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Editing Q&A Part 1

I told everybody to go out and at it, which you guys did. But you also had a lot of questions. Should get in there and at it. Get out there and it. Get in there. Okay, get in there. Don't have that up. Will not be back out with Charlie for getting in or getting out. Just go at it. Stop. So, basically, what I did was when we went through, when we looked at everybody's homework assignments. There were a lot of questions in the homework assignment. So I pulled all of the questions and I put them in a series of slides, going to read the questions to you and answer them. A lot of the questions are we had a lot of the same questions. So first question, we're gonna go piece by piece here, number one. Even with presets, actions, hot keys and bolt editing, I still find myself taking way too long in the editing process. It's taking me a solid week to get through a gallery. I'm not sure what else to do. Any advice? Well, I mean, the first question that I would have for this person, which you can'...

t ask because I guess if the person is always there out there, I guess my first question for this person would be How many images are you delivering to a client? Because obviously, one of the biggest indicators of how long it's gonna take you to edit is how many images you're editing, right? If you're editing 500 that's not going to take a longer 1000. So if that person was out there, I want to know what they're delivering to a client, and they're probably going to give me an answer that I would consider to be too much. Every studio is different, I can tell you that for my own clients, I deliver no more, then between five and 700 images. I know this is kind of an epic, you know, now of like, we want more, we want more, We want more. But I really think that it's good to be disciplined and Teoh make your client confident and letting you make the selections in terms of what the final images should really be. What that collection should include and not include. You know, nobody needs 15 photos of the cake. I'm sorry. You don't you need to deliver that. And I deliver anywhere between 611 100 dependent in the day because my days very all over the place, Yeah, and your days tend to be a little bit longer. You know, it's rare for me to have longer than an eight hour wedding, but you frequently have 10 to 12. Exactly. Obviously, a longer wedding is going to yield more images, but like I can't think of. I mean, if it's taking you a solid week to get through a gallery, the only way it would take you a week to get through a gallery is if I were delivering, like 2500 images form or the other. I mean, the other possibility is your dwelling, and you're trying to make everything perfect. I don't believe in perfection. I have a sort of thing about this. I mean, my only rule, really is that essentially, you just want to get your one rule and one rule my one role. I have a lot of rules. You have to remember that even though we are editing all of the images that were delivering to clients, and we want them to be print ready at the same time, you have to understand that 85% of the way there in a reasonable amount of time is often better than 99% of the way there. Six months later. Because at that point, your client hates you. Give them They're not gonna be happy. They were editing your profit. Away you are, You are and clients. I know. One, by the way, is saying that you don't spend extra time on. The images are putting on your blog's. I'm not saying that What I'm saying is we're full of additional images. Your when you're delivering 6 to 800 to 1000 images to your client. If you're gonna dwell that long on everything, I mean, I hope you're charging a lot of money. Yes, and part of the This is another thing where people tend to get stuck when they're calling their like. It'll take me a week to call a wedding. How do I get faster without sounding flippant? You just do like you've the only thing at this point when it's taking you this long is either your brand new and you're still learning the software which is understand which is totally understandable or you're way too emotionally invested in the work and you can't let it go right, And you just which you may want to outsource. At that point, I mean, if you literally have been doing this for several years and you just can't seem to get past that hump, you save money by outsourcing because you can spend that time on other things. But I have noticed that when people stop getting hung up on every single image and you've just got to get through it, you've got to take your personal feelings about the work out of it. So next question. How do you know when enough is enough? Do you get a non photographer to take a look before you release? How do you know when your style is established or once it's established? When do you change things up? I would never have a non photographer. Look at my work before I release it. That's just not necessary. I just wouldn't last anyone to do it because people don't want to look at 700 photos of someone else's wedding. It's just not right there. There's no way on. How do you know when enough is enough. If you're having to ask yourself if you're doing too much, you're probably doing too much. Absolutely. Yep. If you're doing too many, localized adjustments are probably over doing it. And how many minutes do you spend on each image? Do you have? Ah, I mean, I can tell you that I can add it. Your typical 850 to 900 image wedding in a day. Yeah, without a problem. Yeah, you know, I mean, now that doesn't mean that like, I spend, you know an hour or playing a game and are watching a show. And I were going out to get cookies. But I mean, it's a day and it's a work day. Yeah, I can get it done. I could get up and export it and go get some dinner. And how do you know when your style is established? This is something that we talked a lot about the other day. Actually, I think there's a really big misconception that your photographic style and you're editing Styler different or that the editing somehow establishes you in a style shining, having crediting style. You know that when you work on my images. I like to keep them a little warmer, but also shoot them a little warmer. Like what you're getting from me with raw files. It's about, you know, 83% of the time. You can tell where I'm going with this, right? Like you. She's not looking at these saying Okay, well, here are the files, and now we're going to edit them toe look like A, B, C and D. The editing is just to finish the way I've already photographed it. So as far as an editing style, I don't think I haven't editing. I mean, I think anything is just underscoring your shooting style. So if you're the kind of shooter like Susan that has a more contrast, he look and really exposes for the highlights. That's kind of what she's known for than what I'm doing is I'm reinforcing that style by not brightening up the shadows and not trying to make things evenly lit that makes sense. And then, if somebody has a style that they prefer a look, that's something that's more popular Now would be like trying to look like a more film look like the kind of the way that hose evey issues for that sort of muted, that muted kind of passed out. Look, it's a little bit a lot of time. The highlights are a little bit blown. If you're shooting that way and you're wanting me, Teoh, you know, essentially confirmed that and kind of underscore that that I'm not going to darken down highlights that are blown. I'm gonna kind of dark in them a little bit, but I'm gonna keep things soft. I'm not gonna add a lot of contrast. I'm not gonna pump up blacks. I'm not gonna, you know, add shadows to your work. I'm gonna keep it the way that you sort of shot It will just be confirming that you're not gonna have someone who shoots like me. I want to be processed like Jose. Like those two things were warrant and we'll work. Anyone know what we just looked actually a little terrible. That was bad. And the way Jose shoots can't be edited toe look like the way I shoot. You know, this person says I'm still finding my style. I wanted to be classic and timeless, but I also know that I definitely over process sometimes I know that you can't tell me this is what you should do. But any advice you have here is appreciated. If you're trying to find a classic and timeless style, you need to shoot timeless and classic photographs, right? Like it needs to start with the capture. All right, Next question. This right. And I would also say less is more for that person. Less is absolutely more because classic timeless photos are typically not processed. All if you can see the processing, you've done too much. Agreed. So next question. This sort of hops around in this month. But it was one of the questions, so we'll put it in here. Number one social media outlets. I want to be able to circulate each wedding on Pinterest, Facebook, and maybe keep up with an INSTAGRAM account to do you know of any software that can centralize everything for me? No, There is no one software that can centralized everything, but I'm gonna try to get John on it. I think that you know what? Like I use hoot suite and hoot suite lets me do Twitter and Facebook. But hoot suite does not let me use pence. Not let me dio Pinterest or instagram for Pinterest. I use something called Viral wooed, right? We're talking about that the other day to and for Instagram. There's no way to schedule an Instagram. There just is no service for that. So there is no one turnkey way to do all of your social media in one place. I would recommend keeping a calendar for it. That's the way that for me, it works best like usually on Mondays. All go into Hoot suite and I will figure out my tweets for the week and my Facebook post for the week and I'll put them up and I'll schedule them and I'll walk away so that they just automatically go up on the days that they need to go up. But on Pinterest and I have to go over to another platform and time out my pins to go out through the week and then for Instagram. I have to actually be instagramming real time like there's no one way to do it. But if you work off of a calendar that will make it a little more efficient and second question vendors, a lot of vendors ask me for images What's the best way to do this? Send them a whole gallery of watermarked images. Cindy Defender. Individual images. How do you know they'll give you credit? I send them an email that says, Here's this in Folio Gallery. Go to town, take whatever you need download away. I just ask that you give me credit, you know, and not not to be hard. But if you know if you need them uncredited, then you're gonna have to purchase a commercial license for them on. And if I find out that they're being used uncredited on North, finish your images with you anymore. That's about it. I provide everything with watermark now primarily because of Pinterest. I've had a lot of issues where, you know, people have put them up on their website, which you know is fine and all that they have given me credit the get somewhere else and go somewhere else. And then it never leads back to me. So now I just provide people with watermarked images unless it's specifically a blogged that request it without or a publication, and it would actually be really super easy to just run them through like Blawg stop or something like that. Size him down. Throw your logo on it. Andi, that's something that's been kind of on my list of things to consider is do I want to give clients a social media gallery? And I do do that, right? Like, I know you've done that, but it would be really easy to just when I put them up on you know, when I get them back from you ones and Folio download them, run them through a batch, put up an additional gallery that says social media files, and then link the vendors over to your social media files and then just let them take them. I find that if I go through and I okay, the florist has contacted me. Now I'm gonna go through and pick out every single image that shows the flowers. It just takes time. I'd rather just send them to the whole gallery and say Good night, Christmas cracker. I need Look over here. Um, so basically to distill and you can read this whole thing if you would like Teoh. The one problem I'm having is in my editing. It's slowing me way down in issues with your CO. Botha platform alien skin. Not working the way you want. Images opening from light room two cc and having them do this, that and the other and then workarounds and what not. I like, for example, I can't tell you why your images aren't opening from light room to photo shop CC and what preferences you need. Like we're not. I have to admit, I don't even know what the combative dashboard is. I didn't even know about how the dashboard like I can't troubleshoot the tech problems for you. It's not saying I'm not trying to help you, but I just don't know the intricacies of I don't know the intricacies. I don't work for Adobe. I'm not. You know I can google it for you, but if I were in this situation, that's what I would be doing myself. But the kicker down here, the bottom is way too many steps. Way too many files keep track of Please help the kicker. There is way too many steps you're editing. Process is very is it goes through light room. It goes to light room. It goes through light room one by one. We in the past used an external editor for black and whites because we really liked it. Next silver effects I have now kind of backed away from that a little bit just because it takes longer. I know, I know Jim's giving me a wide open mouth when you're looking at efficiency when you're looking at efficiency, external editing really takes its toll. Now. I kind of saved silver effects for things like blawg images or preview images that I'm providing to clients, which are basically the same thing on when it comes to doing black and whites. I'm doing them in light room now and actually were working on some black and white presets for anybody. That's how you like it. Help me with that. I could have been that, of course, but you know, it doesn't like to look at the things that I blawg and say, Dear God, I don't know how to match this because I don't know what she's talking. Yeah, sorry, but I mean, really, you know, I don't see any reason to ever expert something out and work on it and Photoshopped during my light room workflow. It's just not efficient. They're going to do something with photo shop I would recommend doing it after you've exported the tips from light room. And so what I do when I am editing my images for the blawg, I take them through light room. I export them out. And then I put them in my in my, uh that we used to call Thank you. I put them in photo mechanic and I look at them and I say, OK, what kind of artistic edit So I want to do to these, and then I pull them one at a time and my blawg images or my play images like It's just it's fun. Maybe I'll take it into alien skin and I'll play with it or all retouch the faces in photo shop or someone and so forth. But I would never in a 1,000,000 years taken entire gallery of 850 images and say, Okay, now let's play with all of these unless I'm getting heavily paid to or do it full artistic edit of these images. But I also want to be really clear. The stuff that you see on my Blawg does not look dramatically different from what I'm getting back from you at the end of the editing process. It's not like the images on the Blogger like Super Great. And then the images in the gallery are you know they're okay. No, they just had one extra step taken on them, which is the extra step I would take if someone put in image in an album. Great question. And this is a question from one of our students from the weekly Check in on, and I'm going to sort of rephrase it. Well, has a client ever again been matter upset that there's only retouching done on a few images? And I will rephrase. That is, what is your conversation with your clients setting up that there is going to be an X amount that's going to get extra work? But again, it's It's not that different, like they're not gonna look at a series of 10 Portrait's of the bride, and one of them is super amazing, retouched to death, and the others look dramatically different, right? Like it's I've never had anybody be like, Why did you just retouch these images and not the other ones? Has that ever having to, you know, I've had people make requests for additional retouched. Sure. Same. And what I found in that case is sometimes people have issues that they are self conscious about. I had one client who had pretty severe X Emma, but she wore a strapless dress. So it was visible. No, I mean, you know, that was her right. But you know what? She paid for all of that reacting, and she was happy to do it. And I told her what it was gonna cost. And she said that she thought that was more than reasonable. And we went in and took out all the X My That was on her arms. Sure. And she was happy. But I can't. I don't think any client should expect that to be something that you would never take all of the exit out in the proof stage. No, because you don't know. She might be thinking that that's just part of her. I had a client who had a pretty bad scar from a major car accident, but to her, that was part of who she waas. That was part of you know where she got how she got to where she waas on that day and her husband was a big supporter when she was recovering from that. So she never wanted that scar removed. If I had done that, that could really it would have been really, really hurt her feelings. Then you're suddenly saying I think that this is a flaw in you that needs to be fixed Exactly. And I don't I don't fix back fat. And I don't make arms smaller or waste smaller. I do nothing like that. Actually, I don't want I don't work for Vogue. Even on the images that I blawg the Onley retouching that I'm doing is very light under I retouching and very light skin smoothing and very light. I pops, I'm not tucking in backs. I'm not tucking in arms. I'm doing no liquefying undoing. Nobody modification. I don't fix flyaways either. No, don't fix flyaways either. And listen, I'm not appear saying I'm not going to do this for you. I'm not going to do this for you, but I hear photographers who are like, Yeah, I spent four hours today retouching flyaways on a client's gallery and I like three of those images like and she might not have ever even noticed, right? Like you'll see in a lot of these headings. The a lot of the edits that we're gonna talk about soon. People removing things in post They didn't need to be removed at all. Weirdly, yes. Flyways. Is that little? Yeah. I mean, I know that that's an issue for you. You would be a great client because your hair would be flawless. Would be an awesome target market, like only balk, only bold. Nowhere fly with. All right, I need advice on backing up a really good, reliable and fast system. It would be helpful for me to have you explain Kronos Inc. Which we did, which we get five. Nice. I'm worried that I'm sharpening too little or too much. Is there any chance that you were Jen could go there? You or whore? Process of sharpening and noise removal settings in light room. I know it varies based on I s O, but maybe you could go through one or 20 doesn't very based on. So why don't you speak to what you do? I know what you north bagel does, but I don't do it individually. Image by image? No. We said the baseline sharpening in light room the default is 25. In the past, we've used 75 is our default, but I've sort of back that off to about 50. It just depends. John's probably sitting at home. I yell loudly enough from Reston. We could probably hear The reason I backed it off to 50 is because seasons in treating a lot of high I S o stuff. And I don't want to sharpen the noise necessarily, even though I am going to run it through noise reduction afterwards. So then basically we set that baseline and I don't change my sharpening. Occasionally, I will use something like a clarity brush, and that's pretty much limited to things like ring shots because you want to bring out the detail in the diamond. The fastest. You kinda want to draw attention to the stone invitation sometimes. Yeah, and clarity brush. I mean, it's basically like the warming brush that we talked about that we put up the demo tutorial on Seasons website. You can make yourself a clarity brush and then use that for things like photos of the popularity contrast, and I'll use it sometimes for like grass or details or bodice is of dresses Never skin, Never, ever, ever, ever Never scan unless you really hate. But you run production, right? The North Adenauer is done at the very end. So basically, we used Jeffrey Friedel's Plug him. I think it's f r I E D l. We talked a little bit more extensively about this in our creative lives, but you can go to his website. You want to look for a noise reduction plug in for light room, you need to make a contribution to him. Please. Plug in is really, really good. So please be generous with your contribution. Don't give him 50 cents just so you can get it. At least give the guy, like, 10 or 20 bucks on. Do you install it into light room? And the thing that's a genius about Friedel's plug in is he doesn't on a range. So what you're doing is you're setting the end parameters. You're saying at I s 0 100 with x amount of adjustment and light room, and this is the other brilliant thing is it takes into consideration how much you have raised or lowered exposure in light words, because think about it. If you have an image that you shot at 3200 and it's too dark and you raise it. What happens? You get that kind of ugly noise, especially in the shadows, the Hirai s. So you are raising exposure of the morning as you get. So the plug in you set the range and you say at 100 I s o. With this much exposure change, I want you to do this. And then on the far end, at 12,800 I s O. With this much exposure change, I want you to do this other amount. And then it fills and everything in between on a curve, basically. So you don't have to overthink this and say Like, What do I do it? 6 40? What do I do it? 800. What do I do it? 1000. What do we do? It? 12. 50 Does it for you. It doesn't for you. You just said your rain. It's very gentle. It is. And I mean, you can set it more heavily or lighter, depending on your preferences. So I've been having an issue with this noise reduction that I use in just light rooms, noise reduction. It looked just like it's like it's blurring it. It gets soft. It's almost like a Goshen blur, right? Yes. So tell me about how freedom gonna be different is what you're saying is going to be different now, I will tell you it really high. I s says when you've done a lot of exposure, raising it can start to look a little bit blurred because they're basically at that point, you kind of destroyed the thing, but I'm doing the best doing the best I can. But the thing is, if you set a range and you test it out and you look at the images and you say Well might be over producing a little bit might be looking a little bit too much at the high end. Then you can back that thing down because he lets you set your own ranges so you can do what makes you feel comfortable. Doesn't help that the higher the way high rises esos like 25,000. It'll help a little bit, will help a little bit or just would. You just don't help, especially with the shadow, but the main thing when you're getting up there with your higher I esos is You've got to really nail you. You better. Now you're And if you are going to screw it up in any way overexpose it agreed it's way better to pull it back, then push it up. Which is why, if I have to go up high, I actually try to go a little over so that you can pull it back. But I've stopped. I don't send you anything over I s 10,000 anymore because you yell at me. Look, I understand she's going to say it in a much nicer here, but you'll call me and she's like, Do what you're doing looks like and then you can fill in some four letter words there because you just you don't want to do that to your work. I mean, at a certain like I understand that, you know, we now have these great highest high I s is to work with, and that has been amazing. It's so nice not to use these flash with every image you take. But the truth of the matter is, I don't care what you're shooting with. Once you're getting up into, like, 10,000 I s O. And if you under exposure image and then you have to raise it. Sorry, but it looks like duty. It does your duty. It looks bad. And it's better if you just suck it up and slap on an off camera flash and do something, then to be shooting these kind of like, really, really muddy images at I s 0 10,000 I would not recommend that next question. When exporting files from Lagrimas J pegs their excessively large at setting 10. What export setting to use for J pegs. Jennifer? Yes, We've talked about this to some reason is a known issue with light room that the J pegs you export from light room are so big and it doesn't make any sense. We don't know why, but I think at some point Adobe acknowledged it on. We talked about this before. Excessively large. We don't export JPEG from light room, period. For this reason, we actually export tiffs and then we dio a conversion from tip to J Peg. We haven't sort of an action that does it, but for most people, you could just run it through bridge. Basically, you know, the adobe in the trolls image processor J peg 10. They will come out much smaller. I don't know why I can't answer That doesn't compromise quality at all. No, it's the same quality. They're just significantly smaller. I don't know. You're gonna have to ask. Julian cost that WPP CEO right questions, and then it cost her on the trade show floor. Next question. It would be really helpful for you to go through your post editing workflow. Do you have a good streamline system of uploading images to your Blawg website and social media? Any chance you could go through this? I haven't developed an efficient way to manage post editing workflow yet. I mean, I at risk of offending the person that answered the question. I ask the question. I've answered this question like multiple multiple times. After I do the workflow that I just mentioned, I take the images to blawg. I mess around with them at my own leisure. I put them up on my blawg. Sometimes I mess around with them and say, You know what? I'm too busy right now. The blogger. I'm gonna save these images all block it later. I'm going to get them up in the gallery and get the wedding out and all. Blodgett, you know, I've got some backlogs stuff because in January, February and March, when I'm totally dead, I need some other stuff to Blawg. But after it's done, um, very few images actually go on my website, like in the actual portfolio of my website. If I put one image up a month, right, that's a lot to my blawg. I get it up when I can. The blawg is not something I promised to my clients. This isn't a deliverer, Herbal Frank. To them, it's a nice thing, and it will happen eventually. But people are excited about it, but it doesn't mean you're gonna happen at any particular time. Yeah, and uploading to social media when I do have a blawg post, I try to parlay it out into multiple posts on Facebook instead of, you know, The big thing now is if you put an entire album of images up on Facebook, people are not seeing it the way they're seeing one image at a time. Eso I'll say, you know, here's one. Here's a detail from this wedding the restaurant blawg. A couple days later. Here's a portrait from this wedding. The rest are on my blawg. I'm trying to drive traffic away from Facebook back to my blawg. And if you haven't developed an efficient way to manage post editing workflow yet, you just need to sit down and look at it and write yourself a workflow and write yourself a calendar and follow it and then tweak it. I mean, I tweaked my workflow occasionally. There's no problems with that. I have now added a step to my work workflow called teachable moments where when I'm out of wedding, if I shoot some behind the scenes stuff or if I shoot like let's am shooting Portrait's and I really quickly, like shoot through the different focal lengths and then I I know I want to pull those images later because it's a good, teachable moment. I've added a teachable moment section to my workflow, so just because you've said it, that doesn't mean you can't tweak it. And we were working out. We're working on a workflow app that basically goes through all the different steps and, you know, kind of puts timing on them, etcetera. People have emailed us about it so many times. Apple Post star developer is basically what happened to us. So we have to We have to get a new developer to finish. Basically what, 80 83% of the way? There are 3% of the way there you'll get there. I know the benefits of using a tablet that I would love to hear more about how to use RPG keys. It looks really good, but really confusing. Well, fantastically enough, there is an entire full one day class that will teach you how to use it. I mean, we would be here for the rest of the day if you were gonna do an RPG Keys, tutorial, tutorial. I think it's worth having because you can re reference it, but you need just to sum up essentially RPG keys sits on the left side. It has all of the shortcuts that you need, including things like the different presets. I think we have a template for that somewhere. And then on the right side, I've got the pen in my hand. I've got the tablet in front of me. And that's kind of how I moved to my workflow. And I don't because I'm not editing in bulk. I have the tablet and my keyboard because I'm not trying to when I'm blogging, I'm trying to be efficient, But I'm not working through hundreds of images the way you are. So it doesn't make any sense for me to have an RPG keys for the 50 to 75 images that I'm messing around with. I mean, in the biggest thing about the work Home tablet and the RPG keys is just, you know, the chronic fatigue. Chronic, like injury, repetitive motion stuff. I mean, it really is used when you have those things using a mouse and a keyboard and all that stuff, not only does it super slow you down, and I know for people who haven't used the tablet, it seems really daunting. You will hate it at first. You won't like it. You'll be used to it before you know it, and it will save you so much time. And it also just cuts down on the annoying motion of reaching around because you're just there and you're just ready to go. The other thing I use sometimes there's a product called the Colin Ater. Have you been using, I couldn't get the software work half. It's like a little video game console thing that you hold in your hand on. I just sit back and put my feet up, and it lets me edit through letting the coal through photo mechanic So sometimes it's just finding goofy little things that make it more fun exactly.