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Using Photo Mechanic to Cull

Lesson 16 from: FAST CLASS: Incredible Engagement Photography

Pye Jirsa

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Lesson Info

16. Using Photo Mechanic to Cull

Lesson Info

Using Photo Mechanic to Cull

we like to use photo mechanic when it comes to cooling. The reason for this is light room works based on catalogues, Right. So, Teoh, to get our images visible inside of leg room, we have to go through the process of creating a new catalogue, have to import the images and so forth. What we're working on inside of light room, those air just like what we see this image, this image, what we're actually seeing here is not the image itself. We're seeing a preview of that image. That's that is all like you're showing us is a preview of our image. Nothing is actually modified. Nothing has changed until the point of export when it actually takes the settings you've applied to the image and it creates a new version with those settings applied. The annoying thing about the lightning process is that you have to create a catalogue and you have to import before you can work on anything. Which means that before we can even coal, we have to get it into light room. The cool thing with photo mechanical...

s. Check this out. So I'm gonna go out of my full screen. I'm gonna go to photo mechanic, Photo mechanic works based on. I'm gonna pull this navigator up, so let's just close at the favorites and leave the Navigator. This guy works based on a contact sheet off of your hard drive. So all it does is you pointed to a folder and it will immediately load up that folder ready to go. So, you know, you don't have to create any new catalogues. You don't to do anything. Now. Photo Mechanic does not do editing. But what its Fantastic Four is cooling. It's incredibly fast. And if you are familiar with calling inside of leg room, then you're gonna really like this part. If I double click on this, watch how fast I can cycle through, and I can actually change the size of my windows just to have bigger images and so forth. But watch this. If I want to glance through these Aiken rapidly go through images and it doesn't hang, it doesn't pause. I can go through in coal to my heart's content, and what you're seeing is it's actually reading ex MP files. So when you see like a little crop adjustment, it's showing you what it's picking up from the ex MP see here it shows what we're picking up from the actual X and P file showing the developed stuff. But when you pull in just directly from the camera, there's none of this. So we use this to rate because it's so incredibly quick. We could go through 500 images in 10 minutes, and you can have your 80 images selected and ready to go toe leg room. So I'm gonna show you the most basic way of doing that again. When it comes to cooling, we like to keep things super simple. Simple is awesome. If you press control, comma or command comma, or go to the preferences option down here. When you first install photo mechanic, you'll notice that if we actually mark an image as one, it changes it to purple. I see that purple magenta. I'm slightly color blind people just gonna throw that out there. What color is that? Magenta. Who'd have thunk? It looks purple to me. Whatever. Okay, so we don't want colors because colors don't transfer into leg room when you when you try and synchronize those settings like room doesn't read the same colors as it does in photo mechanic, but it does do stars. So all we do is press control, comma or command comma. To bring up the Preferences window, go right over to the accessibility tab and click 0 to 5 sets star rating instead of 0 to 8 sets. Color class, click the play. This is all the Onley set up you really need to do. To get started with this application is that now we press one. It actually applies a one star so I can sit here and I can go through these images and apply a one any time. I want to keep something. One one one one. I don't like the way he's puckering there, but not too bad. Let's go one, one. Okay, we would select outer images by pressing one notice. I'm not thinking of anything else. It's either keep it one or just throw it away. Those are the only two things in my head. Keep it or throw it away. I would highly recommend I do not edit or work on this machine. This is a tethering machine. If you are working off a laptop, I would highly recommend investing in a good large display a 24 27 inch display because the cooling process becomes so much easier when you're filmstrip is a small piece of this window and you have a large image blown up and you can see it. You can see the detail in the image. You can see everything about it, and it can move from image to image. And your film strip is gonna be your navigational tool, meaning if I can keep my filmstrip large. Watch this. If I can keep this large while still having a large image visible in this loop, view the loop. Use this main area right here. If I can keep the filmstrip large, I can use the filmstrip as I'm calling to basically see what's coming next. So if I see a great pose with a perfect expression, I pick it. And if I see three more similar ones, I just quickly skip past them. And so I'm glancing at both these things at the same time to get through a number of images, and it's very difficult to do here because I can't actually see the images very well on the side. The other cool thing about this if I press Zita, zoom in. I'm gonna shrink down This, uh, we're running like 7 20 p resolution, by the way, is craziness okay? If I press Z, it'll zoom Ito last point and watch how fast this snaps too focused. He has no, like, how quick are how slow is it inside of light room to snap to a 1 to 1 focus or 1 to 1 View Z every time. Go in and out. I can make sure it's focused by way People always asking how to get your images and focus their focus. Guys, shoot 1.4 Know your gear. Make sure you watch it on glance at it It's a tiny bit. Software is a great shot. Who cares? But in general, it's not that bad to get things focused even at y in open settings. Okay, so once I've actually applied those changes, I've I've start all the images that I want to keep. You have a couple different options. I can move them to another folder and say these the ones that I want to work on or I can go directly into light room. So let me just go. Let's go to light room now, Okay? And this is the same folder that I was looking at and photo Mechanic. So in photo mechanic, this guy originals is this guy right here? If I right, click right here and say synchronize folder and click scan for metadata updates, this will tell, like room to read ex MP files, which is what photo mechanic was creating. It'll say read X and P files and is gonna pick up all the one star images. So now all I do is I just select my one stars if you want to switch him over two flags or you want to do whatever you totally can. But now you go into the develop module inside of light room and you just edit your one stars. What we like to dio is we like to this make this original folder. So if we have this original folder on the desktop, we go back over here. So let's just show the folder. This is the folder right here. What I would do is right. Click say new folder inside of this one. Say, except right click again. Se reject. All you're gonna do is turn on your filters at the bottom of this window. So if you just turn on the filters and filter for just one star images, Okay, These are all the images that have been marked one star. I press control A to select them dragon, drop it into except take the other images that are rejects and drag and drop them into reject. When I import into light room, I only import the accepted images. The goal of that is the smaller we keep our light, your catalogues, the more efficiently lighter was gonna run. I know Adobe says that it doesn't slow down, but it does. Light room is a catalog based a data basing system for images. The Mawr you insert into this database the longest gonna take the load the longest gonna take to filter the longer is going to take to do everything that you're doing inside of later. So we do is we Onley import the accepted files at the very end of the process. When we're done, we'll import the rejects so that we can create those exported rejects that we talked about Well, just say about the JPEG files and delete the Ross. Once the client has been satisfied. Basically, with our delivery, this all makes sense. So super easy, very quick cooling on this side. By the way, if you're if you're dealing with, like 50 images, 30 images for a shoot. If you're doing smaller shoots, it doesn't necessarily make sense to go from photo mechanic to light room at about 500 images. Plus, that's when you start to see 15 2030 minutes savings from there from a wedding you're going to see, like +123 hours worth of savings in doing, like several 1000 images of cooling in photo mechanic versus like room.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Presets Installation Guide
Slides for Lessons 1-30
Slides for Lessons 31-51
Favorite Software
Gear
Lightroom Presets
Pre-Shoot Videos

Ratings and Reviews

user-975fc7
 

Man, Pye just covered EVERYTHING! I love the complete process explanation of Photo Mechanic to Lightroom.

Mal Brown
 

Student Work

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