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Building Albums with Smart Albums

Lesson 34 from: The Ultimate Lightroom Classic CC Workflow

Jared Platt

Building Albums with Smart Albums

Lesson 34 from: The Ultimate Lightroom Classic CC Workflow

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

34. Building Albums with Smart Albums

Lessons

Class Trailer

File management and the Library Module

1

Intro and File Management

07:07
2

File Organization and Lightroom Workflow Overview

52:45
3

Workstation Diagram and File Flow

18:30
4

Converting From a Previous Lightroom Workflow

13:12
5

Lightroom CC Tour: Folders and Collections

19:14
6

Lightroom CC Tour: Publish, Histogram and Quick Develop

12:10
7

Importing Images into Lightroom CC

23:41
8

Rules for Selecting Images in Lightroom CC

29:23
9

Organizing Photos in Lightroom CC

14:27
10

Keywording in Lightroom CC

21:01
11

Using Facial Recognition in Lightroom CC

24:13
12

Working With Catalogs in Lightroom CC

09:05
13

Synchronizing Catalogs in Lightroom CC

24:51
14

Using Lightroom Mobile

21:41
15

Publish Services in Lightroom CC

12:39
16

Lightroom Workflow Q&A

15:56
17

Tour of The Develop Module in Lightroom CC

14:23
18

New Features in the Lightroom CC Develop Module

49:52
19

Camera Calibration

17:00
20

Calibrations and Custom Profiles in Lightroom CC

19:00
21

Calibrations in Lightroom CC: Comparing RAW and JPEG

20:12
22

Rules for Developing in Lightroom CC

35:26
23

Understanding Presets in Lightroom CC

16:15
24

Making Presets in Lightroom CC

36:51
25

Syncing Presets in Lightroom CC

30:25
26

Working with Photoshop and Lightroom CC

38:33
27

Using the Lightroom CC Print Module

11:29
28

Setting printer profile in Lightroom CC

13:53
29

Comparing Prints from Lightroom CC

23:08
30

Finalizing the Job in Lightroom CC

15:20
31

Archiving the Job in Lightroom CC

22:08
32

Importing Back from the Archive

25:47
33

Building a Proof Book in Lightroom CC

30:30
34

Building Albums with Smart Albums

56:15
35

How to Create a Portfolio in Lightroom CC

31:35
36

Advanced Search in a Portfolio in Lightroom CC

29:25
37

Scott Wyden Kivowitz Interview on SEO

21:36
38

Optimizing Image Metadata in Lightroom CC

18:20
39

Publishing a Blog Post From Lightroom CC

25:26
40

Making Slideshows in Lightroom CC

21:46
41

Lightroom CC Workflow Recap

22:23

Developing, Presets and Printing in Lightroom CC

Day 3

Lesson Info

Building Albums with Smart Albums

Now we need to make albums albums get tricky because albums are very um there's a lot of stuff that goes into an album but let's talk about different types of albums first before we go into making an album let's talk about different albums so the first thing uh, let's talk about is what is fairly standard album now is what we call a magazine style album or uh, board books there basically a book this is made by kiss so this is kiss books and they make an incredibly beautiful album they make it very quickly they're in the united states so you could get it very quickly if you're in the united states if you're not in the united states then now you're on the other because there's a lot of albums out there that are made outside the united states and so it takes a long time to get them here. And so those of you who are on the outside of the united states you get the same problem when you're dealing with, uh with books from the united states but this one's made in the united states but there t...

hey made very, very quickly so and their customer service is amazing so there fran fantastic, so kiss book says you can go to kiss dot us that's kitt stop us but this is the wedding book you can see that it's it's just a flat page the photograph bleeds across that actually on the bend this is photographic paper everything he makes photograph paper even when they make a thin book that's you know they have they have what's called a linen book the lenin book is thin it doesn't have the boards you can see that there's a board in between these and so that board doesn't exist it's some kind of a really thin substrate instead and so when they're making that book without thes it become is very thin um and it looks more like a book that you might buy in a store or something like that but still photographic paper but this book is very special because instead of a, um instead of a glossy service or a pearl surface it's a matte surface photographic matte surface and I love it I absolutely love matt like I said, I love the rough paper I love matt paper everything about me is matt not glossy I prefer that texture and that feel and so this is a really beautiful uh you know, soft paper so that the prince come out a little bit more like film because when you print on matt paper you don't get quite as punchy of color and it helps to meet the colors down a little bit so it's very beautiful and this is this is what we call they're tuscan line so the tuscan line is there high in line then they have ah the regular line I don't remember what they call that line it's just the kiss wedding book I think and then there's the linen line and linen books and those are the less expensive books and so they have three tears but this is definitely the high end and it's absolutely you know a beautiful beautiful looking book I love love the paper anyway so we want to design one of these and there's several ways you could design it the first way you could design it is you can actually send them photographs and they will design it for you but they also have an online designer so it's a kiss like online you upload your photos and you can have it it'll auto design them and then you can move him around and do some things but a little bit limited in the way that you design your books um just because it doesn't have quite the same controls and it's not quite as fast is doing it um on your computer so we're going to show you how to design these albums on your computer um but before we do that I want to show you another style of album so let me set this one over here I'm gonna show you a new style of album this one comes from leather craftsman leather craftsman has been around for a very long time they're kind of a staple in the industry but you remember the old style albums with, you know, gold around the edges and they've got they even had like a little corners were protected with gold like little you know, protectors and and and they were they were this big and they had mats on the mats were the same size of the mats that you put on a frame, you know? So they were just huge books and you turn him, you know, that's kind of the old style, the matted and then they matt had to be connected with like, a fabric thing in the center so the gutter was really big and stuff like that that's the old stuff at your mom's style, you know, wedding book or whatever, so what they've done is they've come up with another style of matted album, which is there is there's, a group of people out there that really need a matted album they're they're very traditional even though they're new but they want something that feels very traditional very, you know, high end traditional but tactile and so that's what this is so it's gotta really tactile front this is kind of ah it's it's almost like a japanese silk type of it's it's ah, I love it kind of got little hiccups in the self and it's beautiful, but then we when we open it up these air mats and so it will be difficult to see but this is a map and you can see that this is a print you can see there's a shine on the print see that but there's no shine here because it's a mat it's literally a map I don't know how close we can get to that but it is it is very there you starting to see now that there's an edge on the photograph here so the photograph is at the same level as the paper but then it drops down it's cut and then there's a space around the photograph that the photograph has pasted too so it kind of goes up and down and up and down like there's a there's a ridge there so this is literally a photograph that's been pasted or glued into mounted into a piece of paper below it and then that paper has a map around it and so it's a very tactile experience it's very it's just a different experience than you're what today is your traditional album and so this kind of a wedding book is extremely difficult to design. When I used to design these and I used to design these um back when I was shooting film and you used tohave to get like a piece of paper and then they would you would say on page one I want this particular cut out design and then I want picture number one and two to be placed into those places, and then I want picture number three and four to be over here. He had to do draw it out, put things you know, numbers here. And you had to make sure that your your negatives were in the right place or your prints were in the right place so that they would find him. That was a really complicated process. And then they started streamlining at making a little easier. Now you just have to send in your photos, you know, photos one through one hundred and then make sure you label one goes here, too, goes here, and then they would print him out for you place them on there, so things have gotten easier and easier. But now I'm going to show you how easy it can be to actually do the entire design on your computer and then just literally send them the file. So so you could do both of these kinds of books inside of a album designer that is called smart albums, so we're going to show you how to connect light room too smart albums and design an album very quickly. So the first thing that we do is we highlight all of our images that we want to be in our album just like we did when we were going to the proof book, but this time because we're going outside of light room to do it, we're going to connect the two through a published service, so I have shown you how to play around with public service a little bit, but I'm gonna show you how to make a disc published service so if you come over here to the left hand side, you will when lightning ships, you will see a thing that says hard drive, but it won't have any hard drive associated with it and what you need to do is you need to right click that and edit those settings or create a published service so you khun sake, create published folder, but I'm gonna edit those settings and show you what that looks like so inside of your published manager you can make publish services. So this is a published service, all of these so the facebook published service flicker next gen all of this stuff smugmug the thing that we just used the last section in the last session to show you how to post that is a published service, you have to download their published service, plug it in tow light room and then once you do it then you create a published service, so if I were creating a published service, I would choose hard drive it's okay, I want to create a hard drive, published services, so I would say ad, and when I do that, it says what kind you want to make? I can make any of those I'm going to a hard drive published service, and what am I going to call it? And in this case, I would call it album production, but it's already see how it turns red, because I already have an album production, but I'm gonna call album production to just so that we can show you and I hit create once I do that, I've got it it's not saved yet, so it's just sitting there waiting to be saved, and then I'm going to tell it all of the things that I want to do, so I would tell it what specific folder I want to be, and for me, I want to put it in the pictures folder in a folder called album productions, and then inside each one of those there will be an individual folder for each individual album that I'm making, the reason that I wanted to be in a central location rather than in the cause. Otherwise everything that's to do with that job should be in the in the folder, right? In this case, we're putting it in the album productions folders so that light room can always connect to it no matter when the client comes back to me, right? The archive khun b off wherever but the album is ready to be produced, and if the client says go, I don't have to go to the archive to do it. All I have to do is just publish it, ask the printers to print it, and then I'll take that and move it to the archive. When I'm done with it, when I'm all finished, I could move it to the archive, so I just want to have it available to me and it's gonna be a small folder is just a bunch of j pegs for an album, okay, so I'm gonna connect it to the album production area. Once I've connected the album production area, then I'm going to choose to rename or not, I don't want to rename and then I'm going to choose one hundred percent quality j pegs srg be because that's, what, in most cases you would use to print an album and then I'm not going to resize the images keep him at three hundred dp I I'm not going to do anything with sharpening, and I'm not gonna do anything with men today, they're watermarks and then I'm gonna hit save once I hit save now I've got a new album production area here see that says album productions to so now all I have to do is write click this it makes one called album production just disregard that and right click it and you're going to create a published folder when you create the published folder you're going to name that publish folder and I'm just going to call this test and when I do that and include the selected photos and hit create it creates a folder inside of there called test if I were to publish this those images would be put into a folder called test that's inside that folder but I'm going to show you right now here's the cutler wedding that we just we're gonna work on I already published this so we wouldn't have to wait for the images to be built because it makes j pegs and sends them to a spot on your hard drive my right click it it'll show us where it wass so I'm going to just say go to the published folder if I click on that it opens up a folder and you can see cutler wedding here's all the j pegs ready to go now notice that this j peg right here is a color image well what happens then if I decide I want this to be a black and white image so I'm going to turn that to black and white published services when you do something different to an image now it says these are the published folders are photos and this up here is one that you've changed it's modified you need to re publish it if I hit republish it's going to republish this one image. Now if I go back to that folder, see how it's black and white so it has automatically shifted that, but the other thing that's interesting is that it's also been changed here inside of smart albums, so smart albums is watching that folder the same way that light room was watching the folder. And so now, because you have a watched folder on both ends, both of your programs can utilize it and use it to talk to each other. So now I've got light room sending information and smart albums is receiving the information, so now I have the ability to create albums while I'm working in light room. So the way to create an album and smart albums and if you were to start from scratch, let me just save this album. But if I were to start scratch and say, I want to make a new project, open up smart albums, I would open it up and I would choose the type of album I'm going to make, so we're gonna start by making a kiss book. So we start by making a kiss book and that's what we've already done here but when we start to make a kiss book we're going to choose the size of the book that we want to make we're going to choose any kind of cover this is for all covers some of them are different styles that you could make so different different album and you've got lots of different album producers that air tight in so whatever album producer you want to use, they know all the information so now I don't have to know what the bleed in the cut and the whatever is all I need to know is what the page looks like to me and they'll figure out the rest so all of this is done and there's a lot there's some in russia e I mean there's all sorts of their stuff of all across queensberry is down in australia, so I mean they're all over the place, so no matter where you are, you have an album producer near you that khun do yourjob for you and it doesn't take you long to design it, okay? So I'm going to quit out of here because we already have once yet next you're in publishing mode and then you just have to go once you gotten into this area you're going to say I want to import the photos so you say import images and then you go to your pictures folder, you goto album productions, and then you go to that folder of images and you highlight all the images that you want to bring in and you hit import when you do that, they will show up right down here I'm gonna increase this to full size so that we can see the whole thing and see all of the images that we want to design our album with right here we're gonna highlight all of those images and we're going this right here is our film strip view right there, that gray area if I grab it and I drag it into there, it's going to put all the images on the timeline, it's doing it in image, name, order and you can change that here. So you, khun you can tell it how you want those images to be displayed also, you can also say, uh, on ly, show me down here, the unused images, and now it doesn't show many because if you were like individually throwing him up on the line, but I don't like to do that, I like to have all of my image is chosen inside a light room, I lay them out inside of the inside of the published service and decide, does that tell the story? See them all at once if it does that's what I want in the album, so then I'm going to go through and start telling this story. Now, how do I tell this story? The beauty of the way this program smart albums is designed is that it is a natural way to tell a story. I'm going to make natural cut points, just like I would've are making a movie, so I'm going to say, where are the cut points in the story? So, first off there's a cup point here where I say, okay, we're inside of the church, and this is the first experience of the church, so I can either do a cut point here or here I'm into it there. So we gotta cut point inside the church now, it's automatically laying out the images into what it thinks might work. Um, I don't care how it designs them at this point, I'm just trying to tell the story, so I'm going to go here and I say that's its own, uh, this could probably be all four of those. This is the two of them. Then this, uh, area right here? Uh, that when I need think needs to move and I could just drag it into this set here. Actually, I think it needs to go into the church because it's actually part of the church so I drag it there and now it's part of that design and see how it changed the design so it's constantly changing the design but again I don't care about the design right now what I care about is getting ready so I'm looking at this those air all getting ready photos so I'm going to do that getting ready but I know that this image here is a very important one so I'm gonna grab this image I'm and move it outside of that spread so then it's just the four of those going to give that its own spread I'm going to give uh this I'm going to move it over here I want these three on a spread I want these car photos altogether I want this marching up to meet the groom I want that all together then I want them entering the church the two of those I want them looking at each other the kid looking at me I want the those two could go together. I like this is a pairing I think this one I don't care about anymore someone to delete it uh these two uh there we go, we can do that and I'm going to delete this one because it is no longer necessary watch the way it changes the spread so I just kind of keep going through the album and looking for opportunities for stories to be told this one needs to go here because little girls are going to be all together and then this one right here khun go back over here like that to join that one on dh then these I love that photo this this photo cracks me up you got to see this photo so wait you know what hold on it's only showing us square photos for some reason that is interesting so if I want to change this double click it and then I could take this and aiken aiken move them around I that's the best portrait ever so um so I'm gonna just keep moving through these clicking here there we go it's changing that uh there we go those two together that one's its own spread those two these two and then these two and now I've done designing the album at least I've got this spreads. So then all I have to do is scan through these images here and I'm going to go from spread to spread so I'll start at the beginning and I'll go from spread to spread just point at the spread and I'm just using the arrow keys so if I used the writer left aero it moves from spread to spread and if I used the upper down it changes into different layouts that would work so I like that one and so then I moved to the next one this one I like that there we go I like that one this one this one's a good spread but it's see how it's cutting across there I just want to reverse um so I'm gonna double click this by double click this spread it takes me into the editor and then I could just simply take this one and move it over to here and then take this one hoops take this one and move it over to here so that they are and then I'll highlight both of and just make sure that they are centered and then I've got it exactly the way I want it so I could do the editing if I want to add some text two things like for instance, if I want and that's hidden let's tell one by the way I can save it as a template so I save is a template now that's a template that's been added to the templates inside of that it's choosing from for the interesting thing about adding a template is that when I had a template it automatically puts it to the front of the line so now it's going to choose any template that I've made above the templates that it's made and so it knows that that's a more likely scenario that I'll like that which is interesting because it's assuming I'm egotistical about my choices right um but anyway so you get what I'm doing and I'm just going through in choosing different display's until I now this one needs to be seen as a full bleed did you know image so I need to work on this image and say I you know, I need this thing to go all the way across so let's do it like like that and maybe we'll move it all the way over to here there we'll do that so that's a nice image I like that we're going to hit save as a template so now that is a template back to our work and we go to the next one I like that the way it is see that oh, I like that that shows well so I mean usually I can just kind of go through because it's it's doing a good job it's telling the story and then occasionally I have to go in and, you know, alter things a little bit I I found this so interesting you know, over in europe because this this church is old it's in the doomsday book like this church has mentioned and so it's like really old and and there's tombstones all over the place that are old and and and these kids were just playing around hide and go seek around the tomb stones you know, system is this normal? I love it you know, we have such a different feel for for cemeteries in the united states than they do back there. So you get some of this feeling like boston and places like that where the old school where you just you live with your dead but nowadays we kind of put our debt off to the side s so anyway that's it that's that is designing the album and once we're done designing the album, then all we need to do is proof it to the client so instead of going through an added eight well, I guess we could finish editing this whole thing we're not too far off so let's let's keep going let's I like that one like that one this one needs to change hear this? Okay that's close super close and rather than cycling through I'm just going to take this one and I'm going to make it more of a fool pull there we go I like that got it that's good say that is a template and then I'm going to go back and go that's kind of cool. Now over here on the right you can move this up and down you know, to reframe it I'm gonna put that like that like that that's good let's go back on let's, go to the next one seeing that was surprising to me because I would have shown the whole thing but it gave me a different view on it and so I I was and this is another one of those ones that really kind of deserves its own you know it needs to be full spread do you see how I can click on here and see all of my available options rather than cycling through my can seem a little faster and choose him but cycling is is pretty fun and easy makes me feel like I'm playing some kind of a video game dio so um but I think on this one I need to choose you know to, uh full you know, long images so I'm just going to kind of scan through him until I see uh what's actually do this one and then just double click it take this up and watch it'll actually see out grabs that so it knows where the edges are there so now that's perfect um save that as a template go back and by the way, this is all in beta. So this is smart albums to tin beta so a lot of the temple of issues that we're having right here are because they haven't loaded all the templates and yet so we're just working on a limited number of templates so that all the templates they have like a million templates or something like that and they smart they decide based on what size your images are and whether they're horizontal or vertical they make the decision but right now there still in beta so they're still loading those up so by the time you I think comes out in may is when it comes out and so by the time you actually can purchase smart albums too all those uh templates will be in there obviously some and then we're going toe you know lets this one I think we just want to shift I just want to change these upside I want this to come in her to come out then I want them to kiss so I'm going to shift this one over to here and I'm going to grab this one and shifted over to here and make sure they are centred claire so that's perfect and then I want to go back and that's the end so there's our book if I wanted to add some text too that I could I would simply click something double click it grabbed the text tool clipped there type in some text and then I could you know, change the color of the text I can change the font of the text so all of that stuff is available to us if I want to grab it I can move it around and then if while I'm working on it I want to I kind of see what it's gonna look like without all the tools and stuff I just hit the shift key ellis is with shifty option you it's one of these keys there control key that's it iss control key gets rid of all of the things so that I can just view it, see what it looks like without all the controls and then I can let go and that will help me to see what it looks like without yellow things around my text. All right, so once I'm done with that now I want to proof it I can print it out so I can go to file export if I go to export I'm going to and that there's ah okay, so itjust warned me that there's one image that needs to be up scaled because I've got a full bleed image and it's probably too small for the book so I need to increase the size of it which I can do later but I ca and ignore that or I can up increase the size of that particular image on dh then it tells me that kiss books has some specifics on how it wants the images to be sized and how big they can be and so it's warning me of that hit okay and then I can export for print and it's going to give me all the options for exporting too kiss because it knows their requirements or I can just export to cloud proofing so that my client can see it so I'm going to go and upload it as a new album I'm going to set the sharpening on low and I'm going to export that and it's it's going to export this for proofing I needed there's there's are cutler wedding ripe england is going to be the name I'm not going to put any album uh password on it because I want everybody out there to be able to go see it so I'm going to the client's name is going to be jared platt that's me my email is going to be uh support at jared platt dot com are dot sorry dot biz so that's my email support so if you ever need support on your pre sets that you buy from me that's the email that you would send it to um and I'm going to hit next I'm going to say hello everyone and finish the upload so that's the message that you get when you come into the album and it's going to start up loading this album when it's done it's going to give me a link s o that you guys can then go and look at that and you could even comment so that my client's khun comment back and tell me things about the album and then those cloud comments will actually come into smart albums on the page that you commented on so that then I can edit those pages and check off the things that need to be changed so the client and I can have a back way back and forth conversation about their album and we're good now one of the things that we've got to talk about when we talk about working on albums then is if I design an album and let's say cause I can also design my leather craftsman album inside this book and what happens is they give you the options for the different templates they have because they only have a certain number of templates because they have to cut them out you know when they have a machine that does that cutting and so what happens is they give you these templates here and they say inside a smart albums when I'm dragging him into those areas it's just going to pop them into these spots when it sends it to leather craftsman it's going to send a zip file it's going toe create a zip file and you're going to send that zip file to leather craftsman and it's going to give them all of the particulars about where the photos are, what page there on and how they're laid out but you'll notice that I've got this specifically designed with three black and white on this side three black and whites on this side and a color in the middle I like that, but what happens if I had this one black and white, this one black and white? This one was color, these were in black and white, this was color, I like the design, but I'm going to see it in smart albums. I'm going to see oh, this one's in color. So instead of having to double click the image inside of smart albums will open up in photo shop and change it and then go back to what you can. You can right click the image and open it in some external editor, but the problem with doing that is that if you open it in photo shop now, you're gonna have an image that is different inside of this smart albums box right inside of their album collection box, and that image is now going to be in color in your original collection and black and white inside of the album. What I prefer to do is I prefer to design the album once I see the layout, then aiken c o these should be in black and white. This should be in color of really smart design decision, very beautiful, but if they had left one in color, that would've been a problem. All right, so I want to look at the design and say how would this look best? Oh, it would really look good if there's black and white on either side of color in the middle so I'm going to take the two or three images that are still in color all I have to do is tab or command tab overto light room go to the set of images that we're dealing with that air in black and white or color and simply click on that image turn it to black and white once I turned that image to black and white so I'm gonna let me so if I go here and I say I want this image not that um is that should this image I want this image to be in black and white now if I hit v it turns it to black and white and look it's saying this needs to be re published now so now I would hit publish and I'm not gonna do it just yet because we're still in the process of building the album but if I had published it will send that to the folder which is our published folder and then smart albums sees that the image changed it brings it in and replaces the old image with the new image that's in black and white and so this image that's in color will now be in black and white so this process of working back and forth khun b really augmented if you have two monitors because if you have two monitors, then you can have on one monitor. You can have light room and on the other monitor, you're gonna put your smart albums so you're looking at both of them at the same time. And that's how I work up two monitors. I haven't. I'm mac at home, so I have a big mac twenty seven inch, my mac and then twenty seven inch regular monitor. So you put the two side by side and you can look, see here's here's, my, you know, light room and here's my design. And when I look at this and I changed this to black and white and hit published, this goes boom and changes and I can see what the design is going to be. And then I can say yeah, that looks good. Go to the next one. Does that look good? Yeah, that looks good. All the colors together. Move it. Next one. What do I need to do this one? Oh, that one needs to be retouched. That's. Fine. All I need to do is re touch it here, published and it gets retouched there. So then, if the client calls are doesn't call the client types in. Hey, I would like you to, you know, change this whole spread to black and white. Get rid of this color image in the middle of, like, just totally change it to black and white. I can I can do that. I just open up their job and I go to that image, turn it the black and white hit publish and it's on, right? So but but the beauty of this system is that now you have one place to go where you can design all your albums no matter what kind of album you're designing and that's critical, I think because there are some times that I need to make one of these kind of album I need to make a more traditional album. I have a family portrait client that on lee will take this kind of album, and so I make an album like this for two, three years ago, I got to make another album just like this now, and two or three years ago, I had to design it and then send it with the numbers and say, here, put these in these spots or whatever, but now I could design it myself, I khun put it in it it creates the zip file for me while it does all of this and then as soon as it's done I just simply publish it send it off to leather craftsman and they're going to do all of this tricky stuff I mean this is there's a lot of tricky stuff it's fairly easy to print it on a big piece of paper and then stick it to a board very hard to do all this cutting all right but is very beautiful I mean, I love absolutely love the way it's put together and again look at the design and so you've got a kind of a cross of color and then you've got black and white on on the sides that's not something you're going to see in your head when you're editing the images you're only going to see that in your head when you see it in a design in front of you, right? Those are the kind of things that we want to deal with but we want to make that process is easy is possible when we're working with things s o that's why we use the smart albums and I've been using smart albums since smart albums one came out because when I saw that literally florida I was I was at a trade show that I was speaking out and I walked past this booth and there were these two guys sitting there and they and they were they were just kind of standing there and everybody was already in going to the lecture because uh someone was speaking already and then I was kind of prepping for my lecture which was next so I kind of just walking around chatting with the people and I and I saw this system and I thought I wonder what that is and I walked over and I said ok, you have ten minutes of time show me what you got and he started design and I just went you've got to be kidding me this is the most amazing and it was that cut process that sold me because the cut process made it so um I made it so easy but it was such an intuitive experience because it's just a matter of where the cup points in your story you know and we're going to talk a lot about that in our our album production class that we're going to film tomorrow we'll talk a lot about what it takes to tell a story how do you tell a story and what kind of processes air involved in that you know what is the right cut point for a story and what is the right cadence for a story those kind of things need to be considered when you're making an album and this makes it it seems like we're just going really fast and cutting but in our heads were actually making something pretty critical decisions about where the story's going and what we're saying in the story as we make the story happen and so it's filmmaking but instills so we'll talk a lot about story making tomorrow a cz well as go into really nit picky detail on how to really finessed design and work on different things will even show you how to take this into in design if you want to get really tricky and make some completely, you know, off the hook album, you can even go further within design after you've made your basics. But there's no point in designing something and in design from scratch because it takes too long. This will get you all the way there, and then you can have this take you two in design and then in design will finish up with, you know, whatever kind of tricky extra you know graphics you want to throw in or if you want to have, you know, all sorts of tricky, you know, curved edges and stuff like that, you could do all of that, but you're going to do that in design. So, um, any questions you have questions out there? Awesome, and while you're asking questions, I'm going to be copying and pasting this smart albums so it gives me you can see that it gave me a logo right there I'm not a logo a link right there that I'm going to send to my clients now it's already going to send it to the client that I put the email in for which is me but I'm going to copy this right here that's going to be the place that you go so I'm copying this now so you guys can go ahead and ask questions alright so auntie has a question can use the book module to create an e book and save it out as a pdf for publishing um you can make a pdf for sure um whether or not you can turn that into a e book that's really up to you however if you want to really okay if you want to make a book fast you make it in smart albums there's nothing faster so you make the book and smart arms get the bulk of the work out of the way the same way that I use shootout at it to get the bulk of the work out of the way smart albums you saw I designed an album in what ten minutes or something like that and watch while we were talking so it's very easy to design if you then take this design into in design, then you have more options and at that point you can create an e book complete with video complete with audio complete with everything that you want to do because you have the full capabilities of indesign inside, but your design came directly from smart albums, so you quickly made your design and smart albums, and then you went and did all the tricky stuff in a really serious program called in design, and at that point, you can make I put you could you can literally make an act out of it. So that's the way to go. What if you're still a little leery of using cloud services to save files or books? Can you do all what you've explained easily without sharing that data via cloud services? Okay, you never light room and smart albums, you never have to use the cloud service, okay? You don't have to tell. Attach the cloud service at all, it's just an added benefit on dh so it's just a way to share it to the client. If you don't want to share a client that way and you want toe, make a pdf and then send him a pdf that's locked. You could do that, too. So either way, it's fine, but for me, I'll use the cloud service because I love cloud services, yeah, makes things easier, rebecca wants to know, and you got you talked about this a little bit before but does blurb do their own print sharpening and preparing or do you have to send the doc to them with your print sharpening done no they're going they're going to do what it's necessary for printing you do what's necessary for the image so if you get the image looking good in your system it will look good in their print they're fantastic printers they do a great job for a book that costs that little there it's amazing how well the prince actually come out um I wanted to show you really quickly than um as we go so I'm looking at the design right now that has black and white and color so I really should have both of them in black and white or both of them in color and so I'm going to choose between the two and I actually think that maybe it should be color because I liked the reds that are going on inside that car and so I'm going to go backto light room and I'm going to go find that image where are you right there so there's the image that's needs to be in color I'm going to take it out of color are out of black and white and you can see that now it's in color however it might actually be a little bit off of the other image because see it's different color so I'm actually gonna take this image here and I'm gonna synchronize over here and save previous so that I get all of the previous settings. Now you see how it went blurry that's because I was doing some pretty tricky, blurry stuff to kind of get rid of the the sharpness of the whole car. So I was using the radio filter, and then I was taking the sharpness down, and I was taking the the clarity down so it looks like it's a little blurry, just softening it up. So now I need to just go in here to the radio filter itself and just reset that so that it see that now it's back to normal. So I'm I'm sam playing with this one image. It needs to be changed just a little bit in order to match the whole design of the of the the, uh of the book. So let's, take a look at him side by side and see so this one still needs to be a little bit richer and the blacks eso ike come into the quick develop here and I can a new feature. We talked about this earlier that if I I could do, uh, incremental stop changes by hitting the shift key, so I'm going to do very small shadow adjustments by clicking on the shift key and just bringing down the exposure. Of the shadows and the darks just a little bit. Bring them blacks down quite a bit. That's. Probably pretty good. Go back to the develop module and the last thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to get a radial filter. That's a light burn and I'm just going toe burn everywhere around that's, not her. In that way, it matches. So now the two of them match really? Well, so once they match, then I just need to go back to my, uh, factum. I publish service. I could also right click it and say, published now, once I publish, then all of those changes are going to be made. So now if I go over to smart albums, it's, wait for this published to happen so you can see that it's see it's publishing they're they're all published. If I go over to smart albums now, then this image is now in color and some other images and color to our black and white or something. I change something else, and so all of those things have changed. And then at that point, I might have feedback from the client as well. And I might need to make some changes based on their feedback and once I have that feedback if they've come in when I click on a spread, I would see that feedback right here, and once I had accomplished, if they said, hey, move that photo a little bit to the right or the left, then I would just simply do it, and once I had done it, I would hit checkbox that means I'm done, and then that it registers as a hey, you're done with this, you're done with that and it gives you a checklist of things to do. Plus I can also comment back to the client so I can say I all you need is love and then if I hit submit now that is actually on line, so if people are out there looking at it right now and they go to this page let's show you what page it is, it's it's towards the end, if you go to that page, you will see all you need is love, and it will be on down below so we can kind of have a conversation back and forth. You could actually be talking to your client at the time, you know they could be typing and you could be typing and changing, and if you want to get that involved with him, so that is the process of making albums, whether you're making albums with a more old school traditional I hate to call it old school because it's not it's new school old school so it's like god that really you know highbrow old school feel but it's got a new look to it so it's really chic and beautiful so if you're doing that you're going through leather craftsman and doing something beautiful like that, you could do it right here and smart albums or if you're going with what is now the traditional look of a board book, you could do something that's very very chic as well with the tuscan kiss books so these air my two preferred ways to make an album either I'm going to make a tactile album like this I'm going to do it through leather leather craftsman so that I have something really beautiful with edges or I'm going to do it through kiss, which is a much more modern, uh type of, uh, book it's the it's what I call a magazine style um and it's completely printed pages but it still has that beautiful feel to it because not the glossy stuff it's not that I don't like pearl I don't like you know, I just I like this soft finish for a book, so um it feels more like it's a paper book, so I love it so this is kiss uh, books and this is leather craftsman any other questions? Yeah um will I see a color difference in the pictures in the blur book versus what I see in light room? So when you actually get it us, you might see a slight difference because of the when you're looking at your screen, you're looking at red, green and blue rgb, and when you're looking at a press printed book, you're looking at sea. Why m k so you're looking at sayin magenta, yellow and black, so there's no way that those two colors can be exactly the same, they can be very, very close, but there will be a shift in order to print almost perfectly on c m I k you have to spend a lot of money and a lot of effort to get it there, so when you get a blur book, there might be a slight shift, but you would really have to pay attention to see it, because I've never gotten a blurred book back and scene, you know, really bad color or totally dark or totally light never seen that occasionally I've gotten a blur book back with a bent edge or once in a while, I've gotten blur book back with like the edge wasn't cut so that the pages were still attached because they do a slice and they sliced it wrong. But any time that happens you take a picture of it and send it to him and they immediately start printing another book and they send it to you and they say I throw that one away so that their customer service is really good but I've never seen anything like you know off because they really good printers so um you want to keep doing questions yeah let's keep going quite okay um you mentioned a few times in the last couple of days about making sure that upon import j peg important j picking raw files um our separate not linked is it possible to separate those later um if they come if they're imported together um I've never figured out how but that's probably because I've once I did at once I realised the problem and I changed the setting and I've never had to deal with it so I would say change the setting don't deal with it there's probably a way you can separate them out but I've never really investigated what it is but it but it seemed at the time when I first saw it it seemed to be quite problematic on I don't know if they've solved that since then so I don't know I would have to try it and see but it might be a right click type of thing where you find some kind of ah no in there but chances are it it's a hard thing to deal with so I'm not sure why they do that I've never seen a use for it so anything else yeah I had a question about the one album with the cut outs and stuff in it it was in black which isn't I guess maybe something I've seen a lot of is there a particular reason that you did that or is there you talk a little bit yeah it's uh so you have in an amount of album you have usually three or four choices as teo you know dark light you could go different colors and stuff but there's black there's white and there's cream and those air generally your options on dh so it really depends on how much you want the page to feel like a page you because when you look at a book it's white pages and then you've got this image kind of hovering off that white page and so it's it's very understated very minimal but when you when you design it with black as your background then those pay those images especially when they're dramatic images they really pop and they rise up so that your eyes not receiving light from the paper it's receiving light on lee from the photograph on dh there's no right or wrong to that it's a matter of just preferences and in that particular case so when we were looking at that album you can see that when we open up the book that no matter what the the pages, no matter what the images it just really rises off it pops and it comes out at you not only that, but you notice that it's a black mat and then there's white that key line is the background color of the original page that it's stuck too and so what key lines it so that no matter what the images there's always some kind of ah a frame around it even if it gets really dark it doesn't go into the black here you have black and then you have a white key line around it and you accomplish that on a on a printed album as well by putting those key lines in there but this is a physical key line so if there's a feel to it s o it was just a stylistic choice really is to make those things pop but you can also and leather craftsmen makes other books as well with the same matt situation but instead of a black mat you can see this one has a cream matt with a white you know piece of paper around it so it's a completely different you know feel because now all the light is coming at you from the image itself I mean from the mat as well and so then the image is darker then its surroundings as opposed to a lighter than its surroundings so it's just one of those things where you you have to make that decision and this one has a white and cream and you could just do white and white or you could do white with black a black background and that would keep line at black there's a lot of different ways to do it. The key is to do it based on the style of the images I would never choose ah book design and say this is always the book design I'm going to dio I would choose it based on the images in fact, my clients will often say, well, should we choose our album now and I say no, don't choose your album now you can certainly choose that you want our album or something like that so that they know kind of the general price range that they're going to choose for an album, but I don't want them to choose, you know, the cover types and things like that that should be not after the fact because we don't know what the images were really going to look like until we finish photographing it and until I finished adjusting it working on the images that's when I know what that album deserves to be and then I'm going to guide them that way so I will pre design an album or I'll invite them in and say hey I really think that we should probably do something like this you know with a real physical field to the album because it's going to work on your image is better than if we do a regular album or some people I'll actually direct towards book because it works better with their style of photography and so like couture books makes a really amazing magazine and literally is a magazine it's like the huge q magazine type thing and it's really big and really thick and beautiful pages and it's a magazine it's not even a book there's no hardbound it's pinched you know it's perfect bound like a magazine amazing amazing little maggot a big magazines there this big they look super cool so if someone was doing a very new york feel wedding you know with a lot of gritty you know and lots of grain on the images and it's just really a lot of movement in fashion and glory stuff and whatever I would do it that way because it feels right to do it in a magazine style as opposed to an actual album so you gotta choose the album based on the feel of the images and so in this case I just think that that feels right to to see that black and and let everything pop off at you so nothing else matters it's just the pictures so and that's the difference

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Advanced Workstation Setup
Lightroom Presets
Personal Only Working State
Plugin Workflow
The Workflow Archive State
The Workflow Pipeline
The Workflow Working State
Simple Workstation Setup
Shuttle Pro Settings
Bonus and Live Created Presets

Ratings and Reviews

April S.
 

I've been using Lightroom for about a year now. I'm pretty comfortable with the basics and a little more. Sometimes knowing what I want to learn next depends on knowing what's out there to be learned. I listened in to this course from work to get an idea of whether there was enough new content to warrant buying the course. Though Jared covers lots that I know, he filled many small things I didn't know and covered some bigger topics that were new to me. I decided that I wanted to own this course because I respond best to structured learning, and Jared starts at point A and carries through to point Z, so to speak. I have watched his live and rebroadcast courses before and I really like and learn from his teaching style too, so I'm sure this course will be the boost I need as I prepare to subscribe to Lightroom CC instead of just using my local copy. Though another reviewer's tone wasn't very nice, I have to agree that it would helpful to have a written synopsis or outline of courses to help when deciding whether to purchase. Looking at the titles of the included videos is helpful, but not enough. This would be especially useful when a person hasn't seen the live broadcast first, and is simply evaluating a course in the course library.

Jim Pater
 

I learned a lot from this class when I took it a long time ago. I'm not as fond of his ego but that's fine as I don't have to be around him all day long. What I found extremely useful was the video on synching Lightroom Presets. I set this Dropbox synching system on my laptop and desktop Mac computers and it works perfectly. I also use it for other programs as well like Photoshop and another program called Keyboard Maestro. Thanks for your help Jared. Much appreciated trick.

user-69ea7a
 

I am new to Lightroom and from the start of the course it became very clear to me that Jared is one quality person with a real passion to explain everything with great skill and a motivation for success. I did not hesitate to download his course as this is the basis for my personal development and the journey to experience great photography.

Student Work

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