you're photographing with me photographing with taylor photographing with one of my other shooters is you should have the same consistent experience across the board that is powerful now what I encourage all my shooters to do is I say hey eighty percent of what you do should be identical to what I'm teaching you twenty percent of what you do go crazy right try something totally random some and if the client doesn't like it no harm no foul because you have all these other images but if you try and reinvent the wheel every time there's a chance you're gonna let them down let's quickly look through some of these from the alley ah this is one of my favorites from that board inside so very very cool on that light board where we're using video light right that also I posted this last night we had some great online discussion last night that was from that you know metal doorway I'm just quickly looking at some of these but the one I want to show you the most so I think this is pretty cool is let's go here and I'll show you do you remember that alleyway that was not a fun place uh to be so here is the shot that we got on camera right in hey man it was tough for in an alleyway it's cold I gotta deal with with the environment where we got cars and just producing a live show man you want to talk about education on my part just the limitation of trying to run around with my camera tethered you gotta film crew so this is not ideal I would typically as most of you know just from looking at my portfolio these people would be in the middle of the street we would be taking this picture so you know something about you know people getting hurt and legal actions stopped us from being in the middle street but that doesn't mean we can't get great pictures so I shipped this to my team here is the before no that is not the after here's the before here's the after and I know those of you at home if you're seeing what I'm seeing on this tv you're seeing a lot of darkness and the bottom it doesn't look like that on my monitor so I apologize for that in advance but check out the before and after man if we go here again and I'm gonna tell you what we did with this image so if you look at the left side of the building you can see there's a camera operator of it there's a truck and there's a not unattractive building what we did on our end it is we completely remove that building brought in a new building on the left brought in a lamp post which is the source of the light if you can see that up in the top left okay I brought in that light and then ah we change the color of her shirt I hate teal teal is my hated hated with a passion and I think there's a conspiracy here a creative live where they're encouraged people toe wear teal colors so my first time on celeste did it and now this time so what I did was I said screw teal we're going pink baby so we changed the color of her shirt that's powerful stuff could I have done this on my own sure could I have spent three to four to five hours jacking around with this and photoshopped uh not where I want to spend my time I'd rather pay somebody a few extra box to get the drama notice we brought in a new sky on the left right we brought in some telephone poles we gave it a little bit more of an hd are headed and what I'll do later because I don't know what people at home are seeing on this image on the left I'll post this to my facebook sites you can truly see the before now it's not just so you know when they do put pull up that screen just as is you can see the detail oh they see the details okay I just want to make when you pull out just so you know kim and I are both waiting till tomorrow you're both what I made two of you are alright so and you know I will change your colors on on your pictures and susan all right so there's some of them they're some of the before and after and so what I want you to do is I want you to understand my work flow with some of these images so can we bring up my slide again so what I want to do is kind of walk you guys through my work flow my mindset not necessarily how to edit the pictures were getting their baby all right so while they're doing that here's what I don't want you doing with your imagery what I don't want you doing is going in and editing three hundred four hundred five hundred pictures I think that's a complete waste of time instead what I want you doing is picking artwork for your client does that make sense I want to pick five images that I'm going to put artistic at its own I want to pick five images that I'm going to be able to show my client okay as artwork for their home pieces like you see behind me maybe I'm going through some texture on there maybe I'm gonna throw some hdr on there that's where I want to spend my time I'm going to let evolve at its handle the rest guys I got news for you white balancing is monkey work that is not art art that's not where you're spending your time let someone else do the heavy lifting and the thing about outsourcing okay is understanding that no one is going to be one hundred percent they're not you but can they be ninety percent can maybe ninety five percent and yes they can so I want them to call my images down remove all the junk man I take plenty of junk pictures remove him white balance right column get them back to me maybe they do a couple of artistic at its like that edit I just showed you they did that I don't have time for that okay but what I want to do is now maybe pick four images five images from the whole shoot and those are the ones I want to put artistic at it's on okay um so there is a uh I could flip through here if you want guys make life easy for you and so what I'm looking to do let's see here sorry live tv once again this slide right there command and bingo this is my work flow so I will typically shoot from an engagement session three to six hundred images I will then return home download to a hard drive this is my work flow and I want to say this has been my work full since probably two thousand seven two thousand eight and now it's been refined little things have been changed along the way but for the most part this is my work flow I'm going back up to a secondary hard drive I'm gonna outsource to evolve at it so I just shipped them a little portable drive you khun ftp ifyou've got high enough connection but we send them all the raw files they jack with all that stuff they're going to call the images remember this is my engagement workflow not my wedding they're going to call the images to about one hundred fifty to fifty fully edit all hundred fifty to fifty they're they're going to send me the x mps back so in light room right you get those little instruction files that tell the images what toe look like then I'm going to select five images and personally edit those and take them into photo shop and then going to render them into jpeg files this is what taylor is going to use for her preview in ordering session it used to take me two to four hours to process an engagement session now I spend less than thirty minutes what is that extra time worth to you right how much do you spend cause I see you darlene making a face there how much do you spend in post production forget weddings we'll talk about that engagement how much how much time you're spending to three four hours more that's insanity imagine if you took about two and a half hours and put it towards your business a typical engagement job to process cost me less than fifty to sixty bucks to get them the process it is an extra two to three hours of your time worth fifty to sixty bucks yes is getting the images in front of clients in two weeks or less worth that time yes as we're talking business now man let go with the art side of this instead pick your favorite five images at it those so let's go back and we'll go back to light room here and now I want to show you here the kind of edits they're sending back to me right so some are going to be black and white right there going through these images see peotone black and white notice the variety they're picking they have adapted to my business that's what I love about working with evolves they understand my business they know they're not going to give me every picture like this but notice there's some that are posed some that are candid somewhere it right there looking away somewhere they're looking right at the camera they're giving me diversity because I'm shooting with diversity they're giving me some that are super tight some that are wide because they know I have to be able to sell large portrait guess what they're not going to buy a twenty by thirty of this not gonna happen you know what they're gonna buy this in eight by ten because that's what it should be I'm shooting and I'm telling them what it should be by the way I shoot shoot to sell that's how we have to be thinking so even in that alley right normally I would shoot with the seventy two hundred but even in that alley I stepped back okay and took I think on this one I put a thirty five millimeter lens there yep this is my thirty five millimeter lands one point for this is the shot I got because I knew I needed to be a little bigger okay and just go through this they're giving me is much diversity not only in my poses right but in the expression and everything else if I don't do this I'm not going to get the sale and so every image audi of camera doesn't have to be magical but you've gotta offer diversity thes air those premium edits so now here's these air three dollars edits by the way so to get your images to look like this this is a three dollars at it you tell me is this worth three dollars I know I got I spend more on lunch then I do getting them to spend to do this kind of stuff and they'll adapt to your style right your style is going to be different than mine you might like a warmer edit I like a cooler at it you might like texture I might not like texture right whatever the case may be they're going to figure out your style of editing and that is absolutely key so this has got texture on it right and a totally different look that I want but let's say you want to do it yourself I'm cool with that what I want you to do instead and I need to be like a power editor right now is I want you to pick your editing style so let's say this is an image right we want to go with so this was shot fifty millimeter one point four in there so let's edit this for a second so what I'm gonna do is I start with my work flow in light room and so what I'm gonna do here on the left hand side you're seeing my presets these have been created out of necessity because I'm so tired of working in light room and going left right left right up down up down and I'm losing minutes man seconds add up two minutes minutes add up to hours and the next you know I'm sitting in light room forever I wanted something that was easy to do so if we reset this image and go back to zero that's how it came out of camera well now I come into my light room presets here on the left let's hide this give me a little more real estate and what you're seeing here on the left or what I call a corrective edits so the number one and they're numbered how much easier can I make it number one get started boom that's going to hit me with a contrast bump and auto white balance well you know what the contrast bump is perfect I don't like with the auto white balance did for me it's too warm based on what I'm seeing here so let's go with daylight okay that cooled it off a little bit let's try flash okay so now I like the way this is starting to look from a white balance perspective step number three exposure so I can under expose the image if I wanted to or overexpose it we've all had those images where we have to corrective lee bring it down and exposure it's too hot right well personally I like the way this looks from exposure perspective we had great even lighting contrast highlight recovery so light room four is great because you can recover a stop or mohr of light lost so we've got the highlight recovery built in here for you phil like I need to fill some of those shadows I'm gonna get a little phil bump to bring up on his shirt noise reduction you're shooting at thirty two hundred so you're gonna have noise in your image imagery we've got noise reduction built into it so now I want to put a little vignette around it just one click vignette now we get into some of them or what I call creative edits so you'll see here on the bottom left all these creative at it so we can do hd are black and white warm clients love this look weaken d'oh right old color this is also a cool cool tone image right clients love this look but for this image I want to go with an h d r de saturated look I like the way that's looking that's a popular look for us we're pulling out some color we're highlighting all that intense um contrast and the texture behind them I love the texture behind them so this might be the way I would show decline an image a cz maybe a soft creative edit this took me ten seconds right I'm talking you through it it's taking me a little bit longer but within three to five klicks I never had to go to the right side just straight down the left and I did that did you notice though and I challenge all of you if you're using presets from anybody in light room four what's the one thing that happens when you corrective lee edit your image you add exposure you're right you add all these things but now you apply a corrective ah creative at it what happens to your exposure resets to zero because the creative edit the preset they created wipes everything you've done off the map so it goes back to zero notice that even though we were adding all our creative at its here the exposure nothing changed because it doesn't affect exposure contrast levels so that's very important in whatever presets you're going to use well now what I want to do is I'm going to say this is a j paige because I think this is wired teo cs six and I'm currently just working in cs five so I apologize right now let's see here holy cow I want to render this out as a j peg let's go where same folder is the original test you got a j paige full quality and I'm just gonna render this out resize it well sharpening well sean finder and the reason I'm doing this normally light rooms plugged in with ah photo shop and it is on this machine but it's plugged into cs six and I'm not using c s six right now so I'm going to take this image and I want to open this up in photo shot and what I'm looking to do here I want to put texture on this image and I just want to show you how easy it is to apply textures so these air my textures so these are urban textures I am a huge fan of him and so we're going to use this is going to open up it's going to give us twenty five textures to pick from on this pallet super easy so I just move this around I can pick whichever one I want there's twenty five of them and what I this is one of my favorites what I'm gonna do here let's zoom out I'm just going to move this here and I want to know is how quickly and efficiently I'm moving through this stuff that becomes very important I don't want to waste time editing pictures for hours on end and so now I've applied this tax year really quickly really easily and now the system automatically sets up so I can just brush this tax you're off their face off their pants right we don't want texture all over them that becomes extremely important during the post production process how long did this take me to get from zero to sixty guys there's courses there's books on how to be photoshopped gurus and all that other stuff I don't want to be a photo shop guru I want to be a business guru I want to know enough about photo shop to be dangerous wanted know enough about light room to be dangerous and I'm showing you how quickly and efficiently without none of you should be overwhelmed by what you just saw right I almost I almost make it look too easy and that's what I want you to feel I don't want you to feel like this is some advanced crazy thing that you have to learn to do I mean does anybody feel like they can't do what I just did here super easy right and so that's what I want you to pay attention to pick your top five images and just do something like this and what I love about it is now that we've got this kind of mass here and we've got you can see here in the bottom right I could just hit command j and just keep grinning this up I'm right we can make it look ridiculous of course that would never be the goal but quickly we can start adding this stuff up adding layers and layers of textures to get the image to look the way we wanted to look so that has to be your ultimate goal and getting that image from point a to point b questions from you just for me because I am that person where you know I am spending a lot of time on it but I like the idea of outsourcing so that I can have a little bit more fun teo teach myself some of this stuff because you know I don't do the text a ring and and that sort of thing but but I have no time to teach myself something about that so I love what you're saying arlene I mean because I agree with you and that's how I feel you know I buy these books from the bookstore about like you know learn photoshopped in six easy steps and I know photo shop and I want to read these books but I don't have time to read these books right because if I spend an hour reading that's an hour I'm not editing that's an hour I'm not doing business and so we talked about this what is your scalability plan your focus if you want to grow your business is what shooting marketing business if I can get you to do those things and really released some of this stuff your business is gonna grow tenfold it's gonna happen I promise you you still need to know how to do this stuff but you don't need to be an expert right I don't want to know how to replace buildings I don't want to know how to turn on like like I don't either there's there's no reason to and it's never ending right on but do you agree that in the I'm not showing you out it just edit for the sake of editing do you agree that I'm showing you an image that looks very representative of my brand does everybody understand that the way you edit becomes part of your brand and so I still want it to look like my brand I just want to be able to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible so between the light room I would say ninety eight percent of what we do is inside a light room just using the presets I showed you that workflow in light room money for my business then I will take three to five images and do some corrective at it and so when we come back I think on thursday we're going do corrective at it's on um the bridegroom I'm going take it a step further I will show you how to do some beauty and I'm gonna show you how to make their arms skinny and it's not with the right the warp tool or any of that other stuff that's kind of the wrong way we're not using the skinny tool I'm to show you the right technique that commercial editors air using to thin out arms thin out butts make faces that are just like you would see in a magazine and so we have to know how to do that and how it all works but we're going to cover that in a little bit more advanced editing I just want to show you quickly and easily how we do it within the engagement session questions online we do have questions online we're going to take a break can we just go ahead and ask the main question that everyone's asking is how do you get the outsourcing company to know your brand how long does that process take and then also generally how much are you going how much is it going to cost you to outsource your photos for a wedding for entire wedding or say a portrait session yeah so for the short answer is it depends right on how much it's gonna cost depends on what you have them do if you're just having them call and white balance very inexpensive a typical engagement session might cost you anywhere from thirty five dollars to sixty five seventy dollars it just depends right if you shoot one hundred images from an engagement session it's not gonna be that expensive if you shoot a thousand images from an engagement session it's gonna be a little bit more so the first step is just contact them right they're very responsive evolve at its dot com is the company on you're going to be working with probably one of my developers one of my editors and they are awesome the second question is how long does it take to get to know your style it's really easy send a test job and in that test job they're going to start keeping track of your note where you're going you know I really don't like that this is too warm I want a cooler and they're going to make notes so that the next time your production job comes in they're ready to rock and roll but I would say I've been working with them for four years I still find tune the process every time a job goes by I just look at this is an extension of my staff could I hire somebody of course but if that person quits if that person gets ten weddings one editor is never going to handle ten weddings so now with the staff I can scale that I throw them ten weddings I don't care how they do it figure it out that's your job right I just care like I get these jobs back in two weeks