Lessons

Lesson Info

Adobe Lightroom Q&A with Demonstration Part 2

A handful of people jared had been talking about this and it's not something I think we really focused on photo and it says could you please talk about sharpening in the detailed tool in light room when to sharpen the images before or after how to sharpen and become part of your workflow for print for online I'll throw to you okay good so let's go in and just zoom into this shot here and let it sharpen itself here so it's just building the preview right now andi it's taking a while because photo shop is hogging all the bandwidth right now you know I'm gonna force it so if if this ever happens just go in and force it to we're just going to build a one for one preview on this and just build the one and that'll help force it it really photo shop I think is really hogging the band with right now because it's going nuts on it well let's let's goto one that maybe already has the band with here let's go teo let's go down oh here I know what to tell you because I want to tell you a story about...

one of these anyway so let's go to this one here eso when we zoom in here at least now this one's loading there we go okay so there we are we're loading but you can see the sharpness here so inside of the developed module, you have the details section the details section is for sharpening of the image and then there's print sharpening when you go to the export dialogue box or when you were in the print a portion of light room, you can change the print sharpening or the or the web sharpening, and that is right here um, right there output sharpening sharpened four screen matte paper glossy paper because each one requires its own because glass is already sharper and matt paper already is diffraction the light so it looks a little softer it doesn't look quite a sharp so on that paper needs a little bit more sharpening a glossy paper needs a lesser doesn't need as much sharpening screen has its own particular style of sharpening that's needed to make it look good. I typically stay at a low sharpening level and I so whether I'm doing that and I never knew glossy paper, sometimes we'll do metallic paper, but glossy paper to me is like no interest in it. So matt paper is where I usually am. So matt paper with a low amount of sharpening is good unless and this is an important point if you have grain that you've added inside of photo or light room or in photo shop and when you come back and you export it, do not sharpen it because the sharpening effects the grain and so then suddenly your grain especially if you're doing sharpened for screen low or medium or hot it doesn't matter if you have a lot of grain so if you like made an eight hundred or something speed grain also the grange goes on it just looks like it looks like sandpaper it looks horrible because the sharpener looks at the grain and sharpens the grain and so I will turn this off if there's any chance that there's grain being manufactured in it if I've manufactured some rough grain, I won't turn the sharpening on and instead of turning the sharpening on I will just make sure that I increase the sharpening here at the root level because this sharpening is underneath the grain. The print sharpening is everything on top of the grain and so you have a choice and that's I think where the workflow question comes and when do you sharpen? Do you sharpen for print sharpening or you sharpened at the picture level and so typically my my advices sharpen the sharpen the image itself until it looks good on your screen till it looks right and then if there's no brain involved feel free to use a low print sharpening on the way out to kind of make it a little bit sharper but then if there's grain involved then you need to three think that situation and go back and just adjust that a little bit mohr got a little bit more sharpening below the grain before you send it out and don't sharpen at the print level. I know print sharpening is easier, it feels simple er but sometimes it will do very bad things toe images so people are talking about pan o's in light room are they possible? Stitching stitching in light room is not you have to send it out. And so that's, why we have photo shop working on there's, the panel and it's a really good panel, it looks great, yeah, that turned out really nice and it's perfect and so, but you see how photoshopped has done all of this to it. So now it's a matter of do I come in because photoshopped will do a great job creating the sky's up here and I can do this? I even do this grass in your sleep so it's perfect this I can extend this whole thing out and get the entire frame, but for right now, since we don't want to waste time doing that, we're going to assume we don't want to waste time doing that. I don't think there's a lot of people that want to just watch me clone stamp sky for the next ten minutes, but I could even use if I flatten this I could even use the content of where phil and that would do a good job with sky so if you if you want to get the sky done really quickly do you use a content where phil to do that and then you could do content where phil down here a swell but you remember yesterday when we do we're doing content where phil we got rid of the tree because it kept sealing the tree and putting it over somewhere so if you if you mask out the stones that will be a good that'll go a long way for saving you from having stones floating in your sky somewhere right right ok which would look a lot like the alien mother ship that we saw yesterday in one of our pictures which by the way that you know the digital negatives that were providing on a paid side of the if you purchase the course I provided the full alien mothership experience cool in there so you can see all of the pins that made the tree being zoom you know brought up in the mother ships that one's in there I know people look at that and say that is beautiful are real great work yeah in fact I saw a lot of art like that when I was in college so my my fellow artists were very artsy I was kind of that I was the black sheep of my art college I really wass go figure yeah it was because I was too logical I think for the rest of them they're like something's wrong with you you're you want to be organized and you want to earn money and there's something wrong with you but in actuality I think there's something wrong with all of them so I kept me going like I'm the normal one you guys are the weird ones ok we'll stay away I think also ahead sorry this is this is kind of a side issue but what's the size of that file now without flattening it uh size of this is two gigabytes okay can you save that from voter shop is a two gigabyte fire sure I'm just gonna hit save right now it means I have to have two gigabytes of space and I asked his my photo shop if it's greater than two gigabytes says sorry file too large and what are you one cc yes for shops easy yes minds mind saving okay and mine is to point I think it was two point two gigabyte so it's a big file and it will take a lot of effort but once they flattened it'll it'll really calm down but and by the way you could highlight all those and turn them into the right now if I was to highlight these all of these layers and turn them into smart objects then I could re edit them in in camera raw but that would just be a nightmare to do it so I should probably just you know stick toe light room do as much as I can in there then come here now obviously we have to save these out a lot I mean it's just taking forever to save this I'm a ninety eight percent now it's just going to sit there and spend for a little while but once it's saved and I close it it will be available inside of light room and I can work on it there inside of light room so we just gotta wait for a while finish that up another question another question for sure so this was from mark w we're sort of changing years here jarod workflow question I'm still a bit unclear on the portfolio dr concept specifically what is the sub directory structure of the portfolio dr look like when you publish to the portfolio drive are you sending it j pegs raw dmg any clarification would be appreciated great that's great. I love that question let me buy illustration of let's see this document is oh, look at that, huh? This document is bigger than two gigabytes. The file may not be read read correctly by some tiff viewers that's okay it's not saying I can't save it it's just saying that some people can't see this so be aware now I'm gonna close this and I'm gonna quit a photo shop and I'm going to come backto light room on dh then I'm going to go to our grid and I'm going to go to to our job that we were shooting there and there we are and there's the panel right there on that panel can then be worked on inside of light room but I'll end up going back to photo shop finishing all of the grass and the skies and then I'll come back and tweak and play inside of light room to my heart's content and then I think I also will go find some skies and bring those in and make the sky actually really interesting because it was just a it was a typical london type of day and so that's not super expressive so I wantto beef that up um so anyway that's that okay so now let's talk about portfolio so I'm going to do this by virtue of of physically showing you something so this is my coffee mug and I'm I'm going to have a this is my working dr this is this is the drive can we actually see the whole desk here? I'm not sure I'm gonna put it right here so I know they can see this portion of the desk I think so we're going to put here and the working drive and we have a photo in the working dr now I also have a portfolio drive here I'm going to work on this photo and if this photo becomes something that okay great if this photo is something that we want teo to use forever we like it's a three star image it's fantastic this image when I'm finished with the job in the end if it was a bad photo are not a bad photo because it would be deleted but if it was a decent photo this photo would then go to the archive over here somewhere out of our view but we have a portfolio disc for the purpose of being ableto access things constantly so what happens then is while I'm in the process of archiving and sending it over here the actual file moves over to here before I do that I create a copy of that that copy khun b either a d n g so if it is a raw file and I've done nothing to it in photo shop it never needs to go to photo shop doesn't need to be a pig psd it doesn't need to be a tiff because it's raw so I make a copy as a dmg and the dmg goes to the portfolio and then this one gets moved to the archive like that if this one needs to go toe photoshopped to be edited then it will go up the photoshopped become a psd and the psd will still be in the original files but the copy of the of the final file that goes to the portfolio is a psd because that's the best possible file I have of that image the raw and the psd originals again go to the archive after that process is done and I have a copy here which means that this is not I do not go to the working drive tto find images, nor do I go to the archives to find images because a copy of everything that I have made that's really great goes to the portfolio where I can then search them. It doesn't matter what your organization is there as long as you've been key wording on a regular basis inside of your working dr as you're working on them than this photo that's in the archive has key words on it and so does this photo that's in your portfolio so whenever you go to search, you can just search your portfolio for the key word you're looking for and find the photo you need organization is not really all that important the concept of putting things in certain folders and is a very old concept putting things in certain fuller's on ly helps you in the event that there's a catastrophic failure in the system and there's a catastrophic failure in the system that means your lightning catalog dies, it goes kaput and if that's the case organization at the file level helps you to see what shots were in two thousand twelve? What shots were in two thousand thirteen, etcetera, but fortunately, if we're using d, n, g s and p s tease that have keywords in them and have adjustments in them, but that's why we don't send c r two's in any f silver to the portfolio because those don't have the key words inside of them, and they don't have the adjustments inside of them, so we use the dmg so that then if there was a catastrophic, tropp catastrophic failure of the portfolio, I could simply open up a brand new catalogue and import the entire portfolio drive, and they would all show up as though I had never had a catastrophic, catastrophic failure because it pulls in all those settings and all those keywords. That's why we do what we do for the portfolio so part of your work flow when you start, and by the way, I have on, I think it's in one of the one of the courses that we did for photoshopped week was called portfolio management, and we did a whole hour and half on portfolio alone, and so that's a really good one toe look at if you have more questions about it, but in the end, the portfolio, everything from your working dr during the time you're working on the job. Ends up keyword and put into your portfolio and that becomes the final place where you go to look for things everything else is often an archive that on lee gets access when your clients are looking for things because that's when you would go back and they would tell you hey, you shot my wedding on such and such a date or you did a corporate portrait on such and such a date can you pull those files? Yes because I just grabbed the drive from two thousand twelve plug it into my toaster, plug it into my sierra you j bod system and light it up go into the folder find the photo they want deliver it shut it down put the foot the image back into its case awesome thank you hey question for one of our regulars cayenne who asks is there? Is it possible to do time lapse inside of light room, potentially using the slideshow functionality and making the transition speeds very fast? Uh, yeah, absolutely well and I can tell you exactly what that would be if you went tio the let's let's go to say our salt picnic sideshow if I come down and I don't necessarily want to do it to this slide shows all duplicate the slideshow, so now we're doing it to a duplicate of the slide show I can go in here down to the slides themselves and I could go into the fades which we already did a zero and take the slides themselves toe one second that's quickly as you can go so it's a one second speed which is you know I mean still if we if we hit play select all and hit play let's just go play and this is what you're going to get salt picnic you think you're going now notice this is more than a second so it takes the video and leaves it whatever you clipped it out and then it clips the rest of tau one second it would be nice if if they would allow you to go toe like point one second but uh this is this is what you get is one second, right? I mean, you could if you go you take all of those and send them to re premiere you khun tell premier to do it for one frame yeah each and by the way, with premier there is an import preference so you can go to the preference and tell the preference whenever I put in a siri's of photos each photo gets x amount of time on the timeline and so as you import um it'll automatically give you that amount of time and so you could do a timeline of you no one frame per and then you really actually do have a time lapse because that's the best time lapse you can have this one frame because then it's like it's a movie you have twenty four of those per second great s oh, this one is from dibs. Is it possible to have each new catalog populate with certain collections, keywords and presets? Some sort of new catalog template? Now we did go over that and we went over that on day one. No date to corto yeah, we went over that already when we were talking about the small catalog workflow we specifically talked about the need for re pre loading, one template catalog with and what we we loaded it with several things. We loaded it with all of our published services. We loaded it with our collections that we use on a regular basis, including smart collections. We also loaded it and made sure that the preferences were set the way we wanted them to be set. And then the last thing we loaded it with was photos that we use all the time from our either our portfolio or like, if you're a landscape photographer one of your folders that's in your court for art what that's in your, uh, working catalogue or in your template should be skies you just have whenever you see amazing skies, go shoot a bunch of skies and then store it in that folder get rid of all the duds and keep only the best in that folder so that you have constant access to those skies and those guys may also be in your portfolio but they need to be always accessible in your working catalogue or in your template catalogue one of the other so yeah, cool on dh then I know there's a long answer to this question but you want a short one let's do a short one if we buy a song on itunes can we use that song on a slide show? The answer is yes or no okay, if you buy it on itunes and you want to use us in a slide show for your own personal use that's going to be in your home and it's not ever going to go outside of your personal use? Yes that's fine, no one's going to get you on that although technically you don't have the synchronization rights but there's a fair use clause in the copyright law that says that if it's for personal use and you're not actually making any money off of it whatsoever, you're not trying to get a new client off of it. You know, posting on your website if you posted on your website you just violated a lot of laws because now you made it public and you can be fined ten thousand dollars per occurrence and it could be argued in court, probably that each occurrences, every person that watched it. So that could be a really big fine, eh? So it's not a good idea to do it in a business situation. S o that's, when triple scoop comes in that's, that's when you actually go and purchase a license, and with triple scoop it's a ninety nine year license. So it's not it's, not complicated. You buy, you buy access to it for sixty dollars, and you have the ability to use that song. I'm using it here on they paid webinar where people are paying to see it's a commercial use, and we're using it because we have permission from triple scoop and from the artist to do that. No, and correct me if I'm wrong. But I believe with triple scoop too. You can use that for all your clients. If you want to use that in every slide show you d'oh doors open that's, right? And I I used the same song over and over again in different bio you saw a they oh, yeah, I have like, but if you're just going the song, we're just getting started in the industry, you know you can find you come here, a couple there couple, and then and as you need one, buy a new one, and then you will have, you know, over the years, you'll have, like ten or fifteen songs that you use and you'll buy a new one each year, something like that, and then you have access to all these that fit. So I have kids songs, and I have love songs, and then I have really kind of sexy songs that are cool for, like, you know, portrait's orjust for awesome, like landscapes and stuff like that, I have these epic ones that air orchestrations and stuff, so yeah, uh, it's it's okay to do it personally, you know, I I use fun songs with my family stuff all the time, but I don't show it to you. I am not going to show my clients something like that. I'm not trying to get a job off of those things. That's just for my wife have fun looking at her kid's. Perfect that, but I still use triple scoop music for personal stuff because it's actually so it's. Really good it's like straights. It's, great stuff. My my two favorite artists on their mindy gledhill on kevin bernick there they're awesome but there's plenty of amazing, you know, there's, there's, there's. So now it is our great. And speaking of the subject matter, I know there's probably a hack here, but nini would like to know when you add music to a slide show, there is only room for one song. Do you know if it's possible to add more than one song to let light room slide show? Well, if you're on an emoto, you can add as many songs you want, just keep loading it. And by the way, if you're on an emoto, you don't have to pay triple scoop necessarily for the song because you're paying an emoto and an emoto is licensing him from triple scoop. And so, oh, hatamoto actually has a small set of the collection that triple scoop has, and so you can choose songs directly from there. Eso you what will happen is we'll go there and you'll use those and you'll be like, I'm addicted now, and so then you'll start buying your own and uploading, but that being said, there is a hack there's light room can on lee do one mp three per slideshow, but there are plenty of free audio editing software is plus if you happen to be a creative cloud member, you have access to adobes, audio editing software, so then all you do is just download that audio editing software and you can clip the two together load into mp three's, move them together, put him in the you know fatum at the end and then save that is an mp three and now you have two songs back to back and then just name that this song plus that song so you have an mp three that's ten minutes instead of five minutes or six minutes out of three minutes and now that you have to cite back to back and you can run it, just make sure that at the end, when you credit the musician, you credit both musicians one after the other. Okay, two last questions one I would like to hear jared's if you do nothing else with workflow three things the top three things if you don't do anything else, what were those one of those three things going to bay? First find a simple and easy backup solution that you will always do first and foremost everything needs to be backed up, but if it takes you more than five minutes to back something up it's going to take too long now I'm not not talking about copying, but if it takes you more than five minutes to get to the process of backing it up it's too long and you won't do it and then you'll be in trouble someday so the first thing back up the second thing is start a working catalogue and start a portfolio catalog institute, the catalogue system that I've been telling you about unless you have a very specific exception that we've gone through over the past three days start a catalogue system that's organized that has all of your things available to you because that's a huge workflow change on dh then I would say the last the last but certainly not the least thing is is to recognize that you don't get paid by the minute or the hour that you're working in photo shop and light room you get paid by the job and so it's a matter of cutting down the time that you spend there so find that point of diminishing returns and stop working at that point so on and really in my mind the best way to express that is do everything for your client that you can in light room and then make them pay you additional if you want to go to photo shop that's how you structure your prices and for me, it's just a matter of if you want to buy a print, I will retouch it for you. So when you buy a print, you get a retouched print, but before you buy, you see the images as good as I can make them in light room and that's a good dividing line very easily defendable, very rational great okay and last question can you give us some final thoughts were we're heading out and give us some final thoughts about light room but I'm going to open the door for you you know I'm actually going I'm gonna tell you a story okay okay so it was funny because engine a asked me a story about because she had heard a story before about how I became so crazy about crazy about workflow and about efficiency and it's based in two different things number one is just who I am I'm half artist half lawyer basically my dad's a lawyer my mom's an artist and so I got kind of the artsy part of her and I got a lot of the rational side of my dad and I'm literally kind of a fifty fifty split between them and so I I'm I'm unique rational person even though I have very art artistic tendencies and so it makes me a little bit it makes it easier for me too you think about workflow and patterns and and process and stuff like that but aside from just that natural cook proclivity to do those kind of things um when I was first starting working I worked for a photographer named dan vermillion and dan vermillion is uh at the time was uh still is a great photographer in phoenix arizona is commercial photographer and he has a really great studio in downtown phoenix and I met him and he allowed me to come and kind of tag along and this is while I was in college and then as soon as I got done at college I was offered a job at his studio as the digital assistant because he was just starting into digital and dan is amazingly kind and wonderful person like you'll never meet a more kind and amazing person than dan and so he's great he was a great boss because he was very supportive he didn't yell at you didn't like get angry out of you or whatever, but he was very, very organized and he was very specific about what he wanted done and his cables had to be rolled in just this way and when you took if you took your cables outside teo do a shoot outside and you had, you know, cables running through the dirt or whatever when you came back to the studio, there was an hour and a half of taking the cables and cleaning them with a wet rag and clean your power cables so that they were clean and then you would hang them back up. And if you ever found a tangled mess, dan was very disappointed like you could just see it in his face and it was almost like, how could you do this to me? You know, it was like really haven't I taught you better than this you know you're a better person than to allow a cable to be tangle that's the kind of you know and it wasn't like he was yelling at you but you just you just felt horrible that you had allowed a cable to get tangled and so that kind of organization talk to me a lot about the way one should operate their business and the way they should operate there there their world now if you were to ask my wife is jared clean person and does he have messes she would she would laugh because my garage is in complete disarray by physical space was never all that great but I was tasked with digital so when I came in my very first photo job I had other photo jobs but this is my first major job when I came in I was working for a very, very organized film photographer who was just learning digital and so my job as a person who understood digital was to come in and help him come into the digital world. And so I had to look at his surrounding and see how clean and organized it was and I realized that the only way he would understand the computer and inside of that computer was if it was equally is organized and so I learned from the ground up because it was early it was two thousand so we were just digital was kind of new and so as we started into this I got to start from scratch and build a system that became his system and I knew that it had to be organized like he was organized outside for him to understand what was inside and so that's really kind of where my my first understanding of organizing something very very clean I basically replicated the most organized and clean and a freakishly perfect studio I took that and I replicated it inside computer and that's why it became so organized now another story and this is the story that on ginny was talking about and that is um at one point I had a lot of digital but then I had some film because I travelled to sweden I'm not my heritage is swedish I did my master's thesis in sweden with photographers from the t o photographer group the person I did that with was hans ha marsh old who's now dead but I spent weeks over there shooting him and interviewing him and I traveled around sweden and I took all these great photos there on film because that was a long time ago and so I had all this film and I was and my master's thesis is online and so you khun goto s use website and find master thesis is and mine is online and there's a lot of photos online and so at one point I was contacted by a very large corporation that has stores that sell prince in frames that you khun by and they wanted to license my photographs from sweet and this is very early on before I even had a career going, you know, I was still doing a little teaching and finishing up my grad school and all that kind of stuff, so I wasn't really I didn't have my career in full bloom and I was like, awesome, yes, I could do that and I was like, okay, and they said, we want you to put together a web gallery because I would have to scan it in and show it to him because they're in sweden this company is a swedish and they wanted to have more swedish photography represented and so I went in and I started scanning images and then I got him in and I started working on him and finessing him and block and after, like, I think it took me about a week and a half to get to the point where I felt yeah e I felt really good about the images I was going to provide two this company and they were going toe by him and I was going to become rich and I was so happy about it cause I was going to licensing and of course that was before I really understood licensing, and so I probably would have made enough to like you pay a couple car payments or something but I was very excited about it and I wanted to give him these images and so I got the images over to him and I sent them an e mail and I said okay here's the link you know it's all ready for you to look out and they said oh we've already gone to press but what that taught me wass my need for absolute perfection before I showed them the images lost me the job lost me the income because I wanted them to be perfect before they saw all they want to see what what were the options and if I had just scanned them in and made sure they were cropped and straightened and sent them off they would have probably purchased three four five ten of them and then I could have retouched him got him ready and printed them are sent them off to him and I would have had the job but because I was so worried about perfection and I was so worried about doing everything to them so that they were perfect when they came across I lost the job and I never did that again. So now if you ask me for something and you need something I can go and get it now immediately and send it to you and it doesn't take very long because now my portfolio is completely digital including those images from sweden that have been scanned, those have keywords on them, and they're in my portfolio, ready to be viewed if at a moments notice, someone wants to use them, and so organization and key wording and structure and back up all of those things matter because it actually does matter whether or not you can find images and how efficient you are. It does matter. It matters to your bottom line. It matters to your opportunities. It matters to your life, so organization really does matter. Workflow matters. It's, huge that's, what we did three days on it, that's, right? So and quite frankly, we've done about fifteen days. So there's, so many little nuances, too, and so that's. Why this course, I think, was so important because we talked about workflow in general. But now we've gotten a little bit more specific, because there are different types of work flow issues and that's, why we cover him here.