Lessons

Lesson Info

Building a Proof Book in Lightroom CC

I wanted to talk a little bit about the smart previews in how they relate to large cameras and we talked a little bit about that I don't remember when but sometime in the last past two days we talked about this file size of some of these cameras so the new cannon coming out is fifty mega pixels the the nikon that g eight hundred is thirty five, thirty six or something like that so they're big these air really big files and they and they kind of slow down systems and so I, um actually borrowed nikon d a hundred I don't shoot night cons and all, but it was fun to play with it on dh I borrowed it. Uh, well, I rented it from, uh, lens pro to go, so I have to thank them for, uh, for letting me use it. They're super easy to use. I just simply tell him I need this and they can send it out to me and I could send it back comes in a pelican case is perfect. Um, so anyway, big shout out to linz protego. So and for those of you who don't know linds pro to go um here its lens pro to go dot com but ...

if you if you have a need, you need to test something before you buy it or whatever great place to go very easy, tio get your stuff they'll ship it to in pelican case that comes with a little sticker so no matter where you are, you just stick it back on a box and throw it back in the ups and it's on its way back out. So it's pretty easy service to use, but, um I am going tio got to get back to my, uh here we are. So this is a shot that I I I shot these shots with my daughter with that nikon, eh? So we're using really big files, so these air thirty six, thirty six megapixels pixel file so they're very large, very difficult to move around and they're slow so as we move through the photos, you can see that it's loading like it's doing a lot of loading and lightning doesn't need to do that much loading, but it is loading a lot because they're super huge files, it has to load them right? And so that gets really annoying. Now, this is this. I love this. This is her. Yeah, she loves daddy. Um, or maybe actually, I think that's his dad loves indy that's more attuned to what she's like she she knows that I love her, not necessarily the other way around she knows that I love her so anyway, but these are were moving through these really slowly and so I wanted to show you the advantage of building the smart preview so I have smart previous built on these but what's it looking too right now it's looking at the original files because the drive is there so it's always going to default to the original files? Um we want to go tio r uh here's where the fault files are there in this working dr so I'm going to eject this drive, get rid of it. So now that I've gotten rid of that drive and I come backto light room here we are in light room and now notice that it's telling me that the smart preview is what it's using because it can't find the file the file over here if we go away up to the top well, we'd have to go into the library module, but you'd see that it's got a question mark on it the whole disk is gone, so it tells me that the smart previews what's being used now when the smart previews being used its it's just goingto it's going to move through these files a lot faster you see how much faster it's loading those files so there's not as much spin there still, it still has to load him but it's a faster load, so the idea is that if you have very very large files you simply build the smart previews detached the original files and then when you're working you're gonna work on smaller files you can work on justin, get him done and then plug those big files back in that's when you go to print that's when you start exporting that's when you do all that kind of stuff and there's no synchronisation needed or anything like that so that's the advantage of using the smart previews um and again thanks to lens proto go for letting us borrow that camera um okay does that makes sense to everybody so if you have big files use the smart previous to your advantage all righty now I gotta go plug that thing back in so hang on one second let me just plug this drive back in. All right drive now plugged back in yes, it is actually it is it's the uh oh, go ahead. Jared did you have to unplug that disc in order to use those smart previews? Yes. Well, you know, you didn't have to unplug you just have to eject it. Well, dejected. Yeah, yeah, you have to get rid of it somehow you have to tell the computer is no longer here in light what? That you can't do that in light room and just say just used the previous instead of the the real file? No, you don't tell it to use this that or the other thing is it determines it based on whether or not the disc is available. If the disk was available, it will always defer to the real files if the disk was not avail. But it's, just a z z is right clicking and ejecting the drive. You don't even have to unplug it. You just have to unplug it, plug it back in once you do or the other way to do it if you if you object to drive but you don't unplug it, you can always go to your disk utility and tell it to re mount the drive. But it's just a z z to unplug, unplug the drive so anyone all right, let's talk about building albums and building books? So the first thing that I want to do and I'm just going to use these photos of my daughter because I want to do say, a proof book for the client actually let's, let's, do a, uh let's do an entire wedding? There we go and this isn't an entire wedding. I kind of toned it down so that we could do this quickly, but I have sixty six images from a wedding this will give you an idea of what we're doing makes it pretty easy. Um so I have a whole bunch of images from a wedding and I want to send a proof book to the client and let me show you a proof book I think I've shown this once before but this is a proof book soft bound it's nice it's beautiful but it's simple so let's take a look at that from the sky camera there but you can see in the proof book that we've got it starts with a nice picture on the front got a little bit of text in it on dh then it's got these big pictures see that's got big pictures that kind of let people know how cool you know the images that I took where but then it's got little pictures in the back the little patch pictures have the image numbers on him the concept behind this is that the client first looks at the big pictures and they get excited about the big pictures and then when they come back to the little pictures they're obviously more of those so maybe there's one hundred big pictures and then back here there's little ones and in this particular case we also went snorkeling and so I have pictures of snorkeling so that they have that as part of the experience that they experienced when they were doing their engagement photos um so these little pictures if there is a big picture associated with it then when they get to the little pictures they're predisposed to actually choose those pictures, some kind of helping my client, guiding them and educating them on which of the really good images? Because clients aren't professional photographers, they may like photography, but they're not. They're not super great at it, and so you're teaching them along the way you're educating him, and if you educate your client, then they will choose good pictures to go in their albums and things like that if you don't educate them along the way, don't be surprised when your clients make bad decisions about their photographs, so this this whole process is an education, so I want to give proof books to clients because it's my opportunity to do a little education while I'm showing images. So we want to make one of these and it's very easy and quick to make these so let's make one. I'm going to be inside of the, um, library module. First, I'm going to choose the images that need to go into the proof book I need to make a collection for those images for the proof books. I'm going too highlight all the images wherever I happen to be. I'm going to go to the top of the collection's gonna click on, create a collection, and when I do that, I'm gonna name it, and I'm gonna call this the cutler proof book. Then I'm going to put it inside of a folder that tells me I'm working on this thing, so I have a folder called working right down here, and so if I click on the working folder inside of that, there is a proof books to order folder if I click on that now I know that it's going to be in there so that any time because sometimes I'll make a proof book and I won't quite order it because I've got three more to make and if I have a blurb who's the people, they're going to make this proof book they're constantly sending out coupons a thirty percent off twenty five percent off twenty percent off. And so every time I get an email with a with a blurb groupon I printed out and I tape it on my wall, I seriously just tape it right there and that and I highlight the date that it's going to go bad and then I might have three of those and I'll just be working and I'll and I'll see, okay, I've got three proof books I'm gonna wait till I have all three of them done and then I will order all three together so I get twenty percent off all three instead of twenty percent off one and then I don't get to use the other two I forget pay full price for so I want a place where I can be sure to order him because I forget if I don't order it now, I might forget, and so hopefully I can build a proof book and then over the course of a week there a couple more that come in that need to be built, and so I just build the three and then I order at the end of the week instead of at the beginning of the week. All right? So that's, why I have a folder inside of light room that says proof books to order, so I put this in the proof bookstore order. I'm going to tell it to include the selected photos inside of there, and I'm going to hit create when I do that it's going to show me where it just made it, and you can see there's the proof books told order folder and right now, there's only one proof book to order just this one. What I'm going to do now is I'm gonna go straight over from these images I've gotta most select, and I'm going to go over to my book module and in the book module, I have a whole bunch of options on design what I've done is I've simply taken the measurements and you can get the measurements from blurb. So you got a blurb dot com and you're going to take the measurements of their book they're going to tell you what the book measurements need to be and then you're going to take those and you're gonna plug them in to the sizes here actually what am I talking about? No that's how I used to have to do it I don't need to do that anymore because blurbs in here I don't know why I was thinking that before blurred was in here I was still making proof books from light room but I was doing it through the print module and so I had to actually take their sizes and put a plug him in I don't have to do that scratch that that's so funny I totally thought I was teaching five years ago I was back in time I was I was in a different process version I was in process version two thousand three okay, so that's a really lame joke is not okay any time you're making process version jokes you know that you're really lame. Okay, so this is what the proof book will look like when you open it unless there is a proof book auction up here in the book module area there's a book drop down menu and there's book preferences and when you click on the brute book preferences you khun tell it to start a new book by auto filling uncheck that because you don't want it to like every time you go to the blur the book module, you don't want to start building a book you want to go in there and then tell it to build the book um zoomed if it resumed to fill, I want to do zoom to fit so it's not cropping my images and then this is an important one right here, phil, text boxes with you can choose a lot of different things, but you want the file name in the metadata because if you're gonna make a proof book, you want the file name to be the thing that's auto placed in there. All right, so once you've done that you checked those book preferences, then you're going to come over to the right hand side and you're going to choose a book, so you're going to blur buna choose blurb is your book type you can also do pdf or j pegs so you can actually print these out or use a pdf and send it to someone else to print it. But it just is going to be the sizes that blurb uses and then I'm going to go to a standard landscape book I'm going to tell it I want a soft cover, I'm going to tell that I want standard paper I don't need any really amazing paper, I'll show you I'll show you another book from blurb in a minute that was used with really nice paper so you can do it with really nice paper if you're going to do some thing like uh senior book or a baby book or something like that but you don't necessarily want to do that on a proof book because you want it to be less like a book book and then you're going to tell it to turn off the logo if you if you turn off the logo they charge you an extra ten bucks ish something like that but if you turn it on then you khun save some money and this book estimated price right out the gates is twenty four dollars in ninety nine cents that tells you what that's going to be so now you have some settings to contend with what do you want to do here but one of the most important sections that you have here over here we have a auto layout option here so the auto lait option is uh it's a drop down menu just like all other presets but in there you can edit that layout pre set and you can tell it what you wanted to do so you can say I want to have for instance I'm going to choose a four up vertical proof book page and so now you can see that it's going to choose a fixed layout this is the layout you can see that it's got a photo, and then some kind of text below it, and then on this side photo with some kind of text on it. So those are your proof pages, the proof pages, then you're going to tell it to fit the photos, you're going to tell it to match the long edge, and then you're going toe add the photo text and that's what's going to put it in there, right? Okay, so that's, what the proof book page should look like right there. So those are your settings centered, great text, so if you want to kind of make notes on that, or pay attention to that really quickly that's going to be what it needs to look like. Now remember the settings that we gave you before in the proof book preferences you have to check on that you want the file name to be, the the thing that gets auto filled, so I'm gonna hit done, and now once I've made that preset, then all I have to do is set four up proof book page, and then I've got all of my image is selected here and now I'm just simply going to hit this auto layout when I have auto layout it's just building a proof book for me, and it can build up to two hundred and forty pages inside of light room now blurb can accept four hundred and forty pages or for twenty or something like that but right now light room on lee makes a two hundred and forty page book and that's for some reason that's that's actually a light room constraint not eh blurb constraints so light room needs toe update that and make it bigger so because they used to be I think that they only accepted the really great papers or something like that so that was let's kind of I got a legacy problem or something yeah the twenty four ninety five how many pages for this proof book does that include or is it images it's pages okay and so it's still a twenty for ninety five right now because it's still a small book okay, so as you get I think it's once you get to like fifty or whatever then it starts to increase based on the number of pages you start adding so as the book gets bigger it'll get bigger. Um this book right here will cost about between eighty and ninety five bucks or something like that that book and then you can increase the price of it by put a hard cover on it it's an extra ten bucks if you you know put the logo on it it'll go down ten bucks and so you can kind of finance the the price of it but there's a almost one hundred dollars I've never made a blur book that's over a hundred and twenty dollars, so they're very affordable um all right and by the way, here that's a hard copy book but instead of full air instead of proof book pages we are using full ble or full pages here because what we want to do with this book is we want to give it to the vendor so we give this book to the vendor that's why it's nice right that's? Why it's hard bound because the vendor wants to do you want the jobs from the vendor? Okay, so our proof book is designed we've got all of our images here and now what we're going to do is we're going to go in and we're gonna add a few pages so those you know full pages were going to go on add those pages and the way we're going to do that first let's take care of the cover so I actually want this image so if we click down here you can go from grid too toe one page or two a spread, but I'm going to grab this I want this picture to be their photo so I'm gonna grab it and drag it over here which switches the photos so now I can take this one and I can zoom it in and so now I'm going to say that's going to be their photo there we go and then this one I don't want that in there, so I'm gonna delete that out and I'll choose a different one, so let's, just change it to that one, and then I'm going to take this and I'm going to change the size of it, so I'm just going to go in and kind of resize it a little bit so that it's not quite so big and then I can add, you know, some photo tech store I can add page text, too the page and come up here and I can say tim and sam so I can put some text in there, highlight the text I have all the control inside of this book module that I have inside say in design so I can change the size, the text I can change, you know what kind of tracking is on it, aiken, you know, I'm gonna do a lot to that text, I can also change the color so that its white there go tim and sam, and now I now I just need to find the right space for it so I could just go here and drag it down over here, I don't know where the right place for it is right there, probably over that so I might have to move it over to the left or the right so I could do that like that and then I probably just go like this there tim and sam now it's over in the right place still a little bit off and change the tracking on it something like that so I've got my proof book page I can put my, uh named back here on dh then notice that there's absolutely no spine it's such a small book right now that it's like you don't get a spine there's no spine, but once you start getting like into the hundred page two hundred page, then you get a really fix mine and you can put something on the spine as well. Okay? All right, so once we go that way now we've got to design the actual pages so on the pages we can simply right click any of the pages and out of blank page and then we can grab that page and put it on the front and then right click and add another blank page. I always like to start with a blank page at the front where I can take the same photo so I click on the photo and that's going to take me to the photo here so I could find it same photo that's on the front is going to go right here and make sure it looks pretty much the same so that when they opened up the book they get the same photo it's the same experience you open it up you got front page and it's all the same okay that's how we work s so we have the front page there and then inside here we leave a blank page on the left so the always start with the important information on the right hand side and we're going to go in I'm here right click click on this and choose a text page so you can choose all of these different types of pages I'm gonna choose a text page and I'm going to choose a full text page so text all over the page and now I can just click on that and I could go proof book I like that it's now white aiken turn it to grey and I'm going to tell it to be in the the right hand side and down in the middle of the book and I'm going to change the character size down a little bit there so this is what they will see when they open up that spread all right and then I've got my proof book but I want to add those big pages too and so if I want to add a big I used to just put all the big pages up front but I like putting big pages interspersed so what I'll do now is I'll just go through and look for these photos, so if I click on the photo it shows me where that photo is so then I can click on this photo right here and now I can right click here and at a blank page so it just adds a page there and I congratulate this photo and drag it onto that blank page then I could go well, I want this photo to it just showed me where that photo is right? Click this at a blank page move this photo right onto there do you see how that works so now every time they see a photo right next to it, they're going to see the photo or right after it or right before it so they'll right in the same area so they'll be able to find that photo much easier. So it's even giving a better training to the client than putting him all up front and that's how we make our proof book once we're done with the proof book at the very end I'm going to upload I'm gonna put a logo in this collection and just drag my logo onto the page so that I have my logo in there as well and that's why I keep inside of my library if I go back to the library that's why in my creative cloud if you go to the macintosh hard drive and you look inside of the creative cloud there's a design area here and inside the design area is logos for platt so you can see I've got logo's so those air getting transferred all over there they're on my desktop they're everywhere so they're in photo shop because the creative cloud khun transfer all that stuff around I've got logos everywhere I need to be so I've got these logos here getting eight of them and I would just simply grab one of those dragged that into that collection and then put it onto the proof book no didn't necessarily show you that but that's the way I'll do it okay, so going back to the proof book, we're gonna go back into the book module so you can see that it's still already built and now I'm going to do something important, which is create a saved book when I click on create a saved book it's going to ask me for the name of the book? So I'm gonna name it again the same thing cutler proof book and it's going to put it inside of the collection that I was just working in so I'm gonna hit create and once I do that now you'll see that I've got a proof book inside so here's the proof books toe order here's the cutler group and here's the proof book it's done so now I can go do other things. I could work on other things. And then as soon as I'm done with whatever it is I'm working on, then I can say, oh, I want to go order the cutler proof book now because I got three of them there. I just come in. I double click this proof book and it takes me to the proof the book module with the book built. I come over here and I say send to blurb and it will send it up to blur of as soon as it's done. It opens blurbs website order what I want. Enter in my credit card pays for it. Ships it back to me. Pretty simple. Right secured at that point in time. Are you inviting the couple back to the studio? Sometimes. It's not possible with an international right? Depends. Okay. The client is in town. I'll invite him back to the studio. I'll give him a proof book. I'll give him a gift print. We'll do that kind of stuff if the clients out of town, which is probably the majority of my clients, are out of town. And so if that's the case, then I will put it in a box. I've got a little brown boxes that I put the proof book in and then I tie it with a ribbon and then if I have a disc that they're going to use, I put the disk on the ribbon because it's got like, a little hole for the you can thread it through on the ribbon so it looks like a little gold it's, you know, square hanging off their look, a tag almost, and then I so that's their disk, which is not spinning media by the way it is, it is a usb drive. I tie that on there, and then usually they have a stack of fifty proof prince and those going a box with a bow on him and that goes in there and then the proof print that this will go in the box with cardboard around it to protect it that will go in there and all that will be put in bubble wrap and then shut, send it off to the client and they'll get that back is like a big christmas gift with all of that stuff, but all those things have to be collected overtime, so I have to order the proof prints after order the proof book I have to, so I do all of that stuff, and then I released the images to the client online so they start seeing those things online and then they'll get a box later with all of that stuff in it alright good that is proof books you can also design books in here is well you can get us tricky is one because you can start right from scratch and just start working on a book so if I were to go in to the same thing here clear the book I could start making individual pages so I could just right click here and at a blank page and then I could go grab you know a picture this is one of my favorite pictures I drag it onto their right and then I can choose what kind of layout I want it to be so I've got all these different layouts here and I've got two layouts three four multiple photos I've got you know, to prayed to page spreads, double trucks, all sorts of stuff so I got all that stuff available to me and we'll go really in detail on the the class it's it's storytelling and bookmaking so we're gonna talk about that and depth tomorrow as we film and you'll be able to watch it in about a week um so make sure you sign up for that uh and I get the chat rooms will be able to give people more information about that good okay, so uh but you can make as detail the book as you want and here is a book that I created it's just an in studio portfolio of children's work and so you know, I just opened it up and I've designed it very specifically you can see that I've got you on this one I've got a lot of white space and then I've got the photograph and so when you're when you're making this is a really toothy paper, they have pro line paper, which makes they've got really nice papers for their books, so any time I make something special, I wanted to be a pro line paper any time I make a proof book it's the standard paper but the ideas that I'm training my client when they come in the studio, we don't need to make your book with a lot of photos in it I'm okay giving you extra pages let me put some white space, let me design this the way it should be designed so that we're not just trying really hard to, um, make a book full of pictures because you're usedto like a you know, I think that you slide pictures and you gotta have a space for every picture that's not what we want design we wanted to sign something beautiful, something fun, and so we'll put like little quotes from the kid or we'll put little quotes or quotes that the senior really likes or whatever will go here so this is the sales tool for not only the album itself or for the book. But it's. Also the sales tool for me and it's. A very inexpensive way to create portfolios.