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Album Workflow and Publishing Services

We are going to be talking about the process of making albums album workflow is probably one of the most difficult and unknown enjoyable processes that I can think of video being one of those processes that's enjoyable but very difficult and time consuming albums one of those things that it's it's not quite as fun for mia's video is but it's just it's complicated or kind of complicated and so I never really liked it. I just I never really enjoyed the process of albums because they're just so difficult to make because there's third party people that are involved in it you've got to make it to the right specifications got to decide what album you're going toe you know what album company you're gonna work with and they have to figure out their specifications and then you have to design and I was always designing money and in design, which is an amazing program but it's a kind of complicated program to and so you have to learn how to use that and then you have to set up all of your paramet...

ers and then put the images in it and square muay and and and and it's slick is in design is it still takes a while to design your albums and it's just it's just not an intuitive process and so for the longest time I just kind of pushed away from albums and I thought, you know I'll provide albums when the client wants him, but I don't really enjoy the process all that much and I just provide it because it's something that the client would like tohave and I saw it as a something that I provided the client because the client needs it and wouldn't be happy with me if I didn't provide it otherwise I don't see a point in giving out because I'm I'm really interested in one image is time mostly on dh slide shows help to show the story and things like that but that being said, when you when you introduce the opportunity for quick work flow it changes the whole game because then if you could do something quickly and with little little to no effort then it becomes fun because now you're no longer bogged down in process now it's all about expression it's all about enjoying it's all about seeing the images in a different way and deciding how the client's going to be looking at him that's all fun that's a really fun process the part is not fun is all the all the workflow issues that are involved and so I literally in in january was at mystic which is ah fantastic little show for photographers in the north east and I was at mystic and I was I walked in and there was a new company there and that new company quoted was called smart albums and I walked up to the smart albums booth, and I said, show me what you're doing, just show me what you've got to show me. And so he started working on his analgesia and my mouth dropped open, and I'm not impressed with workflow very often, and I am mostly unimpressed with most software that's made because there's always glitches and run around and they didn't quite think through the workflow and as I watched this programme work, my mouth literally dropped open and I soon as I finished talking to the person I turned around and went up to the hotel room and downloaded the software that's how quickly I was sold on it, I went back up, did it, and then I came back down and did my lecture and I was using it in the lecture. That's that's how impressed I was with us and that's how easy it was to learn, and so I am going to show you that software in process, but not just the software, because the software and it's origination in january wasn't actually perfect. It was great, but it had a couple things that could have been better that would allow it to work with light room and the company literally after talking to me and we kind of hashed out some ways to make it interact with light room better. They now in its current iteration has all of those changes implemented how many times you ever seen a software company take a night idea in january and by march has it completely perfectly implemented no one so these are smart guys very smart guys and very nimble is a company which I really like and they take the suggestions and they run with him on dh obviously don't just pepper him with you know I want this I want this they're very very particular about making sure that it's a workflow positive they only put things in that make it work faster and better and more intuitively and so when I suggested these things they saw the value in it and they went toe work and now this new adoration that's available currently right now if you purchase it or you can download it for free for thirty days you will see all of those changes so I'm going to show you how to run through an album workflow that is seamless and easy so the first thing we have to do is we have to find the images that were gonna put into the album and so once we find those images and I just put them into another collection called album and so this is the images that I think are worthy of being in the album and I'm just scanning through him I have one hundred thirty which is a pretty big album but we'll just we'll just roll with it it's a fairly large album I'm gonna build it with one hundred thirty images, innit? Um the the next step in this game is to take these and get them to the smart album process on dh we're going to do that with a published service now we're actually going to do this really fast best I've already done the export so that we didn't have to wait around for this because I don't want you guys to just sit and wait for me to export files to j peg but when I start working on the albums I am going to do it as fast as I possibly can so we've decided that a good time frame for that would be five minutes and thirty seconds so if you've ever designed an album in five minutes and thirty seconds, then kudos to you I am going to try and design this in five minutes and thirty seconds flat and so we'll see how good an album I can create in five minutes and thirty seconds all right, does that sound good? Have you ever designed one in five minutes and thirty seconds just just making sure you know, I think they were like for me it's more like five hours, five hours and thirty seconds yeah, okay five hours and thirty days yes okay, so are you ready you know I'm not ready yet. I have to show you how to get it there for you let me know, so don't tie me yet, okay? You let me know we're gonna tie me from when I start designing it toe when I'm done designing. Okay, so it wasn't supposed to start the timing at the beginning of the segment cause we're already like ten minutes no, no. Okay, I could be designing, not explaining. Okay, so here's, the images that I've chosen and I have simply gone through and chosen and put them into an album collection, which is a virtual collection of images, and now I highlight all of those and I'm going to go down to a published service remember yesterday use yesterday that we did publish services that showed you how to make public services. So when we taught you how to make publish services, we showed you how to make publish services on facebook or on smugmug, but also we showed you how to make one on your hard drive. And so I this is the published service, and I'm just going to quickly just basically go over there. And if if you want to know maura about this, just rewind and go to yesterday and you'll see how to make a public service but it's in this plus, but and you hit plus you go to the published manager and that's where you create your published service and we made a hard drive published service so the hard drive published service is going to take the j pegs or tips or how you set it up, and in our case we made j pegs and those j pegs are going to be created from light room and sent to a location on your hard drive. The unique thing about a public service is opposed to a collection is that it's it's a it's when you click on it it's a virtual collection of images but they have been published to ah hard drive location in j peg form or in tiff form these air still raw these air still d angie's here as virtual inside this virtual collection but there's a duplicate of them is j peg somewhere on your hard drive wherever you've told it to go and they're connected to each other and if I change something on the original digital negatives, it will change it on the j peg and if I delete something from here, it will remove it from that folder. If I add something here, it will add it to that folder so it's constantly in contact with that folder to make sure that that publishes the same on both sides on dh that becomes a connection point toe almost anything that you want to connect to in our case, we're connecting to another piece of software, but in facebook, if you have a facebook publishers it's connecting to facebook's software up online and so that's what a public service does it's his virtual collection a collection that then connects to something and keeps it synchronized. So we're going to go in here, and if I if I hide this right now and I go to my pictures folder and I go into my album production folders so right above the lightman folding the job's folder have an album production folder, and in it you can see a folder called altman wedding book click on that there's all the j pegs. So those are the j pegs that were created by this published service and you notice that I have right here altman wedding book I made that now I'm gonna show you how I made that little folder. I already have the album production published service created if I simply right click the album production at the very top by right, click it and create another published folder. Then I get the option of two tale tell what that's called and I'm just gonna call it a test and I'm not going to include any selected photos and hit create when I do that if I go back to that folder there's nothing because I've only created virtually but then, if I take an image, say this image and drag it in there, I'm not moving it. I've just copied of reference to it so that that image of referenced in the altman wedding book and also in the test, but notice in the test, it says new photos to publish and the other one it says published photos they have been published already, so I'm going to go to the test and right click it and just say, published now, when I do that it's creating that j peg based on the descriptions and the and the preferences I put when I created the published service up here. So every album folder I put down here is going to have that same preferences but it's putting it in a different folder. Now, if I hide this see now there's the wedding altman book here, but there's also test, and it has a j peg in it, and that j peg is a color j peg. If I then go into the either the test or even if I go into this published service and I turned this to black and white, see how it just changed. It says these air the published photos, this one has been modified and needs to be re published if I go over here to mike test this one says it's, modified and needs to really republished if I added photos to it it would say hey there's a new one and it needs to be published not republished but published and if I take one away it'll say here's some that have been deleted that need to be removed so if I'm in this wedding book and I scanned through and I decide I want to remove a shot and I'm just kind of I'm gonna scan through and find some shot let's get rid of this shock so I want to get rid of this shot and I hit delete it's not the leading the photo it's just the leading the reference from this collection if I delete it now if I go up to the top it says here is the modified one here's one that needs to be removed and when I hit published it's going to go to the j pegs and remove that that one that was published and it's going to change the one that was black that was color and change it to black and white and now they've all been published. This one has not been published yet right click it publish it and now that one will be altered a cz well like that and now if I go to that here we go you see the test it's a black and white j peg and if I go over here and this one has one less photo and removed one but the photo of this is black and white as well and it doesn't matter where you work on the photos, you don't have to work on him here I could be working on the photos you know, up here in the actual job so if I go to the wedding here and I scanned down and I turned, you know, one of these other images so if I go back here and say, no, I really want that color turn it back to color when I go down to that published service it says that's modified and needs to be re published, so it's always aware of what you've been doing to the photos and it's always going to keep track of that so that you can keep whatever it is you're doing up update if for some reason and I know I will get this question out there so I'm going to preempt the question and that is if I have a let's say I want to create an album or I want to create a published service that whatever I do to the images is independent of the original images so that I can adjust the wedding album to be different than maybe the what would be on their main site if I want them to be independent and operate independently of each other then when I create this published service so if I right click and create a public service when I do that I'm going to create the publisher and I'm gonna put instead of the original files in it I'm going to create virtual copies and put those in it because virtual copies by the same file but they can pre treated differently without affecting the original file and so if all of these were virtual copies I could do whatever I wanted to him and it wouldn't affect the original copies inside of the original folder so virtual copies air useful for that purpose all right, so we have our images we've published our images to the folder and that's the connection point it's very important to have that connection point active you could just simply export them to a folder so you could go up and choose all your images that you're going to use for this wedding highlight all of them go to the export dialog box and export a folder but if you do it that way you no longer have an active connection point it's just it's a physical export these files I'm gonna work on him but then when I want to change him I've got to go and export the files again and overwrite the files and it's just it's not a direct link connection point so there's more thinking involved there's more process involved so I like to set up published service specifically for album production, and that goes out to the album production and work. And by the way, this method or my method of sending stuff out this way is not new. When I found out about smart albums, I used the same type of mentality when I was doing all my album design inside of in design, because in design has the ability to once you've designed something and you've change stuff and republished stuff you can then tell in designed to synchronize and go look at the original files and pulling back in and change them. And so in design khun do this is well, so if you're here, if you're a designed snob and you have to, you know, you want to have ultimate control, and you want to spend hours upon hours designing your albums in design, knock yourself out but still use this process because this process makes the connection point. So published services make the connection point between light room and another program, whatever that program is.